Two areas of human experience relatively neglected by many
clinicians and theoreticians are of great importance to
psychotherapists,
both on a practical level and in the understanding of human
personality, i.e., the transpersonal and the para-psychological.
These terms are often confused, and do indeed in some respects
overlap. However, if we wish to explore these two frontiers of
psychology, it is necessary to begin with a working distinction
between them.
Parapsychology is the study of interactions between the human mind and the external world that cannot adequately be explained by what we now understand about the laws of physiological psychology and physics. These interactions include telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psycho-kinesis and psychic healing, all frequently grouped together under the rubric of psychic occurrences or paranormal phenomena.
The acceptance of parapsychology as a legitimate branch does not imply belief in the occult or the supernatural, or even spiritual values. It is a field of investigation, formally recognized as such in 1969 by the acceptance of the Parapsychological Association as an affiliated society of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Data regarding the occurrence of psi phenomena under laboratory conditions has been accumulated by respected scientists. Outstanding figures in various conventional fields such as physics, biology, astronomy, and even engineering have indicated their acceptance of the paranormal. It has been said that if the evidence for any other set of phenomena were as convincing as the evidence for the existence of psi, we would accept it as naturally as we now accept the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. Scientists are reluctant to accept the data, (although the total statistical data is impressive), partly because individual experiments are difficult to replicate, and partly because such an acceptance involves a revision of the accepted structure of classical physics - including our concepts of time and space - although these concepts appear far more complex now than in Newton's time.
My personal conviction, and one that is shared by many noted psychotherapists (Freud, Jung, Assagioli, Fodor, Ehrenwald, Eisenbud, Frank, Maslow, Pierrakos, LeShan, Dean and many others), is that psychic phenomena do take place in therapy and may even be an integral part of the therapeutic process.
Evidence for this naturally comes from specific clinical observations rather than from controlled laboratory experiments. But as psychotherapy itself is essentially a very complex and subtle set of interactions between two people, it cannot be explored and replicated by the same methods used with phenomena belonging entirely to the hard sciences. After all, Freud's formulation of the laws governing relationships between conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind were not made in a laboratory, but in his consulting room.
Fortunately, the possibility that the psychic phenomena occur in therapy can be explored on a hypothetical basis even if we prefer to reserve final judgment. As therapists, we can inquire as to under what circumstances these seemingly paranormal phenomena occur, what they can contribute to our understanding of psychotherapy, and-especially-what the responsibilities are for the therapist in their evaluation and management.
In contrast to psychic phenomena, our concept of the transpersonal dimension of human experience is not based on observation and experiment, but is based only upon direct, subjective experience. If, after examining the evidence, we can only say, "I do not believe in the existence of transpersonal experiences" , it is because these experiences are as subjective as love or the enjoyment of beauty or music. We can only say, "I personally, have never experienced any transpersonal feelings." This dimension is related to poetry rather than to science, to religion rather than to research. A definition has been offered by Vaughan, who writes: "The transpersonal level corresponds to the stage of self-transcendence, where the individual no longer experiences himself as separate and isolated, but as part of something larger...The individual in relationship to the universe comes into focus and the underlying unity of all life may be experientially realized."
The Statement of Purpose from the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology also suggests the quality of this approach:
"The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology is concerned with the publication of theoretical and applied research, original contribution, empirical papers, articles and studies in meta-needs, ultimate values, unitive consciousness, peak experiences, ecstasy, mystical experience, being values, essence, bliss, awe, wonder, self-actualization, ultimate meaning, transcendence of the self, spirit, sacralization of everyday life, oneness, cosmic awareness, cosmic play, individual and species-wide synergy, maximal interpersonal encounter transcendental phenomena; maximal sensory awareness, responsiveness and expression; and related concepts, experiences and activities. As a statement of purpose, this formulation is to be understood as a subject to optional individual or group interpretations, either wholly or in part, with regard to the acceptance of its contents as essentially naturalistic, theistic, supernaturalistic, or any other designated classification."
To further highlight the differences between these two approaches to human experience, we may consider the description of a recently developed laboratory device in which subjects, making tens of thousands of trials, attempt to influence which target will be randomly selected by a machine; results are then evaluated by sophisticated statistical procedures that enable a comparison between the accuracy of these results with the results that would have been obtained by chance alone.
"An electronic apparatus displayed to the subjects a group of four small light bulbs, each with a pushbutton adjacent. Pushing any button would cause one of the lamps to light; which one was to push the button next to the determined by a highly random physical process, the disintegrating of an atom in a bit of radioactive strontium. In a first series, the subject was asked to try to three subjects in push the button next to the lamp that would next light, thus automatically registering a 'hit'. A total of 63,000 trials by three subjects in this series yielded highly significant results; i.e., one possibility in 500 million that the score was due to random events."
Clearly, this type of research implies no commitment to belief in supernatural suspension of the natural laws of physics, but does imply the hypothesis that the interaction of human experience and human reality obeys laws we do not yet understand. Conversely, the validity of the transpersonal dimension of human life rests primarily upon the reports of men an women who have undergone mystical experiences which, as William James has pointed out, show impressive similarities from one individual to another, from one culture to another widely different culture, an even from one millennium to another.
Thus, there is consensually validated evidence for the occurrence of psychic phenomena, while transpersonal experiences, although deeply moving for most of those who have undergone them, are essentially related to personal spiritual values. Nevertheless, even with these reservations, a closer scrutiny of psi phenomena suggests certain hypotheses that have a clear relationship with the mystical experience. This is especially true of clairvoyance and precognition, which seem to require more fundamental alterations in our concept of reality than does the phenomenon of telepathy.
The occurrence of telepathic communication between two living people is, for most of us, relatively easy to accept. Decades ago, when this phenomenon was investigated by card-guessing experiments, first by Rhine and later by other research workers, it was apparent (at least during the later years of the laboratory work) that every precaution had been taken against contamination of the guesses by subliminal sensory cues, that the directors of research made every effort to maintain high standards of integrity, and that the statistical evaluation of the data was impeccable. Superficially, the explanation for telepathic communication seemed easy. Electrical charges are involved in brain activity, and a thinking brain can readily be viewed as a source of electrical emissions that could be perceived by another brain under appropriate circumstances. All this seemed hardly more remarkable, to many of us, than television.
This interpretation of the data is quickly demolished by other data, equally impressive in terms of experimental precautions and statistical evaluation, which indicates that statistically significant accuracy in card-guessing can also occur when no human agent is aware of the order of the cards (clairvoyance - knowledge about objects obtained without sensory data and without involvement of any human agent) or when selection of the target card has not yet been made (precognition - knowledge of future events). These experiments imply not merely the possibility of astounding unexplored capacities of the human mind and an entirely new conception of the way in which mind interacts with space and time, but even a new vision of the basic nature of time, space and energy.
As LeShan has convincingly argued, these new conceptions converge astonishingly with contemporary physics, which requires us to accept a non-linear picture of causation and a post-Newtonian picture of space and time. They converge also with the experience of mystical enlightenment - that they are one with mankind and the cosmos, and that time and space are irrelevant.
Again, what are the implications of these concepts for the practicing psychotherapist? It is certainly not our task to try to develop mysticism or even to encourage Maslovian peak experiences in our clientele; even less it is our task to persuade them to accept the occurrence of paranormal events. However, unless we choose to regard our patients as stimulus-response automata who can be manipulated into better social adjustment, we should perhaps recognize that paranormal and transpersonal dimensions of human life be not only valid but valuable.
Parapsychology is the study of interactions between the human mind and the external world that cannot adequately be explained by what we now understand about the laws of physiological psychology and physics. These interactions include telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psycho-kinesis and psychic healing, all frequently grouped together under the rubric of psychic occurrences or paranormal phenomena.
The acceptance of parapsychology as a legitimate branch does not imply belief in the occult or the supernatural, or even spiritual values. It is a field of investigation, formally recognized as such in 1969 by the acceptance of the Parapsychological Association as an affiliated society of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Data regarding the occurrence of psi phenomena under laboratory conditions has been accumulated by respected scientists. Outstanding figures in various conventional fields such as physics, biology, astronomy, and even engineering have indicated their acceptance of the paranormal. It has been said that if the evidence for any other set of phenomena were as convincing as the evidence for the existence of psi, we would accept it as naturally as we now accept the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. Scientists are reluctant to accept the data, (although the total statistical data is impressive), partly because individual experiments are difficult to replicate, and partly because such an acceptance involves a revision of the accepted structure of classical physics - including our concepts of time and space - although these concepts appear far more complex now than in Newton's time.
My personal conviction, and one that is shared by many noted psychotherapists (Freud, Jung, Assagioli, Fodor, Ehrenwald, Eisenbud, Frank, Maslow, Pierrakos, LeShan, Dean and many others), is that psychic phenomena do take place in therapy and may even be an integral part of the therapeutic process.
Evidence for this naturally comes from specific clinical observations rather than from controlled laboratory experiments. But as psychotherapy itself is essentially a very complex and subtle set of interactions between two people, it cannot be explored and replicated by the same methods used with phenomena belonging entirely to the hard sciences. After all, Freud's formulation of the laws governing relationships between conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind were not made in a laboratory, but in his consulting room.
Fortunately, the possibility that the psychic phenomena occur in therapy can be explored on a hypothetical basis even if we prefer to reserve final judgment. As therapists, we can inquire as to under what circumstances these seemingly paranormal phenomena occur, what they can contribute to our understanding of psychotherapy, and-especially-what the responsibilities are for the therapist in their evaluation and management.
In contrast to psychic phenomena, our concept of the transpersonal dimension of human experience is not based on observation and experiment, but is based only upon direct, subjective experience. If, after examining the evidence, we can only say, "I do not believe in the existence of transpersonal experiences" , it is because these experiences are as subjective as love or the enjoyment of beauty or music. We can only say, "I personally, have never experienced any transpersonal feelings." This dimension is related to poetry rather than to science, to religion rather than to research. A definition has been offered by Vaughan, who writes: "The transpersonal level corresponds to the stage of self-transcendence, where the individual no longer experiences himself as separate and isolated, but as part of something larger...The individual in relationship to the universe comes into focus and the underlying unity of all life may be experientially realized."
The Statement of Purpose from the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology also suggests the quality of this approach:
"The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology is concerned with the publication of theoretical and applied research, original contribution, empirical papers, articles and studies in meta-needs, ultimate values, unitive consciousness, peak experiences, ecstasy, mystical experience, being values, essence, bliss, awe, wonder, self-actualization, ultimate meaning, transcendence of the self, spirit, sacralization of everyday life, oneness, cosmic awareness, cosmic play, individual and species-wide synergy, maximal interpersonal encounter transcendental phenomena; maximal sensory awareness, responsiveness and expression; and related concepts, experiences and activities. As a statement of purpose, this formulation is to be understood as a subject to optional individual or group interpretations, either wholly or in part, with regard to the acceptance of its contents as essentially naturalistic, theistic, supernaturalistic, or any other designated classification."
To further highlight the differences between these two approaches to human experience, we may consider the description of a recently developed laboratory device in which subjects, making tens of thousands of trials, attempt to influence which target will be randomly selected by a machine; results are then evaluated by sophisticated statistical procedures that enable a comparison between the accuracy of these results with the results that would have been obtained by chance alone.
"An electronic apparatus displayed to the subjects a group of four small light bulbs, each with a pushbutton adjacent. Pushing any button would cause one of the lamps to light; which one was to push the button next to the determined by a highly random physical process, the disintegrating of an atom in a bit of radioactive strontium. In a first series, the subject was asked to try to three subjects in push the button next to the lamp that would next light, thus automatically registering a 'hit'. A total of 63,000 trials by three subjects in this series yielded highly significant results; i.e., one possibility in 500 million that the score was due to random events."
Clearly, this type of research implies no commitment to belief in supernatural suspension of the natural laws of physics, but does imply the hypothesis that the interaction of human experience and human reality obeys laws we do not yet understand. Conversely, the validity of the transpersonal dimension of human life rests primarily upon the reports of men an women who have undergone mystical experiences which, as William James has pointed out, show impressive similarities from one individual to another, from one culture to another widely different culture, an even from one millennium to another.
Thus, there is consensually validated evidence for the occurrence of psychic phenomena, while transpersonal experiences, although deeply moving for most of those who have undergone them, are essentially related to personal spiritual values. Nevertheless, even with these reservations, a closer scrutiny of psi phenomena suggests certain hypotheses that have a clear relationship with the mystical experience. This is especially true of clairvoyance and precognition, which seem to require more fundamental alterations in our concept of reality than does the phenomenon of telepathy.
The occurrence of telepathic communication between two living people is, for most of us, relatively easy to accept. Decades ago, when this phenomenon was investigated by card-guessing experiments, first by Rhine and later by other research workers, it was apparent (at least during the later years of the laboratory work) that every precaution had been taken against contamination of the guesses by subliminal sensory cues, that the directors of research made every effort to maintain high standards of integrity, and that the statistical evaluation of the data was impeccable. Superficially, the explanation for telepathic communication seemed easy. Electrical charges are involved in brain activity, and a thinking brain can readily be viewed as a source of electrical emissions that could be perceived by another brain under appropriate circumstances. All this seemed hardly more remarkable, to many of us, than television.
This interpretation of the data is quickly demolished by other data, equally impressive in terms of experimental precautions and statistical evaluation, which indicates that statistically significant accuracy in card-guessing can also occur when no human agent is aware of the order of the cards (clairvoyance - knowledge about objects obtained without sensory data and without involvement of any human agent) or when selection of the target card has not yet been made (precognition - knowledge of future events). These experiments imply not merely the possibility of astounding unexplored capacities of the human mind and an entirely new conception of the way in which mind interacts with space and time, but even a new vision of the basic nature of time, space and energy.
As LeShan has convincingly argued, these new conceptions converge astonishingly with contemporary physics, which requires us to accept a non-linear picture of causation and a post-Newtonian picture of space and time. They converge also with the experience of mystical enlightenment - that they are one with mankind and the cosmos, and that time and space are irrelevant.
Again, what are the implications of these concepts for the practicing psychotherapist? It is certainly not our task to try to develop mysticism or even to encourage Maslovian peak experiences in our clientele; even less it is our task to persuade them to accept the occurrence of paranormal events. However, unless we choose to regard our patients as stimulus-response automata who can be manipulated into better social adjustment, we should perhaps recognize that paranormal and transpersonal dimensions of human life be not only valid but valuable.
The Nature of PSI.......
"For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past,
present and future is only an illusion, however persistent."-Albert
Einstein
It is unfortunate that, for many people, scientifically validated phenomena such as telepathy are still confused with vampires, werewolves, and various superstitions associated with Grade "C" movies. Even psychotherapists, who often have the opportunity to observe paranormal occurrences, may regard data on extrasensory perception (ESP) as a mixture of coincidence, poor research methods, muddy thinking, and possibly even deliberate or unconscious fraud. In contrast, this same data on extrasensory perception, psychic healing, and other paranormal phenomena is viewed as convincing by a galaxy of highly accredited physicians, psychologists, physicists, and other scientists, including such luminaries as William James, Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, and the late Gardner Murphy, one of the most highly respected American psychologists.
Data about paranormal phenomena comes from two sources: experiments and anecdotal evidence. It seems that any unbiased person willing to examine laboratory data, such as the scores obtained by literally thousands of subjects in variations of the card-calling method developed by Rhine and evaluated by the most rigorous statistical methods, can hardly fail to acknowledge the existence of extrasensory perception. This data, however, utilizes great numbers of subjects and enormous numbers of guesses, and it is never possible to be sure that a specific subject will guess a specific card correctly.
Anecdotal evidence is more difficult to evaluate because the factors of human error and the possibility of wishful thinking are difficult to rule out. Consider, for example, a patient who enters his therapist's office and excitedly describes his unexpected receipt of a family heirloom from his Uncle Sherman - just as he had dreamed of it three days before! This dream could legitimately be regarded as precognitive, by scientific standards, if it could only be established that:
1. The patient had informed several people about the dream before receiving the watch from Uncle Sherman
2. The patient had no reason to expect that Uncle Sherman would present him with the watch, a factor all but impossible to rule out.
Unfortunately, it is not the therapist's task to determine whether or not the apparently precognitive dream was actually an instance of extrasensory perception; it is his task only to explore the meaning of the gift to the patient. Even if the therapist judges that the patient is probably giving a correct report of what happened, the possible precognitive element in the dream is of clinical importance only in implying that Uncle Sherman's gift had some special significance.
Anecdotal evidence, however, is cumulatively impressive. Many of the experiences reported by people from widely different walks of life, of widely varying personality types, and from all parts of the United States and Europe show certain striking similarities. For instance, there is a multiplicity of stories (many well-supported by corroborative evidence) in which an individual reports seeing the apparition of a geographically distant friend or relative close to the time of the friend's death, sometimes within the same hour. There are also many stories of disasters averted by some kind of precognitive 'hunch' or warning. None of these anecdotes in themselves can constitute proof of psychic phenomena, but taken cumulatively, they not only bulwark the psi hypothesis, but suggest some tentative answers to questions of primary interest to the practicing clinician: Under what circumstances does extrasensory perception occur, and what is its significance to the individual who experiences it?
Both laboratory evidence and anecdotal data strongly suggest that psi phenomena are more likely to occur when some basic human need is served by their occurrence. This is hardly surprising. Classical psychoanalysts see libidinal strivings as the basic determinants of feeling and behaviour; behavioural psychologists think in terms of positive and negative conditioning and reinforcement; humanistic psychologists emphasize self-actualization as the goal towards which we all strive; and every school of thought, in one way or another, recognizes the primary importance of motivation.
Even in the relatively content-free laboratory experiments with the Zener cards, motivation emerges as important. As a group, subjects who believe in the possibility of paranormal communication score higher than chance in card-calling experiments, perhaps because they are not afraid of being receptive to intuition, but perhaps also because they wish to provide evidence for their point of view.
Motivation appears more dramatically in anecdotal instances of spontaneous telepathy or precognition in which the percipient seems to have paranormal warning of a threat to the life or well-being of himself or another person and is consequently able to avert the danger. Anecdotal evidence cannot meet rigorous scientific standards since the episodes occur spontaneously and cannot be replicated, but the reports of such incidents are numerous and striking. For example, Heywood describes two such incidents:
"The percipient...was about to set out for work and did not want to be late when she felt an urge to go down to her landlady's basement kitchen and take in some clothes from the garden lines - clothes which she knew could very well wait. The urge was so overwhelming that she gave into it, hurried downstairs, and saw her landlady sitting at the kitchen table, waving a glass and surrounded by empty beer bottles. But she also heard water splashing in the bathtub with the tap turned off, and hastened across the room to find out why. The landlady's ten month old baby was in the tub, completely submerged except for his feet which were splashing the water. The drunken mother said, "Oh, I was giving baby a bath and forgot about him..." The percipient applied first aid and the baby was saved.
A Mr. C. was in the habit of visiting friends forty miles away at week-ends only, but suddenly... he felt he had to go there at once. So without even fetching night gear from his hotel, he took the first possible train, thinking "This is the craziest thing I have ever done in my life." But he was wrong. On his arrival he found his friend's house in darkness... Then he saw someone lying on the ground. It was his friend's wife. She had had a stroke. Her husband was away, and if Mr. C. had not followed his hunch, have there would have been no one to help her."
Both of these episodes, that seem to go far beyond what could be explained by chance alone, can be accounted for by the hypothesis of telepathy. We may conjecture, for example, that in the first episode, the percipient became telepathically aware of the baby's terror, or that the mother - even in her drunken state - was unconsciously aware of her baby's peril and sent out an unconscious cry for help. We may conjecture, also, that in the second episode, the woman became aware of her need for help before she waxed unconscious, and Mr. C. picked up this need telepathically. Both these hypotheses, of course, are in utter violation of common sense; if there were not so many similar anecdotes reported by respected observers, we would have to regard both the episodes and the explanatory hypotheses as unbelievable.
Similarly, we can only conjecture as to possible motivational factors in the most frequently reported of all spontaneous paranormal phenomena: the apparition of al beloved person, seen either as a sensory vision or in a dream by a friend or relative, usually at the moment of the beloved's death or sometimes shortly before or shortly afterwards. It seems conceivable that these apparitions are made possible by the emotional rapport between the dying person and the percipient, and that on both sides, the motivation may be a reaching out by the dying person - perhaps a wish to be close to another person at the moment of death - which somehow sets up in the percipient a resonance of the same wish for closeness. This, of course, is the purest conjecture. It would be interesting to know a great deal more about the personal relationships of the two communicants in these circumstances, but such intimate material is rarely revealed to interviewers and might even involve unconscious factors on the part of the percipient.
For most of us, precognition is far more difficult than telepathy to reconcile with the safe and sane, familiar work of sensory observation and mechanistic law. Our taken for granted distinction between present and future events is shaken, since individuals seem to 'know' about events that have not yet occurred. Yet for precognition also, anecdotal evidence is well-supported by laboratory experiments and statistically tested mass observations. Evaluated on a group basis, subjects using the Zener cards are able to guess ahead, predicting well beyond chance, the order of cards in a deck that has not yet been mechanically sorted. At the Maimonides laboratory, a gifted 'sensitive' was able to predict - with an accuracy which, according to the statistical formulation of probability, could have occurred by chance only one in five hundred times - which of two coloured lights would next be lighted by an electronically controlled random number generator. Other work at Maimonides is also lends credibility to the age-old belief that dreams may be premonitory, the same 'sensitive' predicted the content of pictures that were selected, through an elaborately controlled random number system, the day after his dream had been recorded. There is also statistical evidence that the number of cancellations for train trips on which catastrophe occurs is greater than the average number of cancellations for trips which are uneventful. It is as if at least some of the travelers who decided to cancel had precognitive awareness, conscious or unconscious, of the impending danger.
Here, too, anecdotal evidence about the spontaneous occurrence of precognitive 'warnings' may show one of the strongest motivations of which human beings are capable - the wish to save the life of a beloved person, an emotion especially strong between mothers and children. A case reported by Louisa Rhine has been corroborated in a way that meets ordinary standards of credibility, although (since in this case the husband was the only witness) it cannot meet scientific standards.
A woman awoke from a nightmare in which she saw her baby, lying in its crib in the next room, crushed by a huge ornamental chandelier which , in actual fact, was suspended from the ceiling above the crib. In this nightmare, the mother saw a clock that was actually in this room; its hands pointed at 3:45. So vivid was the dream that the young mother got out of bed, went into the next room, picked up the baby, and put it back to sleep in her own bed. Her husband awakened, and teased her about her superstitions. Later that night they were awakened by a crash from the adjoining room. The chandelier above the crib had indeed fallen, and the clock read 3:45.
References:
1. Rhine, Louisa. ESP in Life and Lab New York: Macmillan, 1965
2. Mintz, Elizabeth. The Nature of Psi. The Psychic Thread. New York: Human Sciences Press, Inc., 1983
3. Schmeidler, Gertrude R. & McConnell. ESP and Personality Patterns. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958
4. Rhine, Louisa. The invisible Picture. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1960
5. Schmeidler, Gertude R. "Separating the Sheep from the Goats" Jl. Amer. Soc. for Psychical Research 39(1943): 47-49
6. Ullman, M., and Krippner, S. Dream Telepathy. New York: MacMillan, 1974.
7. Schmeidler, Gertrude R. "Evidence for Two Kinds of Telepathy" Int. Jl. Parapsychology 3 (1961):5-48
8. Ehrenwald, J. New Dimensions of Deep Analysis. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1952
9. Joy, W.B. Joy's Way. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1978
10. Garrett, Eileen, Many Voices: The Autobiography of a Medium. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1968
11. LeShan, L. The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist. New York: Ballantine, 1966
It is unfortunate that, for many people, scientifically validated phenomena such as telepathy are still confused with vampires, werewolves, and various superstitions associated with Grade "C" movies. Even psychotherapists, who often have the opportunity to observe paranormal occurrences, may regard data on extrasensory perception (ESP) as a mixture of coincidence, poor research methods, muddy thinking, and possibly even deliberate or unconscious fraud. In contrast, this same data on extrasensory perception, psychic healing, and other paranormal phenomena is viewed as convincing by a galaxy of highly accredited physicians, psychologists, physicists, and other scientists, including such luminaries as William James, Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, and the late Gardner Murphy, one of the most highly respected American psychologists.
Data about paranormal phenomena comes from two sources: experiments and anecdotal evidence. It seems that any unbiased person willing to examine laboratory data, such as the scores obtained by literally thousands of subjects in variations of the card-calling method developed by Rhine and evaluated by the most rigorous statistical methods, can hardly fail to acknowledge the existence of extrasensory perception. This data, however, utilizes great numbers of subjects and enormous numbers of guesses, and it is never possible to be sure that a specific subject will guess a specific card correctly.
Anecdotal evidence is more difficult to evaluate because the factors of human error and the possibility of wishful thinking are difficult to rule out. Consider, for example, a patient who enters his therapist's office and excitedly describes his unexpected receipt of a family heirloom from his Uncle Sherman - just as he had dreamed of it three days before! This dream could legitimately be regarded as precognitive, by scientific standards, if it could only be established that:
1. The patient had informed several people about the dream before receiving the watch from Uncle Sherman
2. The patient had no reason to expect that Uncle Sherman would present him with the watch, a factor all but impossible to rule out.
Unfortunately, it is not the therapist's task to determine whether or not the apparently precognitive dream was actually an instance of extrasensory perception; it is his task only to explore the meaning of the gift to the patient. Even if the therapist judges that the patient is probably giving a correct report of what happened, the possible precognitive element in the dream is of clinical importance only in implying that Uncle Sherman's gift had some special significance.
Anecdotal evidence, however, is cumulatively impressive. Many of the experiences reported by people from widely different walks of life, of widely varying personality types, and from all parts of the United States and Europe show certain striking similarities. For instance, there is a multiplicity of stories (many well-supported by corroborative evidence) in which an individual reports seeing the apparition of a geographically distant friend or relative close to the time of the friend's death, sometimes within the same hour. There are also many stories of disasters averted by some kind of precognitive 'hunch' or warning. None of these anecdotes in themselves can constitute proof of psychic phenomena, but taken cumulatively, they not only bulwark the psi hypothesis, but suggest some tentative answers to questions of primary interest to the practicing clinician: Under what circumstances does extrasensory perception occur, and what is its significance to the individual who experiences it?
Both laboratory evidence and anecdotal data strongly suggest that psi phenomena are more likely to occur when some basic human need is served by their occurrence. This is hardly surprising. Classical psychoanalysts see libidinal strivings as the basic determinants of feeling and behaviour; behavioural psychologists think in terms of positive and negative conditioning and reinforcement; humanistic psychologists emphasize self-actualization as the goal towards which we all strive; and every school of thought, in one way or another, recognizes the primary importance of motivation.
Even in the relatively content-free laboratory experiments with the Zener cards, motivation emerges as important. As a group, subjects who believe in the possibility of paranormal communication score higher than chance in card-calling experiments, perhaps because they are not afraid of being receptive to intuition, but perhaps also because they wish to provide evidence for their point of view.
Motivation appears more dramatically in anecdotal instances of spontaneous telepathy or precognition in which the percipient seems to have paranormal warning of a threat to the life or well-being of himself or another person and is consequently able to avert the danger. Anecdotal evidence cannot meet rigorous scientific standards since the episodes occur spontaneously and cannot be replicated, but the reports of such incidents are numerous and striking. For example, Heywood describes two such incidents:
"The percipient...was about to set out for work and did not want to be late when she felt an urge to go down to her landlady's basement kitchen and take in some clothes from the garden lines - clothes which she knew could very well wait. The urge was so overwhelming that she gave into it, hurried downstairs, and saw her landlady sitting at the kitchen table, waving a glass and surrounded by empty beer bottles. But she also heard water splashing in the bathtub with the tap turned off, and hastened across the room to find out why. The landlady's ten month old baby was in the tub, completely submerged except for his feet which were splashing the water. The drunken mother said, "Oh, I was giving baby a bath and forgot about him..." The percipient applied first aid and the baby was saved.
A Mr. C. was in the habit of visiting friends forty miles away at week-ends only, but suddenly... he felt he had to go there at once. So without even fetching night gear from his hotel, he took the first possible train, thinking "This is the craziest thing I have ever done in my life." But he was wrong. On his arrival he found his friend's house in darkness... Then he saw someone lying on the ground. It was his friend's wife. She had had a stroke. Her husband was away, and if Mr. C. had not followed his hunch, have there would have been no one to help her."
Both of these episodes, that seem to go far beyond what could be explained by chance alone, can be accounted for by the hypothesis of telepathy. We may conjecture, for example, that in the first episode, the percipient became telepathically aware of the baby's terror, or that the mother - even in her drunken state - was unconsciously aware of her baby's peril and sent out an unconscious cry for help. We may conjecture, also, that in the second episode, the woman became aware of her need for help before she waxed unconscious, and Mr. C. picked up this need telepathically. Both these hypotheses, of course, are in utter violation of common sense; if there were not so many similar anecdotes reported by respected observers, we would have to regard both the episodes and the explanatory hypotheses as unbelievable.
Similarly, we can only conjecture as to possible motivational factors in the most frequently reported of all spontaneous paranormal phenomena: the apparition of al beloved person, seen either as a sensory vision or in a dream by a friend or relative, usually at the moment of the beloved's death or sometimes shortly before or shortly afterwards. It seems conceivable that these apparitions are made possible by the emotional rapport between the dying person and the percipient, and that on both sides, the motivation may be a reaching out by the dying person - perhaps a wish to be close to another person at the moment of death - which somehow sets up in the percipient a resonance of the same wish for closeness. This, of course, is the purest conjecture. It would be interesting to know a great deal more about the personal relationships of the two communicants in these circumstances, but such intimate material is rarely revealed to interviewers and might even involve unconscious factors on the part of the percipient.
For most of us, precognition is far more difficult than telepathy to reconcile with the safe and sane, familiar work of sensory observation and mechanistic law. Our taken for granted distinction between present and future events is shaken, since individuals seem to 'know' about events that have not yet occurred. Yet for precognition also, anecdotal evidence is well-supported by laboratory experiments and statistically tested mass observations. Evaluated on a group basis, subjects using the Zener cards are able to guess ahead, predicting well beyond chance, the order of cards in a deck that has not yet been mechanically sorted. At the Maimonides laboratory, a gifted 'sensitive' was able to predict - with an accuracy which, according to the statistical formulation of probability, could have occurred by chance only one in five hundred times - which of two coloured lights would next be lighted by an electronically controlled random number generator. Other work at Maimonides is also lends credibility to the age-old belief that dreams may be premonitory, the same 'sensitive' predicted the content of pictures that were selected, through an elaborately controlled random number system, the day after his dream had been recorded. There is also statistical evidence that the number of cancellations for train trips on which catastrophe occurs is greater than the average number of cancellations for trips which are uneventful. It is as if at least some of the travelers who decided to cancel had precognitive awareness, conscious or unconscious, of the impending danger.
Here, too, anecdotal evidence about the spontaneous occurrence of precognitive 'warnings' may show one of the strongest motivations of which human beings are capable - the wish to save the life of a beloved person, an emotion especially strong between mothers and children. A case reported by Louisa Rhine has been corroborated in a way that meets ordinary standards of credibility, although (since in this case the husband was the only witness) it cannot meet scientific standards.
A woman awoke from a nightmare in which she saw her baby, lying in its crib in the next room, crushed by a huge ornamental chandelier which , in actual fact, was suspended from the ceiling above the crib. In this nightmare, the mother saw a clock that was actually in this room; its hands pointed at 3:45. So vivid was the dream that the young mother got out of bed, went into the next room, picked up the baby, and put it back to sleep in her own bed. Her husband awakened, and teased her about her superstitions. Later that night they were awakened by a crash from the adjoining room. The chandelier above the crib had indeed fallen, and the clock read 3:45.
References:
1. Rhine, Louisa. ESP in Life and Lab New York: Macmillan, 1965
2. Mintz, Elizabeth. The Nature of Psi. The Psychic Thread. New York: Human Sciences Press, Inc., 1983
3. Schmeidler, Gertrude R. & McConnell. ESP and Personality Patterns. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958
4. Rhine, Louisa. The invisible Picture. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1960
5. Schmeidler, Gertude R. "Separating the Sheep from the Goats" Jl. Amer. Soc. for Psychical Research 39(1943): 47-49
6. Ullman, M., and Krippner, S. Dream Telepathy. New York: MacMillan, 1974.
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