Review of 'Parapsychology: The Science of Unusual Experience', Edited by Ron Roberts and David Groome, 2001. London: Arnold. ISBN: 0 340 76168 7. Paperback £12.99

Abstract

It should be said at the outset that despite the title of the book this most certainly is not a text on parapsychology. Indeed, only a minority of chapters directly address parapsychological experiences. But if readers of the Journal can make a conscious effort to put aside this expectation they may still find the book has some significance for their interests. The book aims to survey some experiences that tend to tantalise the general public but in which contemporary mainstream psychologists seem to have relatively limited research interest. The editors choose to designate these experiences as "paranormal" but then explain that by this they mean little else than "unusual". On the other hand, the experiences surveyed here are not necessarily uncommon (thus, dreams are addressed, yet everyone has several dreams each night), nor were they evidently selected on the ground that they are particularly bizarre (frankly psychiatric experiences, for example, are not included). That is, the experiences reviewed in the book are uniformly neither parapsychological nor unusual. In the final chapter one of the editors concedes that the book's subject matter might better have been nominated as "anomalous" experiences, but again the authors of the respective contributions have not invariably established that the experiences being addressed do fundamentally conflict with orthodox principles of psychological science. In short, one of the immediately evident flaws of the book is that the editors failed to establish a unifying theme that could be taken up by each contributor in turn.