2011/07/01 by Andreas Sommer · 1 citation
Psychology · Neuroscience · Medicine · #Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology #Neurology and Historical Studies #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #Psychoanalysis #Telepathy #Friendship #Context (archaeology) #Consciousness #Psychology #Heresy #Publication #History of psychology #Classics #Literature #Philosophy #Epistemology #Medicine #History #Social psychology #Law #Art #Alternative medicine #Theology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0025727300005445
openalex publication_date 2011/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
The English music theorist and philosophical writer Edmund Gurney was the first ‘fulltime’ psychical researcher in history. While he was primarily concerned with empirical evidence for telepathy, Gurney significantly contributed to the late nineteenth-century literature on hallucinations in the sane, and the psychology of hypnotism and dissociation. He conducted the first large-scale survey of hallucinations in the general public and, with Pierre Janet, was the first to publish experimental data suggesting dissociated streams of consciousness in hypnotism. This paper sketches Gurney's contributions to psychology and dynamic psychiatry in the context of his friendship with Frederic W.H. Myers and William James. It is argued that although Gurney's research into hallucinations and hypnotism had been embraced and assimilated by contemporary psychologists such as William James, Alfred Binet and others, his contributions to psychology have subsequently been marginalised because of the discipline's paradigmatic rejection of controversial research questions his findings were entangled with.