DOCTORS AND MEDIUMS

Hokitika Guardian, 13 November 1920, Page 4

DOCTORS AND MEDIUMS

CARDIFF, Sept. 1. Spiritualism, which has been almost taboo at past meetings of the British Association, was introduced in the psychological section at Cardiff to-day by Dr Prideaux, in a paper on a psychologist’s attitude towards telepathy. Coming before such an august body as the British Association, Dr Prideaux’s suggestion that mediums can be scientifically explained is bound to cause a flutter in psychic circles. He suggested that all the paraphernalia of the spiritualist mediums—table rapping and automatic- writing—are capable of scientific explanations. It was absurd, for instance, to attach any significance to dreams. By explaining the mind it was known that dreams are the subconscious expression of past experience. By this the doctor does not necessarily mean that if you dreamed that you were committing a murder you a< tually had done so in some period of your past, but that the scene acted in your dreams would be the suggestion of some such affair either read about, thought about, or seen on the stage. In regard to spiritualist mediums it would be absurd to claim that they were all charlatans. There were good mediums, who fully believed in their power. But it was necessary to submit them to the test of psychological re- ' search. i lie quoted the case of a patient, a young man who suffered from the curious obsession that he continually saw the ghost of his young brother carrying .his head under his arm. The brother was killed in France. It appeared on investigation that the obsession was suggested in a letter to the young man from his mother. One night in a Zeppelin raid a bomb fell rear her house, and burst the door open. She went downstairs and in the Jarkness she believed she saw the figure of her younger son, then in France, handing before her with Iris head under lis arm. About this time she received a letter stating that he expected soon to he in leavy fighting. She wrote to her otlier ion and told him what had happened md, according to tjie lecturer, this was etained in his subconscious mind. If he younger son had been killed on the light of the Zeppelin raid this might i lave been claimed as a genuine ex- ( mple of telepathy. c The scientific aspect of the ease was xplained to the patient with the re- i mrkable result that he was cured of is obsession. n