The Founders of Psychical Research

Alan Gauld’s study centres on Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney and Frederic Myers, whose work helped shape the early Society for Psychical Research. It begins with modern Spiritualism in America between 1848 and 1855, follows its growth in England, and traces the Sidgwick group’s investigations before the Society’s foundation in 1882.

The later chapters consider apparitions reported in Phantasms of the Living, accounts of the dead, thought-transference, physical phenomena and mental mediumship. Gauld also discusses sittings involving Eusapia Palladino and Leonora Piper, together with Myers’s ideas about the subliminal self and the soul. Reported paranormal events are presented as claims requiring assessment, not as established supernatural facts.