A critical examination of the methodology and evidence of the first and second generation elite leaders of the Society for Psychical Research with particular reference to the life, work and ideas of Frederic WH Myers and his colleagues and to the assessment of the automatic writings allegedly produced post-mortem by him and others (the cross-correspondences).

Abstract

This thesis outlines the canons of evidence developed by the elite Cambridge- based and educated leaders of the Society for Psychical Research to assess anomalous phenomena, and second, describes the gradual shift away from that approach, by their successors and the reasons for such a partial weakening of those standards, and the consequences for the general health of the SPR .It argues that, for a variety of reasons, this methodology has not always been fully appreciated or described accurately. Partly this is to do with the complex personality of Myers who provoked a range of contradictory responses from both contemporaries and later scholars who studied his life and work; partly to do with the highly selective criticisms of his and his colleagues’ work by TH Hall (which criticisms have entered general discourse without proper examination and challenge); and partly to a failure fully to appreciate how centrally derived their concepts and approaches were from the general concerns of late-Victorian science and social science. Their early achievements (given the base from which they started) were considerable but the methodology they developed was gradually eroded in some fields by their successors. This was partly because of the nature of the material; partly because of the shared, subjective elite networks of the group; and partly because of the impact of the affair of Gerald Balfour and Winifred Coombe-Tennant on the assessment and interpretation of the cross- correspondence automatic writings. This led to some neglect of experimental work and to an almost cultish atmosphere within the leadership of the SPR itself, particularly damaging in the interwar period.