9. Psychic Research

After having postponed her return to India several times, Trix resumed her marriage and reentered Anglo-Indian social life in 1902. Childless at thirty-five years old, she had lain to rest any hopes of conceiving a baby. Only moderately successful as a writer, she had given up on having a literary career. Instead, she focused her formidable energies on psychic research, having made contact with the respected British Society for Psychical Research (SPR), whose distinguished members were attempting to prove spiritual survival after bodily death. Trix became a valued medium in the carefully designed experiments of the society, writing and sending to England hundreds of pages of automatic script. When Jack’s army service terminated in 1908 and Trix returned to Scotland, she continued her work with the SPR. Rudyard believed that Trix’s psychic work contributed to her mental frailty, but, on the contrary, while working with the SPR, Trix remained sane and stable. This calm period came to an abrupt end in December 1910.

Trix used her ability to put herself into a trance-like state for the purpose of providing evidence for the SPR, but being in this state also had the unintended but welcome result of easing her mind. By coincidence, therapy to relieve mental distress and research to prove the existence of invisible psychic forces overlapped in many areas. Psychic researchers and mental health professionals, called alienists, were investigating trance-like states to uncover unconscious or subliminal awareness. Hypnotism, dream interpretation, free association, and Freud’s primary process psychoanalytic technique depended on establishing access to the patient’s unconscious mind in order to diagnose and treat mental disorders. Psychical research recognized altered states of consciousness as elevated states of inspiration in which spirits were heard, seen, or embodied. Philosophers, psychologists, and psychic researchers all considered dreams, hypnotism, automatic writing, crystal gazing, trances, and speaking in tongues as important areas of mental activity that could be studied and measured with scientific accuracy to reveal the unknown workings of the human mind.