Morselli, Enrico (1852-1929)

Born July 17, 1852, Enrico Morselli was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Turin and after 1889 at Genoa University. He had been a bitter skeptic of psychic phenomena and had published several books including Il magnetismo animale; La fascinazione e gli stati ipnotici (1886) and I fenomei telepatici e le allucinazioni veridiche (1897). However, his encounter with the medium Eusapia Palladino (later revealed to have been falsified) completely convinced him of the reality of Spiritualist phenomena. He held some 30 sittings with Palladino in 1901-2 and 1906-7. He announced his change of thinking in 1907 in the Annals of Psychic Science (vol. 5, 1907, p. 322):

"The question of Spiritism has been discussed for over 50 years; and although no one can at present foresee when it will be settled, all are now agreed in assigning to it great importance among the problems left as a legacy by the nineteenth century to the twentieth.

"If for many years academic science has depreciated the whole category of facts that Spiritism has, for good or ill, rightly or wrongly, absorbed and assimilated, to form the elements of its doctrinal system, so much the worse for science! And worse still for the scientists who have remained deaf and blind before all the affirmations, not of credulous sectarians, but of serious and worthy observers such as Crookes, Lodge and Richet. I am not ashamed to say that I myself, as far as my modest power went, have contributed to this obstinate skepticism, up to the day on which I was enabled to break the chains in which my absolutist preconceptions had bound my judgment."

The next year he published an account of his sightings in the book Psicologia e Spiritismo. Here he presented his psychodynamic theory of materialization phenomena as a compromise between psychological orthodoxy and the spirit theory.

Morselli died February 18, 1929, in Genoa, Italy.

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Morselli, Enrico. I fenomei telepatici e le allucinazioni veridiche. N.p., 1897.

Pleasants, Helene, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology. New York: Helix Press, 1964.