Citation

Frederic W.H. Myers’s book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was a hundred years old in 2003. While the purpose of the book was to argue for survival of bodily death, Myers also presented a unifying model of normal, abnormal, and parapsychological phenomena based on the workings of a subliminal or subconscious mind. Human Personality grew in the contexts of nineteenth-century Spiritualism, psychical research, and psychology and psychiatry. While Myers’s book presented creative ideas, its association with psychic phenomena and ideas of interaction with the spiritual world brought many criticisms. Nonetheless, the book has been very influential and its content is still relevant to present concerns of psi functioning and the subconscious mind. It is also argued that some modern parapsychological work is consistent with Myers’s ideas and that there are several lines of research that may be followed up to put Myers to the test.