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Reflections on being a parapsychologist
Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2003 by Carlos S. Alvarado
In addition to a strategic separation from specific phenomena there is also a tendency among some of us to want to drop survival research in general from the agenda of parapsychology. There have always been attempts to disconnect survival from parapsychology for a variety of reasons. Rene Sudre (1951) argued that survival was not demonstrated by the facts and that it was a topic outside the scope of science, part of the "inaccessible refuge of religious beliefs" (p. 389, my translation). George Zorab (1983) had a similar view when he referred to survival research as the "forlorn quest." Because survival is so difficult to test for scientifically, several figures in the field--such as J. B. Rhine (1974), Gerd Hovelmann (1983) and Harvey J. Irwin (2002)--have branded the subject as untestable and consequently an unproductive area of research. While this may be debated by arguing that there are ways to investigate difficult topics if one follows approaches or analyses that are more subtle than those providing a simple "yes" or "no" decision on the testability issue (e.g., Braude, 2003), I am concerned here with views that see interest in survival as a contaminant in the quest to be seen as scientific. The most recent example is Irwin's (2002) statement that interest in survival may "compromise ... the standing of parapsychological research as a legitimate scientific endeavour" (p. 25). This position, however, is problematic and should not satisfy most parapsychologists because similar political concerns have affected and are still affecting the whole field of parapsychology in terms of its relationship to psychology.
We would do well to consider that such conservative attitudes are in the eye of the beholder and that, consequently, demarcation strategies flow in different directions. While some parapsychologists may feel that interest and research on survival contaminate their more elegant and controlled work that follows from physics or psychology, we need to be aware that others have similarly dismissed parapsychology in general whether or not they perceive survival research to be part of the enterprise. Psychologists, as Deborah Coon (1992) has argued, have a long history of trying to separate their field from the general public's conception that psychic phenomena are studied by psychologists. A good historical example of this was American psychologist Joseph Jastrow's comments in his book Fact and Fable in Psychology, published in 1900. He wrote:
Pernicious is the distorted conception, which the prominence of Psychical Research has scattered broadcast, of the purposes and methods of Psychology. The status of that science has suffered, its representatives have been misunderstood, its advancement has been hampered, its appreciation by the public at large has been weakened and wrongly estimated, by reason of the popularity of the unfortunate aspects of Psychical Research, and of its confusion with them (Jastrow, 1900, pp. 75-76).
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