A Tale of Two Congresses: The Psychological Study of Psychical, Occult, and Religious Phenomena, 1900–1909

Abstract

In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted as a legitimate object of study, whereas the former was not. Comparison of the Congresses suggests that those interested in the study of religion were willing to forego the quest for objective evidence and focus on experience, whereas those most invested in psychical research were not. The shift in focus did not overcome many of the methodological difficulties. Sub‐specialization formalized distinctions between psychical, religious, and pathological phenomena; obscured similarities; and undercut the nascent comparative study of unusual experiences that had emerged at the early Congresses.

A feature-based approach to the comparative study of “nonordinary” experiences.

“…Although researchers recognized that their subjects made dramatically different claims about experiences with similar phenomenological features, their focus was on the evidential value of the experiences-on whether the experiences offered evidence of mental illness, extraordinary abilities, or religious or spiritual realities. Although Flournoy and Sidgwick recognized that the proliferation of seances and mediums who claimed exceptional abilities was linked to the rise of the Spiritualist movement in the latter part of the 19 th century, this did not lead to widespread interest in the effects of cultural learning on experiences among members of the SPR (Taves, 2014). By the early 1900s, the emergent comparative approach was largely overcome by disciplinary sub-specializations within psychology that hardened the boundary between the psychological study of psychopathological and religious experiences, and rejected the study of psychical and mediumistic phenomena as pseudo-scientific (Coon, 1992).…”

“…However, within a few decades, such comparisons were largely abandoned by psychologists. As psychical research came to be viewed as pseudoscientific, the boundaries between it and experimental psychology hardened (Coon, 1992); at the same time, the emergence of disciplinary subfields, such as psychiatry and the psychology of religion, stabilized the classification of experiences based on their clinical impact and/or the claims associated with them, thereby obscuring the extent to which categories such as "psychopathological" and "religious" are themselves culture-bound (Taves, 2014).…”

Child prodigies in Paris in the belle époque: Between child stars and psychological subjects.

“…1 Indeed, Richet had a reputation for his interest in psychical research, an alleged new science advocating the experimental study of spiritualist phenomena that Richet would name métapsychique. Psychical researchers and spiritualists had a strong presence at the Paris psychology conference, a fact that generated controversy among some of the attendees (Taves, 2014). The congress saw the foundation of the Institute Psychique International (which later became the Institut Générale Psychologique), supported by Richet, and which was to be partially devoted to psychical research (Plas, 2000).…”

A Feature-Based Approach to the Comparative Study of “Nonordinary” Experiences

“…Although these researchers recognized that their subjects made dramatically different claims about experiences with phenomenologically similar features, their focus was on the evidential implications of the experiences, that is, on whether they offered evidence of mental illness, extraordinary abilities, or religious or spiritual worldviews. Although Flournoy and Sidgwick did attend to the role of Spiritualist beliefs and practices in the emergence of claims about mediumistic abilities, this did not lead to widespread interest among members of the SPR in the impact of culture on experiences (Taves 2014). By the early 1900s, the emergent comparative approach was largely overcome by disciplinary sub-specializations within psychology that simultaneously hardened the boundary between the psychological study of psychopathological and religious experiences, and rejected the study of psychical phenomena (and by extension mediums) as unscientific (Coon 1992;Sommer 2012).…”