The Trickster and the Paranormal. . - book review

Journal of Parapsychology, The, June, 2002 by Michael Grosso

THE TRICKSTER AND THE PARANORMAL by George P. Hansen. Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation, 2001. Pp. 564. $22.94 (paperback). ISBN 1-4010-0082-7.

This book is an ambitious examination of the sociology of the paranormal. It is an accomplished effort to situate the problematic of psi in the context of some leading currents of modern thought, drawing liberally on the ideas of Max Weber, Victor Turner, structuralists, deconstructionists, anthropology, philosophy, and a good deal more. For Weber, social evolution is the product of two converging, though antithetical, forces: charisma and rationalization. The direction is toward greater rationalization, in which charisma and supernatural power are progressively institutionalized and domesticated. History is a trend toward disenchantment--away from magic, miracle, and the supernatural. This bodes ill for parapsychology, which we might characterize as an attempt to make a science of enchantment, an oxymoronic venture by Weber's lights, which therefore can only draw the quixotic few to its ranks.

Even in its least reputable guises, the paranormal is intellectually very provocative stuff and deserves to be looked at against a wide theoretical canvas. Others have sought a wider canvas, and I will mention a few examples. Krippner (2002) has attempted to situate psi in the postmodern world; so has Griffin (1997), who in particular tried to establish links with the process philosophy of Whitehead; Braude (1986) has done various analytic and reconstructive services for psi, for example, its connections with the multiple personality (a trickster-related motif), the importance of spontaneous cases, its destructive (and therefore trickster) machinations, and so on. F.W.H. Myers perhaps was the most daring and comprehensive conceptualizer of psi.

George Hansen's focus is on the sociophilosophical dimensions of the paranormal. As I interpret it, one of the most interesting implications of his analysis is that the dream of parapsychology one day join the respectable ranks of the great normal sciences is most likely doomed to disappointment. If Hansen is right, the fate of parapsychology is to remain forever a marginal enterprise. The reason is that psi, and all those who get too close to its subversive effects, are apt to fall under the spell of the trickster archetype. As the tide indicates, the trickster is key in this massive 564-page study. The trickster is an archetypal personification of a cluster of interrelated ideas, properties, and tendencies.

Among them are tendencies toward liminality, deception, disruptiveness, boundary-crossing, and antistructure--ideas explored at length in this book. In broadest terms, psi tends to undermine structure, status, hegemony, institutionalism, and rationalization, all preconditions for parapsychology becoming an established science.

The first three parts of the book, up to page 116, lay the groundwork, drawing on psychology, sociology, and anthropology to elaborate the incredibly rich and ramified concept of the trickster and its relation to the paranormal. Psi is thus implicated with such ideas as marginality, clowns, fools, hoaxing, sexual disinhibition, paradox, contradiction, ambiguity, alienation, transition, instability, danger, and elusiveness. As an archetypal constellation, Hansen treats the trickster both as a congeries of abstractions and as a powerful, sometimes inspiring, sometimes destructive, and often possessing psychological force.

One of the book's chief virtues is that it explores in detail the various venues in which the trickster constellation relentlessly foils the scientific dreams of parapsychology. It is impossible to review much of this in any detail, but some of the topics covered include: famous, popular, and prominent psychics; conjurors; CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) and debunking; the role of the paranormal and small groups like SORRAT (Society for Research in Rapport and Telekinesis) and the Kubler-Ross circle; psi and various religious sects; psi and institutions such as academe and the entertainment industry; the history of psychical research; hoaxes, government disinformation, and something the author calls "unbounded conditions," including cattle mutilations, UFO flaps, and Big Foot sightings.

In all these venues, Hansen shows how the trickster loves to collapse the distinctions that sustain the structure of the world--distinctions such as real and unreal, genuine and fraudulent, objective and subjective, truth and falsehood. In the presence of the structure, all categories blend promiscuously into each other in a continual riot of boundary-crossing, forgery, and facsimile. The drama of psi inevitably brings with it an element of noir, shadow, and ambiguity. Government involvement in psi research, for example, has largely been confined to interests in spying, thus forcing participants to play necessary but utterly confounding games of disinformation. The psi-trickster element in ufology renders that field of inquiry even more marginal, dangerous, and repulsive to anyone who aspires to rational and intelligible forms of life and thought.