The CTP Faculty: Adam Crabtree

I grew up in Minnesota on a farm near Long Prairie. I was christened Gary Lee and took the name Adam when, in 1958, I entered St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and became a Benedictine monk. After ordination to the Catholic priesthood in 1964, I came to Toronto to do graduate work in philosophy. There I became part of a unique therapeutic group that was just taking shape in 1965. Initiated by the innovative Welsh psychotherapist, Lea Hindley-Smith, this unusual experiment, called Therafields, developed a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy training program. After experiencing the therapeutic process for myself, I received training as a psychotherapist and began what has become a practice of more than thirty years. In 1976 I married Joanne Hindley-Smith, daughter of Therafields's founder, and we now have three sons, Matthew, Edward and Andrew.

Eventually chafing at the psychoanalytic bit, I broadened my view of what is and is not possible for the human psyche, pursuing a study of the eccentric, the anomalous and the paranormal -- including experiences of past life memories. This resulted in my receiving referrals from colleagues who were baffled or even frightened by the symptoms they encountered in some of their clients. It also meant that I experienced certain difficulties in finding a comfortable place in the ranks of my professional coworkers.

Another outcome of this interest was the revivification of my academic career, since I believed that the only way to intelligently learn about anomalous experiences was to study the history of research already done. So it was that I augmented my clinical work with the examination of classical writings in psychical research, hypnotism and dissociative phenomena. Out of this scholarly work and my clinical experience were born three books. The first was Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality (Toronto: Collins, 1985; Somerville House, 1997). This work combines material from my clinical work with dissociative states and my research into the history of the phenomena. There followed Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism and Psychical Research, from 1766 to 1925: An Annotated Bibliography (White Plains, New York: Kraus International, 1988). This tome, dealing with some 2000 titles in three languages, became the background research for my next book, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), tracing the rise of what I termed the "alternate consciousness paradigm," a framework of thought that became an essential ingredient in all modern psychodynamic psychotherapies.

http://www.esalenctr.org/display/animag.cfm - A link to animal magnetism

It is no accident that hypnotism and its history were central subjects in this academic research. Trance states were regularly employed in my personal psychotherapy, and I have made frequent use of them in my clinical practice over the years. However, a thorough study of the history of trance states did not yield a satisfactory understanding of their nature. It is well known to those who work in the field that there has never been an agreed upon definition of hypnosis, and, bothered by this unsettled state of affairs, I undertook yet another book. It dealt with the subject of trance states in everyday life and was called Trance Zero: Breaking the Spell of Conformity (Toronto: Somerville House Books, 1997; the American edition published by St Martin’s Press, 1999, has a different subtitle). In this book I propose a definition of trance which, in my opinion, applies to the entire gamut of experiences (fascination, hypnotism, mesmerism, relaxation, focusing, etc.) to which that term has been applied over the centuries. From the definition it follows that trance states are not extraordinary experiences after all, but rather something that we are constantly going in an out of as we live our lives. The book also takes up the issue of cultural trance which, without our realizing it, limits and rigidifies the way we think about the world and each other.

Recently I have received several invitations to speak about the subject of life after death. This is rather surprising to me, since I have never thought of myself as particularly learned in that area. Nevertheless, responding to an request from the philosophy department of the University of Toronto, in March 1998 I delivered the Edith Bruce Lecture on Immortality at Hart House. I was also invited to participate in a December colloquium on the survival of bodily death sponsored by Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research and held at Esalen, Big Sur, California, and I will continue as a member of that annual symposium. More recently I have discussed immortality on CBC's "Quirks and Quarks" and have been asked to present seminars on the survival of death. It seems that this area is, willy-nilly, going to remain a part of my investigations.