Remembering Frederic Myers -- Frederic Who?

     Theodor Flournoy, a world-renowned University of Geneva psychology professor, once opined that the name Frederic W. H. Myers should be joined to those of Copernicus and Darwin, completing "the triad of geniuses" who most profoundly revolutionized scientific thought.

       Pioneering psychiatrist William James, wrote that Frederic Myers "will always be remembered in psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mental wilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it."

      "Frederic Who?" you ask.   Put Frederic William Henry Myers into a Google search and the first thing that pops up is a Wikipedia entry identifying him as an English poet and essayist, hardly a reason to justify the glorious comments by Professors Flournoy and James.

       Everyone knows the name of Sigmund Freud, but very few know that of Frederic  Myers, a man who seems to have been ahead of Freud in developing a systematic conception of the subconscious mind. 

        Although not educated as a psychologist, Myers, a Cambridge classical scholar was a de facto psychologist who referred to the subconscious as the "subliminal."  When, in 1911, Freud joined the Society for Psychical Research, which was co-founded by Myers in 1882, he wrote an article making it clear that Myers' "subliminal" was not the same as his "unconscious."  Essentially, the difference was that Myers saw a soul enveloped in the subconscious, while Freud accepted atomic materialism, which denied the existence of a soul.   

        Why isn't Myers remembered today?  Perhaps, because, as Aldous Huxley saw it, Freud was focused on the "rats and beetles in the cellarage," while Myers was more interested in the treasures and birds in the attic, something Freud, who was a mere teenager when Myers began developing his ideas of the subconscious, ignored.        

      In a newly-released biography of Myers, Immortal Longings, author Trevor Hamilton explains that Myers is not remembered today because the prevailing paradigm in those early years of psychology, as it remains today, was the Wundtian approach, which holds that the only things that make sense are those which can be scientifically measured and quantified.  The soul was not subject to scientific measurement, so was rejected.  

       Huxley saw Myers as a classical scholar, a minor poet, a conscientious observer, and a platonic philosopher, someone who "was free to pay more attention to the positive aspects of the subliminal self than to its negative and destructive aspects," as with psychologists and psychiatrists of then and now.  Hamilton quotes Huxley as saying that  Myers' "unconscious" was superior to Freud's in that it was more comprehensive and truer to the data of experience.  How much Myers influenced Freud is not clear, but there is little doubt that Myers' ideas significantly influenced William James and Carl Jung.

      Sir Oliver Lodge, the esteemed physicist and electricity pioneer, stated that Myers had, before his death in 1901, been "laying the foundation for a cosmic philosophy, a scheme of existence as large and comprehensive and well founded as any that have appeared."

      In his autobiography Lodge wrote that Myers had a remarkable interest in science and a portentous memory.  He knew the Ǣneid by heart and could recite many of the Bab Ballads without difficulty.  Lodge remembered attending one of  Myers' lectures on the poet Crabbe, calling it a remarkable tour de force. "He had no notes," Lodge recalled, "but after speaking of Crabbe and his poetry in unexpectedly eulogistic terms, he recited from memory whole reams of Crabbe's poetry, which I had never heard before, and was ignorant of."

      It was Myers, Lodge explained, who broke down his skepticism and showed him the reasonableness of the survival hypothesis.  "He it was who put evidence in my way such as gradually convinced me of the truth of the doctrine."

         Dr. Charles Richet, the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, said:  "If Myers was not a mystic, he had all the faith of a mystic and the ardour of an apostle, in conjunction with the sagacity and precision of a savant."

       The latter part of the 19^th Century was a time of despair and hopelessness for many.   "We were all in the first flush of triumphant Darwinism, when terrene evolution had explained so much that men hardly cared to look beyond," Myers is quoted by Hamilton in explaining why he set out in search of the soul.

       As with so many other educated people, Myers, the son of a minister, had lost his faith, and life had become a march toward an abyss into nothingness. He recognized that there were many who were "willing to let earthly activities and pleasures gradually dissipate and obscure the larger hope" during life's death march, but, perhaps because he was a deep thinker, Myers was unable to effectively use the defense mechanism called repression to overcome his death anxiety and his concomitant fear of extinction.      

       Subtitled "FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death," Hamilton's  book details the efforts of Myers and several of his colleagues to make sense out of various paranormal phenomena which seemed to suggest that the world is not totally mechanistic and that consciousness does survive physical death.

        Although Professor William Barrett, a physicist, is recognized as the prime mover in setting up the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, he relinquished the leadership roles to Myers and his two Cambridge friends, Edmund Gurney, and Professor Henry Sidgwick.  Their objective was to scientifically study the phenomena, including hypnotism, telepathy, multiple personalities, and mediumship, to see if they offered any evidence that mind was not totally dependent on brain and that there is something beyond the five sense.  But they had to do it discreetly, cautiously, and indirectly.  "To admit the literal reality of the ghost was to move back to the dark ages," Hamilton explains their dilemma.   There were simply too many "newly enlightened" people in the upper echelons of society who could not make a distinction between matters of the spirit and the superstitions of the church they had left behind and now scoffed at.

        "It is too simple to represent Victorian England as a pious, fundamentalist land shaken by the advances of a materialistic and iconoclastic science," Hamilton states, pointing out that the census of 1851 revealed that well over five million people did not attend church on Sunday, March 30, 1851.  However, it was clear, Hamilton adds, that the educated middle classes and upper-middle classes were emancipating themselves from their evangelical roots as a result of the scientific and scholarly advances.   Darwinism might have been the crowning blow, but this emancipation had begun well before Darwin, during the "Age of Reason."

       Drawing from Myers' diary, a short autobiography written only for his friends, and other references, Hamilton explores Myers' early life and the influences which shaped his beliefs and disbeliefs. He acquaints us with his days at Cambridge, when he was called, "Myers the superb," and then discusses his conflicting love interests as well as other trials and tribulations.  He tells how Myers hooked up with Gurney and Sidgwick and how the three intellectuals complemented each other in various ways - Myers often brash and assertive, Sidgwick reserved and cautious, Gurney meticulous and somewhere in between Myers and Sidgwick in his enthusiasm for their mission.

        The SPR exposed many fraudulent mediums, although there is controversy over some of the exposures, including that of Madame Blavatsky.  The mediumship of Eusapia Palladino was also very controversial, some members of the SPR convinced that she was a charlatan and other that she was a genuine medium, whereas the truth seems to be that she was a "mixed" medium - producing genuine phenomena at times and faking some at those times when her powers failed her.   Theosophists, in the case of Blavatsky, and Spiritualists, in the case of various other mediums, argued that the researchers simply didn't understand the phenomena and were applying terrestrial science to celestial matters which they didn't understand.    

        As Hamilton sees it, Myers was caught in a Victorian dilemma.  "One set of desires, the yearning for the immortal, spiritual universe, was opposed by another set, which was the wish for privacy and the hiding of any evidence that breached the unimpeachable façade of familial and moral behaviour," he writes.  "His need to prove and even preach survival was counterbalanced by his reticence over intimate evidence."

         That "intimate evidence" involved a number of evidential messages coming to him through different mediums from Annie Marshall, his great love of the early 1870s (although apparently a platonic affair because of her marriage to Myers' cousin).   When Annie killed herself because of her many frustrations, Myers grieved deeply.  When he later married the beautiful and wealthy Eveleen Tennant, their marriage was troubled somewhat because of Annie's communications with Myers from beyond the veil - communications which Myers kept private and which were destroyed by his wife after his death. 

           Myers died at age 57 of  Bright's disease, a kidney disorder.  William James, who was present in Rome when Myers, his friend, died, wrote that "his serenity, in fact, his eagerness to go, and his extraordinary intellectual vitality up to the very time the death agony began, and even in the midst of it, were a superb spectacle and deeply impressed the doctors, as well as ourselves."

        After Myers death, various mediums began receiving messages purportedly coming from Myers.  Some of these messages were very fragmented and made no sense until they were collected and pieced together to make complete ideas.  "The whole process seemed at times like a giant Victorian word game (anagrams, cryptic puzzles, strange puns and rhymes), of which, in fact, Myers and his colleagues...were inordinately fond," Hamilton explains.  These so-called "cross-correspondences" were interpreted by other researchers as attempts by Myers, as well as by Gurney and Sidgwick, both of whom preceded him in death, to overcome some of the objections to mediumship, including fraud and telepathy.  "[They suggested] a high level of collective design and purpose, implying character, intention and personality," Hamilton states.

   One of the more simple cross-correspondences came through on  January 17, 1904, when Alice MacDonald Fleming, the sister of author Rudyard Kipling, received the biblical reference I Cor. xvi, 12 from Myers by means of automatic writing.  Living in India at the time, Fleming was instructed by Myers to send the message to SPR headquarters in London.  He further told the SPR that he tried to get the entire wording through in Greek but could not get Fleming's hand to form Greek characters, and so he gave only the reference. On the very same day, thousands of miles away in England, Mrs. Margaret Verrall, an automatic writing medium who was a member of the SPR, also received the same biblical reference from Myers by means of automatic writing.  This biblical passage, "Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong," was the wording inscribed in Greek over the gateway of Selwyn College, Cambridge, under which Myers frequently passed. 

       One message for Sidgwick's widow, Eleanor, who had been very active in the SPR, read, "Now, dear Mrs. Sidgwick, in future have no doubt or fear of so called death, as there is none."

      In another communication, Myers gave this message about the afterlife:  "The reality is infinitely more wonderful than our most daring conjectures.  Indeed, no conjecture is sufficiently daring."

       Myers was apparently ahead of the times in the area of physical fitness as well.  His diary indicates that he ran two miles most days, one day finishing his run in 13 ½ minutes.   "Beside the record of his time he added ‘Inextricable sadness,'" Hamilton writes. "Through his life, while he was fit enough, one hazards that these runs, at times virtually every day, coincided with periods of intense spiritual and emotional disturbance."

       On a trip to the United States in 1865, Myers  decided to test himself by swimming across the Niagara River, from the Canadian side to immediately below the falls.  "I plunged in; the cliffs, the cataract, the moon herself, were hidden in a tower of whirling spray; in the foamy rush I struck at air; waves from all sides beat me to and fro; I seemed immersed in thundering chaos, alone amid the roar of doom." Myers wrote in his diary.

      Hamilton concludes the book by asking if Myers' quest had been successful.  "In personal terms it was," he opines.  ""He became convinced, on the basis of the intimate sittings he had with both Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Thompson, that he had communicated with human beings (however different their nature and post-mortem existence) who had survived bodily death.  This belief was underpinned by his wide ranging reading and research in paranormal and abnormal activity across Europe and in the United States.  It led to him bearing the onset of death with a kind of joyous resilience, almost even insouciance..."

      On the other hand, Myers obviously failed in his wider hope of establishing immortality for the spiritually-challenged masses.  While the search for immortality continues today, more than a hundred years later, the foundation established by Myers and his colleagues seems to be slowly but increasingly appreciated. 

       Hamilton offers a very interesting, intriguing, informative, in-depth, and even inspirational look at one of history's most overlooked and unappreciated contributors.   One wonders if or when modern psychology will ever escape from the muck and mire of scientific fundamentalism and catch up with Myers. 
        Immortal Longings is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.com.UK