Parapsychology: Naturalising The Supernatural, Re-Enchanting Science

Parapsychology: Naturalising The Supernatural, Re-Enchanting Science 

Egil Asprem

Parapsychology has helped facilitate a modern discourse on purportedly “occult” and “supernatural” phenomena in which the authority of science occupies the high seat. In this article, parapsychology is defined as the organised attempt to create a scientific discipline out of a field of knowledge typically associated with the occult and supernatural. Taken in this sense, we may date its beginnings to the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in England in 1882, representing a group of scientists, philosophers and other scholars organised on the model of the scientific society or club, striving towards serious recognition by other scientific communities and professional societies. In the early decades of the 20th century the approach of the SPR spread to other countries, spawning a discourse which transformed, in the 1930s, into modern professional parapsychology, famously headed by Joseph  Banks Rhine at Duke University...

Opting for a thematic approach to the history of parapsychology, I will look at three interrelated types of questions:

I Philosophical issues, of an epistemological nature, raised or implied  by the project of “naturalising the supernatural”;

II Sociological issues concerning the professionalization process of parapsychology, and;

III Strategies for claiming and maintaining legitimacy for what was, and
still remains, a contested field of knowledge.

Assessing the final impact of parapsychology and the degree to which its strategic choices and alignments succeeded I argue that the project largely failed in its intended ambitions of creating a “science of the supernatural”. Instead I suggest that it has been highly influential in the context of contemporary religion and popular culture. By relating parapsychological discourse to the analytical concepts of “paraculture” (Hess 1993) and “occulture” (Partridge 2004/5), I argue that para- psychology has been central to the dynamics of disenchantment and re-enchantment playing out in the late modern West. While it origi- nally set out to naturalise the supernatural, the cultural significance of parapsychology is rather that it facilitated a re-enchantment of science and secular culture in the process.