The Language of Mediums and Psychics: The Social Organization of Everyday Miracles (review)

John Edward, the most famous practicing medium in the United States, began his career as a television personality in 1998, with an appearance on CNN's Larry King Live, during which he contacted spirits for callers. The sociologist Robin Wooffitt reproduces an excerpt from one of these exchanges in his intriguing book, The Language of Mediums and Psychics; viewers of Edward's own television shows will recognize it as fairly typical. The caller, Kathy, has asked Edward to contact her mother.

Edward: OK. Did they have to make it—was there—this is strange—did they have to make a split decision at the end, whether or not to treat her—or something?

Caller: Yes.

Edward: OK. She's telling me that.

For Wooffitt, this brief exchange reveals an element crucial to understanding how consultations between mediums and their clients function. Edward's conversation with Kathy involved three "turns," two by the medium, one by the sitter. In the first turn, Edward posed a question tentatively suggesting a specific detail about the sitter's mother, the spirit he had been asked to contact. In this question, Edward gave no indication of the source of his knowledge; it could have been an intuitive impression, or a guess of his own. The sitter's reply was a clear, simple "yes." Edward quickly followed up her assent with a statement attributing the earlier piece of information to the spirit of Kathy's mother. A three-part pattern of this type, question followed by brief affirmation, followed by "attribution of the information implied by the question/statement to a paranormal source,"Wooffitt argues, is a leitmotif in interactions between sitters and all sorts of "psychic practitioners," including mediums, psychics, and fortune-tellers. He bases this assertion on an analysis of twenty-five hours of audio and video recordings of practitioners in a wide variety of contexts, from public displays of mediumism to private Tarot card readings.

Wooffitt presents the distinctive formal attributes of these interactions as, in large part, a product of the Western psychic practitioner's peculiar social and epistemological position. Unlike other people in the helping professions—social workers or psychiatrists, say—psychic practitioners must function in an environment where the authenticity of their skills, and even the possibility that such skills exist in the first place, is constantly in question. For an ordinary professional, appropriate training and accreditation are enough; a psychic practitioner has to do much more. Every interaction, whether with a large audience or an individual sitter, must in itself serve as proof of extraordinary powers. Any psychic who regularly fails at this basic task will find it quite difficult to make a career. As Wooffitt puts it, "if a Tarot reader offers wildly inaccurate assessments of the sitter's circumstances, or the medium brings forth spirits who seem to know nothing of their own family history, their authenticity is immediately at issue. They have to demonstrate paranormal means of knowledge acquisition throughout each sitting" (p. 44).

The three-turn exchange elegantly accomplishes this difficult task. If the sitter's response to the initial knowledge claim is negative, or only a hesitant assent, the psychic practitioner can follow up in a variety of ways that mitigate the damage an incorrect assertion would otherwise cause—by abruptly receiving new information that starts a different line of inquiry, for example, or by suggesting that the sitter "keep" the ostensibly incorrect information in mind, with the assumption that its relevance will become clear at some point after the sitting is concluded. If the response is positive, the psychic can immediately ratify the insight and build on it in a subsequent exchange. Of course, it is also possible for the form to be ruptured, and the exchange derailed in ways that reveal just how powerful this three-part sequence is. A sitter, for instance, can volunteer detailed information instead of simply saying "yes" or "no" in the response turn. This extra detail, Wooffitt shows...