Frederic Myers

Coined the word "telepathy", built a theory of the unconscious before Freud published, and spent his life trying to prove something he could not prove.

Who they were

Frederic William Henry Myers (1843–1901), classicist, poet, school inspector, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research — the man who did more than anyone to make the study of these questions look like a discipline rather than a hobby.

Where they came from

Cambridge: a fellow of Trinity, a poet of some reputation, and a member of the circle around the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, whose seriousness set the tone for what followed.

Myers belonged to the generation for whom Darwin and biblical criticism had made Christian belief difficult and for whom the loss was not academic. He wrote openly that the question of survival was the one that mattered, and that he intended to settle it by evidence rather than by faith. The personal driver is generally taken to be the death in 1876 of Annie Marshall, with whom he was in love, though he was circumspect in print.

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 with Sidgwick as its first president. Myers ran much of its investigative work, co-authored Phantasms of the Living (1886) and the Census of Hallucinations (1894), and investigated mediums including Leonora Piper.

He coined telepathy in 1882, along with supraliminal and subliminal — the last of which travelled far beyond him.

What they taught

His major work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, was published posthumously in 1903 and is the reason he is still read.

Its central idea is the subliminal self: that ordinary waking consciousness is a narrow band selected from a much wider personality, and that the rest is not merely a rubbish-heap of repressed material but contains capacities the waking self does not have access to — creativity, genius, healing, and, he argued, the faculties psychical research was studying.

That is a theory of the unconscious, proposed independently and slightly ahead of Freud's, and markedly more generous about what the unconscious contains. Freud's unconscious is where things are pushed down to; Myers's is where things come up from. Both men knew of each other's work; the history of psychology took Freud's road.

William James thought Myers's formulation was the more important, called the discovery of the subliminal region the most significant advance in psychology since he had been a student, and drew on it heavily in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Myers's influence on James is direct and acknowledged, and through James it entered mainstream psychology by a side door.

What we can and cannot say

We can say his psychology outlasted his psychical research. The subliminal self anticipates a great deal of subsequent work on dissociation, automatism, creativity and altered states, and scholars who have no interest in survival still find Human Personality worth reading.

We can say he did not prove what he set out to prove. The SPR's method was sound and its results were not. He hoped for demonstration and got a body of suggestive material, and he knew it.

We can say the aftermath is uncomfortable and instructive. After Myers's death in 1901, the cross-correspondences began — fragmentary automatic writing produced by several mediums on different continents over roughly thirty years, apparently meaningless individually, and containing classical allusions that some investigators held made sense only when combined, as though someone with Myers's classical education were designing a puzzle that could not be explained by telepathy between the mediums. It is the single most elaborate body of evidence in the field's history, it is unfalsifiable in practice, and it has convinced almost nobody who was not already convinced. That the most ingenious case for survival should have been apparently authored by the man who spent his life demanding evidence is either the field's best story or its saddest.

We cannot say what Myers found. What we can say is that he treated a question people usually settle by temperament as a question to be worked on, gave psychology a vocabulary it still uses, and was honest to the end about how far he had got.

Who they were

Where they came from

What they taught

What we can and cannot say

Further reading