Clinical Thought-Reading

'No great discovery is ever made without a bold guess.'—Isaac Newton.

'What a spiritualist medium you would have made!' It was a doubtful compliment, but whatever its implications, Psy not Psi was to be my fate. At the time, 1919, the speaker, my friend Millais Culpin, an early associate member of the Psycho-Analytic Society, was seriously perturbed by the wave of spiritualism which was sweeping the country at the end of the First World War; and in the following year he wrote a small book Spiritualism and the New Psychology, with the object of warning the public against the machinations of the Unconscious. He had difficulty in finding a publisher; one told him frankly that a book from the opposite camp would have a better chance of success.

To the end of his days, in September 1952, Culpin was a stern and uncompromising critic of every attempt to introduce magic into mental processes, and demanded the strictest investigation of facts purporting to give it validity. An expert card conjuror, he delighted to demonstrate how easily people could allow themselves to be deceived under their very noses in the simplest manner after warning the victims of the necessity for the closest observation; and with much experience of the East as well of the West, he was admirably adapted to maintain an objective attitude towards unusual psychical phenomena, whilst his life-long association with that eminent vital statistician, Professor Major Greenwood enabled him to assess the value of 'scientific' claims based on figures. It was some years before I fully understood Culpin's remark. The instantaneous enlightenment that had come from his work on 'shell-shock' and been extended by Ernest Jones's brilliant Papers on Psycho-Analysis was startling in the extreme; but, once the matter was put before them, there seemed no reason why my colleagues also should not be startled into comprehension just as readily. Of course, I thought, they could see concomitant squint as a childish hysteri