Hi, I'm Frederic William Henry Myers, a Cambridge psychologist and poet, born in 1843, died in 1901. My work on altered states of consciousness and weird psychological phenomena had a considerable impact on my friend William James, the founder of psychology in the US, and I was the first British author to realise the importance of Sigmund Freud's work. Both facts are hardly acknowledged by any historian of psychology/psychiatry nowadays (them sissies).
Together with my teacher and friend, the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick, and other Cambridge-based scholars, I founded the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882, which was the first scientific body to investigate alleged psychic experiences, but also the phenomena of dissociation and other (less spectacular) topics related to psychology and psychiatry.
My main interest was in the scientific approach to the problem of hypothetical survival of death, which led to the publication of my magnus opum, "Human Personality and Its Survival after Bodily Death" two years after my own death (which, as you can see, I survived). My work was reviewed by several eminent psychologists and other scholars of the time, some of which thought it was a work of genius, while others felt I was stark raving mad.
For all that matters, Theodore Flournoy, the great Swiss psychologist, wrote about my work: "If future discoveries confirm his thesis of the intervention of the discarnate, in the web and the woof of our mental and physical world, then his name will be inscribed in the golden book of the initiated, and, joined to those of Copernicus and Darwin, he will complete the triad of geniuses who have the most profoundly revolutionised scientific thought, in the order, Cosmological, Biological and Psychological." Shame that hardly anybody has the balls to test my theories anymore, huh?
