26 Oct The Exotic Agenda
I really appreciated Daniels’s musings on the shadow, especially as it relates to our field. The issue of the “exotic agenda” really spoke to me, and I pondered quite a bit over his list of the mundane events of life that have most influenced him: the arts, conversation, sexual love, hill walking, and the like. It seems to me going forward that we as transpersonalists will want to ground our research in what is really useful for people’s daily lives, in addition to our desire to boldly go where no one has gone before.
The articles that caught most of my attention in this week were the ones on mental health and the paranormal. A plethora of researchers have attempted to assign mental health diagnoses to people who either believe in or experience paranormal phenomena. Some studies report significant mental illness in at least 50% of cases, while others show no correlation at all (Dein, 2012). There does appear to be some correlation with childhood trauma, and that paranormal experiences often happen after a difficult life event. Certain personality factors that do seem relevant are tendencies to absorption and fantasy-proneness. On the other hand (Kennedy, 2005), skeptics rank high in personal characteristics of materialism, rational thought, and pragmatism. All in all, Swami (2010) concludes that the evidence on personality traits is mixed.
If a correlation between mental instability and experiences of the paranormal is ever established, we might want to consider this a chicken- egg-type dilemma. People who think outside the mainstream are more likely to be open to extraordinary experiences or happenings, while conventional people are more likely to disbelieve or discount any evidence they receive. This is as true for the lay population as it is for the scientists conducting the research. Thus continues one of the major challenges of our field.
References
Daniels, M. (2021). Shadow, self, spirit: Essays in transpersonal psychology. Imprint Academic.
Dein, S. (2012). Mental health and the paranormal. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 31(1), 61-74.
Kennedy, J. E. (2005). Personality and motivations to believe, misbelieve, and disbelieve in paranormal phenomena. The Journal of Parapsychology, 69(2), 263–292.
Swami, V., Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Shafi, M. (2010). Psychology in outerspace: Personality, individual difference, and demographic predictors of beliefs about extraterrestrial life. European Psychologist, 15(3), 220–228.
© 2022 Catherine Auman
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