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Reflections on being a parapsychologist
Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2003 by Carlos S. Alvarado
This criticism should not be taken to imply that everyone should be a scholar in the past literature of parapsychology, nor that this will solve out current problems. As I argued in the twenty-one-year-old paper cited above, I do not consider the study of our past literature to be a substitute for contemporary research. The issue instead is one of context; current work should be carried out by those who are well-informed about the relevant past developments of the field.
But more than this is included in the meaning of the word education. Being educated not only means knowing how best to collect and analyze data, nor having simple knowledge of antecedents in the literature. Instead, being educated means being aware of continuities and discontinuities in the development of parapsychological ideas and having a familiarity with philosophical, psychological, and general existential issues of the field. In other words, being educated means having a commitment or at least an understanding to the collective identity of parapsychology as a field, even to the point of acknowledging the well-known difficulties to the achievement of consensus on many substantive issues.
There is a parapsychological culture and identity that you find in some workers in the field but not in others. It is a quality that allows us to go beyond our research specialty, beyond the technical aspects of our research to the wider picture of our professional identity, and, of course, to the implications of our work. Having this sense of the field is an identity that stands in stark contrast to the identity of those who see the field just as a technical specialty for data crunching, or a mere intellectual curiosity.
The lack of this deeper sense of what the profession is comes, to some extent, from the contemporary tendency of specialization or overspecialization in our professions. But also it comes from the lack of organized educational programs that provide systematic exposure to different aspects of the field. In terms of professionalization parapsychologists are hybrids; we are a community formed from a combination of self-teaching and extrapolation from the training programs of other disciplines. In spite of recent educational developments and past discussions of education in the field (Shapin & Coly, 1976; Smith, 1999), the fact is that there are not many educational programs where a student can be exposed to a wide range of parapsychological literature. By this I mean systematic exposure to the range of phenomena of the field, to their classifications and terminology, to the classic and the contemporary literature, to the various methods and techniques used in the field now and in the past, to the historical development of the discipline, and to the wide range of the oretical models presented so far. It is unfortunate that at the moment no single educational and training program in existence can achieve this goal. (4)
We must also be aware that training and education in parapsychology are particularly problematic in those geographical regions or countries where parapsychology is even more underdeveloped than it is in the States and parts of Europe. In previous writings I have discussed several problems Latin American parapsychologists face (e.g., Alvarado, 1996b, 2002b). One of these is the lack of general training in scientific research. Some of those engaged in research do not have training in data collection and analysis, a situation that is rapidly changing in such countries as Argentina and Brazil. Consequently, compared to the United States and parts of Europe little scientific research gets done in Latin America. Instead, most parapsychological work is limited to discussions from the old literature, to literature reviews, and to conceptual and theoretical discussions. To further complicate matters many of these parapsychologists have difficulties reading English. Because most current research in parapsychology is published in English, this creates additional serious difficulties in training and educating Latin American parapsychologists. (5)
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