Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel.

In his seminal work, the trickster and the paranormal.

The parapsychologist George P. Hansen argues that the modern skeptical movement, that

rogue's gallery of debunkers, exposers, and acolytes of doubt, is irremediably implicated in the

unreason it seeks to eradicate. When Freud told Carl Jung that psychoanalysis was to act as, quote,

a bulwark against the black mud tide of the occult, I think he was saying something similar.

With the emphasis had put on dreams, fantasy, automatism, and unconscious drives,

Freudian psychoanalysis was in attempt to fight fire with fire,

to tame unreason by means of the same. It's telling that while Freud held up as talking cure

as the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment, there were positivists just down the street who would

soon peg it as troubling evidence that the Enlightenment had failed to banish the old gods.

One person's bulwark is another's open floodgate. We live in a mysterious universe,

and it often seems to me that no part of it is wholly untouched by the ambient mystery.

I can't help but see in the likes of James Randy, the stage magician who devoted his life

to debunking

supernatural claims, an attempt not so much to prove that the weird doesn't exist, but to

inoculate us against its very real presence. In a way, Randy and his fellow skeptics

attune us to the weird, because even as they do the decidedly noble work of exposing the faith-healing

quacks,

fraudulent mediums, and masters of Legerdomain who beguile a credulous and exploit the desperate,

...