Martin Gardner’s “How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James” does not show that the famous medium did so, and misses the lesson of her multiple personality

“Mrs. Leonora Piper (1859-1950)…the most famous direct-voice medium in American history…went into trances during which spirits of the dead took over her vocal cords or seized her hand to write what they dictated” (1, p. 252). Yes, it was that view of what she did that made her famous. But, contrary to what his title implies, Gardner does not claim that James believed Piper contacted the dead, because, as Gardner admits, James never believed it.

James found Piper to be an interesting case of multiple personality, whose alternate personalities occasionally came up with facts whose source defied explanation. And James, skeptical but open-minded, thought that until it was proved Piper got these facts by ordinary means—which Gardner insists, but doesn’t prove—then paranormal cognition of some sort could not be ruled in or ruled out. In any case, all that is speculative, and not James’s main conclusion about mediumship.

In James’s textbook of psychology, he says, “In ‘mediumships’ or ‘possessions’…the secondary consciousness speaks, writes, or acts as if animated by a foreign person…In old times the foreign ‘control’ was usually a demon…Mediumistic possession…seems to form a perfectly natural special type of alternate personality, and the susceptibility to it in some form is by no means an uncommon gift, in persons who have no other obvious nervous anomaly…I have no theory to publish of these cases, several of which I have personally seen.” (2, pp. 393-394).

Thus, James’s only definite opinion about mediumship is that it involves multiple personality, and that it shows multiple personality to be something that “is by no means an uncommon gift” in people who are not mentally ill. Moreover, aside from the issue of mediumship, in general, James concludes, “The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting” (2, p. 401).

1. Martin Gardner. Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? Discourses on Godel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics. New York, W. W. Norton, 2003.

2. William James. The Principles of Psychology [1890], Volume One. New York, Dover Publications, 1950.