The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [113]
In another secretive letter, Myers confided in Oliver Lodge: “I do not say that facts unknown to myself were given[,] but facts unknown to Mrs. P were recombined in a manner & with an earnestness which in Hodgson and myself left little doubt—no doubt—that we were in the presence of an authentic utterance from a soul beyond the tomb.”
Myers asked Richard Hodgson to continue working with Mrs. Piper in search of further proof. It would be easy enough to abandon this ridiculous, hopeless wish to find a dead woman. But Myers, as he told his friends, had a feeling that she was there, just beyond his reach.
Myers found Leonora Piper fascinating anyway. The hunt for Annie just added to the medium’s attraction as an object of study. The mind of a medium, Myers would argue, offered a rare opportunity to explore the true range of human capabilities.
He compared Mrs. Piper’s mental manifestations when in trance state—personalities including G.P and Phinuit—to interlocking puzzle pieces that formed a picture of an intricate brain, operating on levels that ranged from waking awareness to “subliminal consciousness.” He’d already published eight arguments in favor of the multifaceted mind, filling page after page in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. But Myers wanted to go beyond mere advocacy of his position; he wanted to explore the potential of such a mind. How might different aspects of the brain, dif ferent levels of its function, influence each other?
Myers pored over other writings on the subject, sifting them for support. He persuaded the SPR to publish Sigmund Freud’s 1895 paper “Studies in Hysteria” because the Austrian discussed the idea of the subconscious mind. It was the first of Freud’s research papers to appear in a British journal. Freud was just building his reputation as a pioneer in psychiatry at that moment; he would first use the term psychoanalysis in 1896, after ten years of private practice. He had studied hypnosis under Jean Charcot, in Paris, and would later refer to the hypnotic state as one of free association. When the SPR first published his study, Freud had yet to make an impact in London, although his provocative theories were gradually gaining attention. Myers particularly liked Freud’s innovative ways of looking at mental processes. “The fact is,” Freud wrote in “Studies of Hysteria,” “that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria,” that a person had to be understood in terms of their life, their experience, their story, that dismissing them as a pathology was too shallow an approach.
Myers saw nothing shallow or simple about the human mind. He frequently compared the range of human consciousness to the light spectrum, in which visible light constitutes only one small part, while other regions—from the ultraviolet to the infrared—do their work in ways that we cannot see but may sense and respond to anyway. Using that image as an illustration, he offered his own theory proposing that ordinary consciousness, which he sometimes called “supraliminal,” constituted only a small part of mental abilities, the part focused upon helping us function in our daily lives.
Beneath that “waking self” ran the other “streams of consciousness,” currents of mental activity just as invisible as the heat-rich radiation of the infrared region of light and just as potent. Myers proposed that some part of the subliminal, or subconscious, mind was also purely about internal function—managing digestion, the thump of the heart, the whoosh of the lungs. Other “streams” of subliminal consciousness, though, might be used for external functions—processing social communication signals such as facial expression or subtle body gestures. At other levels, the subliminal mind might operate even more subtly, even telepathically. “I suggest, then,” he wrote, “that the stream of consciousness in which we habitually live is not the only consciousness which exists in connection with our organism.”
Perhaps, Myers added, these