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Occasionally circumstances force out into the open an event that is both unique for our time as well as startling in its possible implications. As a participant in and witness to one such possible event, Dr. Eisenbud has written an account of what must be considered the first episode of an ongoing scientific drama. The protagonists are a man named Ted Serios who claimed he could project his own thoughts and images on photographic film and an experienced, informed and articulate psychoanalyst who came to believe that, indeed, he could.
The next and succeeding episodes will be written with the help of the audience itself, both lay and scientific. The ultimate dénouement is not yet discernible. Most people will probably gravitate toward a conventional ending and write the whole thing off as just another situation where professional competence in one field offered no immunity to entrapment by a clever operator. Perhaps a few will entertain the possibility that Nature, caught offguard in a miniskirt, is revealing more than she ever showed before. The reviewer is taking his stand here for the moment. There will be some who, carried away by the passionate conviction of the author, will feel that the genuineness of the phenomenon comes through loud and clear and all that is now needed is an appendix clarifying and refining the mechanism. Finally, there may be those who, like the author himself, suspect that the very genuineness of the phenomenon will tend to keep it outside the domain of the Scientific Establishment because of the way in which Science came into existence in the first place. The author treats of this in detail in a more speculative section at the end of the book, where he suggests that scientific explanation arose on the basis of man's need to outwardly project his psychic powers as a way of getting out from under both the danger and responsibility of personal psychic power. To this reviewer, this effort