Irwin: Flight of Mind
Harvey J. Irwin: Flight of Mind: A Psychological Study of the Out-of-Body Experience. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985. Pp. 382, index. $27.50, cloth. ISBN 0-8108-1737-3.
Book Review – Charles T. Tart
(From Journal of Parapsychology, 53;1989:358-360, reproduced with permission)
If you are seriously interested in the out-of-body experience (OBE), you must get this book. It is far and away the best scientific book published on the subject to date and is indispensable to have around for reference as well as for reading. I say this in spite of having some serious theoretical disagreements with Professor Irwin about the best way to study OBEs, a topic I will return to later. Given the parameters of his approach, though, – one widely shared in psychology and parapsychology – he has done a first-class job.
The book covers just about everything known about OBEs. Various chapters cover the definition of the OBE and its relationship with somewhat similar phenomena such as lucid dreams and depersonalization; a comprehensive and sophisticated discussion of methodological issues, including a good sensitivity to the demand characteristics of experimentation; the phenomenology of the OBE, including the views of the few people who claim to have been able to produce OBEs at will (OBE adepts, in Irwin's terminology); the circumstances in which OBEs occur; qualities of the people who have OBEs; various theories about the nature and purpose of OBEs; their relationship to psychological factors such as imagery skills, attentional processes, and personal needs; and, finally, Irwin's own synesthetic theory for the nature of the OBE. There are 30 pages of references, as well as comprehensive author and subject indexes [it seems a little odd to have to report on the presence of references and indexes, but in the last decade I have seen too many books containing useful technical information that you will want to retrieve later that, alas, have no indices].
After discussing the way the term OBE has been used, Irwin ends up defining it as follows: "Definition: An out-of-body experience is one in which the center of consciousness appears to the experient to occupy temporarily a position which is spatially remote from his/her body" (p. 5). The immediate problem this definition raises, as I have discussed elsewhere (see Tart, 1974; 1976), is that it does not exclude dreams and other altered state experiences, or even highly involved fantasy. Irwin adequately recognizes this problem for dreams, and he handles it by adding that the determination of OBEness must be made during the experience; the experient must not, in his/her later waking consciousness, subrate the experience as only a dream. Irwin recognizes that he is using a fairly broad definition, thus casting a wide net for catching data. Indeed, if he did not cast this wide a net the number of studies on particular aspects of OBEs would usually be too small to attempt any sort of overview.
This addition to the definition does not, however, exclude lucid dreaming, in which one mistakenly classifies a lucid dream as an OBE, nor does it exclude a wide variety of altered states experiences. A person strongly intoxicated with marijuana, for example, is fairly likely to have an occasional experience that he or she might classify as out-of-body (see Tart, 1971) but it might actually represent a purely subjective experience involving great immersion in a vivid internal experience and accompanying loss of sensation from the physical body. Drugs are, of course, only one way of producing such experiences. Several qualitatively, distinct kinds of experiences that might be confused with others under the OBE label have been discussed at greater length elsewhere (see Tart, 1974).
My long-standing concern over too wide a definition of OBE is that analysis then mixes what may be qualitatively distinct types of experiences, producing overall or averaged conclusions that do not accurately represent any of the actual distinct types of phenomena involved. A variant of this is shown by the discussion on pages 67-68 and 208 on physiological correlates of OBEs, where Irwin attempts some preliminary generalizations about EEG state in OBE adepts. He notes that variations may have resulted from different methods used by different adepts to induce the OBE, but he is not as sensitive as he should be to the difficulties of generalizing about EEG when people are in qualitatively distinct physiological states, such as stage 1 sleep versus waking.
Most contemporary researchers seem to share Irwin's approach by casting this wide a net, for better or worse, and Irwin has done a most thorough and useful job. Except for the problems that may result in some areas for this too-wide net, I would have been proud to have written this book myself. The book is (fortunately) too rich to attempt a summary of its results.
There are some places in the book where people knowledgeable in this area might want to offer different interpretations of the research results, but these are largely legitimate scholarly disputes, not errors. I will mention one that needs correction, however: on page 50 I think Irwin has been too harsh in his evaluation of Robert Monroe's writings on his own OBEs. Irwin cites some critical references that note that Monroe's own published accounts of his experiences differ from versions of them published in a poorly disguised form as those of a "Bob Rame" by Puharich (1962). I have known Monroe well for more than 20 years and know he is a careful reporter and that he has been distressed by the Puharich account since it was published because, Monroe reports, Puharich significantly altered the original reports. Details on this are now conveniently available in a newly published biography of Monroe (Stockton, 1989).
This book is the best we have on the study of OBEs to date, but I hope its main effect will be to stimulate extensive new research, taking account of the problems of too broad a definition rather than making us feel that the important questions about OBEs have been answered. They have not.
Charles T. Tart
Dept. of Psychology
University of California
Davis, CA 95616
USA
References
Puharich, A. (1962). Beyond Telepathy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Stockton, B. (1989). Catapult: The Biography of Robert A. Monroe. Norfolk, Virginia: Donning
Tart, C. T. (1974). Some Methodological Problems in Out-of-the-Body Experiences Research. In W. Roll, R. Morris, & J. Morris (eds.): Research in Parapsychology, 1973 (pp. 116-120). Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
Tart, C. T. (1976). Studying Out-of-the-Body Experiences. In T. X. Barber (ed.): Advances in Altered States of Consciousness and Human Potentialities, Vol. 1 (pp. 579-585). New York: Psychological Dimensions Press.
Tart, C. T. (1971). On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication. Palo Alto, California: Science and Behavior Books.
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