''The Psychology of the Occult'' is a 1952 skeptical book on the

paranormal Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as being beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Not ...

by psychologist D. H. Rawcliffe. It was later published as ''Illusions and Delusions of the Supernatural and the Occult'' (1959) and ''Occult and Supernatural Phenomena'' (1988) by

Dover Publications Dover Publications, also known as Dover Books, is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward and Blanche Cirker. It primarily reissues books that are out of print from their original publishers. These are often, but not always, book ...

. Biologist

Julian Huxley Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and Internationalism (politics), internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentiet ...

wrote a foreword to the book.

Content

The book takes influence from the works of Frank Podmore,

Joseph Jastrow Joseph Jastrow (January 30, 1863 – January 8, 1944) was a Polish-born American psychologist renowned for his contributions to experimental psychology, design of experiments, and psychophysics. He also worked on the phenomena of optical illu ...

and Ivor Lloyd Tuckett dealing with the "fallacies underlying psychical research". Rawcliffe critically examines claims of the

occult The occult () is a category of esoteric or supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of organized religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving a 'hidden' or 'secret' agency, such as magic and mysti ...

parapsychology Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, telepathy, teleportation, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (also called telekinesis), and psychometry (paranormal), psychometry) and other paranormal cla ...

and

spiritualism Spiritualism may refer to: * Spiritual church movement, a group of Spiritualist churches and denominations historically based in the African-American community * Spiritualism (beliefs), a metaphysical belief that the world is made up of at leas ...

concluding that they are best explained by psychological factors such as

hallucination A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the compelling sense of reality. They are distinguishable from several related phenomena, such as dreaming ( REM sleep), which does not involve wakefulness; pse ...

hysteria Hysteria is a term used to mean ungovernable emotional excess and can refer to a temporary state of mind or emotion. In the nineteenth century, female hysteria was considered a diagnosable physical illness in women. It is assumed that the bas ...

neurosis Neurosis (: neuroses) is a term mainly used today by followers of Freudian thinking to describe mental disorders caused by past anxiety, often that has been repressed. In recent history, the term has been used to refer to anxiety-related con ...

and

suggestion Suggestion is the psychological process by which a person guides their own or another person's desired thoughts, feelings, and behaviors by presenting stimuli that may elicit them as reflexes instead of relying on conscious effort. Nineteenth-cent ...

as well as "delusion, fraud, prestidigitation, and limitless credulity." Rawcliffe found possible naturalistic explanations for all parapsychological experiments he investigated, noting that there is no scientific evidence for any paranormal power. He suggested that many of the results from ESP experiments can be explained by what he termed ''endophasic enneurosis'' (unconscious

whispering Whispering is an unvoiced mode of phonation in which the vocal cords are abducted so that they do not vibrate; air passes between the arytenoid cartilages to create audible turbulence during speech. Supralaryngeal articulation remains the ...

). The book offers rational explanations for diverse phenomena such as

automatic writing Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged sp ...

dowsing Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, Petroleum, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia),As translated from one preface of the Kassel experiments, "roughly 10,000 active do ...

, fire-walking, lycanthropy and

stigmata Stigmata (, plural of , 'mark, spot, brand'), in Roman Catholicism, Catholicism, are bodily wounds, scars and pain which appear in locations corresponding to the Crucifixion of Jesus, crucifixion Five Holy Wounds, wounds of Jesus in Christian ...

Reception

Daniel Loxton has described the book as an important skeptical work written many years before the founding of CSICOP. He noted that "Much as

Michael Shermer Michael Brant Shermer (born September 8, 1954) is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of '' Skeptic'' magazine, a publication focused on investigating pseudoscientif ...

has done in recent decades, Rawcliffe attempted not merely to debunk these claims, but to explain the underlying psychology of why people believe weird things." Loxton, Daniel. (2013)
"Why Is There a Skeptical Movement?"
Retrieved 4 June 2017.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Psychology of the Occult, The 1952 non-fiction books Anomalistic psychology Books about the paranormal Critics of parapsychology Occult books Popular psychology books Scientific skepticism mass media

Content

Reception

See also

References