The Big Book, and Why It Is Still Read

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death appeared in 1903, two years after Myers died, and it is a strange and ambitious work. Its thesis is that the self available to waking introspection is a narrow band of a much wider personality, and that the same submerged region accounts for a range of phenomena ordinarily filed separately: creative inspiration, the automatisms of hypnotic suggestion, hysterical symptoms, the productions of mediums, and, he argued, communication that outlasts the body.

The evidential half of the book is a mass of case material that has not aged well, since the standards of collection were those of the 1880s and much of it depends on testimony gathered long after the event. The theoretical half is why the book is still cited. William James thought Myers had posed the right question about the structure of the mind even where he had answered it wrongly, and the notion of a subliminal region with its own organisation runs through the psychodynamic tradition that followed. Myers's conclusion, that the evidence favoured survival of death, was not accepted by James, is not accepted now, and does not follow from the psychological argument the book makes so well.