Volume 48, Part A, December 2014, Pages 103–111
Testimonies of precognition and encounters with psychiatry in letters to J. B. Priestley
- Under a Creative Commons license
Open Access
Highlights
- •
- Letters from the public to J. B. Priestley on the theme of time.
- •
- Patient-oriented history of the relationship between psychiatry and precognition in 1960s Britain.
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- Virtue epistemology in relation to spontaneous cases of precognition.
Abstract
Using
letters sent to British playwright J. B. Priestley in 1963, this paper
explores the intersection between patient-focused history of psychiatry
and the history of parapsychology in everyday life. Priestley's study of
precognition lay outside the main currents of parapsychology, and his
status as a storyteller encouraged confidences about anomalous temporal
experience and mental illness. Drawing on virtue epistemology, I explore
the regulation of subjectivity operated by Priestley in establishing
the credibility of his correspondents in relation to their gender and
mental health, and investigate the possibility of testimonial justice
for these witnesses. Priestley's ambivalent approach to madness in
relation to visions of the future is related to the longer history of
prophecy and madness. Letters from the television audience reveal a
variety of attitudes towards the compatibility of precognition with
modern theories of the mind, show the flexibility of precognition in
relation to mental distress, and record a range of responses from
medical and therapeutic practitioners. Testimonial justice for those
whose experience of precognition intersects with psychiatric care
entails a full acknowledgement of the tensions and complicities between
these two domains as they are experienced by the witness, and an
explicit statement of the hearer's orientation to those domains.
Keywords
- Precognition;
- Psychiatry;
- J. B. Priestley;
- Time;
- Letters;
- Public
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.
1. Context
Histories
of psychiatry from the perspective of patients are well established,
such that when Roy Porter regretted that “the history of healing is par
excellence the history of doctors” (1985:
p. 175) he conceded that “the mad … are among the few groups of
sufferers to have attracted much interest, and that largely because of
the polemics of today's anti-psychiatry movement” (p. 183). In three
decades since Porter's call for a redress of scholarly ignorance about
“how ordinary people in the past have actually regarded health and
sickness, and managed their encounters with medical men” (p. 176),
further patient-focused histories of psychiatry have been produced,
inspired not only by anti-psychiatry and patient advocacy movements but
also by the emergence of “history of the emotions” and “medical
humanities” as interdisciplinary fields that are broadening the resource
base and the methodologies available for social histories of illness
and wellbeing.1 Within these studies paranormal experience has not been prominent, though the occult is sometimes discussed.2
The views of psychiatric patients and mental health service users with
experience of the paranormal are almost completely absent from histories
of Western modernity, where the discounting of testimony from witnesses
with psychiatric histories is compounded by the discounting of
paranormal phenomena by mainstream science.
Studies
of the close relations between mind science and the paranormal tend to
be organised around researchers, theorists and investigating
organisations.3
The establishment of scientific credentials for psychical research
involved its practitioners in the amplification of existing class
barriers (Hazelgrove, 2000:
p. 197). A history of parapsychology “from below”, recording paranormal
phenomena in the context of everyday life, awaits development. This
paper focuses on a neglected resource consisting of letters written to
the British playwright and broadcaster J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) in
response to a television appeal for experiences of non-linear time.
For
reasons discussed below, television viewers felt a special bond of
trust with Priestley, and were prepared to make extensive personal
revelations. There was no formal consent procedure, and even those
correspondents who are no longer data subjects (assuming a life span of
100 years) are likely to have living relatives who may recognise their
story. In what follows, those who explicitly requested anonymity have
been included in quantitative analysis only. In all other cases,
identifying details are restricted to the minimum required for using the
selected part of their story. As a compromise between open research and
immediate identification, I have given the archive folder number but
not the full manuscript identifier for each letter quoted here.4
