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Reflections on being a parapsychologist
Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2003 by Carlos S. Alvarado
Attempts to separate out work from specific phenomena and topics present a multitude of agendas and self-interests. So while some of our own shun specific areas of the field because they want their own areas to appear more scientific, others outside the field do the same thing to the whole discipline. As Michael Winkelman (1982) has said, "Academia's failure to include parapsychology is mirrored in parapsychology's failure to respond in a responsible manner to the general population's concern with the areas popularly referred to as occult" (p. 15).
It is regrettable that we feel that we need to deny parts of out subject matter for political purposes, especially when the most conservative experimental ESP studies are similarly disregarded by others outside the field. In our efforts to be accepted, we have become worse than our critics, we have dissociated ourselves from some part of the basic claims of our field by employing the strategy of denial used by outside critics. It is almost as if out traumatic experiences with criticism and rejection have forced us to excise parts of out nature in order to be acceptable to outsiders, and to ourselves. As with other types of traumatic experiences, such defense mechanisms are not necessarily completely conscious nor are they adaptive. By abandoning traditions, areas and problems we are merely turning our backs on important issues, and we are condemning ourselves and everyone else to ignorance on questions that may be of great importance.
As I have argued before, and here I am referring to issues and phenomena not necessarily connected to survival, (7) we should research such problems so as to increase our empirical knowledge of neglected issues (Alvarado, 1996c; Alvarado & Zingrone, 1996). It is true that some problems obtain more attention than others because they are more easily testable and that some research programs are more productive or progressive than others. But hot everything that is important is easily testable. After all, parapsychology has traditionally been about the hard problems. Let us form our identity as parapsychologists not through artificial prescriptions of neglect or demarcation, but by attempts to study systematically any relevant problem the best way we can. The combined knowledge of the behavioral and natural sciences has enough methodologies to study any problem scientifically and critically. This is not to say we are capable of testing or measuring anything we want, but we can at the very least try to learn something about the features and correlates of all the phenomena that fall into our purview. Let us not be conservative at the expense of knowledge.
WHEN PARAPSYCHOLOGISTS HARM THEIR CAUSE
The conservatism some express about particular areas of parapsychology can be, in my opinion, harmful to the field. But parapsychologists exhibit many other behaviors that also hinder the field in a variety of ways. One such behavior encompasses statements about the existence of the phenomena we study. Let me give some examples from the old days. In 1913 Hyslop stated that survival was "proved and proved by better evidence than supports the doctrine of evolution ..." (Hyslop, 1913, p. 88). In 1921 Gustave Geley wrote: "Today we know well the genesis of materializations" (Geley, 1921, p. 174). In 1923 Camille Flammarion stated that "telepathy ... is as certain as the existence of London, Sirus and oxygen ..." (Flammarion, 1923, p. 22). These, and many more recent statements such as overenthusiastic evaluations of the value and role of meta-analysis in parapsychology (Broughton, 1991) and statements predicting the acceptance of parapsychology by science in a relatively short time period (e.g., Honegger, 1982, p. 21; Murphy & Kovach, 1972, p. 475; Stanford, 1974, p. 160) do not help our credibility.
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