--- slug: parapsychology type: lineage subsection: spiritualism-mediumship created: 2026-06-02 updated: 2026-06-20 summary: "The research tradition that studies psychic experience, from the Society for Psychical Research and J. B. Rhine's Duke laboratory to ganzfeld, remote viewing, and psi debates." related: spiritualism: relation: informed-by note: "Parapsychology began as psychical research into the apparitions, mediumship, trance, and survival claims that Spiritualism had made public." psychokinesis: relation: tests note: "Parapsychology gave psychokinesis its modern research vocabulary, including PK, micro-PK, macro-PK, dice studies, and random-event-generator experiments." cold-reading: relation: risks note: "Mediumship and psychic demonstration require controls against cold reading, the ordinary technique that can imitate apparent paranormal accuracy." theosophy: relation: related note: "The Society for Psychical Research investigated Blavatsky's reported phenomena, making Theosophy part of the early psychical-research record." --- # Parapsychology > **Lineage** > > Transmission of ideas and practices through movements, teachers, works, and institutions. *The research tradition that takes psychic experience seriously enough to test it, from apparitions and mediumship to ESP, psychokinesis, ganzfeld, and remote viewing.* Parapsychology is the research lineage that brings psychic claims into disciplined inquiry. It doesn't begin by assuming every medium is honest, every hunch is psi, or every experiment proves the unseen. It begins with a narrower rule: examine the report before dismissing it. Premonitions, messages from the dead, intuitive knowing, remote perception, and mind-over-matter stories all circulate through modern spirituality. Parapsychology is the lineage that tried to give those reports methods, records, experiments, and arguments. ## What parapsychology is Parapsychology is the systematic study of reported psychic phenomena: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, apparitions, mediumship, and claims about survival after death. Older writers called the field **psychical research**. In the 20th century, especially after J. B. Rhine's work at Duke University, the field increasingly used **parapsychology** and **psi** as its umbrella terms. The word places the work beside psychology rather than outside inquiry altogether. Its methods borrow from psychology, statistics, case investigation, and experimental design. A medium's message, a dream that appears to anticipate an event, a card-guessing score, and a random-number-generator run all become material for records and tests. The tradition is neither ordinary laboratory psychology nor devotional practice. Practitioners value it because it treats psi as a serious possibility. Critics challenge it because many reported effects are small, hard to replicate, or vulnerable to fraud, expectation, and loose controls. The field's history is the history of that tension. ## Origin and historical development The modern lineage begins in the late 19th century, when [Spiritualism](spiritualism.md) had made communication with the dead a public phenomenon. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882 by figures including Henry Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Edmund Gurney. Its purpose was not to promote Spiritualism but to investigate claims that the ordinary sciences and churches were both handling badly: apparitions, trance, mediumship, thought transference, hypnotic phenomena, and survival after death. The early Society for Psychical Research was sympathetic enough to sit with witnesses and mediums. It was also skeptical enough to expose fraud and error when it found them. That combination became the lineage's signature. The American Society for Psychical Research followed in 1885 and gave the same project an American institutional home. The next shift came with **J. B. Rhine** at Duke University. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Rhine moved the field toward repeated laboratory tests. His best-known experiments used **Zener cards**, a deck of five symbols that subjects tried to identify without seeing the card. Rhine popularized **extrasensory perception**, or ESP, for the perceptual side of psi, and **psychokinesis**, or PK, for the active side. The card table and dice cup replaced the séance room as the field's public image. After Rhine, the field diversified. The Parapsychological Association was founded in 1957 and became an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. The affiliation placed the field inside a recognized scientific association without settling its claims. From the 1970s onward, research programs took up remote viewing, ganzfeld telepathy experiments, random-event generators, near-death and survival questions, and field investigations of apparitions and poltergeist-like events. ## Main figures and institutions The Society for Psychical Research gave the lineage its first durable institution. Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney brought Cambridge-trained seriousness to phenomena that many educated people either ridiculed or believed too quickly. Myers's *Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death* became one of the great early syntheses, arguing that ordinary waking consciousness is only part of the mind. Rhine gave the field its 20th-century experimental grammar. His Duke laboratory, his books, and the *Journal of Parapsychology* helped fix the terms ESP, PK, and psi in public use. His wife and collaborator, **Louisa E. Rhine**, kept the case-report tradition alive through her collections of spontaneous psychic experiences. Later institutions carried different parts of the inheritance. The **Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research** laboratory, founded by Robert G. Jahn in 1979 and active until 2007, studied whether human intention could affect random physical systems. The **Stanford Research Institute** remote-viewing work of Russell Targ, Harold Puthoff, and Ingo Swann fed both government research and the civilian practice world. The ganzfeld program, associated especially with Charles Honorton and later researchers, became one of the most argued-over experimental lines. ## Major works and methods The field's methods divide into case investigation and experiment. Case investigation preserves the older psychical-research style. Reports of apparitions, crisis dreams, mediumistic messages, poltergeist-like events, and near-death or survival experiences are checked against chronology, witness reliability, possible normal explanations, and the quality of records. Experiment tries to make psi visible under controlled conditions. Rhine's card and dice studies tested whether results could depart from chance across many trials. Ganzfeld studies placed a receiver in a mild sensory-homogenizing state while a sender viewed an image or film clip elsewhere. Random-event-generator studies asked whether intention could bias a physical or electronic system. Remote-viewing protocols asked a viewer to describe a hidden or distant target while blind to its identity. These methods changed the field's tone. The question was whether a result could survive records, controls, statistics, and replication attempts, not only whether a medium could impress a room. ## Core contribution Parapsychology's first contribution is vocabulary. **Psi** gives the field one term for the whole family of claimed anomalous information and influence. **ESP** names the perceptual side: telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. **PK** names the active side: mind or intention affecting matter, chance, or physical systems. Its second contribution is method. The lineage insists that psychic claims can be recorded, bounded, and tested more carefully than rumor. A target can be blinded. A scoring procedure can be set before the trial. A mediumship claim can be checked against what the sitter already knew. None of this proves psi by itself, but it changes the conversation from impression to procedure. Its third contribution is a sympathetic discipline of doubt. The best parapsychology doesn't sneer at psychic experience, and it doesn't let desire do the work. It asks what the experience would have to survive if it were real: leakage, coincidence, fraud, cueing, selective memory, expectation, and statistical error. ## What it transmitted into modern spirituality Parapsychology gave modern spirituality a research language for psychic ability. Many practitioners still speak in older or looser terms: intuition, the clairs, knowing, energy, spirit contact. Behind that language sits the psi vocabulary Rhine and later researchers stabilized. A psychic-development class that distinguishes telepathy from clairvoyance is using parapsychology's map. So is a practitioner who separates ESP from [psychokinesis](psychokinesis.md), even without citing the field. It also gave the practice world protocols. Remote viewing became teachable partly because researchers tried to make hidden-target perception procedural: blind targets, written impressions, sketches, staged methods, and separation between raw perception and interpretation. Ganzfeld entered altered-state and psi culture as a way to reduce sensory noise and invite imagery. Random-event-generator work fed the idea that intention might be tested at the level of probability rather than spectacle. The survival side of the field shaped contemporary afterlife practice. Psychical research treated apparitions, crisis cases, cross-correspondences, and mediumistic messages as evidence to be examined rather than as church doctrine. That posture allowed later spirituality to speak of survival as a dossier and an open question, not only as faith. ## Influence on the contemporary field The influence is strongest where practitioners want seriousness without adopting a debunking voice. A person who has had a precognitive dream may not care about the statistics of ganzfeld trials. Still, the existence of a research tradition changes the felt status of the experience. It says: this has been reported before, named before, tested before, argued before. That does not make every claim true. It does something narrower and more useful. It prevents psychic experience from being forced into only two roles, miracle or mistake. Parapsychology offers a third role: a report that can be handled with care. ## Controversies, criticism, and legacy Parapsychology has never escaped controversy, and the controversy is part of the lineage rather than an external footnote. Critics point to weak replication, flexible methods, sensory leakage, publication bias, fraud, and the difficulty of turning small statistical effects into a stable account of mind and reality. Parapsychologists answer that some effects have appeared across many studies. They also argue that better controls have often followed critique, and that anomalous results should not be ignored merely because they are uncomfortable. The ganzfeld debate shows the pattern. Charles Honorton and other proponents reported above-chance results in telepathy experiments. Ray Hyman criticized the methods. Their 1986 joint communique acknowledged flaws in earlier studies and called for tighter automated protocols. Later reviews continued to disagree. That exchange is parapsychology in miniature: positive results, sharp critique, improved procedure, continuing dispute. Daryl Bem's 2011 precognition studies made the dispute visible far beyond the field. Bem reported evidence for retroactive influence in ordinary psychological tasks. The paper passed peer review in a leading psychology journal, then became a flashpoint in psychology's replication crisis when follow-up attempts failed or produced mixed results. The legacy is not settlement. It is a tradition of refusing both easy belief and easy dismissal. Parapsychology has given the field names, methods, archives, professional bodies, experimental designs, and a long record of dispute. A practitioner doesn't need to treat that record as proof to benefit from it. She needs to know that psychic claims have a history, methods matter, and an experience can be taken seriously without being shielded from criticism. ## Sources - Frederic W. H. Myers, *Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death* (1903) — the major early Society for Psychical Research synthesis, important for survival, subliminal mind, and the older psychical-research frame. - J. B. Rhine, *Extra-Sensory Perception* (1934) and *The Reach of the Mind* (1947) — the Duke laboratory works that popularized ESP, PK, card tests, dice studies, and the statistical style of 20th-century psi research. - Louisa E. Rhine, *Hidden Channels of the Mind* (1961) — a widely read collection and analysis of spontaneous psychic experiences, preserving the case-report side of the Rhine program. - Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne, *Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World* (1987) — the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research statement of the random-event-generator program. - Charles Honorton and Ray Hyman, "A Joint Communique: The Psi Ganzfeld Controversy" (*Journal of Parapsychology*, 1986) — the central exchange over ganzfeld evidence, methodological criticism, and proposed tighter controls. - Jessica Utts, "An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning" (1995), and Ray Hyman, "Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena" (1995) — the paired reviews of the government remote-viewing record, useful because they show the same evidence read in sharply different ways. - Daryl J. Bem, "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect" (*Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 2011) — the mainstream-psychology flashpoint that tied psi research to the replication-crisis debate. - Etzel Cardena, "The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review" (*American Psychologist*, 2018) — a recent sympathetic review of the experimental literature. --- - [Next: Human Potential & Transpersonal Psychology](human-potential.md) - [Previous: Spiritualism](spiritualism.md)