Abstract

Some historians of psychology and medicine have argued that concepts and movements considered today to be metaphysical or pseudoscientific had significant influences on later developments. An example in parapsychology is the concept of survival of bodily death. Ideas of survival have been instrumental in defining important moments of the history of parapsychology. Two such moments were the founding and early work of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and the development of the work of J. B. Rhine and his associates at Duke University. The concept of survival, embedded within the movement of Spiritualism, offered the SPR a set of phenomena to be investigated, including mediumship, hauntings, apparitions and other manifestations. Work on survival led J. B. and Louisa E. Rhine to Duke University and affected their later emphasis on the study of psi capacities of the living. It is also argued that survival was influential in the development of such non-spirit explanations of mediumship as psi -from-the-living and interferences from the medium's mind. The Spiritualist literature contains more discussions of these issues than is generally acknowledged. Parapsychology did not develop in spite of survival, but to some extent because of it.