The Psychology of Spiritualist Mediums1

Much is problematical and tentative in connection with the psychology of mediums and considerable work remains to be done in this field, one of the least worked in the domains of abnormal psychology and psychoanalysis—themselves subjects only a few decades old.

Practically all of the previous psychological studies of mediumship offer explanations of it in terms of mechanism—dissociation, of which the following statement by Flournoy is typical:

The greater part of these phenomena are, without exception, easily explained by mental processes inherent in mediums themselves and their associates. The state of passivity, the abdication of the normal personality, the relaxation of voluntary control over the muscular movements, and the ideas—this whole psychophysiological attitude, where the subject is in the state of expectancy of communication with the deceased—strongly predisposes him to mental dissociation and a sort of infantile regression, a relapse into an inferior phase of psychic evolution, where his imagination naturally begins to imitate the discarnate, utilizing the resources of the subconscious, the emotional complexes, latent memories, instinctive tendencies ordinarily suppressed, etc., for the varions rôles it plays. This is what we might call the psychological theory of mediumship.

In analyzing and accounting for the content of the spirit communications, Flournoy and other similarly-minded students, notably Jung and Wilfrid Lay, pursue the psychogenetic method. The information contained in the messages is traced back to their source in the medium's earlier perceptions and memories of which she at the time took no notice. When entranced, the medium draws upon this material without being aware of it, and presents it as originating in the spirit world. The processes of thus objectifying past perceptions and memories unwittingly, go by the name respectively of cryptaesthesia and cryptomnesia and the mental process common to both is called cryptopsychism.