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     ACKNOWLEDGING AND DEALING WITH THE FEAR OF PSI (NOTE 1)

                     CHARLES T. TART (Note 2)

[This paper was originally published under the above title in the
Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1984,
volume 78, pp. 133.143.]


note--------
Note 1 - This paper is partially based on material presented at a
symposium on the Batcheldor approach held at the combined Twenty-
Fifth Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association and
the Centenary Conference of the Society for Psychical Research at
the University of Cambridge, August 16-21, 1982.
end note----

note--------
Note 2 - My understanding of resistance to psi has been aided by
comments from John Beloff, William Braud, Douglas Dean, Jan
Ehrenwald. Jule Eisenbud, C. A. Meier, Carroll Nash, Carl
Sargent, Gertrude Schmeidler, Berthold Schwarz, Ian Stevenson.
and Rhea White.
end note----


----------------
ABSTRACT:  Unacknowledged fears of psi can create unconsciously
motivated behaviors that inhibit and/or distort the operation of
psi in the laboratory.  Observations suggest that unacknowledged
fear of psi is widespread among parapsychologists, as well as
others.  The ingenious approaches of K. Batcheldor and J. Isaacs
for producing psi may be effective because they bypass fears of
psi, but have long-term limitations through not dealing directly
with it.  A social masking theory of psi inhibition and a primal
conflict theory of psi inhibition are discussed, and 10
strategies for dealing with this fear are presented.  Denial,
avoidance of triggering circumstances,
rationalization/distraction, and dissociation/repression
strategies all have inherent psychopathological aspects.
Desensitization and bypass defenses have healthy as well as
psychopathological aspects.  Cognitive/affective acknowledgement,
learning adaptive coping skills, accepting responsibility, and
personal growth strategies are the most desirable ways of
handling the problem of the fear of psi.
----------------


INTRODUCTION

        For some years, I and many colleagues (see e.g.,
Batcheldor, 1966; Eisenbud, 1963, 1970, 1972, 1979, 1982; LeShan,
1966; Pearce, 1973, 1974; Rogo, 1977) have been concerned with
the issue of conscious fears we may have of psi phenomena and
with the effects which these fears, particularly when
unacknowledged, have on research.  Thus I was quite intrigued by
the emphasis on fear of psi and consequent resistance to psi in
the two preceding papers in this Journal by Kenneth Batcheldor
(1984) and Julian Isaacs (1984).

        Batcheldor has consistently emphasized the problem of
resis-tance to psi and provided a number of useful ideas for
setting up experimental conditions that will affect mood in such
a way that fear may be bypassed.  Too, his emphasis that it is
the 'belief" of the moment, rather than long-term personality
characteristics, that are liable to be important in determining
whether psi phenomena manifest, is particularly valuable.  The
consistently low magnitude of correlations of long-term
personality traits with psi perfor-mance should long ago have
convinced us that these factors are of little practical
importance in dealing with psi.

        Isaacs has taken a number of Batcheldor's ideas and
combined them with his own to broaden their application beyond
the sitter-group setting.  His initial results in producing
apparent psychokine-tic effects in the laboratory suggest the
value of this approach.  In this paper, however, I am going to
focus not on Batcheldor's and Isaacs' contributions, despite
their great value, but on what they left out of their approach.
I shall overemphasize my points, without doing full justice to
the sophistication of their arguments, because I think these
points need to be made very strongly.  The basic thrust of my
theory-that we parapsychologists, as well as other people, have a
lot of unacknowledged fear of psi-requires strong emphasis to
even begin to get past the unconscious resistance we have to
these ideas.


Manipulation versus Collaboration

        Before dealing with the issue of fear of psi per se, I
want to point out that there is a psychological element running
through the cur-rent presentations of Batcheldor's and Isaacs'
approaches that complicates the fear and resistance problem, and
so must be dealt with.  They implicitly follow the dominant
psychological and para-psychological research tradition of
passive subjects who are ma-nipulated by a knowledgeable
experimenter in order to produce effects.  As I have argued at
length (Tart, 1977), this "colonial paradigm" in which passive
subjects are manipulated for the bene-fit of others is a major
drawback in both experimental psychology and experimental
parapsychology.  Participants in experiments are not passive;
they are active problem solvers, using their intelli-gence to
hypothesize the real purpose of the experiment, this hy-pothesis
being subject to their own beliefs, knowledge, personality
characteristics, and needs.  Feelings of being manipulated, even
if it is a "benign" manipulation intended to make them feel
better, can have unconscious reactive effects.  These effects are
highly variable and, being generally unacknowledged, can greatly
increase random error variance and introduce systematic effects
quite contrary to the intentions of the experimenter.  I have
discussed this at greater length elsewhere (Tart, 1977), and an
excellent comprehensive re-view has been made by Silverman
(1977).

        I would suggest that both Batcheldor' s and Isaacs'
approaches could be modified toward the humanistic direction I
have proposed as an alternative model (Tart, 1977).  In that
approach we do not experiment on "subjects," we work with
"colleagues" and "col-laborators" in a situation that does not
involve manipulation or deceit.  Ideally, there is total openness
and honesty between "ex-perimenters" and "subjects." The needs of
people in all roles in the experiment should be considered so
that everyone learns some-thing and, we hope, experiences
personal growth as a result of participating in the experiment.
This collaboration model of an honest, shared endeavor among
colleagues of equal status should greatly reduce the reactive
effects of the standard "colonial paradigm." This result is
highly desirable in and of itself, and it also simplifies
attempts to deal with fear and resistance: Who would honestly
reveal their fears to someone whom they suspect is ma-nipulating
them'?

        Now let me turn to the more important issue of dealing
with fear.


FEAR OF PSI

        I believe, both from observation of others and
observations of myself, that there is a widespread and
unacknowledged fear of psi among people in general, as well as
among parapsychologists.  I have recently formalized some of my
understanding of this fear in the form of a social masking theory
of the inhibition of psi func-tioning and a primal conflict
theory of the inhibition of psi func-tioning (Tart, 1982).

        Briefly, the social masking theory recognizes the fact
that our implicit social contract often calls for not really
understanding other people.  It is as if we had contracted, "I'll
support your illusions if you'll support mine." By "illusions" I
mean the incor-rect perception of our true motivations and
feelings because we attend to a more acceptable fantasy in order
to avoid seeing unac-ceptable aspects of our true self.  Persons
might consciously be-lieve, for example, that they are
sympathetic listeners, when they are actually driven by an
unconscious, unacceptable fear of feeling inferior and being
rejected: Thus identifying with the myth or illusion of being a
sympathetic listener simultaneously avoids the unpleasant
feelings of fear of rejection and subtly obligates others to
accept the person because he or she acts like a sympathetic
listener.  Some of the functioning of ordinary social work
depends on manipulation and deceit, sometimes of oneself as well
as of others.  Psi, insofar as it is seen as an unknown way of
gathering information that may not have any limits, that may be
uncontroll-able, is highly threatening.  Thus there is a fear of
psi as something which would shatter our and others' illusions
and rob us of the social power that comes from effective control
of our own and others' illusions.  Consequently we are
enculturated in ways that deny the existence of psi, or restrict
it to special areas of life so that it does not occur in ordinary
social processes.

        The primal conflict theory of psi inhibition hypothesizes
that mothers and their babies have a natural, emotional
telepathic bond which probably begins before birth and certainly
is very strong after birth and through the first few years of
life.  Because of social pressures, particularly in contemporary
society, mothers feel to-tally responsible for the psychological
health and welfare of their infants, and they are expected to
want to care for their infants at all times.  Real mothers, of
course, often have negative feelings about their infants, but
because of social (and internalized) pressure they try to hide
them.  They may succeed on an overt level, telling their infant
or child that, for example, they are only punishing them for
their own good.  This may extend to repression on the mother's
part of her negative feelings.

        Since it is essential for the child to accept the
mother's overt picture of the way she feels and the consensus
reality of society represented by the mother, an enormous
conflict can be induced if a telepathic channel gives information
denying the overt (and vital) message.  I hypothesize that a
general suppression of psi faculties is carried out by the infant
or child in order to deal with this primal conflict, so that only
the overt message is received and the im-mediate conflict seems
to disappear.  In the adult who has long ago gone through this
primal process, there is an unconscious linkage between the
existence of psi and extremely painful, negative expe-riences
with the mother.  Aside from any fearful qualities of psi per se,
great fear is associated with it because of these painful child-
hood conflicts.  Psychodynamically this results in a denial of
the existence of psi and/or other surface defenses against psi
function-ing.  We will consider these defenses later.  (For a
more extended discussion of these two theories, see Tart, 1982.)

        Batcheldor and Isaacs acknowledge various fears of psi
far more explicitly than most parapsychologists, and this is an
excellent start on dealing with it.  Judging from their
procedures, however, instead of dealing directly with this fear
they bypass it.  That is, they work up ways to try to make the
participants in their experiments feel better about themselves
and/or not notice the fears of psi that they have.

        I'm sure this approach is effective to some degree and
may account for the apparent high level manifestations of psi in
both of these researchers' studies.  It is quite consistent with
my two theories about inhibition of psi functioning that this
approach should produce short-term results, but, from
psychodynamic con-siderations in the above theories, I do not
think that bypassing the issue of fear will be successful in the
long run.  I shall devote the rest of this paper to a
consideration of some of the strategies that can be used for
dealing with fear of psi.  I hope that these sug-gestions will
lead to appropriate research.


DEALING WITH FEAR

        I shall outline 10 general methods of dealing with fear.
I have probably overlooked some other ways.  Of these 10, four
are pre-dominantly negative and psychopathological in the sense
that they exact a high psychological price in terms of wholeness
and uncon-scious complications and reactions.  Four are quite
positive ways of dealing with fear that lead to personal growth,
and two are mixed, having both psychopathological and growth
aspects.

        My assessment of what is psychopathological and what is
psy-chologically healthy in the following discussion of defense
and coping strategies is based on a humanistic and transpersonal
ideal. Briefly, a healthy, growing person has full and
undistorted reality contact with the outside world, restricted
only by the inherent limits of humanness, and full understanding
of and conscious re-sponsibility for his or her mental
functioning.  Psychopathology, by contrast, involves strong
distortion of one's perception of external reality and of other
persons, and distorted and incomplete under-standing of one's
mental processes, frequently accompanied by substitution of
emotionally invested fantasies for realities.  Real people live
on a continuum between these extremes, and psycho-logical growth
is movement toward the healthy ideal.


Denial

        A major way of dealing with the fear of psi is to deny
that psi exists.  After all, if there is no psi, there is nothing
to be afraid of, so one has no fear to acknowledge.

        When someone claims to be making objective, factual
statements about a subject, but behaves in a way that suggests
there are strong emotions operating, it is generally a good
psychological bet to suspect there are unconscious processes
involved.  The vehement denial of the existence of psi, as in the
case of some pseudo-critics whose behavior suggests they are
protecting their  "faith" against heresy, strongly suggests that
fear of psi is quite strong in them at an unconscious level.
Insofar as psi is an aspect of reality, its denial is inherently
psychopathological.

        A variation of the denial defense is to admit that psi
exists, but to deny that one has any fear of psi.  The statement
that 'I am not afraid of psi" may be correct for some people, but
I suspect that for many people, since they have not actually
dealt with the fear of psi to begin with, a denial of having any
fear of psi is simply a defense mechanism.


Avoidance of Triggering Circumstances

        A common way of avoiding experiencing fear of something
is to avoid getting oneself into situations where that fear is
liable to be triggered.  If one fears dark alleys, for example,
one doesn't go into dark alleys.  Perhaps one doesn't even get
close to dark alleys! This is a way of manipulating oneself,
consciously, semiconsciously, or unconsciously, to avoid the
triggering of fear.  If the fear is strong this avoidance has to
actively circumscribe behavior, as one cannot depend passively on
circumstances not triggering one's fear.

        I believe the phenomena I have called the "religion of
the .05 level" (Tart, 1980) is an example of this style of
defense among parapsychologists.  Briefly, I have noticed that
when an experiment produces psi results that are trivial in terms
of their actual mag-nitude, but statistically significant at the
.05 level, there is usually very little criticism of the
experiment from fellow parapsycholo-gists.  The existence of the
mystery (psi) has been reaffirmed by an intellectual abstraction
(statistical significance test), but the actual level of
manifestation is so trivial that it does n0t evoke an emo-tional
response.  The occasional psi results that involve obvious high
level psi functioning usually provoke strong criticism from some
parapsychologists, a far more intense focus on possible
methodological flaws than is applied to studies that are merely
significant at the .05 level.  Such a bombardment of multiple
crit-icism has the psychological effect of denying the reality of
the high level manifestation of psi.  It is a manipulation of
oneself to get away from the triggering circumstance, the
apparent high level manifestation of psi, which is beginning to
trigger fear.


Rationalization/Distraction

        When a feeling of fear begins to manifest, alternative
mental processes may drain off all the energy so that the fear is
not consciously experienced.  An active process of rationalizing
feelings about psi so that psi seems to be something pleasant or
good, and/or an active indulgence in a related process that
effectively distracts one's attention from the circumstances that
are triggering the fear, can allow one to avoid facing the fear.
The many metaphysical and philosophical systems, for example,
that say that psi comes from a "higher level" and so is
inherently good, can serve as a sort of rationalization defense,
whether or not there is any truth in such ideas.  An obsessive
focus on technical and method-ological aspects of psi
experimentation can similarly distract one from implications of
psi that might trigger a fear reaction.


Dissociation/Repression

        A fourth pathological method of dealing with fear of psi
is to dissociate psi functioning from one's conscious self.  To
small de-grees this can be done by giving the credit for psi
abilities to a system," such as Tarot cards, a Ouija board,
"radionic" devices, or the like.  "It's not me; I'm just a
channel for something else; I'm just reading the cards." The
full-blown form of the dissociated defense can occur with the
development of a trance personality, which clearly takes
responsibility away from the individual show-ing the psi.  This
eliminates the problem of what Batcheldor called "ownership
resistance." Insofar as there is total amnesia for the doings of
the trance personality, psi is put at a great distance from one's
conscious personality, thus avoiding triggering fears and
conflicts about psi.  Conflicts about possible "craziness" may
have to be handled, of course, but some people may find this
easier than dealing directly with psi per se.

        Note that I am showing how dissociation/repression may be
used as a form of defense against fears of psi, not commenting on
whether or not there may be genuinely synchronistic events in-
volved in acts like Tarot card reading (Tart, 1981) or the
possible reality, in some cases, of spirit guides.


Desensitization

        Desensitization is the first way of dealing with fear
that has both positive and negative long-term qualities.
Desensitization defenses consist of repeated exposures to the
circumstances triggering one's fear until the initial shock wears
off and one becomes largely habituated.  The process often
includes starting with low levels of the fear-producing stimulus
and progressively increasing its inten-sity as one adapts.  This
is a mental toughening that may be quite effective.  Insofar as
it strengthens one's conscious ability to handle the fear without
actually dealing with the causes of the fear, how-ever, it may
allow other unconscious defenses against psi to con-tinue to
operate and distort psi functioning.


Bypass Defenses

        This is the sort of defense strategy that Batcheldor's
and Isaacs' papers ingeniously use, namely, setting up external
situations, with consequent effects on one's internal
psychological processes, such that one manages to bypass the
problem of fear and still make some psi manifest.  For example,
using a target system that is prone to many artifacts, such as
happens when many hands are upon a table, may allow a genuine psi
response to come out, but since the table movement could be
dismissed as an artifact, this allows one to avoid a direct
confrontation with fear of psi.  This is similar to
rationalization/distraction defenses.

        Another way of carrying out an end run defense is to give
the experimenter great authority (something experimenters often
like) and to believe that the experimenter's manipulations
(personal ac-tions and environmental control) are responsible for
the psi.  The authority relationships common in the colonial
paradigms, insofar as they mesh with needs to have some authority
take control of responsibilities in areas where 'subjects" are
fearful, may work out very well in the short run.  Like the
earlier defense strategies, however, the bypass defense is
inherently psychopathological, even though useful in the short
run, because it abrogates one's own responsibility and distorts
self-knowledge about what is really going on.


Cognitive/Affective Acknowledgement

        Here we consider the first of four positive ways of
dealing with fear in general, as well as with fear of psi
specifically.  In this coping strategy one fully accepts the fear
and experiences it, not just on an intellectual level but on an
emotional level.  One has to be fully able to experience and
acknowledge that one personally fears various aspects of psi.
This may have some adaptive effects in and of itself.  Many
specific fears are magnified by a fear of being afraid.  This can
vanish with full acceptance.  This cognitive and affective
acknowledgement is a necessary basis for the following three
positive coping techniques.


Learning Adaptive Coping Skills

        Having acknowledged fear of psi, one begins to try to
deal with specific aspects of the fear, trying different ways of
handling it and seeing what seems to be successful.  It involves,
of course, a certain tolerance for fear such that one can
mentally or behaviorally try various coping techniques while
experiencing the fear.  It is compa-rable to learning gun safety.
To a person who knows nothing about handling guns, a hunting
rifle is indeed dangerous.  To a person who has been trained to
always treat the gun as if it were loaded and never take any
chances, some fear may remain but fear is largely replaced by
adaptive coping skills.


Accepting Responsibility

        This adaptive coping strategy, based on a cognitive and
affective acknowledgement of the fear of psi, involves a step in
personal growth in which one recognizes the negative sides of
one's nature. It may be possible, for example, to use psi
abilities to injure someone.  Whereas people without much
psychological insight might believe that they would never do such
a thing, a mature person would recognize that in the right mood
they could not only use psi abilities to injure someone, they
could enjoy doing that, feel jus-tified in it.  Having recognized
that aspect of themselves, they could then cope by further
accepting the fact that they are responsi-ble for the
consequences of their actions and could choose to con-sciously
use psi to injure others, but be consciously responsible for what
they have done, or consciously choose not to use psi nega-tively.
Psychologically speaking, denial of one's negative side gen-
erally leads to disguised forms of aggression which may be
consid-erably nastier than conscious, controlled aggression.
This accep-tance of one's negativity and a conscious decision not
to use it is a more adaptive coping strategy than denial.


Personal Growth

        In general, the more psychologically mature a person
becomes, the less a problem should exist with fear of psi.  In
the course of discovering and accepting one's negative side and,
what is often harder for people in our culture, in discovering
and accepting one's positive side, one becomes more self-
accepting and less fearful in general.  This kind of
psychological growth will have involved a great deal of adaptive
dealing with fears of all sorts, and so dealing specifically with
fear of psi is less of a problem.  Psychologically mature people
have dealt with fear in a constructive way before, and so they
have confidence that they can do so again.


CONCLUSIONS

        One of the great discoveries of modern psychology is that
uncon-scious processes exist and that they cannot be effectively
handled by pretending that they are not there.  I believe that
unconscious fear of psi is very strong among parapsychologists,
as well as people in general.  This unacknowledged fear is a
primary reason for the generally trivial manifestation of psi in
our laboratories, and it will continue to stifle progress in our
field until it is acknowl-edged and dealt with.  There may be
real reasons for fearing some aspects of psi, such as potential
military applications (Tart, 1978; 1979), but dealing effectively
with such real problems will not be possible if our
unacknowledged personal fears are unresolved.

        The usual scholarly discussion is oriented toward the
reader's intellectual processes.  This paper is also oriented
toward your emotions.  It is not intended to insult the reader;
since I have had to deal with many of my own fears of psi in the
past, I am quite sympathetic.  Perhaps you have dealt with your
own fears of psi or were lucky enough to have a developmental
history that didn't create any significant fears.  Perhaps your
personal fears of psi are so strong that you will simply forget
the points of this article or you will rationalize that since you
have no significant fears of psi, you can dismiss this discussion
as of academic interest only, applying perhaps to other people.
I suggest that it would be more profitable, both personally and
for our field, if you would seriously look for evidence that you
have strong fears of psi and try to acknowledge and deal with
such fears.  Research projects on others' fears of psi are fine,
but probably will not get very far if we haven't first examined
our own fears.


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Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis
Davis, California 95616