Subliminal Promptings: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Society for Psychical Research

Keeley, James P. "Subliminal Promptings: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Society for Psychical Research"American Imago - Volume 58, Number 4, Winter 2001, pp. 767-791 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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In 1912 Freud published "A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis" in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The Society for Psychical Research, or the SPR, was founded in London in 1882, the result of the efforts of several prominent British intellectuals, scientists, and professionals sympathetic to, but by no means unanimously convinced of, the claims and practices of Spiritualism--the belief that the human personality survives the death of the body and can be contacted by the still living. The SPR originally intended to investigate those claims and practices by subjecting them to rigorous scientific investigation: this in a (as it turned out) futile attempt to salvage such religious beliefs as the spiritual, the miraculous, and the afterlife from the predations of post-Darwinian science by placing them firmly, if possible, on a scientific foundation. In response to various early developments, however, the original purpose of the SPR quickly evolved to include explorations into such occult phenomena as trance states, clairvoyance, and telepathy; into such psychological issues as hypnotism, dreams, and mental pathology; into such occult movements as Theosophy; and into such historically spiritual matters as supernatural events recorded in the Bible and in the lives of the saints and the history of the Church.
For several reasons, however--the SPR's original link to Spiritualism, the persistent subscription to the tenets of Spiritualism on the part of an importunate minority in its membership, its investigations into the possibility of the survival of bodily death, among them--many critics of the SPR, in Britain's [End Page 767] scientific establishment and in its cultural elite, identified the Society itself with its professed object of study. Indeed, a considerable part of the contemporary and current discussion about the SPR...