There are many examples of charlatanism in religious history and in the wider history of spiritual practice. Over the years, some highly visible church movements and leaders have been exposed for deceiving followers—manufacturing moral authority, staging spiritual “results,” and in some cases enriching themselves dramatically through offerings and donations. Outside formal religion, there are also psychics and fortune-tellers who make strong claims about paranormal abilities that they cannot substantiate. Yet even here, the picture is not uniform. Some may sincerely believe in what they are doing, and some—whatever their beliefs—can still offer genuinely helpful human wisdom, sometimes resembling a perceptive psychotherapist. Once again, this is often a frame issue: if there is a setting in which a perceptive person pays close attention to a needy and trusting client, many helpful interactions can occur, including occasional insights that feel “predictive,” even when no paranormal or spiritual mechanism is involved.
With regard to psychics and fortune-tellers, much of what feels uncanny in these settings is better explained by ordinary psychology. Some “predictions” rely on cold reading—careful observation of verbal and non-verbal cues, strategic ambiguity, and gentle probing—combined with the Forer (Barnum) effect, in which feedback is so broad that it could apply to almost anyone, yet is delivered in a way that feels intimate and precisely tailored. In a sense, the client supplies the specificity while the psychic supplies the theatre.
Ironically, a kind of “faith” in the mechanism can make the experience more powerful. If you believe in psychic powers, you will likely be more open, more trusting, more suggestible, and more motivated to find meaning in what is said. This can make the encounter feel transformative—while still having nothing to do with paranormal abilities.
On the evidence: it is tempting to say that careful research on parapsychological phenomena has always been negative. A more precise—and still unsparing—statement is that after decades of investigation, these claims have not produced a robust, independently replicated body of evidence that would justify belief in paranormal powers. There are occasional studies that report statistically significant results, but these effects tend to be small, fragile, and disputed, and they do not survive replication under tighter controls (better blinding, preregistration, fixed stopping rules, and independent labs). Most apparent “successes,” in practice, are better explained by coincidence, selection effects (remembering “hits,” forgetting “misses”), motivated interpretation, and the cognitive biases that flourish in emotionally charged settings.
I am aware, too, of some influential figures in the “new age” / self-help spiritual milieu who, as people, have had a genuinely delightful, warm, and thoughtful style. Louise Hay is an example. Many of her self-help affirmations are beautiful—arguably a more poetic and intimate cousin of cognitive therapy. One shortcoming of how CBT is often presented is its cool mechanistic tone, and the affirmations approach can feel refreshingly humane. So I do sometimes encourage patients to use affirmations.
But alongside the affirmations, the same genre often carries dogmas about disease causation—claims that illnesses are produced by emotional states like resentment, criticism, or guilt, and that changing one’s attitude can dissolve even severe disease. Hay’s own best-selling You Can Heal Your Life is the clearest example: its long appended list assigns a specific emotional cause to nearly every ailment—cancer to long-held resentment, arthritis to habitual criticism. Such claims are not merely scientifically implausible; they are ethically hazardous, because they imply that people with tragic illnesses are partly to blame for having the “wrong” emotional life. Even when there is a kernel of truth (stress matters; psychology affects coping and health behaviour), this is a massive distortion of complex causation.
Most importantly, these beliefs become dangerous when they delay or obstruct timely evidence-based care. A “spiritual” frame that provides comfort and meaning is one thing; a causal dogma that misleads people away from effective medical treatment is another.
A related issue is accountability. In medicine and licensed psychotherapy, there are training standards, ethical codes, professional regulation, and at least some recourse when someone harms you. Spiritual markets are much murkier: the more grandiose the claims (“I can see your future,” “I can heal your cancer,” “the universe told me”), the less often there is oversight commensurate with the potential harm. The result is a predictable asymmetry: vulnerable people—often frightened, grieving, or desperate—are asked for trust, money, and obedience, in exchange for claims that are difficult to test and easy to excuse away when they fail.
And we should not flatter ourselves that education inoculates against this. Even very intelligent people can be drawn into false frameworks when the framework meets a psychological need: relief from uncertainty, the soothing of grief, a sense of control, a narrative that restores meaning, or simply the comfort of being seen. In fact, verbal intelligence can sometimes make the problem worse: it supplies better rhetoric to defend the belief, better stories to rationalize disappointment, and sharper arguments to dismiss critics as “closed-minded.” The vulnerability here is not stupidity—it is humanity, under stress, doing what human minds do best: turning ambiguous experience into a story that feels coherent and safe.
References
Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America.Metropolitan Books.
A cultural critique of the American positive-thinking industry, written with reportorial bite. Ehrenreich—drawing in part on her own treatment for breast cancer—traces how the demand to “stay positive” shades into a doctrine in which illness becomes a failure of attitude and recovery a reward for cheerfulness. Her central charge maps directly onto this chapter: positive-thinking culture quietly relocates responsibility for disease onto the patient, and can crowd out realism, grief, and sober medical decision-making. (Published in the United Kingdom as Smile or Die.)
Hay, L. L. (1984). You can heal your life. Hay House.
The foundational text of the modern affirmations movement, which has sold tens of millions of copies. Hay pairs genuinely humane self-acceptance exercises with a metaphysics of disease: an appended list assigns a specific emotional or mental cause to nearly every ailment—cancer to long-held resentment, arthritis to criticism—and the book asserts that releasing such feelings can dissolve even serious illness. It is cited here as the clearest published example of the chapter’s distinction between a comforting spiritual frame and a causal dogma that can mislead the sick.
Hyman, R. (1977). “Cold reading”: How to convince strangers that you know all about them. The Zetetic (now the Skeptical Inquirer), 1(2), 18–37.
The classic analysis of cold reading by a psychologist who was himself a practising mentalist. Hyman dissects the techniques—high-probability guesses, strategic ambiguity, attentive reading of feedback, and skilful use of the client’s own disclosures—by which a reader can appear to possess uncanny knowledge of a stranger. The paper grounds the chapter’s claim that what feels like paranormal insight is better explained by ordinary, learnable psychological technique.
Randi, J. (1987). The faith healers. Prometheus Books.
A documented investigation, with a foreword by Carl Sagan, of prominent faith-healing ministries. Randi, a professional conjurer, exposes the stagecraft behind apparent miracles—most famously the televangelist Peter Popoff, whose seemingly divine knowledge of audience members’ names and ailments was being transmitted to a concealed earpiece by his wife from information gathered on prayer cards. Randi’s effort to trace people supposedly cured turned up no verifiable healings. The book substantiates the chapter’s opening claim that some highly visible religious healers have been deliberate frauds who enriched themselves from the desperate.
A wide-ranging examination of why belief in the implausible is so common, by the founder of the Skeptics Society. The expanded edition adds the chapter most relevant here, “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things,” whose thesis Shermer compresses into a memorable line: intelligent people are often especially skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for reasons that were not intelligent. This supports the chapter’s closing point that education and verbal facility can entrench false beliefs rather than dissolve them.
Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
A landmark essay, written while Sontag was herself undergoing cancer treatment, against the habit of treating disease as a sign of the sufferer’s character or psychology. She argues that “psychologizing” illness—casting cancer as the disease of the repressed or the emotionally blocked—is a form of victim-blaming that can shame patients and steer them away from effective treatment. The essay is the canonical statement of the ethical objection this chapter raises to mind-causes-disease doctrines.
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