Métapsychique

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In 1905 the Charles Richet who stood before the Society for Psychical Research in London was already a physiologist of the first rank — within eight years he would hold the Nobel Prize for his work on anaphylaxis — and the word he proposed from the president’s chair was meant to carry that authority into a field his profession despised. Métapsychique: not spirit, not soul, not the séance-room’s verdict on the dead, but a name for the study of phenomena that lay, as he put it, beyond the reach of ordinary physiology. The term named an ambition before it named a subject. It claimed for a disreputable borderland the right to a discipline.

Charles Richet (1850–1935), Nobel-laureate physiologist and author of the Traité de métapsychique*, photographed in 1922 — Agence Meurisse / Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).*

Richet had been circling this material for two decades. His “La suggestion mentale et le calcul des probabilités” (Revue philosophique, 1884) had already treated card- and picture-guessing as a problem in probability rather than in faith — counting hits against chance over more than eighteen hundred trials — a statistical instinct unusual for the period and one that would mark the whole program. What 1905 added was a flag. By inventing a Greek-rooted word distinct from the English “psychical research” of the Society he was addressing, Richet drew a line on the map: the same uneasy territory, but a continental charter for it, with its own vocabulary, its own institution-to-come, and its own center of gravity in Paris rather than Cambridge.

A field divided in two

The treatise that fixed the program, the Traité de métapsychique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922), opens by cleaving the subject down the middle, and the division is the durable spine of the whole enterprise. Subjective metapsychics covered apparent knowledge acquired without the recognized senses — clairvoyance, thought-transference, premonition. For this Richet coined a second term, cryptesthésie, “hidden sensibility”: a perception of things whose mechanism is unknown and of which only the effects can be registered. It is the conceptual ancestor of what English-language research would later call extrasensory perception, and the channel through which métapsychique feeds forward into the experimental study of telepathy and precognition.

Objective metapsychics covered the physical claims, and these were the ones that made the field notorious: movements of objects without contact — télékinésie, the realm later filed under psychokinesis — and the materializations, the partial or whole forms said to take shape in the darkened room. For the viscous substance these mediums were held to exude Richet supplied the word that has outlived almost everything else in the literature: ectoplasm. He had coined it around 1894, from the Greek for “exterior” and “moulded,” and in the Traité it carries a flat, clinical confidence — that under certain conditions limbs, faces, and whole bodies form from the medium’s body and then dissolve. The objective phenomena were the program’s wager and, in the end, its wound.

The split mattered because it let Richet press two different epistemic claims with different degrees of force. Cryptesthesia he held to be effectively established by the accumulated statistical surplus; ectoplasmy he held to be a fact attested by photographs and instruments, while conceding it strained every prior category of physics. He declined throughout to say what either meant. A Nobel physiologist could grant that something occurred and refuse, deliberately and at length, to call it a soul.

The non-spiritualist stance

This refusal was the whole point, and it set métapsychique against the milieu that surrounded it on every side. Spiritualism, then at its height, read the séance as proof that the dead survive and communicate; the Kardecist Spiritism of France — Allan Kardec’s codified doctrine of reincarnation and the perispirit — read it as proof of a moral cosmos of progressing spirits. Richet wanted the phenomena examined while every such conclusion was held in suspense. The medium’s performance was data, not testimony; the question was whether anything anomalous occurred at all, not whose voice spoke through it.

The stance was easier to declare than to keep, because the man who paid for the institution did not share it. Métapsychique acquired its home through the endowment of Jean Meyer, a wealthy Lyonnais businessman and a convinced Spiritist — a follower of Kardec by way of Léon Denis — who hoped that laboratory rigor would vindicate the faith. He funded two ventures at once: the explicitly doctrinal Maison des Spirites and the explicitly neutral research institute. The tension was built into the foundation. The patron wanted proof of survival; the program forbade itself from seeking it. That contradiction ran under the institute’s whole early history, and the directors who managed Meyer’s money were not, by temperament, the disinterested skeptics the charter implied — several were former Spiritists themselves.

The Institut Métapsychique International

The Institut Métapsychique International was founded in Paris in 1919, on the initiative of the physician Gustave Geley and the Italian public-health administrator Rocco Santoliquido, with Meyer’s money behind it; Santoliquido served as its first president. In 1923 the French state recognized it as an établissement d’utilité publique, a public-utility body — a remarkable institutional legitimation for a science most academies regarded as no science at all.

Geley, its first director (1919–1924), ran controlled sittings with the celebrated mediums of the day, among them the Polish medium Franek Kluski, whose séances produced the paraffin “spirit moulds” that remain in the institute’s collection. Geley was himself a believer in survival and reincarnation, and his De l’inconscient au conscient argued the metaphysics openly — a reminder of how thin the charter’s neutrality could wear in practice. He died on 15 July 1924 in an airplane crash returning from Warsaw, and the directorship passed to Eugène Osty (director from 1925 until his death in 1938), a physician whose instincts ran the other way: toward instrumentation, control, and the trapping of fraud.

Gustave Geley (1868–1924), physician and first director of the Institut Métapsychique International, who ran its early sittings with mediums such as Franek Kluski — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Osty’s tenure produced the program’s methodological high-water mark. From 1930 he conducted some ninety sittings with the Austrian medium Rudi Schneider, guarding the object to be moved with an infrared beam wired to cameras, so that any interruption of the beam would photograph the room. The apparatus was built to detect cheating; instead it recorded, repeatedly, an apparent absorption of the infrared by some unseen agency synchronized with the medium’s breathing. The Schneider experiments are among the most carefully engineered in the history of the field — and among the most contested, since the readings could never be cleanly separated from the possibility of a freed limb. Through all of it the institute amassed photographs, instruments, paraffin casts, and case records, the physical archive of a science that never quite arrived.

What it established, and what it did not

How much métapsychique proved was contested at the time and is contested still, and the verdict falls unevenly across Richet’s two halves. The objective phenomena — the materializations, the ectoplasm — did not survive scrutiny. Several of the mediums the institute studied were caught in fraud; the famous photographs of Eva C. (Marthe Béraud) under Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s investigation were later shown to include faces cut from the magazine Le Miroir, the cardboard letters still legible in the plates. No materialization has been reproduced under conditions that later science would accept, and the whole physical wing of the program is now read as a cautionary chapter in how expert observers, working in darkness and wanting the result, can be deceived — a lesson the British society had already learned in its own fraud scandals, and the reason the two traditions, for all their kinship, kept distinct reputations.

The medium Eva Carrière (Marthe Béraud) with a claimed ectoplasmic form, photographed during Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s investigations in 1912; the materializations were later shown to incorporate faces cut from magazines — Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The subjective wing fared differently. Cryptesthesia, stripped of the séance apparatus and reduced to the card and the drawing, became testable in ways ectoplasm never could; that thread runs forward into the statistical parapsychology of the laboratory — into the card-guessing programs and, much later, the meta-analytic disputes over telepathy and precognition that proponents still press and methodologists still reject, the mainstream verdict resting at null. What Richet’s program contributed there was less a body of confirmed results than a posture: that anomalous reports deserve investigation rather than dismissal, and that investigation need not begin by deciding in advance what the answer must be.

Lineage: from the magnetic fluid to the laboratory

Métapsychique did not arise from nowhere. Its deepest root lies in mesmerism — in Franz Anton Mesmer’s universal fluid of the 1770s and, more decisively, in the Marquis de Puységur’s discovery of somnambulisme magnétique, the lucid trance whose subjects seemed to diagnose illness and perceive at a distance. The magnetic somnambule’s “traveling clairvoyance” is the direct ancestor of Richet’s cryptesthesia; the nineteenth century inherited from the magnetizers both the phenomena and the conviction that they admitted natural rather than supernatural study. By the 1850s that material had dispersed through the séance circles of Spiritualism, and it was out of the séance room — its mediums, its physical marvels, its trance speakers — that the would-be science took its subjects.

Against this background métapsychique was also a contest with the reigning philosophy of its century. The positivism descended from Comte held that knowledge must rest on observable, lawful, repeatable fact, and that whatever could not be so disciplined fell outside science. Richet’s gambit was to accept the rule and claim the territory anyway — to insist that the anomalous could be counted, photographed, instrumented, and so dragged inside the positivist fence. It was a thoroughly positivist heresy: not a revolt against scientific method but a demand that the method be turned on the very phenomena it had ruled out of court. That is why the program leaned so hard on probability, on apparatus, on the controlled sitting. It was trying to be more rigorous than its despisers, on ground they had declared off-limits.

The cross-Channel comparison sharpens what was distinctive. Where the British Society for Psychical Research built its reputation on spontaneous-case statistics — the census of crisis apparitions, the long mediumistic sittings, a literary and survival-minded program — the continental institute, under Geley and Osty, bent toward the physical séance and its instrumentation: ectoplasm, telekinesis, the camera and the infrared beam rather than the affidavit. The chemist William Crookes, whose 1870s investigations of physical mediumship were a touchstone for both traditions, sits closer in spirit to the Paris program’s appetite for the material marvel than to Cambridge’s statistical caution. The two enterprises studied the same borderland and cross-fertilized constantly, but they were not one movement, and their names mark the difference: psychical research in English, métapsychique in French.

Scholarship and sources

The program is unusually well documented in primary materials that have entered the public domain, and in a focused modern historiography.

The systematic statement is Richet’s own. The Traité de métapsychique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922) gathers the whole field into one treatise; it is freely readable in the original at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica and in full transcription on Wikisource. Stanley De Brath’s English abridgment appeared as Thirty Years of Psychical Research (Macmillan, 1923). The objective-phenomena literature it draws on — Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation (English translation 1920) and the séance photographs of Eva C. — is likewise period-public-domain and is now read chiefly as evidence of how the physical claims collapsed.

The landmark modern study is the historian of science Sofie Lachapelle’s “Attempting Science: The Creation and Early Development of the Institut métapsychique international in Paris, 1919–1931” (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41, 2005), which anatomizes the founding tension between Meyer’s spiritist hopes and the institute’s scientific charter; her Investigating the Supernatural (Johns Hopkins, 2011) extends the account across French psychical research as a whole. Heather Wolffram’s The Stepchildren of Science (Rodopi, 2009) sets the French program beside its German counterpart, and the Society for Psychical Research’s Psi Encyclopedia provides documented, source-anchored articles on Richet, Geley, Osty, and the institute itself. For the lineage backward into the magnetic and séance traditions the standard frame remains Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud (1993) and Alan Gauld’s A History of Hypnotism (1992).

The institute Richet helped inspire still operates in Paris.

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