From 1879 until his retirement from the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts in 1903, Edward Cowles a... more From 1879 until his retirement from the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts in 1903, Edward Cowles almost singlehandedly guided the professional transformation of the community of American alienists, or asylum physicians, from a marginal sect to a respected biomedical specialty in U.S. general medicine. Influenced by the rise of scientific medicine and its laboratory revolution, Cowles used his long tenure as superintendent of McLean and (in 1895-1896) his prominence as president of the American Medico-Psychological Association (or AMPA, the prior name of the American Psychiatric Association) to introduce changes that would bear fruit in the 20th century. His goal was to emulate the scientific values and laboratory practices of European, particularly German, psychiatry. Indeed, he was the first in the United States to insist on using the term "psychiatry" for what was then more commonly referred to as "alienism" or "asylum medicine" (1, 2). But in the 1890s "psychiatry" sounded too German for most American alienists, and it was not until after 1917 that it caught on in the United States (3). Cowles should be remembered for many other firsts. In 1888 he established the first laboratory in the country devoted to basic and clinical psychiatric research. Biological psychiatry in America truly began at McLean with Cowles (4). When McLean moved to a newly built facility in 1895, its new laboratory attracted worldwide attention, inviting comparisons to Kraepelin's dual-purpose clinical and research clinic in Heidelberg (5-7). Biochemical, neuropathological, and experimental (physiological) psychology research was conducted with the purpose of understanding the prodromal or prepsychotic vulnerability stage of illness (nervous exhaustion, the most severe form of neurasthenia), which Cowles believed, if reversed or halted, could prevent its evolution into The medical staff of the McLean Asylum, circa 1891; Cowles is at the far right. Photo courtesy of McLean Hospital Archives, Belmont, Mass.
As our medical schools and graduate programs fill with students who were born after 1989, we meet... more As our medical schools and graduate programs fill with students who were born after 1989, we meet young mental health professionals-in-training who have no knowledge or living memory of the Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) moral panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. To those of us who are old enough to have been there, that era already seems like a curious relic of the past, bracketed in our memory palaces behind a door we are loathe to open again. Source: Some mass cultural phenomena are so emotionally-charged, so febrile, and in retrospect so causally incomprehensible, that we feel compelled to move on silently and feign forgetfulness. Historian Alfred Crosby noted these "peculiarities of human memory" in the 1976 first edition of his book, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. 1 "Why have (Americans) so thoroughly forgotten it since?" he asked. 1(p319) Until Crosby's book appeared, even historians had avoided the painful subject for 50 years. Without resorting to psychiatric or psychoanalytic explanations, Crosby speculated that any mass event that had "enormous influence" but that "utterly evades logical analysis" might justify our ignorance of it "because the alternative would be to sink into the quicksand of speculation without any limits." 1(p322)
Biomarkers are in demand for disease diagnosis, treatment response monitoring, and development of... more Biomarkers are in demand for disease diagnosis, treatment response monitoring, and development of novel therapeutics. Biomarker discovery in neuroscience is challenging due to absence of robust molecular correlates and the interpatient heterogeneity that characterizes neuropsychiatric disorders. Because of the complexity of these disorders, a panel of biomarkers derived from different platforms will be required to precisely reflect disease-related alterations. Animal models of psychiatric phenotypes as well as-omics and imaging methodologies are important tools for biomarker discovery. However, the limitations of current research concerning sample handling and collection, candidate biomarker validation, and a lack of interdisciplinary approaches need to be addressed. Ultimately, the coordinated effort of relevant stakeholders including researchers, physicians, INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF 1
The fanfare surrounding the publication of DSM-5 presents the manual as psychiatry's bible, a... more The fanfare surrounding the publication of DSM-5 presents the manual as psychiatry's bible, a diagnostic decree that clinicians rely on and abide by. Such reception highlights the deficiency of public understanding of mental disorders and their treatment. Last week we asked Liah Greenfeld what she'd most want to convey to the public to help correct that misunderstanding, and below, Richard Noll, author of American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox, takes on the same question. -----"The public here believe in drugs and consider prescription as the aim and end of medical skill," complained Swiss-émigré neurologist Adolf Meyer in August 1894, "whereas in Germany and in many other places, the people regard the drugs as quite as great an affliction as the disease itself." The same is true today. Indeed, since the publication of DSM-III in 1980, even more so.
presented a paper in which he outlined his reasons for dropping the term 'dementia praecox' in fa... more presented a paper in which he outlined his reasons for dropping the term 'dementia praecox' in favour of a competing diagnostic concept and term, 'schizophrenia'. Southard's criticisms reflected the opinion of many US psychiatrists at that time, leading to the replacement of Emil Kraepelin's dementia praecox by Eugen Bleuler's schizophrenia in US psychiatry by the mid-1920s. The text of Southard's lecture is published here for the first time.
Biomarkers are in demand for disease diagnosis, treatment response monitoring, and development of... more Biomarkers are in demand for disease diagnosis, treatment response monitoring, and development of novel therapeutics. Biomarker discovery in neuroscience is challenging due to absence of robust molecular correlates and the interpatient heterogeneity that characterizes neuropsychiatric disorders. Because of the complexity of these disorders, a panel of biomarkers derived from different platforms will be required to precisely reflect disease-related alterations. Animal models of psychiatric phenotypes as well as -omics and imaging methodologies are important tools for biomarker discovery. However, the limitations of current research concerning sample handling and collection, candidate biomarker validation, and a lack of interdisciplinary approaches need to be addressed. Ultimately, the coordinated effort of relevant stakeholders including researchers, physicians,
That's it, a book to wait for in this month. Even you have wanted for long time for releasing thi... more That's it, a book to wait for in this month. Even you have wanted for long time for releasing this book encyclopedia of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders; you may not be able to get in some stress. Should you go around and seek fro the book until you really get it? Are you sure? Are you that free? This condition will force you to always end up to get a book. But now, we are coming to give you excellent solution. The solution to get this book is that we don't over you the free book. But, we offer you the free information about encyclopedia of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Why should be this book to read and where is the place to get it, even the soft file forms are common questions to utter. In this website, we don't only provide this book. We have still lots of books to read. Yeah, we are on-line library that is always full of recommended books. Own this book as soon as possible after finishing read this website page. By owning this book, you can have time to spare to read it of course. Even you will not be able to finish it in short time, this is your chance to change your life to be better. So, why don't you spare your time even juts few in a day? You can read it when you have spare time in your office, when being in a bus, when being at home before sleeping, and more others. And why we recommend it to read in that free time? We know why we recommend it because it is in soft file forms. So, you can save it in your gadget, too. And you always bring the gadget wherever you are, don't you? So that way, you are available to read this book everywhere you can. Now, let tae the encyclopedia of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders as you're reading material and get easiest way to read.
Sa man wen hua yan jiu, di 2ji [Shamanistic Culture Studies 2], edited by Guo Shuyun. Changchun: Ji lin ta xue chu ban she, 2009, 168-181. ISBN: 9787560136578, 2009
The first complete Polish translation of THE JUNG CULT: ORIGINS OF A CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT (Prince... more The first complete Polish translation of THE JUNG CULT: ORIGINS OF A CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT (Princeton University Press, 1994).
Translator: Jerzy Korpanty Kraków, Poland: Vis-à-vis Etiuda LTD, 2021
This is a Japanese translation of a JSPS Fellowship address delivered in June 2018 at the Univers... more This is a Japanese translation of a JSPS Fellowship address delivered in June 2018 at the University of Shiga Prefecture in Hikone, Japan.
It was published in Kikan Minzokugaku (Ethnographic Quarterly), a publication of the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in Osaka, Japan in the Winter 2019 (No. 167) issue, pp. 86-95.
From 1879 until his retirement from the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts in 1903, Edward Cowles a... more From 1879 until his retirement from the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts in 1903, Edward Cowles almost singlehandedly guided the professional transformation of the community of American alienists, or asylum physicians, from a marginal sect to a respected biomedical specialty in U.S. general medicine. Influenced by the rise of scientific medicine and its laboratory revolution, Cowles used his long tenure as superintendent of McLean and (in 1895-1896) his prominence as president of the American Medico-Psychological Association (or AMPA, the prior name of the American Psychiatric Association) to introduce changes that would bear fruit in the 20th century. His goal was to emulate the scientific values and laboratory practices of European, particularly German, psychiatry. Indeed, he was the first in the United States to insist on using the term "psychiatry" for what was then more commonly referred to as "alienism" or "asylum medicine" (1, 2). But in the 1890s "psychiatry" sounded too German for most American alienists, and it was not until after 1917 that it caught on in the United States (3). Cowles should be remembered for many other firsts. In 1888 he established the first laboratory in the country devoted to basic and clinical psychiatric research. Biological psychiatry in America truly began at McLean with Cowles (4). When McLean moved to a newly built facility in 1895, its new laboratory attracted worldwide attention, inviting comparisons to Kraepelin's dual-purpose clinical and research clinic in Heidelberg (5-7). Biochemical, neuropathological, and experimental (physiological) psychology research was conducted with the purpose of understanding the prodromal or prepsychotic vulnerability stage of illness (nervous exhaustion, the most severe form of neurasthenia), which Cowles believed, if reversed or halted, could prevent its evolution into The medical staff of the McLean Asylum, circa 1891; Cowles is at the far right. Photo courtesy of McLean Hospital Archives, Belmont, Mass.
As our medical schools and graduate programs fill with students who were born after 1989, we meet... more As our medical schools and graduate programs fill with students who were born after 1989, we meet young mental health professionals-in-training who have no knowledge or living memory of the Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) moral panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. To those of us who are old enough to have been there, that era already seems like a curious relic of the past, bracketed in our memory palaces behind a door we are loathe to open again. Source: Some mass cultural phenomena are so emotionally-charged, so febrile, and in retrospect so causally incomprehensible, that we feel compelled to move on silently and feign forgetfulness. Historian Alfred Crosby noted these "peculiarities of human memory" in the 1976 first edition of his book, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. 1 "Why have (Americans) so thoroughly forgotten it since?" he asked. 1(p319) Until Crosby's book appeared, even historians had avoided the painful subject for 50 years. Without resorting to psychiatric or psychoanalytic explanations, Crosby speculated that any mass event that had "enormous influence" but that "utterly evades logical analysis" might justify our ignorance of it "because the alternative would be to sink into the quicksand of speculation without any limits." 1(p322)
Biomarkers are in demand for disease diagnosis, treatment response monitoring, and development of... more Biomarkers are in demand for disease diagnosis, treatment response monitoring, and development of novel therapeutics. Biomarker discovery in neuroscience is challenging due to absence of robust molecular correlates and the interpatient heterogeneity that characterizes neuropsychiatric disorders. Because of the complexity of these disorders, a panel of biomarkers derived from different platforms will be required to precisely reflect disease-related alterations. Animal models of psychiatric phenotypes as well as-omics and imaging methodologies are important tools for biomarker discovery. However, the limitations of current research concerning sample handling and collection, candidate biomarker validation, and a lack of interdisciplinary approaches need to be addressed. Ultimately, the coordinated effort of relevant stakeholders including researchers, physicians, INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF 1
The fanfare surrounding the publication of DSM-5 presents the manual as psychiatry's bible, a... more The fanfare surrounding the publication of DSM-5 presents the manual as psychiatry's bible, a diagnostic decree that clinicians rely on and abide by. Such reception highlights the deficiency of public understanding of mental disorders and their treatment. Last week we asked Liah Greenfeld what she'd most want to convey to the public to help correct that misunderstanding, and below, Richard Noll, author of American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox, takes on the same question. -----"The public here believe in drugs and consider prescription as the aim and end of medical skill," complained Swiss-émigré neurologist Adolf Meyer in August 1894, "whereas in Germany and in many other places, the people regard the drugs as quite as great an affliction as the disease itself." The same is true today. Indeed, since the publication of DSM-III in 1980, even more so.
presented a paper in which he outlined his reasons for dropping the term 'dementia praecox' in fa... more presented a paper in which he outlined his reasons for dropping the term 'dementia praecox' in favour of a competing diagnostic concept and term, 'schizophrenia'. Southard's criticisms reflected the opinion of many US psychiatrists at that time, leading to the replacement of Emil Kraepelin's dementia praecox by Eugen Bleuler's schizophrenia in US psychiatry by the mid-1920s. The text of Southard's lecture is published here for the first time.
Biomarkers are in demand for disease diagnosis, treatment response monitoring, and development of... more Biomarkers are in demand for disease diagnosis, treatment response monitoring, and development of novel therapeutics. Biomarker discovery in neuroscience is challenging due to absence of robust molecular correlates and the interpatient heterogeneity that characterizes neuropsychiatric disorders. Because of the complexity of these disorders, a panel of biomarkers derived from different platforms will be required to precisely reflect disease-related alterations. Animal models of psychiatric phenotypes as well as -omics and imaging methodologies are important tools for biomarker discovery. However, the limitations of current research concerning sample handling and collection, candidate biomarker validation, and a lack of interdisciplinary approaches need to be addressed. Ultimately, the coordinated effort of relevant stakeholders including researchers, physicians,
That's it, a book to wait for in this month. Even you have wanted for long time for releasing thi... more That's it, a book to wait for in this month. Even you have wanted for long time for releasing this book encyclopedia of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders; you may not be able to get in some stress. Should you go around and seek fro the book until you really get it? Are you sure? Are you that free? This condition will force you to always end up to get a book. But now, we are coming to give you excellent solution. The solution to get this book is that we don't over you the free book. But, we offer you the free information about encyclopedia of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Why should be this book to read and where is the place to get it, even the soft file forms are common questions to utter. In this website, we don't only provide this book. We have still lots of books to read. Yeah, we are on-line library that is always full of recommended books. Own this book as soon as possible after finishing read this website page. By owning this book, you can have time to spare to read it of course. Even you will not be able to finish it in short time, this is your chance to change your life to be better. So, why don't you spare your time even juts few in a day? You can read it when you have spare time in your office, when being in a bus, when being at home before sleeping, and more others. And why we recommend it to read in that free time? We know why we recommend it because it is in soft file forms. So, you can save it in your gadget, too. And you always bring the gadget wherever you are, don't you? So that way, you are available to read this book everywhere you can. Now, let tae the encyclopedia of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders as you're reading material and get easiest way to read.
Sa man wen hua yan jiu, di 2ji [Shamanistic Culture Studies 2], edited by Guo Shuyun. Changchun: Ji lin ta xue chu ban she, 2009, 168-181. ISBN: 9787560136578, 2009
The first complete Polish translation of THE JUNG CULT: ORIGINS OF A CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT (Prince... more The first complete Polish translation of THE JUNG CULT: ORIGINS OF A CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT (Princeton University Press, 1994).
Translator: Jerzy Korpanty Kraków, Poland: Vis-à-vis Etiuda LTD, 2021
This is a Japanese translation of a JSPS Fellowship address delivered in June 2018 at the Univers... more This is a Japanese translation of a JSPS Fellowship address delivered in June 2018 at the University of Shiga Prefecture in Hikone, Japan.
It was published in Kikan Minzokugaku (Ethnographic Quarterly), a publication of the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in Osaka, Japan in the Winter 2019 (No. 167) issue, pp. 86-95.
[For a pdf of the complete book, see Researchgate.net] Each book is a reflection of its historica... more [For a pdf of the complete book, see Researchgate.net] Each book is a reflection of its historical context. This book was an attempt to begin a discourse of "history from below" in Jung studies. It contains the first extensive archival material from the analysis diaries and letters of patients of C.G. Jung or his close associates during the critical post-Freud 1913 to 1930 period. Previously unpublished material from the diary of Constance Long (who inscribes letters from Jung in her diary, including a rather Gnostic one from Jung to her friend Joan Corrie), Fanny Bowditch Katz, Edith Rockfeller McCormick (daughter of John D. Rockefeller) and the McCormick family of Chicago, and Harvard psychologist Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan.
The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony, edited by V.J. Ballester-Olmos and Richard W. Heiden, 2023
The author employs an autobiographical frame to address the concurrent rise of the satanic ritual... more The author employs an autobiographical frame to address the concurrent rise of the satanic ritual abuse moral panic and claims of recovered memories of UFO abductions in the 1980s and 1990s. He highlights the influence of privileging subjective data over objective data as a source of scientific error that can lead to clinical, cultural and social movements that can potentially have adverse effects.
This unused preface to THE ARYAN CHRIST (1997) was written in early 1997 after I had completed th... more This unused preface to THE ARYAN CHRIST (1997) was written in early 1997 after I had completed the book manuscript. Wisely, my editor at Random House, Ann Godoff, decided it would not fit with the rest of the book.
Invited presentation, Institute of Philosophy, Mongolia Academy of Sciences. Invitation extended ... more Invited presentation, Institute of Philosophy, Mongolia Academy of Sciences. Invitation extended by CHULUUNBAATAR Gelegpil, Mongolia's Minister of Education and Culture.
Powerpoint presentation delivered at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA... more Powerpoint presentation delivered at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 29 May 2015
Invited presentation to the faculty and students of the Institute of Philosophy, Mongolian Academ... more Invited presentation to the faculty and students of the Institute of Philosophy, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ulaanbaatar, 16 June 2017. Invitation extended by CHULUUNBAATAR Gelegpil, Mongolia's Minister of Education and Culture.
Conference paper for "Psychopathological Fringes: Historical and Social Science Perspectives on C... more Conference paper for "Psychopathological Fringes: Historical and Social Science Perspectives on Category work in Psychiatry," Institute fur Geschichte der Medizin un Ethik in der Medizin, Charite, Universitatsmedizin Berlin, 13 February 2015.
ABSTRACT
The current fascination with “category work” and the negotiation, objectification and policing of the boundaries of diagnostic categories may be a reflection of presentist biases of historians of psychiatry that occlude subtle nuances of the medical cognition and practices of past actors. Historians fawn over fringes: liminal phase changes such as the moving targets of thresholds, of dimensions that coagulate into categories and then dissolve again into novel continua, of relentless streams of hyper-reflexive nomenclature that bubble up and bury the bodies of patients.
The oscillating dialectic of figure/ground reversals provoked when contemplating the relationship of category to fringe is a mesmerizing one. Perhaps too mesmerizing. One difficulty for historians attempting to understand this relationship may stem from the implicit assumption that physicians of the past engaged in an explicit cognitive exercise at the point of diagnosis. Instead the practice may have been more akin to recognizing a melody or a scent. Another difficulty for historians may be the presentist assumption that physicians of the past shared our concern with “error.” Evidence suggests in fact that a century ago, at least in the United States, most did not. This was especially true for those devoted to the treatment of nervous and mental diseases. If diagnostic error is not a concern, neither are sharply defined categories, or policed boundaries, or prodromes or fringes. It is left to historians to chase these phantoms.
Of all the modern medical specialties, psychiatry had (and continues to have) the greatest difficulty in not only accepting, but negotiating the conceptual boundaries of objective “error” and “medical certainty.” Using chronic psychosis and its prodromes as a thread, this paper explores the efforts of early 20th century US alienists and neurologists to adopt a moral economy of science based on the negation of subjectivity – and why this failed.
When Kraepelin's dementia praecox (1896) and Bleuler's schizophrenia (1908) were introduced as di... more When Kraepelin's dementia praecox (1896) and Bleuler's schizophrenia (1908) were introduced as discrete natural disease entities, accurate differential diagnosis became a necessity for both clinical and research purposes. Objectivity, the containment of subjectivity, became a core value of the new scientific self of the psychiatrist. Focusing primarily on psychiatrists in the US in the early 20 th century, I will trace the evolution from a " scientific self of subjectivity " as a basis for diagnosing schizophrenia that relied on psychiatrists' " feelings " or bodily sensations provoked by a patient, to the development of " objective " symptom rating scales in the late 1920s and, in 1933, their linkage with factor analysis as a statistical tool for identifying invisible (latent) dimensions of structure behind the chaos of psychosis. Despite their hypothetical nature, researchers have tended to reify factors and occasionally invoke them as causative agents. I will argue that rating scales, which do not " count " anything at all and reside on the threshold of objectivity, and factor analysis, an exploratory but not a confirmatory statistical method, have been central to the dissolution of the schizophrenia concept. Reified factors of psychosis have replaced schizophrenia as objects in psychiatry. But a never-ending cycle of " deconstructing psychosis " into further hypothetical constructs that " exist " in a realm of Platonic pretensions outside the direct experience of the physician challenges claims of enhanced objectivity in diagnosis.
What is the Paranormal?
“The paranormal” is a comparative category that serves as a dumping groun... more What is the Paranormal? “The paranormal” is a comparative category that serves as a dumping ground for a wide variety of beliefs, experiences and claims that fall outside the normative boundaries of our culture’s notions of scientific reasoning and conventional religious doctrines. By default, both scientific and religious elites have left it to experimental psychology and psychiatry to try to make sense of these domains of human experience, and more than a century of such research has much to tell us about how to critically evaluate this material. However, psychology is not enough to grasp all of the dimensions of the paranormal. Therefore, as we develop our “tool kit” of critical thinking skills we will need to also approach this material from perspectives in philosophy, sociology, comparative religions, anthropology, history and investigative journalism. This course, then, will be multidisciplinary in its approach, with insights from psychological research providing the Ariadne’s thread to help us find our way through and out of this labyrinth. After all, we don’t really want to meet the Minotaur (or Mothman), now do we?
Uploads
Videos by Richard Noll
Papers by Richard Noll
Translator: Jerzy Korpanty
Kraków, Poland: Vis-à-vis Etiuda LTD, 2021
It was published in Kikan Minzokugaku (Ethnographic Quarterly), a publication of the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in Osaka, Japan in the Winter 2019 (No. 167) issue, pp. 86-95.
Translator: Jerzy Korpanty
Kraków, Poland: Vis-à-vis Etiuda LTD, 2021
It was published in Kikan Minzokugaku (Ethnographic Quarterly), a publication of the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU) in Osaka, Japan in the Winter 2019 (No. 167) issue, pp. 86-95.
ABSTRACT
The current fascination with “category work” and the negotiation, objectification and policing of the boundaries of diagnostic categories may be a reflection of presentist biases of historians of psychiatry that occlude subtle nuances of the medical cognition and practices of past actors. Historians fawn over fringes: liminal phase changes such as the moving targets of thresholds, of dimensions that coagulate into categories and then dissolve again into novel continua, of relentless streams of hyper-reflexive nomenclature that bubble up and bury the bodies of patients.
The oscillating dialectic of figure/ground reversals provoked when contemplating the relationship of category to fringe is a mesmerizing one. Perhaps too mesmerizing. One difficulty for historians attempting to understand this relationship may stem from the implicit assumption that physicians of the past engaged in an explicit cognitive exercise at the point of diagnosis. Instead the practice may have been more akin to recognizing a melody or a scent. Another difficulty for historians may be the presentist assumption that physicians of the past shared our concern with “error.” Evidence suggests in fact that a century ago, at least in the United States, most did not. This was especially true for those devoted to the treatment of nervous and mental diseases. If diagnostic error is not a concern, neither are sharply defined categories, or policed boundaries, or prodromes or fringes. It is left to historians to chase these phantoms.
Of all the modern medical specialties, psychiatry had (and continues to have) the greatest difficulty in not only accepting, but negotiating the conceptual boundaries of objective “error” and “medical certainty.” Using chronic psychosis and its prodromes as a thread, this paper explores the efforts of early 20th century US alienists and neurologists to adopt a moral economy of science based on the negation of subjectivity – and why this failed.
“The paranormal” is a comparative category that serves as a dumping ground for a wide variety of beliefs, experiences and claims that fall outside the normative boundaries of our culture’s notions of scientific reasoning and conventional religious doctrines. By default, both scientific and religious elites have left it to experimental psychology and psychiatry to try to make sense of these domains of human experience, and more than a century of such research has much to tell us about how to critically evaluate this material. However, psychology is not enough to grasp all of the dimensions of the paranormal. Therefore, as we develop our “tool kit” of critical thinking skills we will need to also approach this material from perspectives in philosophy, sociology, comparative religions, anthropology, history and investigative journalism. This course, then, will be multidisciplinary in its approach, with insights from psychological research providing the Ariadne’s thread to help us find our way through and out of this labyrinth. After all, we don’t really want to meet the Minotaur (or Mothman), now do we?