Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (Spiritual Phenomena)

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. __Common Phantoms__ brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences. Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today. "Modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences, this book brings to life the seances, deathbed communions, flashes of clairvoyance, and telepathic experiments that captivated the American public from the 1860s well into the twentieth century. The book contextualizes psychical research, an unorthodox "science of the soul," within a long history of citizen science in the United States. Rather than a superstitious impediment to the progress of laboratory psychology, psychical research belongs to a continuous tradition of knowledge production by ordinary people in everyday settings. The book reveals how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. They formed a far-flung network devoted to gathering evidence and making the study of experience an "in vivo" field science. And they persisted despite growing marginalization in the 1920s and 30s, as psychology asserted its professional and laboratory-based status. Each chapter delves into the vigorous experimental culture of amateur psychical researchers, challenging readers to discern whether this was a pseudo-science, a failed science, or a phantom science-one impossible yet persistent, the faint rapping of a curiosity that refuses to be extinguished"-- Provided by publisher Book description from the publisher (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28936): "Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences. "Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today." Introduction: At Home, with Ghosts 1 *The Weather Map at the Bottom of the Mind 2 *Machines That Dream Together 3 *Drawings from the Other Side 4 *Psychic Domesticity 5 *The Wilderness of Insanity Conclusion: To Keep Alive and Heap Up Data