I don’t know whether you have heard of the London “Society for Psychical Research,” which is seriously and laboriously investigating all sorts of “supernatural” matters, clairvoyance, apparitions, etc. I don’t know what you think of such work; but I think that the present condition of opinion regarding it is scandalous, there being a mass of testimony, apparent testimony, about such things, at which the only men capable of a critical judgment – men of scientific education – will not even look…. It is a field in which sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature, which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon are impossible. (McDermott, 1968, p. 787
Modern psychology must expand its definitions of reality. James recognized that modern psychological science must expand its definitions of life, mind, and consciousness and its limiting ideas about the nature of reality and the abilities that lie within each individual if it was not to become a caricature of itself or a handmaiden to its own laboratory technology and give up its claim of investigating the nature of human personality and its greater world.
Frederick William Henry Myers (1843-1901)
Frederick William Henry Myers. Both G. T. Fechner and William James attempted to address those elements of the soul that religion refused to examine. F.W.H. Myers (1843-1901) was an another early pioneer of the transpersonal approach who developed a conception of “subliminal consciousness” as a doorway to the unknown reality of the psyche based on his studies of psychopathology, genius, sleep, hypnotism, sensory and motor automatisms, trance, possession, and ecstasy (Myers, 1961, 1976).
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Myers and James were collaborators. Myers’s conception of the subliminal consciousness became the basis for some of James’s contribution to the psychology of the subconscious. According to historiographer Eugene Taylor (1996b): “Myers’s formulations were, in fact, central to the development of James’s psychology and philosophy in the 1890s, and they form the epistemological core of James’s scientific activities in abnormal psychology and psychical research” (p. 79). Myers’s work advantageously combined both religious and scientific viewpoints in a way that was rare for his times, except perhaps for the work of his colleague and friend William James who likewise gave voice to subjects avoided by others.
Contributions of F.W.H. Myers to transpersonal psychology. Frederick Myers’s vision for psychology pointed out new directions for science to follow. Although neglected by official psychology for 100 years, Myers’s work did make early inroads in certain areas of psychology and popularized the notion of a “subliminal consciousness” that flows beneath ordinary waking consciousness (Myers, 1976).
He recognizes, to use more current terms, the distinction between the preegoic and the transegoic, as well as the distinction between the pathological and the more authentic, or integrally, spiritual. In this connection, he is the first as well to propose the analogy of the spectrum of consciousness to describe the full range of subliminal activity. (Kelly, 2002, p. 79)
Myers’s theory of a subliminal self. Drawing upon scientific work in experimental psychopathology, psychical research, and the “experimental psychology of the subconscious” (Taylor’s phrase), Myers began with the hypothesis that we possessed an inner self of extraordinary creativity, organization, and meaning – psychology’s nearest corollary to the soul (Myers, 1961, 1976). He referred to this interior personality structure as the “subliminal self.” Distinct, though not separate, from the outer ego of the personality this inner, subliminal self forms our larger identity, orders the intricate involuntary systems of the body, and makes available superior inner knowledge in dreams and states of creative inspiration.
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Myers’s theory of subliminal consciousness. The subliminal regions of consciousness were not only the source of visions, voices, and impulses that lead the individual to act in line with the fulfillment of his or her finest abilities, but also act as channels for obsessive thoughts and delusions, and various sorts of psychopathology. Myers (1961) collected a wealth of supporting material for his theories, numerous and relevant facts concerning powers, abilities, energies within the human personality that could suddenly awaken, transforming the individual’s life. Myers’s theories concerning the subliminal self, after making early inroads, however, vanished from the mainstream of academic and philosophic life.
In age that gave us both Myers and Freud, psychology followed Freud. At the beginning of the twentieth century, psychology was at a crossroads. It could have followed one of two paths that were actually mutually contradictory theories of the nature of human personality. One was the path of F.W.H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882, and author of the 1903 classic Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (Myers, 1961). William James regarded the two-volume, 1,360 page magnum opus as containing some of the strongest evidence obtained to date for “transmarginal consciousness” and the existence of a “growth-oriented dimension within the normal personality to which one could make appeal and through which ideas could have an effect” (Taylor, 1996b, p. 143). The other path was the one of Sigmund Freud who wrote in 1900 his Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1996), a book that he considered to be his most important work. In an age that gave us both Freud and Myers, psychology followed Freud.
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“Soul” and “spirit” viewed as threatening to scientific status of positivist psychology. Psychology followed Freud for several reasons. Part of the reason for psychology’s choice in favor of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and against Myers can be found in Deborah Coon’s (1992) article “Testing the Limits of Sense and Science: American Experimental Psychologists Combat Spiritualism, 1880-1920.” American psychologists were struggling to give the new discipline of psychology scientific roots like those established in the natural sciences of Newtonian physics, chemistry and biology and sought to erect barriers between psychology and spiritualism and psychic research. They found the concepts of “soul” and “spirit” distasteful and a threat to the scientific legitimacy of the nascent discipline of psychology.
Parapsychology gave voice to elements of the soul that religion denied. Precognition and telepathy – those unofficial elements of the mind that appeared to contradict known laws of science – were also to be denied by official psychology because they were believed to contain the relics of religious superstitions and primitive animistic thinking, logical inconsistencies and passions that would, if not opposed and repudiated, destroy the objective structure of psychology itself.
Psychology ignored Einsteinian physics and favored Newtonian mechanics. While scientific physical theory has been forced to acknowledge Einsteinian principles, the philosophical movement of modern psychology in this area was and remains to this day very limited.
Myers’s “subliminal self” fits in quite well with Einsteinian physic, and the existence of precognition could also ride rather nicely along with Einstein’s relative time. Psychology, however, ignored these very scientific theories that might have given a theoretical basis for the exploration of the soul, and settled instead upon the quite prosaic and deadening duty of fitting a Freudian ego with a Darwinian subconscious into an industrial society… The soul was not officially recognized, and the religions themselves, while giving the soul lip service, steadfastly refused to investigate its reality and labeled as heretics or demented anyone determined to do so. (Roberts, 1978, p. 98)
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