Actions for Common phantoms [electronic resource] : an American history of psychic science

Email RIS file
Bookmark
Report an Issue

Common phantoms [electronic resource] : an American history of psychic science / Alicia Puglionesi

Author
Puglionesi, Alicia
Published
Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2020.
Physical Description
1 online resource
Access Online

Availability

I Want It
I Want It

Finding items...

Series
Restrictions on Access
License restrictions may limit access.
Contents
Introduction : at home, with ghosts -- The weather map at the bottom of the mind -- Machines that dream together -- Drawings from the other side -- Psychic domesticity -- The wilderness of insanity -- Conclusion : to keep alive and heap up data
Summary
"Modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences, this book brings to life the seances, deathbed communions, flashes of clairvoyance, and telepathic experiments that captivated the American public from the 1860s well into the twentieth century. The book contextualizes psychical research, an unorthodox "science of the soul," within a long history of citizen science in the United States. Rather than a superstitious impediment to the progress of laboratory psychology, psychical research belongs to a continuous tradition of knowledge production by ordinary people in everyday settings. The book reveals how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. They formed a far-flung network devoted to gathering evidence and making the study of experience an "in vivo" field science. And they persisted despite growing marginalization in the 1920s and 30s, as psychology asserted its professional and laboratory-based status. Each chapter delves into the vigorous experimental culture of amateur psychical researchers, challenging readers to discern whether this was a pseudo-science, a failed science, or a phantom science-one impossible yet persistent, the faint rapping of a curiosity that refuses to be extinguished"--
Subject(s)
Genre(s)
ISBN
9781503612785 (ebook)
9781503608375 (cloth)
9781503612778 (paperback)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 36200498