Montague Ullman - Psi and Psychiatry

Montague Ullman

This chapter traces the close connection that has always existed between medical psychology and psychic research. Beginning with the interest of some of the pioneers of both the SPR and the ASPR in the exciting discoveries of the unconscious dimensions of human personality and the possible relevance of the study of abnormal mental states to their pursuits, the theme of this interconnection was examined by the founders of the psychoanalytic movement and their followers down to the contemporary scene. The contributions from the clinical setting have provided a rich store of information concerning the emotional atmosphere in which psi occurs, the personality dynamics at play, the relative roles of patient and therapist, and the clinical criteria for the recognition of the telepathic dream. An example of one such dream is included.

Psychiatry is the branch of medicine that deals with disturbances in thought, feeling, and behavior. Such disturbances may be mild and reversible or severe and irreversible. They may be functional or organic, depending on whether there are identifiable changes in brain structure or physiology. Psychiatry as such may be viewed as an applied science coming under the broader heading of the behavioral sciences. The latter designation is multidisciplinary and includes both theoretical and applied sciences having to do with behavior; it addresses itself to the full range of human behavior, both normal and pathological. Several common threads bind the behavioral scientists of today with their precursors of the last century. These include an interest in the unconscious determinants of behavior, the range of human potential, and the roots of eccentric, deviant or unusual behavior.

All of these interests are prominently revealed in the writings of the early group of scholars and scientists who struggled to initiate and develop psychic research on a scientific basis. Thus, major themes filling the publications of the SPR and the ASPR during their formative years were the problems of subliminal consciousness, the nature of suggestion and hypnosis, the nature of trance states, possession, and multiple personality. All of these concerns are very much with us today, in more modern dress, in the attention we pay to the unconscious dimension of human personality and in our various investigations into the broad range of phenomena associated with altered states of consciousness (reverie, trance, hypnosis, dreams, hypnogogic states, psychotic states, etc.). Then, as now, psychic researchers were intrigued with the possible relevance of these states to psychic or paranormal phenomena.

A number of distinguished psychologists and medical men specializing in nervous disorders were associated with the early work of the SPR. Their efforts were both exploratory and reactive-exploratory in terms of their dogged efforts to study, evaluate, and record instances of paranormal phenomena and reactive in the sense of taking issue with what they felt were the limiting aspects of the materialism and determinism that characterized the science of their day and the outlook of scientists generally. They were perhaps the humanistic psychologists of their time, open to all that could shed new light on human nature and its potential. Holding that the danger of mechanistically boxing man in was far greater than the almost inevitable social stigma and the frustration of false leads that one encounters in tracking down the paranormal, they nevertheless chose the latter course. They set themselves the task of examining occult claims, including the evidence for survival, designing experiments in thought transference and clairvoyance and exploring the emerging field of hypnosis for its possible relevance to the phenomena they were studying. They took a second look at various psychopathological syndromes with the same end in mind. Hysteria (45, 46) was studied not only in relation to unconscious mental functioning but also for the light it could shed on such well-known effects as the sensory and motor automatisms that often occurred in trance states. Cases of multiple personality (45, 47) were assiduously observed for their bearing on a theory of consciousness and the role of the subliminal or subconscious. Cases of paranoia and obsession (53) were studied from the standpoint of possible spirit possession and the question of the continued existence of discarnate entities.