Métapsychique

← Encyclopedia

Métapsychique is the term the French physiologist Charles Richet proposed for the scientific study of phenomena that seemed to lie outside ordinary physiology: telepathy, premonition, and the alleged physical effects of mediumship. He introduced it in 1905, in his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research in London, and the word marked an ambition as much as a subject — to treat such reports as data for a discipline rather than as proof of a doctrine.

The choice of name was deliberate. Spiritualism, then at its height, took the séance-room as evidence that the dead survived and could communicate; Richet wanted the phenomena examined while that conclusion was held in suspense. He divided the field in two. Subjective metapsychics covered apparent knowledge acquired without the senses — what later researchers would call extrasensory perception. Objective metapsychics covered the physical claims: movements without contact, materializations, the ectoplasmic substances that mediums were said to exude. A Nobel laureate in physiology, Richet brought the apparatus and the caution of the laboratory to a domain most of his colleagues regarded as beneath notice, and he held back from any verdict on what the phenomena, if real, finally meant.

The program acquired an institution. The Institut Métapsychique International was founded in Paris in 1919 and recognized as a public-utility body in 1923, endowed largely by Jean Meyer, a committed spiritist who hoped scientific study would vindicate his beliefs — a tension built into the enterprise from the start. Its early directors, Gustave Geley and then Eugène Osty, ran controlled sittings with celebrated mediums and amassed photographs, instruments, and case records. Richet’s Traité de métapsychique of 1922 gathered the whole field into a single treatise, the most systematic statement the movement produced.

How much it established remains contested, and was contested at the time. Several of the mediums the institute studied were later caught in fraud, and the objective phenomena in particular have found no replication under conditions later science would accept; the subjective claims fed into the experimental parapsychology that followed. What the continental tradition contributed was less a body of confirmed results than a stance — that the reports deserved investigation rather than dismissal, and that investigation need not begin by deciding what the answer had to be. The English-speaking world largely kept the older phrase “psychical research”; “metapsychics” stayed the continental word for the same uneasy borderland between the laboratory and the séance. The institute Richet helped inspire still operates in Paris.