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5. Education and Training in Parapsychology
As we
all know the profession of parapsychology is not regulated. There are no
certification programs or organizations, nor any way to control the use of the
term parapsychologist. In many phone books, and on the Internet, the term
parapsychologist is used as a synonym for psychic. In some places, such as
Brazil, there have been attempts to define the profession legally, but without
success (Hiraoka, 2002).
Most parapsychologists come to the field from other areas of science or of
academia. As is well known, most people in the field do not have an educational
background in parapsychology in the same way that members of other disciplines
have in their own fields.
McConnell and Clark (1980) reported in their survey of
PA members that only five out of 203 respondents claimed doctoral training in
parapsychology as their main area of training. The situation is better now due
to Robert Morris's efforts at the University of Edinburgh, as well as to the
efforts of Deborah Delanoy and others at universities in the UK (Smith,
1999).
But most researchers in the field today have not been trained in parapsychology
and basically conduct research based on their training in psychology,
psychiatry, physics, and other disciplines, as well as on their own private
study of the parapsychological literature. This is all good in terms of
techniques and general scientific philosophy. Formal training in research from
another field can certainly be applied to parapsychology, as many of us know
from personal experience. In fact, this is essential for progress. In addition,
it is not uncommon for some scientists to shift research areas, for which they
self-train themselves by gaining knowledge of the relevant literature and
methodology through personal study.
While I do not doubt training from other disciplines applies well to
parapsychology, I worry about the lack of a parapsychological education in some
of the workers in the field. I am using the word education here as a wider
construct than training to include an overarching perspective that is formed out
of a sense of identity, and of general knowledge of the field. It is unfortunate
to note that some individuals active in our field are so highly specialized that
they barely know anything outside of their own narrow specialty area. This
produces serious problems. For example, there are some experimental ESP
researchers and researchers in areas related to the concept of survival of
bodily death that have little or no idea what goes on in the rest of
parapsychological research. However, both sides could learn from each other
about the complexity of psychic phenomena. Views about the nature of ESP that
come from experimental studies and nothing else provide only part of the picture
(Alvarado,
1996c). As seen in such studies as
Steve Braude's (2003) recently
published analysis of survival evidence, psi functioning in survival contexts is
certainly different in the way it manifests in the laboratory and shows
different levels of complexity, at least in terms of the forms of the
manifestations. While this work may expand the views of experimentalists,
experimental work is also important to the evaluation of survival evidence. This
work tells us something about the capabilities of the living that will help us
evaluate survival evidence. Unfortunately, some people interested in survival
are not aware of this work.
Do we have a general view of the variety and origins of theoretical concepts?
What relevant work was conducted on our subject by the previous generation? As I
documented 21 years ago in a paper published in the Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research (Alvarado,
1982), there are many examples of publications in
our field that show lack of familiarity with the history of our methods, and
with previous findings and concepts. This is why I have devoted part of my
career in parapsychology to reminding others of the richness of the literature
of the past, be this in terms of specific phenomena or issues (e.g., Alvarado,
1989a), of more general considerations of social aspects (e.g., Alvarado,
1989c), or of the importance of particular concepts or agents of change (e.g.,
Alvarado,
2003).
It has been disappointing to me that younger workers in the
field still have to be reminded of the existence and careers of recently
deceased parapsychologists, or that these younger workers still have to be told
that some of their interests have been discussed before in great detail by those
that preceded them. Unfortunately, this lack of perspective is not limited to
the youngest workers of the field. Some experienced researchers also show this
tendency to myopia, nor is this a historical situation uncommon in other
scientific fields. Still, one would expect that anyone who considered themselves
a practicing parapsychologist would want to have a general knowledge, if not a
detailed one, of the history of one's own specialty and of areas of the field
outside of it. The lack of familiarity with our shared past has practical
implications in that much of what has gone before would help current researchers
to generate hypotheses, and to refine theoretical models and evaluate the work
of others (see Alvarado,
1982).
This criticism should not be taken to imply that everyone should be a scholar in
the past literature of parapsychology, nor that this will solve out current
problems. As I argued in the twenty-one-year-old paper cited above, I do not
consider the study of our past literature to be a substitute for contemporary
research. The issue instead is one of context; current work should be carried
out by those who are well-informed about the relevant past developments of the
field.
But more than this is included in the meaning of the word education. Being
educated not only means knowing how best to collect and analyze data, nor having
simple knowledge of antecedents in the literature. Instead, being educated means
being aware of continuities and discontinuities in the development of
parapsychological ideas and having a familiarity with philosophical,
psychological, and general existential issues of the field. In other words,
being educated means having a commitment or at least an understanding to the
collective identity of parapsychology as a field, even to the point of
acknowledging the well-known difficulties to the achievement of consensus on
many substantive issues.
There is a parapsychological culture and identity that you find in some workers
in the field but not in others. It is a quality that allows us to go beyond our
research specialty, beyond the technical aspects of our research to the wider
picture of our professional identity, and, of course, to the implications of our
work. Having this sense of the field is an identity that stands in stark
contrast to the identity of those who see the field just as a technical
specialty for data crunching, or a mere intellectual curiosity.
The lack of this deeper sense of what the profession is comes, to some extent,
from the contemporary tendency of specialization or overspecialization in our
professions. But also it comes from the lack of organized educational programs
that provide systematic exposure to different aspects of the field. In terms of
professionalization parapsychologists are hybrids; we are a community formed
from a combination of self-teaching and extrapolation from the training programs
of other disciplines. In spite of recent educational developments and past
discussions of education in the field (Shapin & Coly, 1976; Smith, 1999), the
fact is that there are not many educational programs where a student can be
exposed to a wide range of parapsychological literature. By this I mean
systematic exposure to the range of phenomena of the field, to their
classifications and terminology, to the classic and the contemporary literature,
to the various methods and techniques used in the field now and in the past, to
the historical development of the discipline, and to the wide range of theoretical models presented so far. It is unfortunate that at the moment no single
educational and training program in existence can achieve this goal.[4]
[4]
Of course, the lack of educational programs depends to a great extent on the
lack of a numerous and well organized parapsychological profession.
We must also be aware that training and education in parapsychology are
particularly problematic in those geographical regions or countries where
parapsychology is even more underdeveloped than it is in the States and parts of
Europe. In previous writings I have discussed several problems Latin American
parapsychologists face (e.g., Alvarado,
1996b, 2002b). One of these is the lack
of general training in scientific research. Some of those engaged in research do
not have training in data collection and analysis, a situation that is rapidly
changing in such countries as Argentina and Brazil. Consequently, compared to
the United States and parts of Europe little scientific research gets done in
Latin America. Instead, most parapsychological work is limited to discussions
from the old literature, to literature reviews, and to conceptual and
theoretical discussions. To further complicate matters many of these
parapsychologists have difficulties reading English. Because most current
research in parapsychology is published in English, this creates additional
serious difficulties in training and educating Latin American
parapsychologists.[5]
[5]
On the wider issue of the language barrier in parapsychology see Alvarado
(1989b).
Next part: 6. How Does it
Feel to be a Parapsychologist?
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