Frederic William Henry Myers (6 February 1843 – 17 January 1901) was a British classicist, poet, and psychical researcher, best known as one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 and as the person who coined the term "Telepathy."
Early life
Myers was born in Keswick, Cumberland, the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was educated at Cheltenham College before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned first-class honours in both classics and moral sciences and was later elected to a fellowship. Following the death of a close friend, Myers's interests shifted away from classical literature and toward psychical research and the question of what, if anything, survives death.
The Society for Psychical Research
In 1882, Myers co-founded the Society for Psychical Research alongside philosopher Henry Sidgwick, psychologist Edmund Gurney, and physicist William Barrett, establishing it as the first organisation dedicated to the scientific investigation of psychical claims. He served as honorary secretary for much of the Society's early history and was elected its president in 1900, a position he held until his death the following year.
Myers co-authored the Society's early landmark study Phantasms of the Living (1886) with Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore, which devised much of the classification system used across the Society's early work on apparitions and telepathic experience.
Coining "telepathy"
Myers coined the term "telepathy" in 1882, from the Greek for "distant feeling," to describe what he understood as the direct transmission of feeling or impression between minds without any recognised sensory channel. He also introduced a number of other terms into psychical research, including "supernormal" and "veridical," and compiled an early psychical research dictionary. He developed a broader theory of the "subliminal self" — a layer of mind beneath ordinary consciousness capable of exceptional perception and creativity — which influenced contemporaries including psychologist William James, though it was not accepted by the wider scientific community.
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
Myers spent much of his later career compiling material for what became his major posthumous work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published in 1903, two years after his death. The book synthesised decades of the Society's research into mediumship, automatism, and apparitions, though it left many of the evidential questions it raised unresolved.
Death and legacy
Myers died in Rome on 17 January 1901. Following his death, numerous mediums claimed to have received communications from his spirit, given his prominence in the field during his lifetime. His conceptual framework, particularly the idea of the subliminal self, remains cited as a significant influence on the early development of psychical research, even though his broader theories were not taken up by mainstream psychology.