Frederic William Henry Myers (1843–1901) was a classical scholar, poet, philosopher, and past president of the Society for Psychical Research.[1]
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Frederic William Henry Myers was the son of Rev. Frederic Myers and brother of poet Ernest Myers. He was educated at Cheltenham College, and Trinity College, Cambridge where he received a B.A. in 1865.[2][3]
In 1867, Myers published a long poem, St Paul, which became very popular. It was followed in 1882 by The Renewal of Youth and Other Poems. He also wrote books of literary criticism, in particular Wordsworth (1881) and Essays, Classical and Modern (in two volumes, 1883), which included a highly-regarded essay on Virgil.
Myers was interested in psychical research and was one of the founder members of the Society for Psychical Research in 1883.[4][5][6] He became the President in 1900.[7]
In 1893 Myers wrote a small collection of essays, Science and a Future Life.[8]
In 1903, after Myers's death, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was compiled and published. It was two large volumes at 1,360 pages in length, which presented an overview of Myers's research into the unconscious mind.[6][9][10] Myers believed that a theory of consciousness must be part of a unified model of mind, which derive from the full range of human experience, including not only normal psychological phenomena but also the wide variety of abnormal and "supernormal" phenomena.[9][10]
Frederic Myers may be regarded as an "important early depth psychologist", and his significant influence on colleagues like William James, Pierre Janet, and Théodore Flournoy and also Carl G. Jung has been well documented.[11]