Carl Wickland

Who was Carl Wickland?

Carl August Wickland was a psychiatrist, a paranormal researcher and a non-fiction author.

Wickland was born in 1861 at Liden, Norland Province, Sweden. His father taught him cabinet making in his youth. Later he studied watchmaking.

In 1881 he arrived in St. Paul, Minn. after having emigrated from Sweden the year before. He married Anna W. Anderson in 1896 and they moved to Chicago so that he could attend Durham Medical College from which he graduated in 1900. He became a general practitioner of medicine and specialized in researching mental illnesses.

In 1909, Wickland became chief psychiatrist at the National Psychopathic Institute of Chicago. He continued in that position until 1918 when he and his wife moved to Los Angeles, California. Wickland founded the National Psychological Institute, a non-profit corporation for the research of psychology. The Institute operated a sanitarium, where at any one time six to ten patients would be treated until they were brought back to sanity and good health.

Wickland, in collaboration with his assistants, Nelle Watts, and Celia and Orlando Goerz, wrote and published in 1924, Thirty Years Among the Dead a book that detailed their experiences in abnormal psychology. Wickland believed that the doctrine of reincarnation was incorrect: