Reflections on being a parapsychologist

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2003 by Carlos S. Alvarado

While I do not doubt training from other disciplines applies well to parapsychology, I worry about the lack of a parapsychological education in some of the workers in the field. I am using the word education here as a wider construct than training to include an overarching perspective that is formed out of a sense of identity, and of general knowledge of the field. It is unfortunate to note that some individuals active in our field are so highly specialized that they barely know anything outside of their own narrow specialty area. This produces serious problems. For example, there are some experimental ESP researchers and researchers in areas related to the concept of survival of bodily death that have little or no idea what goes on in the rest of parapsychological research. However, both sides could learn from each other about the complexity of psychic phenomena. Views about the nature of ESP that come from experimental studies and nothing else provide only part of the picture (Alvarado, 1996c). As seen in such studies as Steve Braude's (2003) recently published analysis of survival evidence, psi functioning in survival contexts is certainly different in the way it manifests in the laboratory and shows different levels of complexity, at least in terms of the forms of the manifestations. While this work may expand the views of experimentalists, experimental work is also important to the evaluation of survival evidence. This work tells us something about the capabilities of the living that will help us evaluate survival evidence. Unfortunately, some people interested in survival are not aware of this work.

Do we have a general view of the variety and origins of theoretical concepts? What relevant work was conducted on our subject by the previous generation? As I documented 21 years ago in a paper published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (Alvarado, 1982), there are many examples of publications in our field that show lack of familiarity with the history of our methods, and with previous findings and concepts. This is why I have devoted part of my career in parapsychology to reminding others of the richness of the literature of the past, be this in terms of specific phenomena or issues (e.g., Alvarado, 1989a), of more general considerations of social aspects (e.g., Alvarado, 1989c), or of the importance of particular concepts or agents of change (e.g., Alvarado, 2003). h has been disappointing to me that younger workers in the field still have to be reminded of the existence and careers of recently deceased parapsychologists, or that these younger workers still have to be told that some of their interests have been discussed before in great detail by those that preceded them. Unfortunately, this lack of perspective is not limited to the youngest workers of the field. Some experienced researchers also show this tendency to myopia, nor is this a historical situation uncommon in other scientific fields. Still, one would expect that anyone who considered themselves a practicing parapsychologist would want to have a general knowledge, if not a detailed one, of the history of one's own specialty and of areas of the field outside of it. The lack of familiarity with our shared past has practical implications in that much of what has gone before would help current researchers to generate hypotheses, and to refine theoretical models and evaluate the work of others (see Alvarado, 1982).