Frederic W.H. Myers

' Frederic William Henry Myers''' (1843–1901) was a poet, classicist, philologist, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research.

Youth
Frederic William Henry Myers was the son of Revd Frederic Myers (1811–1851) and his second wife Susan Harriet Myers nee Marshall (1811–1896). He was a brother of poet Ernest Myers (1844–1921) and of Dr. Arthur Thomas Myers (1851–1894). His maternal grandfather was the wealthy industrialist John Marshall (1765–1845).

Myers was educated at Cheltenham College and at Trinity College, Cambridge where he received a B.A. in 1865, and university prizes, including the Bell, Craven, Camden and Chancellor's Medal: however he was forced to resign the Camden medal for 1863 after accusations of plagiarism. He was a Fellow of Trinity College from 1865 to 1874 and college lecturer in classics from 1865 to 1869. In 1872 be became an Inspector of schools.

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.

Psychical research
Myers was interested in psychical research and was one of the founder members of the Society for Psychical Research in 1883. He became the President in 1900.

In 1893 Myers wrote a small collection of essays, Science and a Future Life.

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. 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.

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.

Metetherial World
Myers speculated on the existence of a deep region of the unconscious (collective unconscious) or what he termed the “subliminal self” which he believed could account for paranormal events. He also proposed the existence of a “metetherial world,” which he wrote to be a world of images lying beyond the physical world. He wrote that apparitions are not hallucinations but have a real existence in the metetherial world which he described as a dream-like world. Myers’ belief that apparitions occupied regions of physical space and had an objective existence was in opposition to his contemporaries views such as Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore who wrote that apparitions were hallucinations.

Personal life
In 1880, Myers married Eveleen Tennant (1856–1937), daughter of Charles Tennant (1796-1873) and Gertrude Tennant. They had two sons, the elder the novelist Leopold Hamilton Myers (1881–1944), and a daughter.

Poetry

 * Poems. London: Macmillan, 1870.
 * The Renewal of Youth and other poems. London: Macmillan, 1882.
 * Fragments of Prose and Poetry. London: Longmans, Green, 1904.
 * Saint Paul: a poem. London: Macmillan, 1905.
 * (edited with introduction and notes by E.J. Watson). London, 1916.
 * Collected Poems, with autobiographical and critical fragments (edited by Eveleen Myers). London: Macmillan, 1921.

Literary

 * Wordsworth. New York: Harper & Bros., 1881.
 * Essays, Classical and Modern (two volumes). London: Macmillan, 1883.
 * Essays. London: Macmillan, 1911.

Paranormal

 * Science and a Future Life, with other essays. London: Macmillan, 1893.
 * Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (two volumes). London: Longmans, Green, 1903.
 * (in one volume, edited and abridged by Leopold Hamilton Myers). London, 1909.
 * New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1961.
 * Fragments of Inner Life: an autobiographical sketch. London: Society for Psychical Research, 1961.