One of the most important mediums in history was Mrs. Leonora Piper of Boston, who was studied for twenty years by William James, Richard Hodgson, and other luminaries in the field of psychic research. Her mediumship raised important questions about her "controls," the guiding spirits who served as intermediaries between the living and the deceased - gatekeepers to the Beyond.
Mrs. Piper's most famous control was a Frenchman named Dr. Phinuit. The good doctor presented himself as a departed spirit eager to assist in Mrs. Piper's work. But troubles quickly arose. Phinuit was able to give little evidence of his authenticity. Although supposedly French, he could speak only in a few words of that language. Although he claimed to be a physician, he didn't know much about medicine. When pressed on his personal history, he was notoriously vague and inaccurate about the details. Laborious research failed to turn up any evidence of a French physician by that name living in the appropriate place and time.
Most researchers concluded that the Phinuit was a product of Mrs. Piper's unconscious mind, a co-personality split off from the mainstream of her personality in order to facilitate her mediumistic work. Not a few researchers went further, saying that if Phinuit was only a co-personality, an aspect of the medium's hidden mind, then so were the spirits who allegedly communicated through her. The idea was that, just as the mind is able to create a personality that calls itself Phinuit and has a distinctive voice and personal background, so the mind can create or re-create the personality of a departed loved one. Therefore, according to this theory, Mrs. Piper was not communicating with the deceased at all; she was manufacturing simulacra of the deceased in her own unconscious mind.
Naturally, for this to work, the unconscious mind must have very robust psychic powers. It must be able to look into the mind of the sitter and pull out whatever memories are necessary to reconstruct the sitter's departed loved one. In some cases, it has to do more. The unconscious mind must range beyond the s?ance room to find information held in the minds of other people perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles away, or information preserved in documents unknown to any living person. Perhaps the unconscious mind must even be able to link up with some source of infinite knowledge -- Cosmic Consciousness, the Collective Unconscious, the Akashic Records, or whatever we might call it. In other words, the medium's unconscious mind must be equipped with super-ESP, a.ka. super-psi.
So here we have the million-dollar question. If, as seems likely, Phinuit was a creation of Mrs. Piper's own mind, can we conclude that the spirits Phinuit helped bring through were equally illusory?
I don't think so. There's a very basic point here that is sometimes not sufficiently acknowledged. If Phinuit were manufactured in exactly the same way as all the other spirits that Mrs. Piper brought through, then we should expect no particular differences between Phinuit and the other spirits. But in fact, we see tremendous differences. The other spirits, in contrast to Phinuit, were able to give convincing accounts of themselves, including details of their earthly lives that could be checked and verified. The fact that Phinuit was unable to do this indicates, to me, that he was a fundamentally different type of entity from the departed loved ones who came through at the s?ances.
Moreover, the super-psi hypothesis suffers from an obvious defect. If Mrs. Piper's unconscious mind was in touch with a source of infinite knowledge, as required by super-psi, then why did she not use this source of infinite knowledge to flesh out her portrait of Phinuit? Why did she not make Phinuit speak fluent French? Surely the knowledge of how to speak French is part of any infinite store of wisdom that the unconscious mind can allegedly tap into. Why did she not provide Phinuit with a working knowledge of medical science? Why did she not simply take some real person right out of the historical record to serve as the template for her control - someone whose identity could be verified? If her unconscious mind was in touch with unlimited information, then it should have been easy for her to find an appropriate real-life person from some past era and re-create that person.
But this is not, apparently, what was done. Instead her subconscious mind created a fictional persona that could not speak French, did not know much about medicine, and could not provide verifiable details about his earthly existence. The very deficiencies of Phinuit that led researchers to believe he was only a co-personality, split off from the main branch of Mrs. Piper's mind, should also have led them to conclude that Mrs. Piper had no capacity for super-psi. After all, if she did have such a capacity, why fail to use it in the creation of her control spirit, the most important of all the spiritual entities she brought through?
A similar argument, of course, can be made with regard to Mrs. Piper's other spirit controls, such as Rector and Imperator - but not her control George Pellew, who convinced many researchers that he was a genuine departed spirit.
The argument can also be extended to the famous case of Patience Worth, a personality that spoke through an ordinary housewife named Pearl Curran. While in touch with the Patience Worth personality, Pearl Curran was able to produce an impressive quantity of literature, including lengthy novels that were critically praised in her day. Yet when efforts were made to track down the real-life Patience Worth, no conclusive evidence that she had existed could be found. And Patience, like Phinuit, was not very convincing when speaking of her personal background.
For these reasons, many investigators have speculated that Patience Worth was a co-personality generated by Pearl Curran's subconscious and that the resulting literary output was made possible by super-psi - in this case, the ability of the unconscious mind to tap into a database of literary and historical information and use it creatively.
But as with Phinuit, we encounter an obvious problem: if Pearl Curran's super-psi was prodigious enough to generate book-length works of fiction containing accurate historical facts and obscure vocabulary from past eras, why did it fail her in the creation of Patience Worth herself? Surely a faculty capable of reconstructing the life of Jesus in minute detail, something Patience Worth accomplishes in her book The Sorry Tale, would be capable of reconstructing Patience's own life.
As I look at it, there are two hypotheses that are more plausible than the super-psi hypothesis in regard to Patience Worth. The first is that Patience was a real spirit, a departed human being, who left no traceable record of her earthly life, or who used a symbolic name for some unknown reason. The second hypothesis is that Patience was a co-personality generated by Pearl Curran's unconscious mind, and that once this co-personality existed, it served as a doorway through which one or more actual spirits could communicate pseudonymously.
The bottom line is that the inability of both Dr. Phinuit and Patience Worth to produce evidence proving their own identities is not a point in favor of the super-psi hypothesis. Rather, it is a point against the super-psi hypothesis. If super-psi were a real phenomenon, and if it had been used to produce Phinuit and Patience, then those two personalities should have been far better able to speak up for themselves than they were.
http://washingtontimes.com/national/200 ... -3170r.htm
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