The denial of death and the out-of-the-body experience
- 1 January 1984
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Nature in Journal of Religion and Health
- Vol. 23 (4) , 317-329
- https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00991391
Abstract
The out-of-the-body experience is a phenomenon which continues to be reported and continues to be interpreted in many ways. It seems, however, that more attention is given to finding a spiritual base for this occurrence than a psychological understanding of it. This paper considers the psychological forces of denial as a suitable explanation for the OBE and suggests that these experiences may be understood as hallucinations caused by traumatic events rather than genuine previews of the afterlife. That is: “Do these people transcend their bodies and also time and space to acquire these experiences, or could it be that nothing has been transcended at all save the need to deny death and thus transcend its feared consequence, which is ‘not being’?”Keywords
This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
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- On the value of denying deathPastoral Psychology, 1972
- Psychotherapy and the Patient with a Limited Life Span†Psychiatry: Interpersonal & Biological Processes, 1961
- Predilection to DeathPsychosomatic Medicine, 1961