Will do ... I believe there is a summary paper by the authors and this may also be helpful in the mean time:
http://anti-matters.org/articles/12/public/12-12-1-PB.pdf
This is indeed an excellent presentation of the essential contributions of each chapter of
Irreducible Mind. Here are extracts from the reviewer's summary of chapter 5 as an example:
"The topics of the fifth chapter (by Adam Crabtree) are psychological automatisms and secondary centers of consciousness. Myers categorized psychological automatisms under two heads: passive and active, or sensory and motor. Motor automatisms included automatic writing,5 automatic speaking, automatic drawing, and use of the Chevreul pendulum. Sensory automatisms included apparitions, hallucinations, dreams, anesthesias, automatically manifested creative productions (such as literary or musical compositions), most hypnotic phenomena, as well as “idiot savant” performances. What all psychological automatisms had in common was that they arose from some unknown inner conscious intelligence. Hence their close association with the subject of multiple personalities."
"After discussing Myers’s views on automatisms and related views of some major contemporaries (Pierre Janet, William James, Morton Prince, T. W. Mitchell, William McDougall, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung), Crabtree turns to more recent work on automatisms and multiple personalities by Ernest Hilgard and by Stephen Braude. Particularly noteworthy is Braude’s analysis of the reasons for accepting the notion of a unifying self beyond multiplicity, which for Crabtree provides one of the most persuasive arguments to date for the reality of Myers’s Subliminal Self.6
[6 Myers (1887, p. 260) considered it erroneous to think that the analysis of personality into many components means that there is no ultimate unity behind it. He insisted on the clear distinction between “Individuality” or “Self ” — “the underlying psychical unity” which he postulated “as existing beneath all our phenomenal manifestations” — and “personality’’ or “self,” by which he meant the “more external and transitory” chains of memory, including the ordinary supraliminal self, as well as the potentially infinite number of selves that may be formed from “the elements of our being” (Myers, 1892, p. 305; 1888, p. 387).]
Although Braude’s supporting data are drawn principally from the experiences of individuals with multiple personality disorder (now more generally called dissociative identity disorder), “the same conclusions could be reached from a similar examination of the production of hypnotic personalities and other secondary personalities of automatism” (IM, p. 340).
Crabtree holds that cognitive psychology, having embraced a one-consciousness view of mental functioning, is essentially unable to deal with the data of psychological automatism. “Many cognitive theorists have an almost superstitious fear of the notion of ordinary consciousness itself, and if they are so spooked by this ‘ghost in the machine’. . . they respond to the possibility of secondary centers of consciousness as to a veritable band of demons” (IM, p. 346). Which is why [w]e have hardly begun to look at how multiple conscious centers manifest concretely in ongoing human life, an undertaking that was already well underway at the beginning of the 20th century.
We have yet to carry out the serious and thorough examination of the whole spectrum of human experience that Myers and James said was so sorely needed, paying attention to phenomena that today, as at that time, remain unpopular to establishment science. (IM, p. 348)
Between the formation of the SPR in 1882 and his death in 1901, Myers and his colleagues published in their Proceedings and Journal something over 10,000 pages of reports on supernormal phenomena, including not only extended field observations with mediums and heavily documented studies of spontaneous cases, but early attempts to study telepathy and kindred phenomena experimentally and quantitatively. “The industry, thoroughness, and care manifest in these publications is unsurpassed in any scientific literature known to me,” writes Gauld, echoing James (1910, pp. 304-305): “were I asked to point to a scientific journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources of error might be seen in their full bloom, I think I should have to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.” Further hundreds of articles, monographs, and books written with similarly high standards were published during the same time period in continental Europe and the United States. One of the great contributions of [Myers's]
Human Personality is that it distills this enormous mass of material into an orderly, coherent, and accessible scheme of presentation.
The book itself is thickly documented with case reports and summaries of observations, and it repeatedly refers the reader to other reports, additional documentation, and more detailed reports on the same or related subjects. This vast literature, to which
Human Personality itself is only an introduction, remains an unrivaled archive of information with which anyone who intends to render judgment on the phenomena must become familiar. Collectively it provides impressive — and in my view, compelling — evidence for the reality of supernormal phenomena. Any serious examination will dismiss this literature at its peril. (IM, p. 353)
In the remainder of the chapter Crabtree discusses the connections between automatisms and supernormal performances and abilities.
The physiologists who originally developed the notion of automatism were struggling to explain, among other things, the subjective descriptions of the creative process given by some of the greatest literary and musical masters, who spoke of their productions as sometimes coming to them fully formed, as though they had been fashioned in some hidden workshop by artists unknown. These historical geniuses described feelings of not being part of the process that produced their greatest works, acting more like scribes than anything else. (IM, p. 354) Myers suggested that genius should be regarded as a power of utilizing a wider than normal range of faculties that in some degree are innate in all — “a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought” (HP, vol. 1, p. 71). He described the “inspiration of genius” (Meyers’s own quotes) as
"a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being. I shall urge that there is here no real departure from normality. . . but rather a fulfilment of the true norm of man, with suggestions, it may be, of something supernormal; — of something which transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an earlier stage. (HP, vol. 1, p. 71)
The subject of genius is further developed in Chapter 7."
http://anti-matters.org/articles/12/public/12-12-1-PB.pdf
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