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The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870-1939

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jhmas/jrq051

1468-4373

Kristen Ann Ehrenberger,

Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs

The Stepchildren of Science is a solid consideration of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German debates on science, authority, experimental evidence, and the desire to elucidate mental and physical laws. The title is a phrase psychologist Wilhelm Wundt used as a derogatory epithet to describe what was called “psychical research” in the late nineteenth century and “parapsychology” by the 1920s. Historian Heather Wolffram employs sociologist Thomas Gieryn's concept of double-boundary-work (see his Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999) to show how parapsychologists distanced themselves from lay spiritualists and occultists on the one hand while justifying themselves to the state, the churches, the courts, and academic scientists on the other. Although critics saw these “border sciences” as fringe subjects, their proponents viewed them as frontier disciplines for advancing knowledge. Research into the paranormal had its roots in the early-nineteenth-century craze for mesmerism. This developed in the second half of the century into spiritualism, a belief in the transcendental soul, and modern occultism, which credited unknown powers for activities like automatic writing. Whereas spiritualist séances experienced a surge in popularity in the modernization of the fin de siècle and again after the horrors of the First World War, modern occultism suffered from its association with theosophy and the disgraced Madame Blavatsky, so German psychical researchers of the 1880s and 1890s re-imagined it as animism. Animists like Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and T. K. Oesterreich believed in the reality of paranormal occurrences and sought to explain them by physics, chemistry, or biology. Conversely, critical occultists, led by Max Dessoir and Albert Moll, disbelieved in the paranormal but found the un/conscious fraud interesting for the insights they could derive about the psychology of belief and suggestibility.