Trevor Hamilton, Immortal Longings: F.W.H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), pp. 359, £19.95, hardback, ISBN: 9-781845-401238.

Abstract

Since Henri Ellenberger’s Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), historical interest in Frederic Myers (1843–1901), a Trinity classicist and poet, Cambridgeshire inspector of schools, and co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research, has grown slowly but steadily. Immortal Longings, based on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, is the first biographical monograph dedicated to this unusual figure. While the focus of the book is clearly on Myers’ research into ‘supernormal’ phenomena, and particularly the question of the survival of the human personality after bodily death, Trevor Hamilton also provides original insights into Myers the man of letters and, perhaps most interesting to readers of this journal, Myers the psychologist. Lacking formal scientific or medical training, Myers was a hugely disciplined and gifted autodidact well versed in physiology and science at large. Together with his close friend Edmund Gurney (1847–88), he studied the psychology of sensory and motor automatisms as well as hypnotism. Gurney and Myers were the first to present strong arguments contradicting W.B. Carpenter’s notion of automatisms as ‘unconscious cerebration’, and they upset the dominant medical view of hallucinations and dissociative phenomena as intrinsically pathological. Popular for having coined the term ‘telepathy’, Myers’s coinage of ‘hypnopompic’ is less known. With his brother, the physician Arthur Myers (with whom he undertook a scientific evaluation of alleged miraculous healings at Lourdes), his intimate friend Henry Sidgwick and Sidgwick’s wife Eleanor, Myers actively participated in the making of fledgling academic psychology. They attended and helped to organise the International Congresses for Physiological/Experimental Psychology, with Myers serving as secretary of the second Congress in 1892 at University College, London. The first British author to identify the significance of Freud’s work in 1893, Myers was a friend of Theodore Flournoy and William James, whose psychology cannot be understood without an appreciation of the considerable impact Myers’ concept of the ‘subliminal Self’ had on both. Though Myers was a very visible author when alive, and respected by most contemporary psychologists interested in the psychology of the unconscious, his work was quickly forgotten after his death. Doing justice to the immense diversity and often conflicting facets of Myers’ personality, Hamilton competently stands up to the challenge to paint a nuanced and psychologically plausible picture of this controversial figure. Presenting a well-substantiated alternative to certain previous portrayals of Myers as a ruthless philanderer and cheat, and, as an intrinsically gullible victim of a desperate will to believe, Hamilton offers an impartial and detached revision of former accounts that appear to have retroactively punished rather than explained Myers’ and other eminent intellectuals’ epistemic deviance. For example, Hamilton argues that, contrary to popular, widely promulgated accounts of Myers and his fellow psychical researchers, a ‘will to believe’ in post-mortem survival, telepathy and other scientifically unpopular notions, does not necessarily exclude a ‘will to know’ and thus the capacity for thorough self-criticism, methodological rigour and relentless suspicion of errors. At the same time, Hamilton does not gloss over certain sins doubtlessly committed by Myers, but he makes a compelling case that they do not detract from the overall value of his contributions to contemporary studies of the human mind, which, as William James observed in an obituary of Myers, had an enormous significance for the mind sciences quite independent from the unpopular research questions they were entangled with. To be sure, the Myers who emerges from this overdue biographical study is a terrible snob. But he was also a man of high intellectual integrity and courage, whose friendship with men of equally independent minds, such as Henry Sidgwick and William James, appears more comprehensible in Hamilton’s account than in previous ones that had a metaphysical axe to grind. Even though Immortal Longings might be a little too concerned with clarifying the question of whether or not Myers was a nasty or likeable fellow, it shows, current trends in historical scholarship notwithstanding, that there is still considerable use for traditional biographical studies – particularly if they serve to rehabilitate misunderstood historical figures who may have fallen victim to ideological boundary-work which historians have not always resisted participating in.