Who Was Mrs Willett?

This book is styled as a report from the front line of consciousness studies, using questions raised by the story of the early 20th century medium 'Mrs Willett', who turns out to have been Mrs Winifred Coombe-Tennant, a woman of considerable presence and distinction who did not want her name directly associated with this work during her lifetime. The author outlines the origins of the Society for Psychical Research and the extraordinary story of the Cross-Correspondences, messages purporting to come from some of the founders and often containing complex classical allusions that could only be understood by comparing messages from different mediums. This remains one of the best studies pointing towards the survival of personality, but it raises all sorts of issues about the nature of personality and identity.

These concepts turn out to be more fluid than we might think at first sight, and the author develops his own understanding of mentality, not only in relation to the brain but also social dynamics. He develops the idea of attractor landscapes as a way of picturing mentality and explores the boundaries of mind in relation to classical theories put forward. From all this he derives a series of propositions with varying degrees of certainty. Towards the end of the book he pulls the strands together by considering the nature of the NDE. Not everyone will agree with his interpretation of the OBE element as reflecting an enhanced ability to make conscious use of sensory clues reaching the brain. He does not in this case reference the recent work by Pim van Lommel reviewed in this issue. Nunn is resistant to a soul hypothesis, speculating whether Myers and other communicators really did continue to exist as developing personalities, or whether our understanding of time and memory is so incomplete that we do not currently have enough pieces of the jigsaw. This is a sophisticated and detailed discussion which enables the reader to think these complex issues through in a nuanced fashion and refine their thinking accordingly.