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The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a non-profit organization in the United Kingdom whose stated purpose is to understand "events and abilities commonly described as 'psychic' or 'paranormal' by promoting and supporting important research in this area" and to "examine allegedly paranormal phenomena in a scientific and unbiased way." It was founded in 1882 by three dons of Trinity College, Cambridge, Edmund Gurney, Frederic William Henry Myers, and Henry Sidgwick, because of their interest in spiritualism.
The Society has a membership of 5,500 and an average revenue of 5.2 million pounds per year. Its headquarters is in Marloes Road, London.
The Society holds no corporate opinions: all opinions expressed are those of the individual members. It publishes the quarterly Journal of The Society for Psychical Research (JSPR) and irregular Proceedings, and holds an annual conference.
History
Its purpose was to encourage scientific research into psychic or paranormal phenomena in order to establish their truth. Research was initially aimed at six areas: telepathy, mesmerism and similar phenomena, mediums, apparitions, physical phenomena associated with séances and, finally, the history of all these phenomena. The Society is run by a President and a Council of twenty people. The organisation is divided between London and Cambridge, the London headquarters were initially at 14 Dean's Yard. A French branch of the Society was formed in 1885 as the Société Française pour Recherche Psychique (SFRP), which means "French Society for Psychical Research". Later, an American branch of the Society was formed as the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), becoming an affiliate of the original SPR in 1890. Famous supporters of the society have included Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Carl Jung, J. B. Rhine and Arthur Conan Doyle (who was duped on at least one occasion by tricksters).
The Society was especially active in the thirty years after it was founded, gaining fame for the Hodgson Report in 1884. Most initial members were spiritualists but there was a core of professional investigators - the Sidgwick Group, headed by Henry Sidgwick, a formation pre-dating the SPR by eight years. The Society was weakened by internal strife, a large part of the members (the Spiritists) left as early as 1887 in opposition to the non-spiritualist approach taken by most intellectuals.
| The presidents of the Society for Psychical Research | |
| 1882-1884 | Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), philosopher |
| 1885-1887 | Balfour Stewart (1827-1887), physicist |
| 1888-1892 | Henry Sidgwick (→ 1882) |
| 1893 | Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), later prime minister, originator of the well known Balfour Declaration |
| 1894-1895 | William James (1842-1910) American psychologist and philosopher |
| 1896-1897 | Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), physicist and chemist |
| 1900 | Frederick William Henry Myers (1843-1901), philologist and philosopher |
| 1901-1903 | Sir Oliver Lodge (1851; †1940), physicist |
| 1904 | Sir William Fletcher Barrett (1845-1926), physicist |
| 1905 | Charles Robert Richet (1850; †1935), French Physiologist und Nobel Prize winner |
| 1906-1907 | Gerald Balfour (1853-1945), politician |
| 1908-1909 | Eleanor Sidgwick (1845-1936), parapsychologist |
| 1910 | Henry Arthur Smith (1848-), Anwalt |
| 1911 | Andrew Lang (1844-1912) |
| 1912 | W. Boyd Carpenter (1841-1918), Bischof |
| 1913 | Henri Bergson (1859-1941) French philosopher; Nobel Prize for literature 1927. |
| 1914 | Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864-1937), philosopher |
| 1915-1916 | George Gilbert Aime Murray (1866-1957), philologist |
| 1917-1918 | Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (1860-1955), professor of philosophy in Oxford |
| 1919 | John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842-1919), physicist, Nobel Prize 1904 |
| 1920-1921 | William McDougall (1871-1938), psychologist |
| 1922 | Thomas Walter Mitchell (1869; †1944), editor of the British journal of medical psychology |
| 1923 | Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), astronomer |
| 1924-1925 | John George Piddington (1869-1952), businessman |
| 1926-1927 | Hans Driesch (1867-1941), German biologist and natural philosopher |
| 1928-1929 | Sir Lawrence Jones (1885-) |
| 1930-1931 | Walter Franklin Prince (1863-1934), founded the Boston SPR in 1925 |
| 1932 | Eleanor Sidgwick (→ 1908) and Oliver Lodge (→ 1901) |
| 1933-1934 | Edith Lyttelton (1865-1948), playwright |
| 1935-1936 | Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887-1971), philosopher |
| 1937-1938 | John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (→ 1919) |
| 1939-1941 | Henri Haberley Price (1899-) |
| 1942-1944 | Robert Henry Thouless (1894-), psychologist |
| 1945-1946 | George Tyrell (*1879; †1952), mathematician |
| 1947-1948 | William Henry Salter (1880-), lawyer |
| 1949 | Gardner Murphy (1895-1979), psychologist |
| 1950-1951 | Samuel George Soal (1889-1975), mathematician |
| 1952 | George Murray (→ 1915) |
| 1953-1955 | Frederick Stratton (1881-), astrophysicist, professor in Cambridge |
| 1956-1958 | Guy William Lambert (1889-), diplomat |
| 1958-1960 | Charlie Dunbar Broad (→ 1935) |
| 1960-1961 | Henri Habberley Price (→ 1939) |
| 1960-1963 | Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-), professor of Greek studies in Birmingham and Oxford |
| 1963-1965 | Donald James West (1924-), psychiatrist and criminologist |
| 1965-1969 | Sir Alister Hardy (1896-1985), zoologist |
| 1970 | W. A. H. Rushton (1901-1980), physiologist, professor in Cambridge |
| 1971-1974 | Clement William Kennedy Mundle (1916-), philosopher |
| 1974-1976 | John Beloff (1920-2006), psychologist at the University of Edinburgh |
| 1976-1979 | Arthur J. Ellison (-2000) |
| 1980 | Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980) |
| 1980 | Louisa Ella Rhine (1891-) |
| 1981-1983 | Arthur J. Ellison (→ 1976) |
| ??? | ??? |
| 1992-1993 | Alan Gauld |
| 1993-1995 | Archie Roy, professor of astronomy in Glasgow, founded the Scottish SPR in 1987 |
| 1996-1999 | David Fontana, professor of psychology at Cardiff University |
| 1999-2004 | Bernard Carr, professor of mathematics and astronomy at London University |
| 2004- | John Poynton, Biologist |
Remark concerning the persons in italics: Eleanor Sidgwick was the wife of Henry Sidgwick and the sister of both Arthur Balfour and Gerald Balfour.
Today
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The Society still exists and states its principal aim as "understanding events and abilities commonly described as 'psychic' or 'paranormal' by promoting and supporting important research in this area." Of its initial aims, the most successful has been the gathering of data relating to the history of the paranormal - the SPR has built up an extensive library and archive, part of which is held at the University of Cambridge. The society's Journal is peer reviewed and it is described by the Psychology department at Edinburgh University as containing "scholarly reports of a high standard".
The Society still has many well known figures among its members, including parapsychologists Susan Blackmore, Ciarán O'Keeffe, and Louie Savva. Investigators of spontaneous phenomena (hauntings, etc.) include Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair who are best known for the Enfield Poltergeist.
References
- [http://www.spr.ac.uk/index.php3?page=library SPR website
- [http://www.spr.ac.uk/index.php3?page=library SPR website
- http://moebius.psy.ed.ac.uk/~info/SocAssoc.php3 Edinburgh University Website
- Vernon Harrison. (1997) H. P. Blavatsky and the SPR. ISBN 1-55700-119-7
See also
External links
- SPR home page
- The Society for Psychical Research Scandal
- The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Paranormal Claims
- The Need for Responsibility in Parapsychology: My Sixty Years in Psychical Research by Eric Dingwall, a history and evaluation
- The Society for Psychical Research: an outline of its history By William Henry Salter, 1948
- Journal of the Society for Psychical Research By Society for Psychical Research (Great Britain)., Harry Houdini Collection (Library of Congress),1884