Abstract

René Warcollier, chemical engineer and President of the Institut Metapsychique International from 1950 to 1962, was one of the greatest names in French psychical research. After presenting Warcollier, I review the main lines of his research from 1908 until his death in 1962. Starting with his earliest contributions, I show how his discoveries and his elaborations on telepathic phenomena, through thousands of experiments, have contributed to understanding the processes operating in the telepathic transmission of drawings. Warcollier was particularly interested in the different types of processing which are involved in the transmission of telepathic information between agent and percipient. The richness and the complexity involved in such mechanisms pushed him to formulate many hypotheses elaborating his discoveries. These include some major shifts or even contradictions in his thinking, from one decade to another. However, his work, his knowledge of telepathic phenomena in its more subtle aspects, opened the way to future research in parapsychology, and, in particular, to those who continue to explore the nuances of telepathic training.