Etzel Cardeña

Who is Etzel Cardeña?

Etzel Cardeña is the Thorsen Professor of Psychology at Lund University, Sweden where he is Director of the Centre for Research on Consciousness and Anomalous Psychology. A native of Mexico, Cardeña studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana in México and completed an MA in clinical psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada and an MA and PhD in Personality Psychology at the University of California, Davis. His doctoral thesis under the supervision of Charles Tart was on the phenomenology of deep states of hypnosis. He subsequently went on to do post-doctoral work in the area of dissociation and hypnosis at Stanford University under David Spiegel. Cardeña has held academic posts at Georgetown University, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the University of Texas–Pan American, among others. He has served as President of the Society of Psychological Hypnosis, the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and the Parapsychological Association for the year 2008-2009. He has expressed views in favour of the validity of some paranormal phenomena. In a series of interviews with Swedish Newspapers he has said that there is evidence for telepathy, psychokinesis and precognition and that he himself has had experiences that could be interpreted as supporting the psi hypothesis. His edited book Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence published in 2000 and a second edition in 2014 is a scholarly volume on anomalous experiences. His two volumes Altering Consciousness discusses the importance of altered states across history, culture, and in many disciplines including philosophy, anthropology, psychology, biology, and various others.