The Survival Hypothesis: Essays on Mediumship
Edited by Adam J. Rock
Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. viii + 310 p. $47.45 (paper).
ISBN-13: 978-0786472208; ISBN-10: 0786472200.

Although not without its defects, this is an excellent book destined to become a standard reference in mediumship studies. It covers the subject from many angles and will appeal to students and scholars at all levels and in several disciplines, no small achievement.

Following a Foreword by Lance Storm, a brief Preface, and an Introduction by the editor, there are 16 original contributions, arranged in four parts: Explanation and Belief; Culture, Psychopathology and Psychotherapy; Empirical Approaches; and The Present and the Future. Notes and references accompany the chapters, making them self-contained. The book concludes with an index.

In his introduction, Adam Rock lays out the main themes: what mediumship is and what distinguishes it from related practices, such as shamanism; and whether it is possible to determine with any degree of certainty that a medium is in contact with discarnate entities. Stephen Braude opens Part 1 with a strong paper that teaches us just how difficult the source-of-psi problem in survival research is to resolve, yet holds open the possibility of genuine communication from beyond. The next contribution, by Michael Sudduth, is much less satisfactory. Sudduth has a tendency to attribute ideas from the popular sphere to serious research and to set up straw arguments he can attack with ease. Moreover, he lumps psi and super-psi together as “living agent psi.” This move might be justified if super-psi were no more than an unusually far-reaching psi, although it is not if super-psi is defined in terms of complexity rather than degree. If super-psi is framed as complex psi, then it is easier to contrast with regular, simple psi, and one may ask which is more parsimonious, simple psi communication between a discarnate actor and a medium, or the complex living-agent super-psi that may be required to explain the same results.

After Sudduth come two papers supplying the skeptical perspective. Chris Roe and Elizabeth Roxburgh present the argument that cold readings could explain veridical mediumistic communications, but don’t acknowledge that investigators in the heyday of mediumship research understood and controlled for this possibility with such stratagems as proxy sitters, absent sitters, and sitters who were introduced after a medium was in trance, sat silently behind her, and left before she emerged from trance, or that contemporary researchers regularly employ double-blind, triple-blind, even quintuple-blind protocols.

Krissy Wilson summarizes problems skeptics have with the practice of mediumship and research on it. What stands out here is how insular and self-referential the skeptical position can be. Like many other skeptics, Wilson relies on a few debunking works that have themselves been debunked, without acknowledging the criticisms of the criticisms. Psychical researchers have sometimes been guilty of the same thing, but the very inclusion of this chapter shows that at least in the area of mediumship, parapsychology is cognizant of contrary opinions, and later chapters show that mediumship studies are becoming increasingly better integrated with other disciplines. Tony Jinks concludes Part 1 with an interesting discussion and model of the tensions between belief and experience in the context of mediumship.  He seems unaware of mediumship in tribal societies or in Asian or classical Greek or Roman culture, however, and places the “origins of mediumship in mesmerism” (p. 91).

Joan Hageman and Stanley Krippner start off Part 2 with a much more sophisticated treatment of similar issues of personality, belief, and attentional strategies in mediumship, employing the Jungian framework of personality types and bringing cultural variables into the mix. Rafael Locke, Adam Rock, and Roger Walsh then contrast shamanism and mediumship phenomenologically using Locke’s “visionary practice model.” Christopher Cott describes communications with gods and spirits in East and Southeast Asia, exploring further the boundaries of what mediumship is and entails. The final two chapters of Part 2 deal with the psychology of mediumship. Jacob Kaminker shows how mediumship differs from conditions such as epilepsy and schizophrenia, with which it is sometimes confused, and why it should not be considered a psychological disorder. Next, Rafael Locke returns with an examination of the psychotherapeutic potential of mediumistic experiences.

Part 3 takes up empirical approaches to the study of mediumship and the source-of-psi problem. In the first chapter of this section, Julie Beischel reviews recent studies that have approached mediumship in a quantitative, proof-oriented way. She has come to agree with Braude and Sudduth that it is impossible to distinguish between living-agent and deceased-agent psi, yet she urges the entire field to adopt the quintuple-blind research protocol developed by her Windbridge Institute. Beischel may well be right that her protocol does not permit us to test what we would like to test, but then why should everyone adopt it? The key problem as I see it is that Beischel (like other recent researchers) works with mental mediums rather than trance mediums. The most intriguing work in the earlier 20th century was with trance mediums, some of whom apparently were successful in opening themselves to temporary possession by discarnate entities. The communicators presented themselves with mannerisms, speech styles, etc., that often went well beyond simple information and are not so easily explained away without recourse to super-psi. A return to research with trance mediums would appear to be a more promising way to get at the source-of-psi problem than persevering with an acknowledged dead-end protocol. Kylie Harris and Carlos Alvarado follow Beischel with a review of qualitative, process-oriented mediumship research, but give only brief attention to the classic era, instead focusing most of their attention on contemporary research, including that in psychiatry, anthropology, and sociology.

Elizabeth Roxburgh and Chris Roe describe a mixed-methods approach to mediumship that combines quantitative and qualitative designs and illustrate it with an account of their research with British Spiritualist mediums. Graham Jamieson and Adam Rock introduce what they call a systems-level neuroscience approach to resolving the source-of-psi problem. Unlike either reductionism or functionalism, the systems-level model takes an integrated, hierarchical view of brain functioning. Different ways of accessing psi information (by living agents, by deceased agents) should in principle activate different parts of the brain, and if these can be identified, could provide a way of assessing which agency is in play on what occasion. Julio Peres, Alexander Moreira-Almeida, and Leonardo Caixeta review research on the neurophysiology of altered states of consciousness, including mediumship, and report a Brazilian study involving “psychography,” or trance-writing.

A brief Part 4 begins with a discussion by Julie Beischel, Mark Boccuzzi, and Edwin May of the place of mediumship in parapsychology. The authors defend survival research against Harvey Irwin’s (2002) wish that it just go away, pointing out the contributions that it can make and indeed has made in several areas, including bereavement management. They draw a distinction between “survival psi” and “somatic psi” that could be conceptually and practically useful, but which requires much greater development. Then comes a concluding chapter in which all the authors of the book (singly or in groups) discuss “the future of the field of mediumship,” for the most part repeating the arguments made in their individual papers.

This book provides an unprecedented overview of research on mediumship and supplies a good synopsis of the state of the art. It could have used a chapter on the historical work with trance mediumship or more recent case studies of drop-in communicators from researchers such as Erlendur Haraldsson, Ian Stevenson, Alan Gauld and Hernani Andrade, not only for the sake of completeness, but because this research differs in essential ways from that currently being conducted with mental mediums and because it has much promise in helping to resolve the source-of-psi problem.

The title of the book, The Survival Hypothesis, moreover, is somewhat misleading, because mediumship research represents only one line of inquiry on this topic. One cannot evaluate the survival hypothesis or the source-of-psi problem solely through mediumship. In fact, as Braude notes repeatedly in his chapter, cases of the reincarnation type provide a much greater challenge to super-psi and potentially much stronger evidence that consciousness (or at any rate, something) survives death. If reincarnation is accepted, then the relative likelihood and unlikelihood of mediumistic communication may need to be reevaluated, with implications for how the phenomenon is studied. Consequently, this  book should not be read as an appraisal of where we stand on the survival question or the source-of-psi problem. As a summary of current research on mediumship, however, it is unparalleled. The issues raised above notwithstanding, this is a job well done, and I recommended it highly to newcomers and old-timers alike.

Reference

Irwin, H. J. (2002). Is scientific investigation of postmortem survival an anachronism? Australian Journal of Parapsychology, 2, 19-27.

 

Published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,