Mediumship

I’m frequently asked why I bother “investigating the paranormal” or even “having anything to do with mediums” if I’m always such a vocal “sceptic in the media!” For those who read some of my work, or follow what I say quite carefully, you’ll already have realised that I am quite open-minded about the field and the special claimants (e.g. psychics, mediums) who litter it. But, it’s still a valid question. Why are parapsychologists interested in mediums? And I think, there’s a valid, and simple, answer.
Some individuals claim to possess mediumistic abilities that allow them to contact the ‘spirit world’ and receive information from the deceased. There are several reasons to investigate these claims:

First, mediumistic abilities, if valid, would provide evidence to support the survival of bodily death, and thus have important implications for aspects of psychology. Such data would, for example, present a strong challenge to key assumptions underlying neuropsychological research, including the notion that human personality, cognition, and consciousness is dependent on a living brain. Evidence of genuine mediumistic abilities would also raise intriguing questions about the sensory mechanisms that might underlie such abilities and, on a more practical level, have important implications for the many aspects of clinical and counselling psychology concerned with bereavement and grief.

Second, demonstrations of apparent mediumistic abilities have a significant impact on public belief and behaviour. Recent opinion polls have revealed that almost 30% of Americans now believe in the existence of genuine mediumistic abilities, approximately 10% of Britons visit mediums to both receive messages from the deceased and obtain general guidance for their lives, and new types of television programmes featuring such demonstrations consistently attract millions of viewers (guilty your honour!). Well-controlled tests of mediums would help the public and television programme makers assess the validity of such alleged abilities, and thus help inform their resulting decisions and behaviour.

Third, certain individuals working in non-paranormal contexts make claims that are analogous to those made by mediums, and the methods developed to test mediums could be used to examine these claims. For example, some clinicians claim to be able to gain insights into patients’ backgrounds purely from their reactions to certain projective tests, some practitioners working in an occupational setting appear to be able to give detailed accounts of people’s personality simply from their scores on certain assessment tools, and some individuals operating in a forensic context claim to be able to produce accurate profiles of offenders from a very limited amount of behavioural information. Several writers have recently noted that the anecdotal evidence supporting these claims may be the result of the same type of psychology that can underlie the apparent accuracy of mediumistic readings (i.e. the use of general statements, chance, etc.), and thus the methods developed to examine such claims may benefit from a thorough understanding of the procedures used to test mediumship.

Given the nature of the theoretical and practical issues surrounding this topic, it is perhaps not surprising that the scientific testing of mediumship has a long and controversial history going back over 100 years and that several parapsychologists are still “having anything to do with mediums!”

© Ciaran O'Keeffe 2011
www.theparapsychologist.com
www.theschoolofparapsychology.org