Medical Research

To start with a definition, the word paranormal means communication without the currently recognized sensory processes; may also refer to physical movements without physical processes recognized. For several centuries, now described as paranormal phenomena occurred and were described. Most historians of the subject agree, however, that systematic investigations such occurrences did not begin until 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research (SPR - SPR) was founded in London. Its founders have openly declared their intention to investigate unusual phenomena.

I am a latecomer in this field, because my activity in the area did not begin until I had already established myself in conventional psychiatry. Had training in that specialty and in psychosomatic medicine. My research and training enabled me to advance in academic positions and in 1957 was appointed professor and director of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.

As I reached that position requires a small digression. Since my birth I suffered from repeated bouts of bronchitis and spent much time in bed. Diseases held me back, but I read a very helpful and my mother continued striving to restore my health. I have an unusually retentive memory, and phases of good health, I jumped ahead of my peers in school. Teachers like superior students, and became a favorite of some at McGill University. After I recovered from several bouts of pneumonia, one of the teachers advised me to leave the cold of Canada for the Arizona heat. In Arizona, somehow learned to improve my health. After that, I resumed a normal growth path in my training and academic placement.

Throughout, I acquired the reputation of dissident (maverick). This epithet seemed appropriate for someone who questioned the assumption, held dogmatically by most psychiatrists, that the human personality is more plastic in infancy and childhood than in later years (Stevenson, 1957). The publication of my challenge to this doctrine annoyed many of my colleagues in psychiatry and even angered some. For me, receiving my article on this subject provided me a useful training to respond to the rejection of my studies of paranormal phenomena.

At the time of my appointment at the University of Virginia, I returned to an earlier interest. In my childhood, I had been exposed to reports of paranormal phenomena through reading in my mother's extensive library, books on Eastern religions and theosophy, the latter being a derivative of Buddhism and Hinduism. My training in medicine had given me some understanding of scientific methods, and I began to wonder about the evidence for unusual phenomena reported in the books I had read. Did not seem conclusive, but did not seem negligible. So I read more about research on the paranormal, especially in the works of the founders of the SPR, as Myers and Gurney, for whom I developed an abiding admiration. I have also been familiarizing myself with the leaders of the American Society for Psychical Research that was, shall we say, a sort of younger sister SPR. In this group, CJ Ducasse and Laura Dale especially earned my gratitude by showing me that skepticism about some evidence of paranormal phenomena do not exclude acceptance of other evidence.