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Robert H. Thouless
Robert Henry Thouless (15 July 1894 – 25 September 1984) was an English psychologist and parapsychologist.[1] He is best known as the author of Straight and Crooked Thinking (1930, 1953), which describes flaws in reasoning and argument.[2] CareerHe studied at Cambridge University where he earned B.A. hons in 1914, an M.A. in 1919 and a PhD in 1922.[1] He was a lecturer in psychology at the universities of Manchester, Glasgow and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge. He wrote on parapsychology and conducted experiments in card-calling and psychokinesis.[3] His own experiments did not confirm the results of J. B. Rhine and he criticised the experimental protocols of previous experimenters.[4][5] He is credited with introducing the word psi as a term for parapsychological phenomena in a 1942 article in the British Journal of Psychology.[6] He served as president of the Society for Psychical Research from 1942 to 1944.[1] Thouless identified as a "Christian psychologist". He questioned the alleged visions of Jesus Christ that the mystic Julian of Norwich reported to have experienced and concluded they were the result of hallucinations.[7] Thouless was a friend of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and attended his lectures.[8] Attempt to prove dead could communicate with the livingIn 1948 he created a test that he thought could prove that he could communicate with living people after his death.[9] One way of testing this was to ask dying people to write a message that would be sealed, then ask a medium to try to contact the deceased for the message.[9] The weakness in this was that the medium might have been shown the message before the seance, so he enciphered it using keywords he refused to divulge.[9] The ciphertext was "BTYRR OOFLH KCDXK FWPCZ KTADR GFHKA HTYXO ALZUP PYPVF AYMMF SDLR UVUB".[9] The Survival Research Foundation based in Miami offered a reward of $1000 to anyone who could break the cipher within three years of Thouless' death.[9] In 1995 the cipher was broken by James Gillogly who wrote cryptanalysis software to crack the variation of the playfair cipher used.[9] The deciphered message read "This is a cipher which will not be read unless I give the keywords."[9] The keywords were black and beauty.[9] ReceptionHis An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion (1923, reprinted 1961) received a mixed reception from academics. One criticism of the book was the over-reliance of Freud's psychoanalyst approach to the subject.[10] Professor James E. Dittes wrote that despite the obsolete Freudian views it is a useful elementary guide to the psychology of religion.[11] Psychologist John Beloff commenting on Thouless and his parapsychological studies wrote:
Psychologist L. Börje Löfgren has criticised Thouless for endorsing the mentalist Frederick Marion as a genuine psychic. He suggested that "Thouless is an honest man, but his powers of self-deception must be rather considerable."[12] Personal lifeRobert Thouless married Priscilla Gorton, an English teacher, and was the father of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Thouless.[13] Publications
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