Popular and professional interest in areas that are usually pejoratively labeled “occult” or “mystical” has risen enormously in the last fifteen years. As William Roll tells us at the beginning of his contribution to this book, “In 1967 the Ouija board surpassed Monopoly as America's favorite board game.” Since Monopoly can symbolize so many traditional American values, this is indeed a large-scale development.

Psychiatry and Mysticism represents a start by its editor, Stanley Dean, and many distinguished contributors to gather together some scientific knowledge of a large, amorphously bounded area that Dean