Gladys Osborne Leonard (28 May 1882 – 19 March 1968) was a British trance medium, renowned for her work with the Society for Psychical Research. Although psychical researchers such as Oliver Lodge were convinced she had communicated with spirits, skeptical researchers were convinced that Leonard's trance control was a case of dissociative identity disorder.
Life
Leonard was born in Lytham on 28 May 1882. She claimed to have experienced her first 'visitation' by spirits when she was a child. She claimed that the spirits would show her landscapes which she would refer to as the 'Happy Valley'. She was trained as a singer but childhood illness in 1906 prevented her from continuing. Her interest in spiritualism developed whilst she was ill when a Spiritualist nurse in the hospital invited her to take part in her first table seance.
Work
By 1915 Leonard was giving professional readings. She claimed to channel the spirit of an Indian woman named Feda who had been married to her great-great-grandfather, and readings were given 'through' her. Patrons of Leonard attested that when Feda was being channelled Leonard spoke in broken English with little understanding of the language.
Leonard gained fame as a medium after conducting séances with the family of Oliver Lodge, which were described in his book Raymond or Life and Death (1916). The book documented the séances that he and his wife had attended with Leonard. Lodge was convinced that his son Raymond had communicated with him and the book is a description of his son's experiences in the spirit world. According to the book Raymond had reported that people who had died were still the same people when they passed over, there were houses, trees and flowers and the Spirit world looked similar to earth but there is no disease. The book also claimed that when soldiers died in World War I they had smoked cigars and received whisky in the spirit world and because of such statements the book was criticised. Walter Cook wrote a rebuttal to Lodge Reflections on Raymond (1917) that directly challenged Lodge's beliefs in Spiritualism.
In 1918 Leonard began working with the Society for Psychical Research. The Society would often use proxies in place of grieving relatives in an attempt to minimise fraud. Their publication detailing the results of these sittings was praised by psychical researchers and resulted in even more publicity for Leonard. Leonard later worked with Radclyffe Hall and the results of those sessions were published in the Proceedings for the Society for Psychical Research in 1919.
Reception
Researchers such as Clodd (1917), Culpin (1920), Hansel (1966) and Moore (1981) who investigated Leonard's mediumship from psychical reports were not convinced she had communicated with spirits.
Clodd has stated that Leonard had known some of her sitters before the séances, and could have obtained information by natural means. Culpin has suggested that her results could be explained by cold reading and subjective validation. As a medium she specialised in 'book tests', whereby she would select a book from the shelf which held special significance to the deceased. In 1921, Eleanor Sidgwick analysed these tests and found that only 36% were successful. The philosopher Antony Flew commented that Leonard's references to books and pages were imprecise.
Charles Richet who studied the alleged communications in Raymond concluded that autosuggestion was the likeliest explanation for the information gathered by Leonard and her spirit control "Feda" was a secondary personality. Historian Ruth Brandon has also noted that Feda was a "typical hysterical" second personality.
In 1934, Whately Carington tested Leonard and her control by word-association tests also came to the conclusion Feda was a secondary personality and not a spirit. The psychologist Donald West wrote regarding the tests:
Carington discovered that the results given by Feda and Mrs Leonard were neither what one would expect from testing two different persons nor what one would normally get from testing the same person twice. Superficially their patterns were grossly dissimilar, but they were related to each other – that is, negatively correlated. Where the normal Mrs Leonard tended to give a long reaction time, the entranced Mrs Leonard gave a short one, and vice versa. In other words Feda and Mrs Leonard were not independent individuals; they were complementary characters. The result is in keeping with the theory that Feda is a dramatization of the medium's own subconscious trends. It is very difficult to reconcile these findings with a Spiritualistic interpretation.