…joined the SPR in 1890 and later served as council member, secretary, treasurer and president. He helped create a research endowment fund and assisted in reorganising the American Society for Psychical Research. His major writings focused especially on Rosalie Thompson’s mental mediumship, trance controls and automatic writing. Life and Career…
…experimented with hypnosis, crystal-gazing, telepathy and automatic writing in his student years and later served as president of the Society for Psychical Research. His writings explored telepathy, mediumship and reports of supernormal phenomena in classical antiquity, bringing historical scholarship into dialogue with psychical research. He is perhaps best remembered for…
…aware of the crisis. Gurney’s and Myers’s guiding idea – complemented by findings from their simultaneous exploration of the psychology of automatic writing and hypnotically-induced hallucinations and dreams – was that, if veridical hallucinations did occur, they might be understood as recipients’ idiosyncratically dramatized expressions of telepathic impressions, received below…
…of mood or feeling, a more precise and sudden disruption of the mental flow, an impulse to do something (for instance ‘I should telephone so and so’), or perhaps even as automatic or semi-automatic bodily behavior (as in automatic writing and speech). As far as the topic of apparitions is…
…a medium and automatist, Travers Smith attempted automatic writing, and produced scripts purporting to come from the deceased playwright Oscar Wilde6Travers Smith (1923).. In her analysis she considered the possibility of cryptomnesia, the unconscious memory of details read in books and elsewhere, but found convincing the ‘the reconstruction of personality’…
…vol. 1, 321-22. The projected force was thought to be stronger when the medium was less conscious. This was because trance could inhibit the higher brain centers, allowing for the lower centers to be involved with the force automatically. Morselli believed that consciousness interfered with automatic processes, taking psychic force…
…draw conclusions about whether an effect occurs is a post hoc analysis that has little value. This was a significant change from his earlier writings. Arguments similar to Rhine’s late-life rejection of the usual optimistic views about meta-analysis began emerging in psychological writings about 40 years later. The evolution of…
…him vulnerable to criticism. 9Thouless (1968). Critique by Vernon Harrison In 1986 Dr Vernon Harrison, a senior SPR member and expert in photography and handwriting, published a powerful critique of the handwriting evidence in the Hodgson report. Having examined in the British Library all the Mahatma Letters received by Sinnett…
…inorganic matter.2Driesch, 1899). During the following years, he turned increasingly to writing about biological questions from an analytical and theoretical perspective. As a result of his published treatises he was invited to hold the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1907 and 1908. These lectures were published in…
