Between Life and Death

📖 The Scoop

"Tales of commerce with the dead. Reports of strange happenings in the borderlands between the living and the who-knows-what. Concerns as ancient as humankind. Robert Kastenbaum, renowned writer on the subject of death and dying, along with a host of other well-known thinkers, offers perceptive, scholarly insights on those experiences that lie between life and death. Near-death encounters or perhaps actual returns from death itself are experiences significant to those who have them and to many who hear about them. They may also have significant impact on attitudes well beyond the crisis-of-death situation. A keen look at these phenomena challenges both the method and knowledge of science. This volume brings the exotic and the everyday closer together with exploration of topics such as communicating with the dead and deliberately induced premortem out-of-body experienes. Here is information, responsible criticism, and sociohistorical context from a variety of clinical, research, and humanistic perspectives. The authors include a clinical psychologist who works intimately with people who have life-threatening illnesses, a social psychologist who has studied subcultural differences in attempts to contact the dead, a psychiatrist, developmental psychologist, humanist educator, and several more. Most of the contributors participated in the 1977 symposium of the American Psychological Association on communication with the dead. These essays are written in the spirit of sustained exploration - an approach that is neither relentless 'debunking' nor pipeline-to-the-divine. They treat the experiences between life and death as serious, believable, and worthy of study. The volume provides a needed and valuable contribution to the growing literature on death and dying. It offers the reader thought-provoking stimuli for one's own reflections on life, death, and the gray areas in between."--back cover.

Genre: No Category (fancy, right?)