Spectres of the Self

People have been seeing ghosts for a long time. That, at least, is what they say (which, in the absence of personal experience, is all we have to work with). Faced with such dubious evidence, historians understandably tend to side-step the question which immediately occurs to everyone else: are they real? They do, however, sometimes consider the second question that occurs to people (which is also the first question that occurs to psychologists): why do people believe in them? But, before we can begin to answer either question, we must first consider what is meant by ‘real’, what it is that people believe in. This is where matters become more complex, and where history is needed in order to understand the relevant meanings and contexts within which people have believed that certain things are one thing or another. Shane McCorristine adopts a position that neither a parapsychologist nor a sceptical psychologist would take, but one that provides no problem for a cultural historian: ghosts are both real and not real. His thesis is that modern ghosts are both more real and less real than traditional haunting ghosts—more real because they involve all the senses, appear in photographs and on television; less real because most people see them as psychological phenomena, products of a haunted mind, spectres of the self. Or, to put it in language that psychologists and parapsychologists would understand, ghosts are not real, and most people believe they are not real, but they are interesting cultural phenomena that reflect the way we see things

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Order (exchange · Skepticism · Sociology · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

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  Betty M Bayer•Women's studies quarterly•2012

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