Reflections on being a parapsychologist

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

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A PARAPSYCHOLOGIST?

If you can identify with the language barrier faced by Latin American parapsychologists you will have an idea of the frustrations some members of that community feel as they attempt to stay current with the literature of the field. But there are many other aspects to our experiences as parapsychologists.

Many of us, myself included, feel that we are working in an area full of great potential. In fact, some may even feel that they are pioneers because they are exploring areas that have great implications for humankind. While S. David Kahn (1976, p. 213) has suggested that with better replication rates parapsychologists will lose the romance of being lonely workers in an unrecognized field, I believe that most of us will not miss his so-called romance. One of the worst aspects of being a parapsychologist is, in fact, working in a field where one gets little respect from science and society at large. Let me illustrate with some personal experiences.

Soon after I returned to Puerto Rico in 1997 after having acquired a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Edinburgh for work on a parapsychological topic, a member of my family handed me a newspaper clipping about local "parapsychologists" who had recently been convicted and sent to jail. The clipping in question described how some charlatans had obtained money from some people under the promise of helping them to use some occult procedures (Cordero, 1997). How would you feel when you find the profession described in such a way in the press? I felt that I had come home to be identified with charlatans.

In Great Britain, obtaining a Ph.D. in psychology with Robert Morris nets you a conventional academic job in psychology with the prospects of a conventional career unfolding before you. In Puerto Rico my degree branded me as a parapsychologist with little to offer to psychology. I sent my CV to a university well-known for their federally funded science programs through a family friend who had contacts at the university only to have the CV returned almost immediately. From the comments of the family friend, it was obvious that the university wanted nothing to do with a parapsychologist. In another institution I was able to teach a graduate level parapsychology course a few times but it was eventually canceled for lack of students because someone in the registrar's office who found parapsychology distasteful had told the students that the course had been closed when it was still open. While others in the field have had much worse experiences than mine (see Hess, 1992), the ones I had made my life difficult, especially financially. Even more, such rejections made me feel marginal in society, and I found myself needing to bolster my spirits by reminding myself of my belief in the importance of parapsychology.

Another problem we sometimes encounter as parapsychologists is that some individuals we have contact with want to tell us about our subject matter. As Charles Richet (n.d./ca 1928) said in the 1920s, when dealing with psychical research "everybody regards himself as qualified to utter negative or affirmative opinions which have no more value than if, without being a chemist, one were to speak to a chemist of the derivations of pyridine, or to a physicist, of the waves of radium, or to an astronomer, of the heat of the stars" (p. 28).