Abstract

Discusses changes in the relationship between psychology and parapsychology during the last 50 yrs. Before 1925 psychology had very little to do with parapsychology. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, parapsychology, helped by financing from laymen, had found its way into a few university psychology departments. Landmark events in the relation between the 2 disciplines are described (e.g., the publication in 1934 of the authors's monograph, Extra-sensory Perception, which met with vigorous and positive response from many psychologists). The 3 major criticisms launched by psychologists had to do with (a) the soundness of parapsychology's experimental methods, (b) the validity of its statistics, and (c) the possibility of fraud on the part of the experimenter. As these challenges were answered, psychologists came increasingly to understand the problems of parapsychology and to acknowledge it as a legitimate field of scientific inquiry. With growing acceptance another urgent problem has appeared: What should parapsychology's field of research be? A strong distinction is made between problems appropriate for study because they can be answered by rigorously designed experiments and phenomena like survival, telepathy, retrocognition, and out-of-the-body experiences which can be neither proved nor disproved by experiment. It is concluded that parapsychology is now ready for adoption by psychology; the 2 disciplines should be treated in a single integrated department of a university. (35 ref)