Metapsychy, or metapsychics, is the French science known in English-speaking countries as parapsychology or psychical research. As Régine Plas has shown, the ‘psychic’ phenomena were among the first subjects of psychological inquiry. Like many of his colleagues, Henri Piéron began his career researching apparent telepathic phenomena, and in collaboration with Nicolae Vaschide explained them in terms of an ‘intellectual parallelism’. From 1913 onward, Piéron developed the ‘Métapsychie’ section of L’année psychologique, where he used his critical skills to sometimes foster and (...) sometimes discourage this field of research. In the background to these events was the issue of metapsychy's place within the field of psychology, a field on which Piéron had himself helped to confer institutional and professional status. The growing disparity between metapsychy and psychology suggested a distinct demarcation between the two disciplines, with Piéron zealously fulfilling a missionary role as one of several gatekeepers. While open to what were presented as new examples of physiologically objectified psychic activity, he never really seems to have observed anything he considered convincing and so generally suspected fraud. His interventions played a role in the emancipation/expulsion of metapsychy from the nascent field of psychology, with the advantage of increasing recognition of the epistemic authority of the latter. (shrink)

At the turn of twentieth century, in France, psychical research wasn’t fully separated from psychology. The Institut général psychologique (IGP) was created in 1900 as an attempt to integrate the scientific study of anomalous phenomena in modern science. One forgotten actor of this society was “psychologist” Louis Favre, a polymath researcher with a passion for scientific methodology and the “scientific mind.” He developed a pioneer experiment on the influence of magnetic passes on plants and microbes, with a control group. He (...) also participated to IGP’s 3-years study of physical medium Eusapia Palladino, from which he suggested several general ideas on the study of anomalous phenomena. Later in his life, he offered to classify this study at the forefront of scientific dynamics, under the name of “Anomalialogy of the phenomena.” According to him, this field is highly compatible with scientific method, and may even be the best place to train our “scientific mind.”. (shrink)