Society for Psychical Research

The Society for Psychical Research grew out of a conversation in the autumn of 1881 between the journalist Edmund Dawson Rogers and the physicist William Fletcher Barrett, both frustrated that claims of thought transference and spiritualist phenomena were dismissed by mainstream science without serious study. A conference held on 5 and 6 January 1882 at the headquarters of the British National Association of Spiritualists in London proposed forming a dedicated research body, and the Society was formally constituted on 20 February 1882.

The Cambridge moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick became its first president, lending the enterprise academic respectability, while the founding committee included Barrett, Rogers, the medium William Stainton Moses, the barrister Frederic W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney. The Society organised itself into standing committees covering thought reading, mesmerism, the reputed force described by Karl von Reichenbach, apparitions and haunted houses, and the physical phenomena of spiritualism. Its stated purpose was to approach these problems in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry that had allowed science to resolve other once obscure questions. Early members brought real scientific standing to the project, among them the chemist William Crookes, already known for his controversial investigations of the medium Florence Cook, and the philosopher William James in the United States, who helped found a sister society there in 1885.

The Society's most consequential early inquiry concerned the Theosophical Society. In 1884 the SPR sent a young Cambridge graduate, Richard Hodgson, to India to investigate reports of materialized letters and other physical phenomena associated with Helena Blavatsky. Hodgson's 1885 report, based partly on letters implicating Blavatsky and her housekeeper Emma Coulomb in fabricating the messages, concluded the phenomena were fraudulent and called Blavatsky one of the most accomplished impostors in history. The verdict shaped the Society's reputation for rigor for a century, though in 1986 the SPR's own handwriting expert Vernon Harrison published a detailed critique of Hodgson's evidence, arguing the case against Blavatsky had not been proven to the standard Hodgson claimed.

Beyond Theosophy, the SPR conducted a landmark statistical Census of Hallucinations in the 1890s, investigated telepathy experiments and mediums including Leonora Piper, and later analysed the cross correspondences, a set of interlocking automatic writings produced by several mediums after Myers's death in 1901 that some members read as evidence of his survival. The Society survived the general professional retreat from psychical research in the mid twentieth century and continues today, publishing the peer reviewed Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and maintaining an archive and the online Psi Encyclopedia, while taking no institutional position on whether the phenomena it studies are real.