The Founders of Psychical Research

Alan Gauld is a psychologist and historian of psychical research, and this Routledge and Kegan Paul book is his academic history of the founding generation and early years of the Society for Psychical Research in Britain. Its strength is that it remains a standard scholarly account of the Society's formation, tracing its founders' methods and motivations with genuine historical rigor rather than either dismissing or endorsing their subject matter. Its limit is that it is a history of the Society's early period specifically, so a claim about the Society's later twentieth century work or about the validity of any particular investigation it conducted needs a source with that more specific or more recent focus, rather than being drawn from this founding history alone.