Dr. Instream told us that the psychologist’s behavior was an example of the sort of performance that so upset parapsychologists. But more, he told me once again that he’d found no such tendencies on my part. “The man’s had no experience in the practice of psychology,” he said. “He’s only read textbook cases of this or that.” Then he told us that while the experience was unfortunate, perhaps it was best that we encountered it early in the game. Academic psychologists were apt to take a dim view of mediumship, he said. I would have to let such comments roll off my back. I should have laughed at the young psychologist. I should have said, “Well, it takes one to know one,” or some such.

It was the craziest and most vexing vacation we’ve ever spent. At the first lecture we attended, the speaker gave a demonstration in hypnosis. Except for ourselves and a few students, the symposium was attended by psychologists, doctors, and dentists. The lecturer was a psychologist who is well known for his work in hypnosis. Lowering his voice, he said that since most of those in the audience used hypnosis professionally, they should know what it felt like to be hypnotized themselves. So he began.

In spring 1965, about a year after we wrote Dr. Osis, Rob wrote to Dr. Instream (not his real name), who was connected with a state university in upstate New York. Dr. Instream had been one of the nation’s foremost psychologists in his earlier years, and had investigated many mediums in the past. If Seth was a secondary personality he would know it, I thought. Again we enclosed a few sessions with one letter. Dr. Instream wrote back, expressing interest and inviting us to attend the National Hypnosis Symposium to be held in July 1965.

Dr. Instream treated Seth with deference, great deference—and I admit that I found this somewhat suspicious at the time. I wasn’t sure myself as to who or what Seth was, and the thought crossed my mind more than once that the doctor’s attitude was simply a device to gain my confidence—the psychologist’s pretense that he believed in the existence of his patient’s delusion as unquestioningly as the patient did.

[...] Doctors, dentists, and psychologists attended. It was there that Jane and I had our most unfortunate encounter with the young psychologist. [...]

When your precious psychologists walk out of their bodies and tell me what is in California, then I will listen to their theories of personality and when your psychologists put on the type of personality performance that I can put on—then I will listen to them when they tell me about the ego and subconscious. [...]

And even, therefore, the worms dance in the grass and laugh at your psychologists’ theories, for even they know that they are more than the reality the psychologistswould grant to you. If you were what the psychologists think you are and no more then would you be faced with an extinction predestined for you before your birth. [...]

([Florence:] “Isn’t this what the psychologists call the ego and the super ego and the subconscious... [...]

[...] Do not tell me that my theory of personality is only another word for the ego or for your psychologists’ theories. [...]

Gramacy was a psychologist and a magician, and he came to our house because he was a scientist looking for some real magic. He was a compact, dark-skinned and dark-haired person with soft brown large eyes that were kept half closed when he was being a psychologist, and turned larger, commanding and yet inviting when he was being a magician. [...]

[...]

[...] (Eyes closed.) The letter I wrote to [Michael] Kosok does indeed apply, and in its way so does the article about the psychologist that Ruburt was telling you about. [...]

The psychologist believed most heartily in his theory of mental disintegration with age, and he set out to prove that he was right, bringing about self-predictive difficulties. [...]

(The article about the psychologist creating his own reality, featuring his own mental deterioration, is in the latest issue of Human Nature magazine—November 1978. [...]

Now: there is one large point, underestimated by all of your psychologists when they list the attributes or characteristics of consciousness. [...]

[...] He does not realize, however, nor do your other psychologists, what I have told you often—that there is an inner ego; and it is this inner ego that organizes what Jung would call unconscious material.

[...] It is the fear that the “unconscious” is chaotic that causes psychologists to make such statements. [...]

(Yesterday I received in the mail a copy of a long article that Sam Menahem, a psychologist in Fort Lee, New Jersey, has written for a summer issue of Reality Change. [...]

[...] “I think he was also answering some of the points that psychologist made in his letter,” she said. [...]

[...] If a psychologist wants to say simply: Hallucination, then he would have to admit it was hardly a random thing; but well directed, to a point and for a purpose. [...]

[...] If this would be called hallucinatory by psychologists, then of course far more than vision was involved; the massive quality was definitely sensed directly and vividly. [...]

(9:27.) Your evolutionary science, combined with your psychologists, so served to rob men and women of a sense of dignity and meaning that their problems and difficulties were in a way depersonalized. For example, they became part of the species’ natural aging processes, as per your psychologist’s article. [...]

(Here Seth refers to an article by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, who wrote in Psychology Today for November, 1978 about the decline in his own cognitive abilities. [...]

[...] Dr. Eugene Barnard, a psychologist then at North Carolina State University, came out publicly with a statement favoring astral projection. [...]

I was really excited to think that a psychologist would do his own experimentation with projection, and I wrote him. [...]

[...] Not until it was over did I realize what he’d been up to—now that’s a good psychologist! [...]

[...] … In any sense in which a psychologist of the Western scientific tradition would understand the phrase, I do not believe that Jane Roberts and Seth are the same person, or the same personality, or different facets of the same personality. [...]

[...] An understanding of this system will serve to explain to the psychologists certain things that are not now plain to them.

[...] It cannot be clearly understood simply because at present psychologists believe that association works only in connection with past events.

Psychologists, generally speaking, have not accepted the latest theories of your own physicists, however. [...]

[...] A psychologist would explain this reaction by presuming some kind of unpleasant event occurred in the past. [...]

[...] There is one large point, underestimated by all of your psychologists, when they list the characteristics or attributes of consciousness. [...]

[...] He does not realize however, nor do your other psychologists, what I have told you often—that there is an inner ego; and it is this inner ego that organizes what Jung would call unconscious material.

[...] (Pause.) It is the fear that the unconscious, so-called, is chaotic, that causes psychologists to make such statements, and there (pause) is also something in the nature of those who practice psychology, a fascination, in many cases, already predisposed to fear the so-called unconscious in direct proportion to its attraction for them.

[...] Another is my own longtime interest in the American psychologist and philosopher, William James [1842–1910]; he wrote the classic The Varieties of Religious Experience.³ A third is a letter received last week from a Jungian psychologist who had been inspired by Seth’s material on the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung [1875–1961], in Chapter 13 of Seth Speaks. [...]

[...] A letter from a Jungian psychologist helped serve as a stimulus. The psychologist asked me (deeper and with humor) to comment about Jung. [...]

(The letter from the Jungian psychologist evidently provided the immediate impetus for the fly episode and for Monday evening’s events, though. [...]

[...] He wasn’t mentioned in the psychologist’s letter, for instance. [...]

(On June 27 Jane had received a letter from Tam Mossman at Prentice-Hall, requesting information on Dr. Instream, Dr. Bernard, both psychologists; and on Ray Van Over. [...]

[...] No academic psychologist, including Dr. Instream, will give you a statement to the effect that I am a survival personality. [...]

[...] “The exasperation comes because your good psychologist almost undermined the confidence I managed to give Ruburt in our session with your friend, Phillip. [...]

[...] I may make bold to remark that I am more stable than you or Ruburt or the fine psychologist.

CHAPTER
FIVE:

A Psychologist’s Letter
Gives Me the Jitters—
Seth’s Reassurance

[...] It often seems that sleep is almost a small death, and psychologists have compared dreaming with controlled insanity.⁵ You have so divorced your waking and dreaming experience that it seems you have separate “lives,” and that there is little connection between your waking and dreaming hours. [...]

[...] The piece was about a European psychologist, and included his considered opinion that “dreams are the junk of the mind.” [...]

[...] We even have the words of a signed psychologist saying that I am not a secondary personality. [...]

What psychologists speak of as association is definitely an important psychological characteristic. What psychologists do not understand, however, is that in deep levels of subconscious activity associations may spring from the inner self’s latent knowledge and experience of past lives.

Beneath this undifferentiated subconscious layer we will find, and psychologists can find through testing and hypnosis, a layer composed of memories, dealing successively with each previous existence, and separated by a layer between lives that is, again, undifferentiated.

[...] Neither of us thought the person in question a psychologist. [...]

[...] If your psychologists and scientists would begin a study of their own dreams, they would learn much through personal experience.

[...] Since psychologists deal with psychological activity, it is all the more amazing that they have not concentrated upon psychological activity, observing it first hand as it exists in their own various stages of consciousness.

[...] Ruburt’s mother, as mentioned earlier, had often told him that if he kept on as he was going he would lose his mind; and contacts with psychologists, when he feels they are testing him, brings up this old issue.

Bernard did not operate as a psychologist. [...]

Ruburt interpreted Instream’s final attitude to mean that the psychologist had more or less by implication justified the mother’s frequent warning. [...]