Psychopathology: Mishlove excerpt #8

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove writes in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” that many types and degrees of possession have yet to be cataloged. This is particularly true regarding possession within mental mediumship and channeling. However, there is also a psychopathological dimension associated with possession, obsession, and spirit attachment.

This section includes testimony from multiple professional psychotherapists. Sometimes it includes the identification of discarnate entities. This material highlights the price to be paid – in terms of human well-being – for ignoring the data supporting postmortem survival.

Wilson Van Dusen was Chief Psychologist at Mendocino State Mental Hospital in California. Van Dusen felt negative discarnate entities often hounded the psychotic patients with whom he worked. He maintained that Emanuel Swedenborg’s visionary descriptions of heaven and hell were actually an accurate depiction of the human unconscious.

Mental health professionals influenced by the spiritist tradition in Brazil often incorporate a similar diagnostic approach.

Clinical psychologist Edith Fiore describes how some discarnate spirits become earthbound because of their addictions to alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and even chocolate. Many discarnates are confused and don’t realize they are no longer in their own body.

The situation Fiore describes may be more common than we realize. Adam Crabtree, a Freudian psychotherapy trainer based in Toronto, acknowledges, that he has also encountered cases of discarnate possession in his therapy practice.

Psychotherapists rarely function as psychical researchers, trying to verify the identities of the possessing entities. They aim to help their patients, not to cultivate evidence about postmortem survival. Because of these diverging interests, the psychical research literature pays little attention to the therapeutic interest in possession.

Nevertheless, there are instances where therapists working with depossession have been able to identify the discarnate possessing entities that manifest under hypnosis. In his 1934 book, The Gateway of Understanding, Carl Wickland, a physician who practiced depossession therapy for several decades, supplies specific, verified details naming four such discarnate persons unknown to him at the time of the treatment

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.