Common Phantoms by Alicia Puglionesi

Author:Alicia Puglionesi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 16. Upton Sinclair’s drawing of a football and Mary Craig Sinclair’s telepathic impression of the football as a cow. Mental Radio (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930), 31.

After their correspondence about Ostoja dwindled to a halt, Prince heard nothing more from the Sinclairs until the publication of Mental Radio in 1930, which he learned of in the newspapers. He approached the book with some trepidation, admitting that he had “suspected, rightly or wrongly, that once or twice in the past [Upton] had failed to discover the devices of certain clever professionals.”65 Prince, however, found himself “interested beyond any expectation” in the Sinclairs’ findings. He resoundingly agreed that they gave “evidence of telepathy, as good as any that could be imagined or desired.”66 With his characteristic diplomacy, he revised his opinion and incorporated Upton and Craig into the category of reliable witnesses.

Prince’s support was not a simple matter of writing a jacket blurb or defending the Sinclairs in the press. Once he accepted them as reliable witnesses, he wanted to scrutinize their work firsthand. The Sinclairs had made an end-run around Prince and the BSPR network by consulting William McDougall, then the head of Duke University’s psychology department, on drafts of their manuscript. McDougall visited them in California and wrote a friendly introduction for Mental Radio. In all likelihood they avoided Prince precisely because of Craig’s awkward history with him, but the appearance of McDougall’s name in the pages of Mental Radio was also an indicator of Prince’s declining fortunes. McDougall represented the future of psychology as a science, anchored in the laboratory of a research university, while Prince held onto the gentlemanly tradition of the nineteenth century.

McDougall had seen the hopeless state of psychical research during his brief tenure at the ASPR and removed himself from the zone of spiritualist contamination, while Prince continued to fight for, and hold, his modest realm of scientific integrity within it.67 What Prince did with Mental Radio was a triple assertion of his commitment to experiential knowledge: he reanalyzed and reinterpreted all of Craig and Upton’s original drawings, he reproduced their experiments himself, and he urged all members of the public to do likewise. Although he respected McDougall’s work and judgment, Prince’s psychical research was rooted in a model of broad-based observation and knowledge-making rather than the opinions of professional psychologists.

All of this is to say that Prince took the Sinclairs’ entire telepathy project and repurposed it as a case study for the Bulletin of the Boston Society for Psychical Research. Comparing Prince’s journal article to the Sinclairs’ text opens up the discursive play of observation, experience, and authority that is lost in assessments like that of John Durham Peters, who simply accuses the Sinclairs of reading too much into their images. I take their determined overreading of the telepathic drawings of 1928 and 1929 to reflect the epistemological standards and shared logics of an investigative community in flux. Establishing identity between a football and a cow became more than the pet

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