The modern and systematic study of the so-called paranormal phenomena has its roots in the 19th century spiritualist movement. Many consider the foundation, in Britain, of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in the 1880s was the first step. A large number of the SPR members (and sympathizers), as well those from similar organizations created around the world in the following years, were mostly motivated by a quest to prove the immortality of the soul. Their emphasis on medium séance and haunting activities is therefore not surprising. Those who are nowadays interesting in researching haunting are very often referring to the body of literature created or inspired by the SPR, and remain motivated by the belief in the immortality of the soul (even if they may not be willing to admit it).
In spite of the great care deployed in conducting empirical research, the overall psychical research was, and still is, very problematic due to the fact that their fundamental assumptions was essentially improvable. The epistemological foundation of psychical research was based on two inter-related principles. The first one is that if information only available to a deceased person is obtained by a medium, then it is considered as evidence pointing towards the immortality of the soul. The second one is that if there is physical activity (noise, footsteps, knocking, human-shaped moving shadows, etc) near were a person died or was interred, then it is also evidence considered as pointing towards the immortality of the soul. In other words, ghostly activities are assumed to be caused by the spirit of a deceased individual.
Both these principles, however, are actually fundamentally flawed. As research in remote viewing has clearly shown, information about something than only a deceased person would have known can indeed be accessed without any “involvement” of a spirit or ghost. Hence, accessing information cannot be used as evidence of the immortality of the soul simply because the actual source of such information is not known, and the use of mediums to talk or sense spirits is in no way necessary. If fact, an argument can be made that mediums are simply practicing a non-visual form of remote viewing by self-deluding themselves into having a spiritualist communication, while in fact they are simply neutralizing their consciousness—a key enabler for ESP effects. As well, the Jungian hypothesis of the Absolute Knowledge could be invoked to explain every single medium-related gathering of information through paranormal means.
In a similar way, research on PK (like the Philip Experiment) and RSPK has shown that living human beings can create all these physical manifestations, and that invoking a non-human entity is not necessary to explain these phenomena. If anything, it is the livings’ unconscious belief in ghosts that seems to be the key variable for such manifestations.
It is not surprising that already in the 1920s, researchers intuitively knew that the psychical research approach was leading to a dead end, and motivated the creation of scientific parapsychology by people like J.B. Rhine. It is safe to say that the parapsychologists’ rejection of psychical research was fully vindicated by the 1980s.
The above is a very brief, but standard, description of the paranormal research intellectual history. However, there is an important component of that history that is often overlooked: the departure from psychical research was not only the fact of quantitative and positivist scientists like J.B. Rhine, but also due to the emergence of psychoanalysis as an accepted scientific discipline.
The central role of psychoanalysis in studying the paranormal
In reviewing yet another older book, there are a number of interesting issues about the study of the paranormal that emerged, and that can be of great importance for parasociology. The book is:
Fodor, Nandor. (1959). The Haunted Mind: A psychoanalytical look at the supernatural. New York: Garrett.
It is interesting to note, for instance, that Sigmund Freud had an interest for the paranormal since the early days of his career, although the full extent of this interest was only revealed two decades after his death. Carl Jung’s interest was well-known relatively early in his career. A number of analysts followed him afterward, like Eisenbud and Fodor. The fundamental thrust behind this interest, in the case of psychoanalysts, was that many of them experienced ESP and synchronistic events in the course of their practice.
For any analyst, it is important to be mindful of the phenomena known as transference and counter-transference, where the patient might become dependent on what the analyst is thinking, and conversely the analyst might become too emotionally attached to their patient. For the analysts, the experience of ESP events can be interpreted as either being too close to a patient so that both come to think alike or it is a genuine psi effect. For them, it was important to find out which interpretation was the most accurate. It appears that both can occur concurrently. There are many instances where the patient (or the analyst) could not objectively have known the information, but the emotional proximity tends to enhance such ESP activity. Given that emotional proximity can be both an enabler and a proxy for ESP, this makes such research challenging. It is therefore not surprising that those who thirst for clear-cut answers focused almost exclusively on quantitative laboratory-based research. In the end, the issue of emotional proximity was found to be an important issue in the laboratory too, through what is known in parapsychology as the experimenter’s participating in the psi effects.
This is an important reminder for any researcher interested in psi. Not only those who do research on haunting and poltergeist (and UFOs) can be unconsciously full-fledge participants in causing psi effects to occur, but they tend to be offended at the very idea that they and the witnesses are probably more important to study than the physical manifestations. Fodor, although not having UFOs in mind, wrote a very crisp passage on this issue: “Up to that time, psychical research was a singularly one-sided scientific pursuit. The researchers, no matter how intrigued by the mysteries of the supernormal, felt they were upholding the strictest scientific standards by investigating the reported phenomena exclusively. To them, any questions of the mental background or personality of a medium under examination or of a family experiencing a haunting were beside the point—a distracting influence of no bearing on the reality of the psychic event” (p. 6). Fodor wrote this in the 1950s, referring to events that occurred in the 1930s. It is fascinating to see that 80 years later little has changed.
The psycho-dynamics of paranormal research is also quite interesting and important. It is known that ETH UFO researchers have ignored many witnesses reporting cases not fitting the “typical” ET encounters. The same can be said of ghost researchers. Based on my own personal observations of such “research activities”, I can also add that who speaks during a field research has a lot of impact as whether the information will be retained or not. In other words, the internal “pecking” order plays a major role on determining which data that will be reported or excluded. Similarly, the anticipation as whether it is a “haunting” or a “poltergeist” will also determine what is reported. I noticed that during a “haunting” research, “poltergeist” data would be ignored. Lastly, if someone high in the pecking order is performing fraud, or at least is somewhat cheating, that person might not be denounced and the fraud not reported because it would go against the “mood” of the group.
As Fodor noted about a medium that he saw committing a fraud, “…stating it publicly against a crowd of believers was a dangerous thing. Negative evidence must be absolutely overwhelming when pitted against the will to believe, while positive statements are accepted without questioning. Moreover, the moment you permit even the suspicion that you are beginning to doubt to enter a medium’s mind, you are no longer allowed to get near her. I had caught Mrs. Perriman before, walking in the dark and breathing down my neck. I said nothing because I realized that any statement against her would have compromised me.” (p. 251). I wonder how many UFO and other paranormal research have suffered from this group thinking syndrome.
As noted in a previous post, fraud and group thinking are important elements to understand how genuine psi effects can be produced. The key is to investigate the psychological reason behind fraud and group thinking. As Fodor noted, “there is no mystery behind the mercenary exploitation of human gullibility. In a few cases, the trumpet [instrument used in medium scéances for allegedly allowing the dead to speaking to the living] may be the best vehicle for the medium to display the rare gift for obtaining supernormal information about the living and the dead. For some idiosyncratic reason, the trumpet and a ventriloquistic dissociation may be the best means for meaningful telepathic, clairvoyant, and prophetic utterances.” (p. 258).
Collective psi events
Fodor, through the course of his life-long research on the paranormal, developed an interesting concept for parasociology that seems to have been forgotten by most parapsychologists: the family gestalt and by extension what he called the “racial gestalt”. Fodor found that there are certain paranormal events that cannot be explained by solely focusing on an individual mind. In some cases, a serious explanation has to encompass an entire family mindset and can only be understood as idiosyncrasies specific to a family (this view can be considered as a precursor to what will be found later by researchers dealing with RSPK). Fodor gave the example of “[…] the death coaches driven by ghost drivers, and many other human, semi-human, and animal apparitions that in old English families are the heralds of impending death. They add ‘body’ to the Family Gestalt. The older the family, the stronger the Gestalt. Nebulous and ill-defined as it necessarily must be, the concept of the Family Gestalt unites a variety of ill-assorted phenomena of folklore with psychical research.” (p. 51).
Fodor also saw a Gestalt for larger groups. For instance, he wrote that “the Jews had a racial Gestalt for two thousand years. It has changed into a national Gestalt for the people of Israel, but not for those still living in the diaspora. The power of this racial Gestalt is well known to the world. For centuries the Jews tried or were forced to assimilate, and for centuries they resisted or had been rebuffed and were shut into ghettos and concentration camps.” (p. 53). Whether one agrees or not with Fodor’s interpretation, it is clear that the general notion of a collective emotional energy, which can lead to social psi effects, is interesting for parasociology.
It is also interesting to note that Fodor describes the Gestalt effect in ways that are similar to Sheldrake’s concept of morphic field. The longer the field is in place, the stronger it is (i.e. old families, and ethnic group with long shared history). Fodor actually used a metaphorical description of the family gestalt as ionized field. “If a statement of survival is meant by the event, it has a more significant bearing for the family that for the individual son. Continuance of the family as a collective entity regardless of the individual death might well be given a telekinetic emphasis. If we accept the splitting of the ring [every time an oldest son dies] as a genuine phenomenon, we automatically admit that the dynamic means are available at the moment of death for the dying. We may have a conception of the manner of its genesis if we consider death as an event similar to ionization. When an electron, a member of the atomic family, is shot out of its orbit (death), the energy discharged can be photographed as a trail of comet-like light. Ionization means that the air is rendered conducive of electricity.”(p. 48).
Older contactees
A short note to show that the “contactee” phenomenon predates the flying saucer era by at least 20 years. In October 1926, Fodor interviewed someone who claimed to be in telepathic communication with Mars, and that soon the Martians would communicate in clear with us (p. 260). According to that same man, “they [the Martians] want to teach us, to help us. They are far more ahead in civilization than we are. But we cannot expect miracles from them. They will not teach us more than we are ready for … There are different races on Mars, just as on this earth. The cultured ones do not differ much from us. But there are Martians who look like rats. I have been in contact with Mars for ten years. I wanted to leave them alone, but they would not let me. It is my mission to listen to them.” (pp. 264-265). This story has all the narrative structures of the ET stories of today. Clearly, the social and psychological narrative structures, rather than the content, are the key to understand the ET component of the UFO phenomenon.
Eric Ouellet ©2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
UFOs, Synchronicity and Morphic Fields
This post examines the notions of synchronicity and morphic field in the context of UFO sightings. If the UFO phenomenon is essentially a psi-related reality, then synchronistic events should be associated with it. Such association, then, should be investigated seriously. What it means is that witnesses may actually have misperceived a mundane object and interpreted it as an ET spaceship. In such circumstances, the ETH ufologist would typically discard such sighting, and ignored any data coming out of it. ETH ufologists (and sceptics) would simply call this a mere coincidence.
But does it really matter if the UFO is actually a misperception or a truly unexplainable aerial phenomenon? I would propose that it does not matter much as long as the experience can be understood as a synchronistic event. One needs to look if the perception of a UFO at that very time could have been a meaningful event that relates to other part of the witnesses’ life. Why, because one should be aware that it is how many psi events start. Meaningful but mundane acausal events can lead to PK effects because ultimately they originate from the same unconscious processes. A single misperceived mundane object might not be a relevant point of data, but when it is put in perspective with several other data points, it might become very relevant. From a methodological standpoint, this implies significant changes as to how UFO events should be investigated. Not only UFO frauds or hoaxes (as discussed a few posts ago) should be included in any serious research but also UFO synchronistic (yet mundane) events.
The idea that synchronistic events surround the UFO phenomenon is not new, however. Raymond Fowler, famous for having investigated the Andreasson affair , wrote a book on how synchronicity was occurring in his life and he his UFO research (Fowler, Raymond. 2004. Synchrofile. Lincoln: iUniverse). John Keel, when investigating for the Mothman Prophecy also noted many synchronistic events around him. Scott Rogo, while researching for Haunted Universe had a few very troubling synchronistic events. Bertrand Méheust started his classic book on UFOs out of a synchronistic event.
To get a better sense as to how synchronicity can be integrated into parasociology in general, and the study of UFOs in particular, a closer look at synchronicity is required. Today’s post is inspired by a short but interesting book on the notion of synchronicity. I certainly recommend it for anyone who wants to have a good and clear introduction to this notion. The full notice is:
Combs, Allan and Mark Holland. (1996). Synchronicity: Through the eyes of science, myth and the trickster. New York: Marlow.
Synchronicity as a matter of perspective
The notion of synchronicity has been used in modern physics to describe the famous Bell’s inequalities. John Bell found that when two particles in the same quantum state are pushed through a splitter, their spin (quantum self-rotation) varies in the same way even if they are in a different position and have a different velocity. They appear to be linked by a non-causal property that is call in physics synchronicity or non-locality. In other words, what is perceived at the local level (the particles) can be only understood by a nonlocal understanding of reality (pp. 14-15). The physicist David Bohm proposed that synchronicity is a matter of perspective. If one transposes the splitter experiment from a four dimension construct into a six dimension universe, then the two particles become two different views of the same particle, which explains the paradox discovered by Bell. The key here is to understand that a six dimension universe cannot be imagined by the human mind. It is only a mathematical abstraction, but it is also an acceptance that there are other forces at play in the universe and that it requires a different approach to take stock of them.
If this general principle is extracted out of physics and applied to human life, this raises many interesting issues. One of them is that synchronistic events can be seen as outcomes of a morphic field (as discussed in a previous post, see also Sheldrake 1981; 2006). The morphic field becomes a descriptor for those additional dimensions beyond the usual four. There is also some empirical evidence to show that the notion of morphic field can be used that way. Combs and Holland mentioned some interesting experiments that involved mice, which at every generation they became more effective at finding their way out of a maze (p. 25). Another set of experiments was a hidden picture that was easier to recognize by people outside Europe after it was shown on British television. Somehow the knowledge was integrated into a morphic field (p. 27). Arthur Koestler, the well-known author and parapsychologists, also proposed that all ESP events were forms of synchronicity, in a way congenial Jung’s notion of Absolute Knowledge, which itself can be considered as super-morphic field.
The issue of psychokinesis (PK), however, is more complex. Combs and Holland underlined an approach proposed by Suzanne Padfield, who “ believes that the influence of thought upon material events is actually based on physical brain processes—that patterns of brain activity occurring at the molecular or atomic level tend to bring about similar patterns of external world activity. Such patterns ‘ are connected in a similarity space in which distances are defined by degree of similarity and where time and space do not automatically appear at all” (p. 35). This idea is not new. It is actually a very old one akin to the belief in the power of prayer, and more recently discussed in the book and movie The Secret. Human will can both tap into and influence morphic fields. In this context, the distinction in parapsychology between ESP and PK could be based on the notion of information exchange. ESP is mostly characterized by taking information out of a morphic field, while PK is rather characterized by inputting information in a morphic field.
Multi-level synchronicity as morphic field information exchange
By following the same logic, one could construe UFO events as an exchange of information. A substantial emotional upset in a community inputs information in a morphic field which eventually leads to a PK event (i.e. UFO sighting) while at the same time the individuals (who may have nothing to do with the original emotional outburst) “catch” information from the morphic field, and thus explaining the paranormal events linked to UFO sightings (e.g., premonition and dreams of UFOs, be there at right place and right time, synchronistic events before UFO sightings, and UFO repeaters who could be seen as more “in touch” with this type of morphic field).
This way of looking at the UFO experience goes much beyond what Combs and Holland discussed. But it can help to resolve an apparent paradox illustrated by the 30 year-old debate between Bertrand Méheust and François Favre. As discussed in previous posts, Méheust considers that people who see UFOs are truly witnesses of an event for which they have no impact on. This view is supported by the fact that many key symbolic elements in UFO sightings appear to have no meaning for the individual witnesses, but do have a meaning for their community or society. On the other hand, as François Favre underlined, the UFO experience is very often surrounded by paranormal events (premonition, telepathy, synchronicity, Oz factor, etc) directly linked to the witnesses. It is Favre's contention, therefore, that people who see UFOs have something to do with it (or in his terminology, they are psi-subjects). The notion of information exchange between a society and individuals through a morphic field would resolve this paradox. And quite frankly, it could be a foundational concept for parasociology applicable to other macro psi effects such as hauntings, RSPK (poltergeist), Bigfoot sightings, etc.
Archetypes versus morphic fields
The question would then shift to how societies “connect” to a morphic field. One of the usual answers is linked to the notion of an archetype being activated, as proposed by Carl Jung. As discussed in a previous post, the use of archetype can be highly problematic when it is situated at the sociological level. But if the notion that societies tend to input more into a morphic field than extracting from it, while it tends to be the reverse for individuals is correct, then maybe the Jungian “mistake” makes more sense. A major collective emotional discharge is not activating a social archetype it rather creates the conditions of archetypes at the individual level to be activated along the same line of resonance within a given morphic field. This is in line with what I wrote in the last post: “A symbol’s potential strength within a specific society, at a specific time of its history, is the key to interpretation rather than its presumed universal and timeless meaning”. In other words, the concept of archetype is a useful one at the individual level, but should be abandoned for the sociological level. The more plastic and dynamic notion of morphic field is definitely more effective at the sociological level. This perspective is certainly more coherent with what is known from the social sciences. However, the hard question as to why a few collective emotional discharges give rise to macro psi effects, while most of them do not remains to be answered.
How individuals connect to a morphic field is better understood, given the extensive research done in parapsychology. Just to name a few, one can underline the unconscious belief, facility to dissociate or suspend the intellect, exposure to electro-magnetic fields, strong and unresolved unconscious conflicts, etc. Yet, like for the sociological level, the hard question as to why some individual produce psi effects while others do not in similar circumstances remains unanswered as well.
The presence of synchronistic events, however, should be retained as a key indicator for future research.
Eric Ouellet ©2009
But does it really matter if the UFO is actually a misperception or a truly unexplainable aerial phenomenon? I would propose that it does not matter much as long as the experience can be understood as a synchronistic event. One needs to look if the perception of a UFO at that very time could have been a meaningful event that relates to other part of the witnesses’ life. Why, because one should be aware that it is how many psi events start. Meaningful but mundane acausal events can lead to PK effects because ultimately they originate from the same unconscious processes. A single misperceived mundane object might not be a relevant point of data, but when it is put in perspective with several other data points, it might become very relevant. From a methodological standpoint, this implies significant changes as to how UFO events should be investigated. Not only UFO frauds or hoaxes (as discussed a few posts ago) should be included in any serious research but also UFO synchronistic (yet mundane) events.
The idea that synchronistic events surround the UFO phenomenon is not new, however. Raymond Fowler, famous for having investigated the Andreasson affair , wrote a book on how synchronicity was occurring in his life and he his UFO research (Fowler, Raymond. 2004. Synchrofile. Lincoln: iUniverse). John Keel, when investigating for the Mothman Prophecy also noted many synchronistic events around him. Scott Rogo, while researching for Haunted Universe had a few very troubling synchronistic events. Bertrand Méheust started his classic book on UFOs out of a synchronistic event.
To get a better sense as to how synchronicity can be integrated into parasociology in general, and the study of UFOs in particular, a closer look at synchronicity is required. Today’s post is inspired by a short but interesting book on the notion of synchronicity. I certainly recommend it for anyone who wants to have a good and clear introduction to this notion. The full notice is:
Combs, Allan and Mark Holland. (1996). Synchronicity: Through the eyes of science, myth and the trickster. New York: Marlow.
Synchronicity as a matter of perspective
The notion of synchronicity has been used in modern physics to describe the famous Bell’s inequalities. John Bell found that when two particles in the same quantum state are pushed through a splitter, their spin (quantum self-rotation) varies in the same way even if they are in a different position and have a different velocity. They appear to be linked by a non-causal property that is call in physics synchronicity or non-locality. In other words, what is perceived at the local level (the particles) can be only understood by a nonlocal understanding of reality (pp. 14-15). The physicist David Bohm proposed that synchronicity is a matter of perspective. If one transposes the splitter experiment from a four dimension construct into a six dimension universe, then the two particles become two different views of the same particle, which explains the paradox discovered by Bell. The key here is to understand that a six dimension universe cannot be imagined by the human mind. It is only a mathematical abstraction, but it is also an acceptance that there are other forces at play in the universe and that it requires a different approach to take stock of them.
If this general principle is extracted out of physics and applied to human life, this raises many interesting issues. One of them is that synchronistic events can be seen as outcomes of a morphic field (as discussed in a previous post, see also Sheldrake 1981; 2006). The morphic field becomes a descriptor for those additional dimensions beyond the usual four. There is also some empirical evidence to show that the notion of morphic field can be used that way. Combs and Holland mentioned some interesting experiments that involved mice, which at every generation they became more effective at finding their way out of a maze (p. 25). Another set of experiments was a hidden picture that was easier to recognize by people outside Europe after it was shown on British television. Somehow the knowledge was integrated into a morphic field (p. 27). Arthur Koestler, the well-known author and parapsychologists, also proposed that all ESP events were forms of synchronicity, in a way congenial Jung’s notion of Absolute Knowledge, which itself can be considered as super-morphic field.
The issue of psychokinesis (PK), however, is more complex. Combs and Holland underlined an approach proposed by Suzanne Padfield, who “ believes that the influence of thought upon material events is actually based on physical brain processes—that patterns of brain activity occurring at the molecular or atomic level tend to bring about similar patterns of external world activity. Such patterns ‘ are connected in a similarity space in which distances are defined by degree of similarity and where time and space do not automatically appear at all” (p. 35). This idea is not new. It is actually a very old one akin to the belief in the power of prayer, and more recently discussed in the book and movie The Secret. Human will can both tap into and influence morphic fields. In this context, the distinction in parapsychology between ESP and PK could be based on the notion of information exchange. ESP is mostly characterized by taking information out of a morphic field, while PK is rather characterized by inputting information in a morphic field.
Multi-level synchronicity as morphic field information exchange
By following the same logic, one could construe UFO events as an exchange of information. A substantial emotional upset in a community inputs information in a morphic field which eventually leads to a PK event (i.e. UFO sighting) while at the same time the individuals (who may have nothing to do with the original emotional outburst) “catch” information from the morphic field, and thus explaining the paranormal events linked to UFO sightings (e.g., premonition and dreams of UFOs, be there at right place and right time, synchronistic events before UFO sightings, and UFO repeaters who could be seen as more “in touch” with this type of morphic field).
This way of looking at the UFO experience goes much beyond what Combs and Holland discussed. But it can help to resolve an apparent paradox illustrated by the 30 year-old debate between Bertrand Méheust and François Favre. As discussed in previous posts, Méheust considers that people who see UFOs are truly witnesses of an event for which they have no impact on. This view is supported by the fact that many key symbolic elements in UFO sightings appear to have no meaning for the individual witnesses, but do have a meaning for their community or society. On the other hand, as François Favre underlined, the UFO experience is very often surrounded by paranormal events (premonition, telepathy, synchronicity, Oz factor, etc) directly linked to the witnesses. It is Favre's contention, therefore, that people who see UFOs have something to do with it (or in his terminology, they are psi-subjects). The notion of information exchange between a society and individuals through a morphic field would resolve this paradox. And quite frankly, it could be a foundational concept for parasociology applicable to other macro psi effects such as hauntings, RSPK (poltergeist), Bigfoot sightings, etc.
Archetypes versus morphic fields
The question would then shift to how societies “connect” to a morphic field. One of the usual answers is linked to the notion of an archetype being activated, as proposed by Carl Jung. As discussed in a previous post, the use of archetype can be highly problematic when it is situated at the sociological level. But if the notion that societies tend to input more into a morphic field than extracting from it, while it tends to be the reverse for individuals is correct, then maybe the Jungian “mistake” makes more sense. A major collective emotional discharge is not activating a social archetype it rather creates the conditions of archetypes at the individual level to be activated along the same line of resonance within a given morphic field. This is in line with what I wrote in the last post: “A symbol’s potential strength within a specific society, at a specific time of its history, is the key to interpretation rather than its presumed universal and timeless meaning”. In other words, the concept of archetype is a useful one at the individual level, but should be abandoned for the sociological level. The more plastic and dynamic notion of morphic field is definitely more effective at the sociological level. This perspective is certainly more coherent with what is known from the social sciences. However, the hard question as to why a few collective emotional discharges give rise to macro psi effects, while most of them do not remains to be answered.
How individuals connect to a morphic field is better understood, given the extensive research done in parapsychology. Just to name a few, one can underline the unconscious belief, facility to dissociate or suspend the intellect, exposure to electro-magnetic fields, strong and unresolved unconscious conflicts, etc. Yet, like for the sociological level, the hard question as to why some individual produce psi effects while others do not in similar circumstances remains unanswered as well.
The presence of synchronistic events, however, should be retained as a key indicator for future research.
Eric Ouellet ©2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Carl Jung, UFOs, and his method
This post is an attempt to come to term with some problems found in Jung’s analysis of the UFO phenomenon. As well, it seeks to integrate better his notion of archetype in parasociology. Jung’s last book, written in conjunction with some of his closest and most trusted followers, provides some key answers. In Man and His Symbols, Jung explains in plain terms his methodology and some of his key concepts such as the notion of archetype. The full notice is:
Jung, Carl (Ed.). (1964). Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell.
From the individual to the social analysis
Jung was a psychoanalyst, and unsurprisingly, he saw the universe from an individual’s point of view. Yet, Jung used his approach to study social realities, and other borrowed from him to do the same. Claude Lévy-Strauss, the famous French anthropologist, is probably the best known scholar who borrowed from Jung. Lévy-Strauss attempted to interpret social realities like social myths and cultural taboos using (implicitly) the notion of archetype. Although Lévy-Strauss is considered one of the pillars of modern anthropology, he was not able to show the universality of such method because archetypical myths vary very much from one society to the next. Hence, from a sociological and anthropological perspective, no social theory based on archetypes can be safely formulated. Many in these two disciplines attributed Lévy-Strauss’ problematic theorization of society to his implicit adherence to rigid structural Marxist theories, and that he failed to accept that social reality can be constructed in an almost unlimited number of ways. This may be true, but I think that at the core of Lévy-Strauss’ misuse of archetypical analysis is actually Jung’s own misunderstanding of the difference between social and individual realities. Furthermore, when Jung used his method at the sociological level, he did follow his own established methodology. This is particularly apparent in Flying Saucers (1958).
Jung, like Freud, considered that dreams are the “golden path” to the unconscious, and developed an extensive methodology to interpret dreams in order to understand what is going on with his patients. In Man and His Symbols, he wrote that the “two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that somehow it makes sense, and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious.” (p. 18). Clearly, societies do not dream as individuals do, and therefore some adaptations of the method are required. Although myths could be understood as expressions of a socially shared unconscious, they do not behave like dreams. Individual dreaming is an ongoing activity; it is about a multitude individual issue; and it uses a very wide array of symbols. On the other hand, foundational myths of a society tend to be relatively static; it is the same story repeated over time through conscious means. I think these fundamental differences are at the centre of Lévy-Strauss’ theoretical problems. Whatever is considered as collective dreaming it ought to be dynamic, and clearly it must be a product of the social unconscious rather than a conscious effort of repeating the same basic story. Social rumours are certainly fitting better the billet because they are dynamic and spontaneous. And it is exactly what Jung used in Flying Saucers: rumours. Social psi events are another good choice as they are both dynamic and spontaneous, and they can also be found in Flying Saucers (but only if one reads between the lines).
Social psi events, like UFO and alien sightings, are symbolic and similar to dreams in that there are made of “images and ideas that dreams contain cannot possibly be explained solely in terms of memory. They express new thoughts that have not yet reached the threshold of consciousness.” (p. 26). Not only individuals are oftentimes in a dream-like state (the Oz factor), but they often attribute a meaning of some sort to their experience. Furthermore, “symbols, I must point out, do not occur solely in dreams. They appear in all kinds of psychic manifestations. There are symbolic thoughts and feelings, symbolic acts and situations. It often seems that even inanimate objects cooperate with the unconscious in the arrangements of symbolic patterns. There are numerous well-authenticated stories of clocks stopping at the moment of their owner’ s death[...]” (p. 41). Once again, UFOs as symbolic manifestations are not solely subjective experiences, but involve also some “participation” from unanimated matter. Based on Jung’s approach, it is certainly meaningful to consider UFOs as akin to dreams, as they are both symbolic manifestations of the unconscious. The real issue, in fact, is not ontological; individual dreams and social psi events share enough fundamental characteristics to be analyzed with the same methodology. The problem is epistemological; Jung did not apply a key principle of his own methodology when dealing with flying saucers.
Jung is abundantly clear about the issue that each individual is unique, and each dream is unique. Therefore, “it is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol. No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream. Each individual varies so much in the way that his unconscious complements or compensate his conscious mind that it is impossible to be sure how far dreams and their symbols can be classified at all” (p. 38). And one more, “the knowledge of human nature that I have accumulated in the course of 60 years of practical experience has taught me to consider each case as a new one in which, first of all, I have had to seek the individual approach. [...] Some cases demand one method and some another” (p. 55). And just to be sure, “the interpretation of dreams and symbols demands intelligence. It cannot be turned into a mechanical system and then cramped into unimaginative brains. It demands both an increasing knowledge of the dreamer’s individuality and an increasing self-awareness on the part of the interpreter”. (p. 81) I think Jung could not have been clearer: his methodology is fundamentally about a case-by-case approach.
In Flying Saucers, Jung simply did not do that. He actually did not use a case-by-case approach. If Jung had followed his own method, he would have put the American society (or a portion thereof) on the “couch”, and try to understand what was going on with this particular society, at this particular time. Concretely, he should have taken the time to look into the special symbolism unique to the 1947 UFO wave and then repeat for the 1952 one, and treat them as if they were two different dreams. Then, he should have taken a different approach with a different “patient” (i.e., France) and look into the particular symbolism of the 1954 wave, and treat as yet another “dream” to interpret. The same should have been done with the Brazilian UFO wave of the late 1950s. What Jung did, instead, is to seek directly the universal symbolism behind the flying saucer and try to develop a reference book for a particular symbol, contrary to his own prescription. Or to put it in the words of his collaborator Aniela Jaffé, “Jung has explained the UFOs as projection of a psychic content (of wholeness) that has at all times been symbolized by the circle. In other words, this ‘visionary rumor,’ as can also be seen in many dreams of our time, is an attempt by the unconscious collective psyche to heal the split in our apocalyptic age by means of the symbol of the circle”. (p. 285).
Jung should be celebrated for being the first one to understand that UFOs are directly linked to collective unconscious processes, but he should be fustigated for not following his own method. Like Lévy-Strauss, he produced a static and rigid interpretation of a manifestation of the socially shared unconscious, and in both cases it is (in my opinion) the main point of dissatisfaction found in the writings of these two great minds of the 20th century.
UFO and the concept of archetype
Jung rightfully claimed that his concept of archetype was often misunderstood (p. 57). Archetypes are unconscious emotional thought-patterns that have a “tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern” (p. 58). Furthermore, according to Jung “like the instincts, the collective thought patterns of the human mind are innate and inherited. They function, when the occasion arises, in more or less the same way in all of us. Emotional manifestations, to which such thought patterns belong, are recognizably the same all over the earth” (p. 64).
What this means is that in spite the fact that each dreamer and each dream are unique, they all share in common the activation of archetypes, and that each archetype has representational commonalities. The activation of an archetype is in turn linked to an imbalance between the conscious life of an individual and his/her unconscious one. Such imbalance is produced by events in the environment of the individual, and these events can be in the future (Jung gave an example of an archetype activated by a rationally unpredictable death that occurred 3 years later) (p. 66). In other words, for Jung the unconscious is working outside the “normal” flow of time.
For Jung, archetypes also operate at the social level, “but while personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archetypes create myths, religions, and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of history”. (p.68). It is probably the most problematic component of the concept of archetype. Historians and sociologists have convincingly refuted such a deterministic view of social reality. If there is something impossible to predict is social change. Yet, if one agrees with Jung, social change could be predicted because it is essentially a socially shared and inherited response mechanism to our environment. I think, once again Jung has not followed his method in developing the concept of archetype. Like in the case of individuals, societies might activate the same archetype when facing similar emotional challenges, but each response to such archetypical activation is unique and its ultimate outcome unpredictable. The more substantive argument here, I think, is that there is a fundamental indeterminacy linked to multiple unconscious interacting in a society, which does not exist at the individual level. In other words, the socially shared unconscious is much more dynamic and volatile because it is “fed” by thousands and millions of dynamic individual unconscious. From that point of view, to see in UFOs an archetypical circle, which interpretation is applied indiscriminately to every case is simply contrary to what Jung advocated. Jung, in fact, simply “turned into a mechanical system” his interpretation, and was rather unimaginative about it.
One can agree with Jung that when an archetype is activated, there is a lot of psychic energy in action (what he called numinosity) (p. 87), and by extension it is reasonable to think that psi events, including social psi events, are produced when an archetype is activated. Jung, particularly, interpreted synchronistic events as a sign of an archetype being activated (pp. 226-227). However, it is important to remember than even when a high level of emotional energy activates a particular thought-pattern (i.e. an archetype) the symbolic representation used by the unconscious can vary widely. I would even say that the same symbol (like a round UFO) can be used to express the activation of different archetypes (and I think that’s why Jung was prescribing so much caution in interpreting dreams and demanded to have an extensive knowledge of each dreamer) . Within societies, the meaning attached to each symbol is actually socially negotiated. For instance, the swastika, which is an old and widespread symbol, in Western countries is associated with the evil of the Nazi regime (death and destruction), while in India it is a positive religious symbol (continuity), and among Native American it is a positive and traditional symbol used to re-assert the Native culture (re-birth). Of course, one could say that in all these three instances it is about the “cycle of life”, but then one needs to ask about which part of the cycle? Thus, what is the usefulness of such interpretation if you do not have the context? Clearly, it is unwise to think that the presence of the same symbol means that the same archetype has been activated.
To stay within Jung’s timeframe, it is quite possible to see the 1947 UFO wave as an activation of survival fears (in the context of the USSR about to have the bomb); the 1952 wave as being linked to feeling of abandonment by the mother or parents (federal civil servants at the mercy of Senator MacCarthy—more on this on a future post); the 1954 wave as a lost of status within the tribe of powerful nations (France was just about to cease to be a colonial power); and the Brazilian wave of the late 1950s as the father becoming tyrannical (the emergence of a really bad military dictatorship in Brazil). Once again, all these four waves could be generalized as fears linked to safety, but then it becomes meaningless. Other societies in the same situation had a werewolf wave (France, a few years before the 1789 Revolution), mermaids (Israel in 2009), etc., which have nothing to do with circles. I think that round UFOs became in the 1950s a convenient symbol to grab attention, and it was unconsciously adopted by many societies in a context where it would be meaningful (i.e. beginning of the space age).
The ultimate conclusion that must be drawn for parasociology is that Jungian analysis, when transposed to the sociological level, must be adapted: the social unconscious selection of symbols (such as UFOs) must be understood based on the contextual capacity of a symbol to influence the collective consciousness. A symbol’s potential strength within a specific society, at a specific time of its history, is the key to interpretation rather than its presumed universal and timeless meaning. When a symbol becomes “institutionalized” then it will tend to repeat itself (hence we see UFOs since the last 60 years), and can be effectively described through Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic fields (as discussed in a previous post). At the same time, I think symbolism in social psi events has also a declining effect because a symbol, when overused, loses its capacity to grab the attention of the collective consciousness. Such a declining effect at the individual level has been discovered a while ago by parapsychology (i.e. a same experiment produces lower psi results over time, as the individual unconscious gets bored and loses its focus).
Once again, Jung’s idea to look for activated archetypes to understand the emergence of UFO waves was simply brilliant. But Jung was no sociologist. At the social level, one symbol can reflect a vast array of archetypes. In other words, the symbolism directly linked to a psi event (like a round flying saucer) is not enough to understand the event. As Jung prescribed, there is nothing like developing “an increasing knowledge of the dreamer’s individuality and an increasing self-awareness on the part of the interpreter”.
Eric Ouellet © 2009
Jung, Carl (Ed.). (1964). Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell.
From the individual to the social analysis
Jung was a psychoanalyst, and unsurprisingly, he saw the universe from an individual’s point of view. Yet, Jung used his approach to study social realities, and other borrowed from him to do the same. Claude Lévy-Strauss, the famous French anthropologist, is probably the best known scholar who borrowed from Jung. Lévy-Strauss attempted to interpret social realities like social myths and cultural taboos using (implicitly) the notion of archetype. Although Lévy-Strauss is considered one of the pillars of modern anthropology, he was not able to show the universality of such method because archetypical myths vary very much from one society to the next. Hence, from a sociological and anthropological perspective, no social theory based on archetypes can be safely formulated. Many in these two disciplines attributed Lévy-Strauss’ problematic theorization of society to his implicit adherence to rigid structural Marxist theories, and that he failed to accept that social reality can be constructed in an almost unlimited number of ways. This may be true, but I think that at the core of Lévy-Strauss’ misuse of archetypical analysis is actually Jung’s own misunderstanding of the difference between social and individual realities. Furthermore, when Jung used his method at the sociological level, he did follow his own established methodology. This is particularly apparent in Flying Saucers (1958).
Jung, like Freud, considered that dreams are the “golden path” to the unconscious, and developed an extensive methodology to interpret dreams in order to understand what is going on with his patients. In Man and His Symbols, he wrote that the “two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that somehow it makes sense, and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious.” (p. 18). Clearly, societies do not dream as individuals do, and therefore some adaptations of the method are required. Although myths could be understood as expressions of a socially shared unconscious, they do not behave like dreams. Individual dreaming is an ongoing activity; it is about a multitude individual issue; and it uses a very wide array of symbols. On the other hand, foundational myths of a society tend to be relatively static; it is the same story repeated over time through conscious means. I think these fundamental differences are at the centre of Lévy-Strauss’ theoretical problems. Whatever is considered as collective dreaming it ought to be dynamic, and clearly it must be a product of the social unconscious rather than a conscious effort of repeating the same basic story. Social rumours are certainly fitting better the billet because they are dynamic and spontaneous. And it is exactly what Jung used in Flying Saucers: rumours. Social psi events are another good choice as they are both dynamic and spontaneous, and they can also be found in Flying Saucers (but only if one reads between the lines).
Social psi events, like UFO and alien sightings, are symbolic and similar to dreams in that there are made of “images and ideas that dreams contain cannot possibly be explained solely in terms of memory. They express new thoughts that have not yet reached the threshold of consciousness.” (p. 26). Not only individuals are oftentimes in a dream-like state (the Oz factor), but they often attribute a meaning of some sort to their experience. Furthermore, “symbols, I must point out, do not occur solely in dreams. They appear in all kinds of psychic manifestations. There are symbolic thoughts and feelings, symbolic acts and situations. It often seems that even inanimate objects cooperate with the unconscious in the arrangements of symbolic patterns. There are numerous well-authenticated stories of clocks stopping at the moment of their owner’ s death[...]” (p. 41). Once again, UFOs as symbolic manifestations are not solely subjective experiences, but involve also some “participation” from unanimated matter. Based on Jung’s approach, it is certainly meaningful to consider UFOs as akin to dreams, as they are both symbolic manifestations of the unconscious. The real issue, in fact, is not ontological; individual dreams and social psi events share enough fundamental characteristics to be analyzed with the same methodology. The problem is epistemological; Jung did not apply a key principle of his own methodology when dealing with flying saucers.
Jung is abundantly clear about the issue that each individual is unique, and each dream is unique. Therefore, “it is plain foolishness to believe in ready-made systematic guides to dream interpretation, as if one could simply buy a reference book and look up a particular symbol. No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream. Each individual varies so much in the way that his unconscious complements or compensate his conscious mind that it is impossible to be sure how far dreams and their symbols can be classified at all” (p. 38). And one more, “the knowledge of human nature that I have accumulated in the course of 60 years of practical experience has taught me to consider each case as a new one in which, first of all, I have had to seek the individual approach. [...] Some cases demand one method and some another” (p. 55). And just to be sure, “the interpretation of dreams and symbols demands intelligence. It cannot be turned into a mechanical system and then cramped into unimaginative brains. It demands both an increasing knowledge of the dreamer’s individuality and an increasing self-awareness on the part of the interpreter”. (p. 81) I think Jung could not have been clearer: his methodology is fundamentally about a case-by-case approach.
In Flying Saucers, Jung simply did not do that. He actually did not use a case-by-case approach. If Jung had followed his own method, he would have put the American society (or a portion thereof) on the “couch”, and try to understand what was going on with this particular society, at this particular time. Concretely, he should have taken the time to look into the special symbolism unique to the 1947 UFO wave and then repeat for the 1952 one, and treat them as if they were two different dreams. Then, he should have taken a different approach with a different “patient” (i.e., France) and look into the particular symbolism of the 1954 wave, and treat as yet another “dream” to interpret. The same should have been done with the Brazilian UFO wave of the late 1950s. What Jung did, instead, is to seek directly the universal symbolism behind the flying saucer and try to develop a reference book for a particular symbol, contrary to his own prescription. Or to put it in the words of his collaborator Aniela Jaffé, “Jung has explained the UFOs as projection of a psychic content (of wholeness) that has at all times been symbolized by the circle. In other words, this ‘visionary rumor,’ as can also be seen in many dreams of our time, is an attempt by the unconscious collective psyche to heal the split in our apocalyptic age by means of the symbol of the circle”. (p. 285).
Jung should be celebrated for being the first one to understand that UFOs are directly linked to collective unconscious processes, but he should be fustigated for not following his own method. Like Lévy-Strauss, he produced a static and rigid interpretation of a manifestation of the socially shared unconscious, and in both cases it is (in my opinion) the main point of dissatisfaction found in the writings of these two great minds of the 20th century.
UFO and the concept of archetype
Jung rightfully claimed that his concept of archetype was often misunderstood (p. 57). Archetypes are unconscious emotional thought-patterns that have a “tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern” (p. 58). Furthermore, according to Jung “like the instincts, the collective thought patterns of the human mind are innate and inherited. They function, when the occasion arises, in more or less the same way in all of us. Emotional manifestations, to which such thought patterns belong, are recognizably the same all over the earth” (p. 64).
What this means is that in spite the fact that each dreamer and each dream are unique, they all share in common the activation of archetypes, and that each archetype has representational commonalities. The activation of an archetype is in turn linked to an imbalance between the conscious life of an individual and his/her unconscious one. Such imbalance is produced by events in the environment of the individual, and these events can be in the future (Jung gave an example of an archetype activated by a rationally unpredictable death that occurred 3 years later) (p. 66). In other words, for Jung the unconscious is working outside the “normal” flow of time.
For Jung, archetypes also operate at the social level, “but while personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archetypes create myths, religions, and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of history”. (p.68). It is probably the most problematic component of the concept of archetype. Historians and sociologists have convincingly refuted such a deterministic view of social reality. If there is something impossible to predict is social change. Yet, if one agrees with Jung, social change could be predicted because it is essentially a socially shared and inherited response mechanism to our environment. I think, once again Jung has not followed his method in developing the concept of archetype. Like in the case of individuals, societies might activate the same archetype when facing similar emotional challenges, but each response to such archetypical activation is unique and its ultimate outcome unpredictable. The more substantive argument here, I think, is that there is a fundamental indeterminacy linked to multiple unconscious interacting in a society, which does not exist at the individual level. In other words, the socially shared unconscious is much more dynamic and volatile because it is “fed” by thousands and millions of dynamic individual unconscious. From that point of view, to see in UFOs an archetypical circle, which interpretation is applied indiscriminately to every case is simply contrary to what Jung advocated. Jung, in fact, simply “turned into a mechanical system” his interpretation, and was rather unimaginative about it.
One can agree with Jung that when an archetype is activated, there is a lot of psychic energy in action (what he called numinosity) (p. 87), and by extension it is reasonable to think that psi events, including social psi events, are produced when an archetype is activated. Jung, particularly, interpreted synchronistic events as a sign of an archetype being activated (pp. 226-227). However, it is important to remember than even when a high level of emotional energy activates a particular thought-pattern (i.e. an archetype) the symbolic representation used by the unconscious can vary widely. I would even say that the same symbol (like a round UFO) can be used to express the activation of different archetypes (and I think that’s why Jung was prescribing so much caution in interpreting dreams and demanded to have an extensive knowledge of each dreamer) . Within societies, the meaning attached to each symbol is actually socially negotiated. For instance, the swastika, which is an old and widespread symbol, in Western countries is associated with the evil of the Nazi regime (death and destruction), while in India it is a positive religious symbol (continuity), and among Native American it is a positive and traditional symbol used to re-assert the Native culture (re-birth). Of course, one could say that in all these three instances it is about the “cycle of life”, but then one needs to ask about which part of the cycle? Thus, what is the usefulness of such interpretation if you do not have the context? Clearly, it is unwise to think that the presence of the same symbol means that the same archetype has been activated.
To stay within Jung’s timeframe, it is quite possible to see the 1947 UFO wave as an activation of survival fears (in the context of the USSR about to have the bomb); the 1952 wave as being linked to feeling of abandonment by the mother or parents (federal civil servants at the mercy of Senator MacCarthy—more on this on a future post); the 1954 wave as a lost of status within the tribe of powerful nations (France was just about to cease to be a colonial power); and the Brazilian wave of the late 1950s as the father becoming tyrannical (the emergence of a really bad military dictatorship in Brazil). Once again, all these four waves could be generalized as fears linked to safety, but then it becomes meaningless. Other societies in the same situation had a werewolf wave (France, a few years before the 1789 Revolution), mermaids (Israel in 2009), etc., which have nothing to do with circles. I think that round UFOs became in the 1950s a convenient symbol to grab attention, and it was unconsciously adopted by many societies in a context where it would be meaningful (i.e. beginning of the space age).
The ultimate conclusion that must be drawn for parasociology is that Jungian analysis, when transposed to the sociological level, must be adapted: the social unconscious selection of symbols (such as UFOs) must be understood based on the contextual capacity of a symbol to influence the collective consciousness. A symbol’s potential strength within a specific society, at a specific time of its history, is the key to interpretation rather than its presumed universal and timeless meaning. When a symbol becomes “institutionalized” then it will tend to repeat itself (hence we see UFOs since the last 60 years), and can be effectively described through Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic fields (as discussed in a previous post). At the same time, I think symbolism in social psi events has also a declining effect because a symbol, when overused, loses its capacity to grab the attention of the collective consciousness. Such a declining effect at the individual level has been discovered a while ago by parapsychology (i.e. a same experiment produces lower psi results over time, as the individual unconscious gets bored and loses its focus).
Once again, Jung’s idea to look for activated archetypes to understand the emergence of UFO waves was simply brilliant. But Jung was no sociologist. At the social level, one symbol can reflect a vast array of archetypes. In other words, the symbolism directly linked to a psi event (like a round flying saucer) is not enough to understand the event. As Jung prescribed, there is nothing like developing “an increasing knowledge of the dreamer’s individuality and an increasing self-awareness on the part of the interpreter”.
Eric Ouellet © 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Reading Notes – On the Trail of the Poltergeist
This post is about a classic in parapsychology written by psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor. This is an older book published in the late 1950s, and it recounts Fodor’s investigation of a famous British poltergeist case in the late 1930s. There are a number of key ideas in parapsychology that emerged from Fodor’s research. In spite of its older age, this book brings a number of useful concepts to parasociology. The full notice is:
Fodor, Nandor. (1958). On the Trail of the Poltergeist. New York: Citadel Press.
Fraud and the study of the paranormal
One of the main challenges in the study of the paranormal is the issue of fraud. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) established a policy in the late 19th century that should someone commit fraud at any time, he or she would not be studied anymore by the SPR. This policy was adopted by other similar organizations. But this policy is erroneous in many ways. First of all, the presence of fraud does not preclude the possibility of genuine psi effects. Furthermore, as Batcheldor (1984) has shown, a bit of “cheating” helps to make people believe that they can succeed in producing psi effects. Such (unconscious) belief is a critical condition for producing psi effects. Also, it is important to note that the production of psi effects is helped when consciousness is “neutralized,” so that the unconscious can act with less constraint. Such neutralization may occur through psychological dissociation, which can be pathological or not.
One of Fodor’s key findings is that the distinction between genuine psi effects and fraud is not a useful one. What produces psi and what motivates one to enact fraud are very often coming from the same unconscious processes. Hence, as Fodor wrote about the case he investigated, “some of these happenings were self-evidential, establishing an excellent case for the supernormal range of the powers of Mrs. Forbes’s unconscious, others were of a compromising character but psychologically still very interesting. They made me incline to the analytical view that dissociated persons can work on two levels of consciousness. They may attempt fraud on one and continue it on the second in a state of genuine trance; they may also produce supernormal phenomena. In other words, the table sittings have led me to conclude that there is a genuine psychic angle in the problem of fraud and that the life of a dissociated personality must be considered as a whole and not split into departments of the genuine and the fraudulent” (p. 81).
From the point of view of UFO studies, such finding is important. A rash of UFO sightings is often accompanied with hoaxes. Yet, the symbolic content of those hoaxes is most likely feeding from the same socially shared unconscious processes. Therefore, one should not exclude fraud from the data when investigating a UFO wave, or a rash of sightings, as they provide important information. A good example of this is the Gulf Breeze incident of 1987-1988. The most common opinion is that Ed Walter engaged in fraud, as miniature models of the UFO photographed by him were found in his house. Yet, this does not preclude the possibility that he may have had a genuine UFO sighting. But what is more interesting is that it started a series of sightings in the region. Some of them were most likely night tests (or training) of seaborne missiles by the U.S. Navy (which in turn can be seen as an interesting synchronistic event), while others sightings could have been genuine psi events.
Interpretation of symbols
Another interesting element in Fodor’s book is the issue of interpreting symbols. As he wrote “there was a process of reasoning behind the apparently senseless act of the Poltergeist. It is not easy to follow it and it is never certain that our interpretation will be correct, but a little light is better than none at all. [...] The very choice of Mrs. Forbes’s apports [teleportation] impresses me as a cipher in which her tragic life-story is hidden. From wherever she got them, whether they came to her by supernormal or normal means, they had a definite meaning; they were governed by unconscious association.” (p. 217).
Without going through all his analysis, here are a few examples of what he meant. Fodor was convinced that Mrs. Forbes’ Poltergeist was linked to her repressed feelings linked to her past, as he discovered that she was victim of a pedophile when she was five. There were violet flowers appearing during the Poltergeist, which can mean “violate” (i.e. violated). There was coral appearing, which can be linked the choral that was singing when she was victimized. Her wedding night appears to have been very traumatic as well, although not because of her husband, but because of her past. Several objects appeared on their wedding anniversary. Many objects thrown by the Poltergeist were aimed at her husband (Mrs. Forbes clearly loved him consciously, but unconsciously wrongly associated him with her aggressor). Fodor’s interpretation is clearly influenced by the Freudian approach to psychoanalysis where sexual issues are central to interpretation. But his work shows that if one wants to interpret the symbolic meaning of psi events he or she must plough large (i.e. go much beyond the actual psi event) and look into a number of non-obvious symbols (like the word associations).
As shown in the posts related to the Hill story, such holistic symbolic approach can be fruitful. However, when it comes to interpret symbols linked to expressions of the socially shared unconscious, through events in the public realm, Fodor’s suggestions are more difficult to apply. In the public realm there are many more activities going on. It can be quite difficult to decipher what is relevant from what is not. Kottmeyer (1996) and Viéroudy (1977) noticed, however, that in the United States major UFO sightings tend to be related to concerns related to national security (which implies indirectly that we have a bunch a very psychologically repressed people in those milieus).
To go back to the Gulf Breeze incident, we have here again another case that tends to confirm the interpretation key for American cases. But because it was declared a fraud by many, key clues were missed. What was not studied is the symbolic signification of the sightings, including Walter’s alien visitation claims. His story is essentially about someone who is losing control over his life, and trying to get back control by making his story public. The symbolic structure of Walter’s life presents interesting parallels with key public events contemporary to the Gulf Breeze incident.
The first sighting occurred on 11 November 1987, on Veteran’s Day, which had a very special meaning for the Navy. Earlier that year 37 sailors of the USS Stark, a ship based in Florida, were killed in the Persian Gulf, in the context of the so-called Tanker War. It was one of the largest lost of life for the Navy since World War II. Emotions were certainly high on that day of 1987. These sailors died accidentally due to an Iraqi pilot who mistook the American ship for an Iranian one, but the U.S. Navy was there to fight the Iranians. Yet, at the same time the American government was accused of secretly selling weapons to Iran (Iran-Contra Gate). Feelings of betrayals among sailors were probably running very high.
What is more telling, however, is that there was a similar lost of control and scrambling to regain it during the same time period in and around the Office of the President. “The Democratic-controlled United States Congress issued its own report on November 18, 1987, stating that ‘If the president did not know what his national security advisers were doing, he should have.’ The congressional report wrote that the president bore ‘ultimate responsibility‘ for wrongdoing by his aides, and his administration exhibited ‘secrecy, deception and disdain for the law.’ It also read in part: ‘The central remaining question is the role of the President in the Iran-contra affair. On this critical point, the shredding of documents by Poindexter, North and others, and the death of Casey, leave the record incomplete’. “ (From Wikipedia)
The Gulf Breeze sightings occurred in a liminal time, i.e. when the content of a major public report was known by a few key players, but not released publically yet while there was serious tensions about national security in the Persian Gulf (a scenario similar to the Barney and Betty Hill story about the Transport Commission’s report and the Berlin crisis). Furthermore, it resembles a lot the October 1973 UFO wave, as there was a major conflict in the Middle East simultaneous to the Watergate scandal unfolding through the sudden resignations of the Secretary of Justice and his Deputy (as discussed in a previous post). In other words, this is another case in the United States of UFO wave concurrent to high level tensions about national security accompanied a major challenge to a key democratic institution.
Are these interpretation keys useful for future events? It is less than sure. Many days during the Bush administration would qualify for such context favourable to UFO wave (war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, the 2004 elections, 9/11 commission, Abu Ghraib, CIA authorized torture, etc), but there was no major rash of UFOs between 2000 and 2008 in the United States. A possible explanation for the lack of major UFO sightings is that the lost of trust in the Executive branch during the Bush era was more gradual and therefore less prone to sudden major collective emotional discharges. As well, maybe the American society is now more cynical than before, so there was no big upset about what occurred. Another possibility is that other psi events replaced UFOs, but remained under the “radar screen” (e.g., more Bigfoot sightings, more ghosts, more Chuppacabra, etc.).
In the light of Fodor’s research, it appears to me that a number of UFO cases might have been “closed” too fast.nAs well, this shows that the generally shared ”intuition” about a link between governmental conspiracies and the UFO phenomenon might hold some truth after all. But not in the way that most people imagine: UFOs are not enacting conspiracies (to hide their existence), but rather it is conspiracies about mundane power issues that set the stage for UFO sightings, be they psychokinetic UFOs, hoaxes, or synchronistic passage of mundane aerial objects.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Fodor, Nandor. (1958). On the Trail of the Poltergeist. New York: Citadel Press.
Fraud and the study of the paranormal
One of the main challenges in the study of the paranormal is the issue of fraud. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) established a policy in the late 19th century that should someone commit fraud at any time, he or she would not be studied anymore by the SPR. This policy was adopted by other similar organizations. But this policy is erroneous in many ways. First of all, the presence of fraud does not preclude the possibility of genuine psi effects. Furthermore, as Batcheldor (1984) has shown, a bit of “cheating” helps to make people believe that they can succeed in producing psi effects. Such (unconscious) belief is a critical condition for producing psi effects. Also, it is important to note that the production of psi effects is helped when consciousness is “neutralized,” so that the unconscious can act with less constraint. Such neutralization may occur through psychological dissociation, which can be pathological or not.
One of Fodor’s key findings is that the distinction between genuine psi effects and fraud is not a useful one. What produces psi and what motivates one to enact fraud are very often coming from the same unconscious processes. Hence, as Fodor wrote about the case he investigated, “some of these happenings were self-evidential, establishing an excellent case for the supernormal range of the powers of Mrs. Forbes’s unconscious, others were of a compromising character but psychologically still very interesting. They made me incline to the analytical view that dissociated persons can work on two levels of consciousness. They may attempt fraud on one and continue it on the second in a state of genuine trance; they may also produce supernormal phenomena. In other words, the table sittings have led me to conclude that there is a genuine psychic angle in the problem of fraud and that the life of a dissociated personality must be considered as a whole and not split into departments of the genuine and the fraudulent” (p. 81).
From the point of view of UFO studies, such finding is important. A rash of UFO sightings is often accompanied with hoaxes. Yet, the symbolic content of those hoaxes is most likely feeding from the same socially shared unconscious processes. Therefore, one should not exclude fraud from the data when investigating a UFO wave, or a rash of sightings, as they provide important information. A good example of this is the Gulf Breeze incident of 1987-1988. The most common opinion is that Ed Walter engaged in fraud, as miniature models of the UFO photographed by him were found in his house. Yet, this does not preclude the possibility that he may have had a genuine UFO sighting. But what is more interesting is that it started a series of sightings in the region. Some of them were most likely night tests (or training) of seaborne missiles by the U.S. Navy (which in turn can be seen as an interesting synchronistic event), while others sightings could have been genuine psi events.
Interpretation of symbols
Another interesting element in Fodor’s book is the issue of interpreting symbols. As he wrote “there was a process of reasoning behind the apparently senseless act of the Poltergeist. It is not easy to follow it and it is never certain that our interpretation will be correct, but a little light is better than none at all. [...] The very choice of Mrs. Forbes’s apports [teleportation] impresses me as a cipher in which her tragic life-story is hidden. From wherever she got them, whether they came to her by supernormal or normal means, they had a definite meaning; they were governed by unconscious association.” (p. 217).
Without going through all his analysis, here are a few examples of what he meant. Fodor was convinced that Mrs. Forbes’ Poltergeist was linked to her repressed feelings linked to her past, as he discovered that she was victim of a pedophile when she was five. There were violet flowers appearing during the Poltergeist, which can mean “violate” (i.e. violated). There was coral appearing, which can be linked the choral that was singing when she was victimized. Her wedding night appears to have been very traumatic as well, although not because of her husband, but because of her past. Several objects appeared on their wedding anniversary. Many objects thrown by the Poltergeist were aimed at her husband (Mrs. Forbes clearly loved him consciously, but unconsciously wrongly associated him with her aggressor). Fodor’s interpretation is clearly influenced by the Freudian approach to psychoanalysis where sexual issues are central to interpretation. But his work shows that if one wants to interpret the symbolic meaning of psi events he or she must plough large (i.e. go much beyond the actual psi event) and look into a number of non-obvious symbols (like the word associations).
As shown in the posts related to the Hill story, such holistic symbolic approach can be fruitful. However, when it comes to interpret symbols linked to expressions of the socially shared unconscious, through events in the public realm, Fodor’s suggestions are more difficult to apply. In the public realm there are many more activities going on. It can be quite difficult to decipher what is relevant from what is not. Kottmeyer (1996) and Viéroudy (1977) noticed, however, that in the United States major UFO sightings tend to be related to concerns related to national security (which implies indirectly that we have a bunch a very psychologically repressed people in those milieus).
To go back to the Gulf Breeze incident, we have here again another case that tends to confirm the interpretation key for American cases. But because it was declared a fraud by many, key clues were missed. What was not studied is the symbolic signification of the sightings, including Walter’s alien visitation claims. His story is essentially about someone who is losing control over his life, and trying to get back control by making his story public. The symbolic structure of Walter’s life presents interesting parallels with key public events contemporary to the Gulf Breeze incident.
The first sighting occurred on 11 November 1987, on Veteran’s Day, which had a very special meaning for the Navy. Earlier that year 37 sailors of the USS Stark, a ship based in Florida, were killed in the Persian Gulf, in the context of the so-called Tanker War. It was one of the largest lost of life for the Navy since World War II. Emotions were certainly high on that day of 1987. These sailors died accidentally due to an Iraqi pilot who mistook the American ship for an Iranian one, but the U.S. Navy was there to fight the Iranians. Yet, at the same time the American government was accused of secretly selling weapons to Iran (Iran-Contra Gate). Feelings of betrayals among sailors were probably running very high.
What is more telling, however, is that there was a similar lost of control and scrambling to regain it during the same time period in and around the Office of the President. “The Democratic-controlled United States Congress issued its own report on November 18, 1987, stating that ‘If the president did not know what his national security advisers were doing, he should have.’ The congressional report wrote that the president bore ‘ultimate responsibility‘ for wrongdoing by his aides, and his administration exhibited ‘secrecy, deception and disdain for the law.’ It also read in part: ‘The central remaining question is the role of the President in the Iran-contra affair. On this critical point, the shredding of documents by Poindexter, North and others, and the death of Casey, leave the record incomplete’. “ (From Wikipedia)
The Gulf Breeze sightings occurred in a liminal time, i.e. when the content of a major public report was known by a few key players, but not released publically yet while there was serious tensions about national security in the Persian Gulf (a scenario similar to the Barney and Betty Hill story about the Transport Commission’s report and the Berlin crisis). Furthermore, it resembles a lot the October 1973 UFO wave, as there was a major conflict in the Middle East simultaneous to the Watergate scandal unfolding through the sudden resignations of the Secretary of Justice and his Deputy (as discussed in a previous post). In other words, this is another case in the United States of UFO wave concurrent to high level tensions about national security accompanied a major challenge to a key democratic institution.
Are these interpretation keys useful for future events? It is less than sure. Many days during the Bush administration would qualify for such context favourable to UFO wave (war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, the 2004 elections, 9/11 commission, Abu Ghraib, CIA authorized torture, etc), but there was no major rash of UFOs between 2000 and 2008 in the United States. A possible explanation for the lack of major UFO sightings is that the lost of trust in the Executive branch during the Bush era was more gradual and therefore less prone to sudden major collective emotional discharges. As well, maybe the American society is now more cynical than before, so there was no big upset about what occurred. Another possibility is that other psi events replaced UFOs, but remained under the “radar screen” (e.g., more Bigfoot sightings, more ghosts, more Chuppacabra, etc.).
In the light of Fodor’s research, it appears to me that a number of UFO cases might have been “closed” too fast.nAs well, this shows that the generally shared ”intuition” about a link between governmental conspiracies and the UFO phenomenon might hold some truth after all. But not in the way that most people imagine: UFOs are not enacting conspiracies (to hide their existence), but rather it is conspiracies about mundane power issues that set the stage for UFO sightings, be they psychokinetic UFOs, hoaxes, or synchronistic passage of mundane aerial objects.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Some particular methodological challenges about psi
Welcome back to all. I hope you all had a great summer.
This post is based on an older but interesting article about researching psi, which provides interesting suggestions that I find useful for the study of UFOs and UFO waves. The article is:
Shewmaker, Kenneth L. and Carlton W. Berenda. (1962). “Science and the problem of psi”. Philosophy of Science 29(2): 195-203.
Psi as a human phenomenon
The article raises an important question about the notion of psi, which is still incompletely answered by present-day parapsychology: Can psi be studied scientifically? The real challenge with this question is, in fact, not about what psi is, but how one defines science. If science is defined as developing an organized body of knowledge about the fundamental dynamics of the universe (broadly defined), then psi can be studied scientifically. But if the study of the fundamental dynamics of the universe requires repeatable experimentation (i.e. at will) as a sine qua non condition, then psi cannot be studied scientifically because it is too elusive and unpredictable for experimentation. If this last and very narrow view of science is accepted, then not only parapsychology is in trouble, but also sociology, political science, anthropology, etc.
Most scientists now agree that the crux of the matter is not about experimentation, but about ontology (i.e. what are we dealing with). When one is dealing with humans, then there are a number of additional challenges not found in natural sciences that come up. Humans are creative and find innovative solutions that cannot be predicted; they self-define they own reality and therefore their behaviour is not easy to predict; human situations are always found in an open environment so that variables cannot really be controlled, or even all known; humans have unconscious mental processes that are hard to investigate but that have a lot of impact on their behaviour, preferences, etc. These additional challenges make experimentation almost useless when it comes to humans and thus other methodologies are required.
The point here is that psi is a human phenomenon and it should be studied by using the methodology of the human and social sciences rather than the one from natural science. The consequence of this is that those who have a narrow view of science will never be satisfied because they need experimentation or quasi-experimental setting to study any object of inquiry. If the object does not fit this mould, then they simply ignore the research done on the topic. It goes without saying that this issue is of paramount importance for the study of UFOs and UFO waves as psi effects. ETH ufologists, by definition, consider UFOs as physical objects that should be studied using the natural science approach. They tend to have a narrow (not to say naive) view of science, and therefore use that the experimentation criteria to reject other approaches (while themselves cannot produce any experimental data worth that name...). In other words, the centrality of the human dimension is usually completely ignored. As well, most ETH ufologists are not interested in understanding the ontological challenges linked to the UFO phenomenon (do they even know the existence of the word ontology?). Hence, it is further reason to accept that there is no point in trying to engage ETH ufology.
Some methodological suggestions
Shewmaker and Berenda take notice of some key issues about the study of psi. Psi cannot be produced “on demand” for very long (the well-known declining effect of psi first noticed by J. B. Rhine). The same problem exists in social psychology (e.g. one cannot repeat the same focus group experiment too many times with the same group, people get sick of it). Almost all ostentatious psi effects are unique events (like most social, political, and cultural events). As well, these psi effects tend to be spontaneous. Most parapsychologists think that it is because psi effects are dependent on unconscious mental processes that cannot be monitored simultaneously to the production of the effect. Spontaneous psi effects tend to have a symbolic content that cannot be interpreted objectively; it requires an in-depth understanding of the producer’s psyche and unconscious thoughts. Lastly, a number of parapsychologists consider that ESP effects, in particular, are constantly occurring, where psi-gathered information, normally gathered information, innovative thought and fantasy are always mixed up, which makes psi almost impossible to insulate from other variables and influences.
To deal with such challenges, they offer a number of solutions that are relatively closed to what has been proposed for parasociology so far. First, they proposed to use what they call “nondiscursive symbolism [which] has been used in the discussion of various art forms and for communicating the psycho-dynamics of individual patients in the psychological clinic” (p. 200). What this means is that the methodologies found in the symbolic interpretation of arts and dreams can be quite useful in understanding the uniqueness of a psi event. This has been already discussed about UFOs and UFO waves on this blog, and it is further arguments to continue to do so.
When it comes to individuals, they propose something that few parapsychologists have done so far (even in the case of poltergeists). “The course to pursue would seem, therefore, to be a truly intense psychological study of the person or persons involved in any reported incident of psi, not simply to determine the personality type but rather with the intent of a presentational understanding of the unique persons and the unique event. This is to suggest that clinicians “gang-up” on one reported psi incident, as soon after the fact as possible, making use of any or all clinical devices at their command. Special attention might be paid to such questions as: ‘What psychological meaning did the psi event have for this particular person at this particular time? What were the conditions of the interpersonal relationships at the time? What function did the psi event appear to serve for the persons involved?” (p. 201).
This suggestion is quite interesting and brings back to the forefront the case of Barney and Betty Hill, as they were the object of an intense psychological study by Dr. Simon and a significant portion of the data was made public in Fuller’s book. As shown in the previous posts about the Barney and Betty Hill case, the questions suggested by Shewmaker and Berenda are not only relevant, but most of them can be answered with the existing data from the Barney and Betty Hill hypnotic investigation! It is clear that true Close Encounters of the 3rd type (CE3) (i.e. involving BOTH seeing an object up close and their perceived passengers), as well as the so-called CE4, can be best studied through the approach proposed by Shewmaker and Berenda. The key, however, is to change the central question from “what can I learn about aliens and their spaceship” to “what can I learn about the people (and their deep mental processes) who can create macro psi effects”. This last question is a true scientific question, but about unique and spontaneous human phenomena.
Implications for parasociology
The questions proposed by Shewmaker and Berenda can be applied to social-level psi effects as well, although it would sociologists and anthropologists who should “gang up”. The questions would become: What sociological or cultural meaning did the psi event have for this particular society at this particular time? What were the conditions of the inter-group relationships at the time? What function did the psi event appear to serve for the society involved?
To offer some concrete illustration of this approach, the new case of seeing mermaids (yes, mermaids) in Israel will be used. The mermaid “wave” info can be found at: http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/israel-mermaid/
This is an interesting variation to the UFO wave phenomenon. Inter-group relationships: there are a lot tensions in Israel about the Iranian nuclear programme, and the unclear plans of the West on how to deal with it. At the time of the sightings, there was not much talk about it in Israel (vacation season), but it was probably "cooking" in the collective unconscious. Sociological or cultural meaning: the symbolism is also interesting, as mermaids (like the devil) mislead people in the wrong direction while being attractive or inviting. What function: I think many people in Israel are coming to accept unconsciously the tempting yet dangerous notion that further diplomatic talks with Iran is a waste of time, although diplomatic talks appear to be the "righteous" way. Concretely, Israel might be getting the resolve to deal with the Iranian threat with or without Western support (with all the very serious consequences this might create for the Middle East and the world in general).
This is only a short illustration, but it shows that a parasociological approach can be used on a number phenomena.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
This post is based on an older but interesting article about researching psi, which provides interesting suggestions that I find useful for the study of UFOs and UFO waves. The article is:
Shewmaker, Kenneth L. and Carlton W. Berenda. (1962). “Science and the problem of psi”. Philosophy of Science 29(2): 195-203.
Psi as a human phenomenon
The article raises an important question about the notion of psi, which is still incompletely answered by present-day parapsychology: Can psi be studied scientifically? The real challenge with this question is, in fact, not about what psi is, but how one defines science. If science is defined as developing an organized body of knowledge about the fundamental dynamics of the universe (broadly defined), then psi can be studied scientifically. But if the study of the fundamental dynamics of the universe requires repeatable experimentation (i.e. at will) as a sine qua non condition, then psi cannot be studied scientifically because it is too elusive and unpredictable for experimentation. If this last and very narrow view of science is accepted, then not only parapsychology is in trouble, but also sociology, political science, anthropology, etc.
Most scientists now agree that the crux of the matter is not about experimentation, but about ontology (i.e. what are we dealing with). When one is dealing with humans, then there are a number of additional challenges not found in natural sciences that come up. Humans are creative and find innovative solutions that cannot be predicted; they self-define they own reality and therefore their behaviour is not easy to predict; human situations are always found in an open environment so that variables cannot really be controlled, or even all known; humans have unconscious mental processes that are hard to investigate but that have a lot of impact on their behaviour, preferences, etc. These additional challenges make experimentation almost useless when it comes to humans and thus other methodologies are required.
The point here is that psi is a human phenomenon and it should be studied by using the methodology of the human and social sciences rather than the one from natural science. The consequence of this is that those who have a narrow view of science will never be satisfied because they need experimentation or quasi-experimental setting to study any object of inquiry. If the object does not fit this mould, then they simply ignore the research done on the topic. It goes without saying that this issue is of paramount importance for the study of UFOs and UFO waves as psi effects. ETH ufologists, by definition, consider UFOs as physical objects that should be studied using the natural science approach. They tend to have a narrow (not to say naive) view of science, and therefore use that the experimentation criteria to reject other approaches (while themselves cannot produce any experimental data worth that name...). In other words, the centrality of the human dimension is usually completely ignored. As well, most ETH ufologists are not interested in understanding the ontological challenges linked to the UFO phenomenon (do they even know the existence of the word ontology?). Hence, it is further reason to accept that there is no point in trying to engage ETH ufology.
Some methodological suggestions
Shewmaker and Berenda take notice of some key issues about the study of psi. Psi cannot be produced “on demand” for very long (the well-known declining effect of psi first noticed by J. B. Rhine). The same problem exists in social psychology (e.g. one cannot repeat the same focus group experiment too many times with the same group, people get sick of it). Almost all ostentatious psi effects are unique events (like most social, political, and cultural events). As well, these psi effects tend to be spontaneous. Most parapsychologists think that it is because psi effects are dependent on unconscious mental processes that cannot be monitored simultaneously to the production of the effect. Spontaneous psi effects tend to have a symbolic content that cannot be interpreted objectively; it requires an in-depth understanding of the producer’s psyche and unconscious thoughts. Lastly, a number of parapsychologists consider that ESP effects, in particular, are constantly occurring, where psi-gathered information, normally gathered information, innovative thought and fantasy are always mixed up, which makes psi almost impossible to insulate from other variables and influences.
To deal with such challenges, they offer a number of solutions that are relatively closed to what has been proposed for parasociology so far. First, they proposed to use what they call “nondiscursive symbolism [which] has been used in the discussion of various art forms and for communicating the psycho-dynamics of individual patients in the psychological clinic” (p. 200). What this means is that the methodologies found in the symbolic interpretation of arts and dreams can be quite useful in understanding the uniqueness of a psi event. This has been already discussed about UFOs and UFO waves on this blog, and it is further arguments to continue to do so.
When it comes to individuals, they propose something that few parapsychologists have done so far (even in the case of poltergeists). “The course to pursue would seem, therefore, to be a truly intense psychological study of the person or persons involved in any reported incident of psi, not simply to determine the personality type but rather with the intent of a presentational understanding of the unique persons and the unique event. This is to suggest that clinicians “gang-up” on one reported psi incident, as soon after the fact as possible, making use of any or all clinical devices at their command. Special attention might be paid to such questions as: ‘What psychological meaning did the psi event have for this particular person at this particular time? What were the conditions of the interpersonal relationships at the time? What function did the psi event appear to serve for the persons involved?” (p. 201).
This suggestion is quite interesting and brings back to the forefront the case of Barney and Betty Hill, as they were the object of an intense psychological study by Dr. Simon and a significant portion of the data was made public in Fuller’s book. As shown in the previous posts about the Barney and Betty Hill case, the questions suggested by Shewmaker and Berenda are not only relevant, but most of them can be answered with the existing data from the Barney and Betty Hill hypnotic investigation! It is clear that true Close Encounters of the 3rd type (CE3) (i.e. involving BOTH seeing an object up close and their perceived passengers), as well as the so-called CE4, can be best studied through the approach proposed by Shewmaker and Berenda. The key, however, is to change the central question from “what can I learn about aliens and their spaceship” to “what can I learn about the people (and their deep mental processes) who can create macro psi effects”. This last question is a true scientific question, but about unique and spontaneous human phenomena.
Implications for parasociology
The questions proposed by Shewmaker and Berenda can be applied to social-level psi effects as well, although it would sociologists and anthropologists who should “gang up”. The questions would become: What sociological or cultural meaning did the psi event have for this particular society at this particular time? What were the conditions of the inter-group relationships at the time? What function did the psi event appear to serve for the society involved?
To offer some concrete illustration of this approach, the new case of seeing mermaids (yes, mermaids) in Israel will be used. The mermaid “wave” info can be found at: http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/israel-mermaid/
This is an interesting variation to the UFO wave phenomenon. Inter-group relationships: there are a lot tensions in Israel about the Iranian nuclear programme, and the unclear plans of the West on how to deal with it. At the time of the sightings, there was not much talk about it in Israel (vacation season), but it was probably "cooking" in the collective unconscious. Sociological or cultural meaning: the symbolism is also interesting, as mermaids (like the devil) mislead people in the wrong direction while being attractive or inviting. What function: I think many people in Israel are coming to accept unconsciously the tempting yet dangerous notion that further diplomatic talks with Iran is a waste of time, although diplomatic talks appear to be the "righteous" way. Concretely, Israel might be getting the resolve to deal with the Iranian threat with or without Western support (with all the very serious consequences this might create for the Middle East and the world in general).
This is only a short illustration, but it shows that a parasociological approach can be used on a number phenomena.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The ugly truth about ufology
This week’s post, exceptionally, has been graciously hosted on two RRRgroup blog sites. It can be found at either:
http://ufoprovo.blogspot.com/
http://ufor.blogspot.com/
Also, I will be taking a break for the month of August, resuming posting in September.
Lastly, I would like to invite people who might be interested to contribute a text (short or long) to Parasociology, or simply to provide comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism to contact me at: parasociology@gmail.com.
I will continue to monitor my e-mail during the month of August.
I wish you all a good second half of summer!!!
http://ufoprovo.blogspot.com/
http://ufor.blogspot.com/
Also, I will be taking a break for the month of August, resuming posting in September.
Lastly, I would like to invite people who might be interested to contribute a text (short or long) to Parasociology, or simply to provide comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism to contact me at: parasociology@gmail.com.
I will continue to monitor my e-mail during the month of August.
I wish you all a good second half of summer!!!
Thursday, July 23, 2009
UFOs and the aesthetic experience
This post may appear, at first, a bit off track but I think that some important insights can be gained from looking at the nature of the artistic (or more accurately, the aesthetic) experience. As I will try to show, psi effects and the aesthetic experience have a number of similarities, especially in the context of understanding the inner dynamics of the social unconscious. This linkage between psi and arts is inspired from reading an article in the field of cultural studies by Tim Dean. The full notice is:
M. Dean, Tim. (2002). “Art as symptom: Zizek and the ethics of psychoanalytic criticism”. Diacritics 32(2): 21-41.
Misunderstanding the social unconscious
This article is far removed from UFOs and ufology, but Tim Dean introduces a useful concept for parasociology out of his critique of how cultural studies interpret the social unconscious. The main trust of Dean’s critique is that writers and intellectuals in cultural studies tend to use the notion of social unconscious to suit their needs, without providing any possibility that their assessments can be falsified. In other words, anything and everything has been used to describe the content of the social unconscious without providing any ways to verify if it is indeed correct or not.
Dean focuses his critique particularly on the written work of Slavoj Zizek, who considers that the content of artworks is symptoms of problems in the social unconscious, and more generally as symptoms of our key but unspoken social problems. For those who do not know about Zizek, he is probably the most “in vogue” public intellectual in the United States right now, who wrote on a wide range of topics always using the same methodology of seeing symptoms everywhere. Zizek, in his approach, is strongly influenced by thinkers of the neo-Marxist school of thought, especially Althusser, who considered that the concrete reality of societies (i.e. capitalism) is what drives everything (i.e., known as the infrastructure), and that ideas, perceptions, and arts are simply a reflection of the infrastructure (i.e. symptoms of). The neo-Marxists, and those influenced by them, added a psychoanalytical twist, in looking at how ideas that support and justify capitalism get into people’s head, and how they can free themselves from such alienating ideas. In other words, the alienating ideas of capitalism are the content of the social unconscious.
As a large number of researches have shown since the days of post-structuralism that such perception is seriously flawed. Capitalism and its various expressions benefit many in many different ways; alienation is a relative term and not only linked to economical matters; and therefore the content of the social unconscious is not driven by anything in particular, but rather by an indefinite number of drivers. The implication is that the content of the social unconscious is not something fully understandable through the language of consciousness, and therefore Zizek and others cannot claim what they do about the social unconscious. Although we can sense that the social unconscious has at a certain time a particular content, it is almost impossible to define it clearly. To reinforce the analysis of this particular aspect of the social unconscious, Dean proposes to use the concept of “enigmatic signifier” from the philosopher Jean Laplanche to acknowledge our limited access to the social unconscious, especially when it comes to the aesthetic experience.
Psi and the aesthetic experience
The aesthetic experience is by definition something that changes someone. After one contemplates long enough a master’s painting, for instance, something changes inside that person at the unconscious level. That individual is now a different person, even if such difference is small and very subtle. I think it can be said the same thing about the psi experience. When someone sees a UFO, and not even in a close encounter context, he or she is changed. A new interest for UFO emerges, or for the paranormal in general, or some serious questioning about whether UFO are ETs from outer space. Similar changes can be caused by seeing a ghost, leading to wondering about if there is a life after death, etc.
Where it becomes interesting is when the change is effected at the social level. As Dean wrote in academic terms, “extrapolating from Laplanche, I would suggest that as soon as one conceives alterity in symbolic terms, one sees that otherness exceeds intersubjectivity and intercultural dynamics; otherness is the property of discourse, and enigmas of otherness are exacerbated by art” (p. 38). In other words, arts changes societies and how we relate to each other, but such a change remains enigmatic. It is enigmatic because the content of what will emerge cannot be predicted, nor in which way people are changed. To use Dean’s terminology, the aesthetic experience is autonomous from our consciousness; the social unconscious drives its effect on society according to its own rules, and these rules are radically distinct from what the consciousness is used to. It is in this sense that Dean wrote, “I am suggesting that the concept of relative autonomy pertain to not only cultural production but also to cultural reception: relative autonomy at the level of reception implies a fundamental irreducibility of sense or understanding” (p. 38).
Dean goes as far as saying that the purpose of arts is actually to disrupt in an unpredictable way what is happening at the conscious level. “We might even say that art’s purpose lies in intensifying those aspects of alterity that otherwise remain dormant in everyday discourse and conventional intersubjective communication. From this perspective, the disruption of normative communication would signal a proximity to aesthetic experience, and art would be defined less as the secluded reserve of high culture than as the practice or experience of disruption through which something like the enigmatic signifier becomes palpable” (p. 38).
Similarities between the aesthetic experience and the psi experience can be further expanded as both violate norms (the former violates norms about the conscious meaning of reality while the latter violates conscious norms about what is possible and impossible—as discussed in previous posts). In both cases there is an enigmatic signifier at play that cannot be reduced to an object easy to analyze. As well, both arts and psi can be construed as intensifications of what is dormant in the unconscious. Finally, both are acts of creation, as discussed in a previous post.
If Dean is right, then it is possible to construe social psi also as an enigmatic (or unpredictable) attempt to disrupt the collective consciousness, to distract us from ourselves in order to change us as a society. Concretely, this means that there is no point in attempting to predict a UFO wave, for instance, nor to predict what social impact it may have. (A similar statement could be made for predicting individual sightings and how such sightings affect the individual witnesses). However, it is possible after the fact to envision a number of possible tensions within the social unconscious that might be responsible for the phenomenon. This remains an interpretative task where more than one explanation can co-exist. In any case, however, no one should think that it can be turned into an exact science.
I think the concept of “enigmatic signifier” is useful to describe the crux of the problem about UFOs and other psi effects. As an exact scientific explanation cannot be produced, the phenomena remain mostly outside the realm scientific debates, and are essentially outside any cut and dry description that could resolve the issue once and for all. Those who still try to use an exact science approach to the problem (like many ETH ufologists and the old style parapsychologists) are continuously disappointing because they cannot be predictive in a cut and dry way.
The similarities between the psi and the aesthetic experiences are certainly providing sobering thoughts. After all, this means that parapsychology (and wanna be ufology) should see themselves as something more akin to the humanities (history of arts, philosophy, classical studies, etc) rather than to the sciences. As for parasociology, it is not too problematic as it is already influenced by qualitative approaches and the interpretative tradition of sociology.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
M. Dean, Tim. (2002). “Art as symptom: Zizek and the ethics of psychoanalytic criticism”. Diacritics 32(2): 21-41.
Misunderstanding the social unconscious
This article is far removed from UFOs and ufology, but Tim Dean introduces a useful concept for parasociology out of his critique of how cultural studies interpret the social unconscious. The main trust of Dean’s critique is that writers and intellectuals in cultural studies tend to use the notion of social unconscious to suit their needs, without providing any possibility that their assessments can be falsified. In other words, anything and everything has been used to describe the content of the social unconscious without providing any ways to verify if it is indeed correct or not.
Dean focuses his critique particularly on the written work of Slavoj Zizek, who considers that the content of artworks is symptoms of problems in the social unconscious, and more generally as symptoms of our key but unspoken social problems. For those who do not know about Zizek, he is probably the most “in vogue” public intellectual in the United States right now, who wrote on a wide range of topics always using the same methodology of seeing symptoms everywhere. Zizek, in his approach, is strongly influenced by thinkers of the neo-Marxist school of thought, especially Althusser, who considered that the concrete reality of societies (i.e. capitalism) is what drives everything (i.e., known as the infrastructure), and that ideas, perceptions, and arts are simply a reflection of the infrastructure (i.e. symptoms of). The neo-Marxists, and those influenced by them, added a psychoanalytical twist, in looking at how ideas that support and justify capitalism get into people’s head, and how they can free themselves from such alienating ideas. In other words, the alienating ideas of capitalism are the content of the social unconscious.
As a large number of researches have shown since the days of post-structuralism that such perception is seriously flawed. Capitalism and its various expressions benefit many in many different ways; alienation is a relative term and not only linked to economical matters; and therefore the content of the social unconscious is not driven by anything in particular, but rather by an indefinite number of drivers. The implication is that the content of the social unconscious is not something fully understandable through the language of consciousness, and therefore Zizek and others cannot claim what they do about the social unconscious. Although we can sense that the social unconscious has at a certain time a particular content, it is almost impossible to define it clearly. To reinforce the analysis of this particular aspect of the social unconscious, Dean proposes to use the concept of “enigmatic signifier” from the philosopher Jean Laplanche to acknowledge our limited access to the social unconscious, especially when it comes to the aesthetic experience.
Psi and the aesthetic experience
The aesthetic experience is by definition something that changes someone. After one contemplates long enough a master’s painting, for instance, something changes inside that person at the unconscious level. That individual is now a different person, even if such difference is small and very subtle. I think it can be said the same thing about the psi experience. When someone sees a UFO, and not even in a close encounter context, he or she is changed. A new interest for UFO emerges, or for the paranormal in general, or some serious questioning about whether UFO are ETs from outer space. Similar changes can be caused by seeing a ghost, leading to wondering about if there is a life after death, etc.
Where it becomes interesting is when the change is effected at the social level. As Dean wrote in academic terms, “extrapolating from Laplanche, I would suggest that as soon as one conceives alterity in symbolic terms, one sees that otherness exceeds intersubjectivity and intercultural dynamics; otherness is the property of discourse, and enigmas of otherness are exacerbated by art” (p. 38). In other words, arts changes societies and how we relate to each other, but such a change remains enigmatic. It is enigmatic because the content of what will emerge cannot be predicted, nor in which way people are changed. To use Dean’s terminology, the aesthetic experience is autonomous from our consciousness; the social unconscious drives its effect on society according to its own rules, and these rules are radically distinct from what the consciousness is used to. It is in this sense that Dean wrote, “I am suggesting that the concept of relative autonomy pertain to not only cultural production but also to cultural reception: relative autonomy at the level of reception implies a fundamental irreducibility of sense or understanding” (p. 38).
Dean goes as far as saying that the purpose of arts is actually to disrupt in an unpredictable way what is happening at the conscious level. “We might even say that art’s purpose lies in intensifying those aspects of alterity that otherwise remain dormant in everyday discourse and conventional intersubjective communication. From this perspective, the disruption of normative communication would signal a proximity to aesthetic experience, and art would be defined less as the secluded reserve of high culture than as the practice or experience of disruption through which something like the enigmatic signifier becomes palpable” (p. 38).
Similarities between the aesthetic experience and the psi experience can be further expanded as both violate norms (the former violates norms about the conscious meaning of reality while the latter violates conscious norms about what is possible and impossible—as discussed in previous posts). In both cases there is an enigmatic signifier at play that cannot be reduced to an object easy to analyze. As well, both arts and psi can be construed as intensifications of what is dormant in the unconscious. Finally, both are acts of creation, as discussed in a previous post.
If Dean is right, then it is possible to construe social psi also as an enigmatic (or unpredictable) attempt to disrupt the collective consciousness, to distract us from ourselves in order to change us as a society. Concretely, this means that there is no point in attempting to predict a UFO wave, for instance, nor to predict what social impact it may have. (A similar statement could be made for predicting individual sightings and how such sightings affect the individual witnesses). However, it is possible after the fact to envision a number of possible tensions within the social unconscious that might be responsible for the phenomenon. This remains an interpretative task where more than one explanation can co-exist. In any case, however, no one should think that it can be turned into an exact science.
I think the concept of “enigmatic signifier” is useful to describe the crux of the problem about UFOs and other psi effects. As an exact scientific explanation cannot be produced, the phenomena remain mostly outside the realm scientific debates, and are essentially outside any cut and dry description that could resolve the issue once and for all. Those who still try to use an exact science approach to the problem (like many ETH ufologists and the old style parapsychologists) are continuously disappointing because they cannot be predictive in a cut and dry way.
The similarities between the psi and the aesthetic experiences are certainly providing sobering thoughts. After all, this means that parapsychology (and wanna be ufology) should see themselves as something more akin to the humanities (history of arts, philosophy, classical studies, etc) rather than to the sciences. As for parasociology, it is not too problematic as it is already influenced by qualitative approaches and the interpretative tradition of sociology.
Copyright © 2009 Eric Ouellet
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