Unidentified Read Online Free PDF Page A

if book sales picked up.
    “Medication and therapy over four months reversed her condition.” He clicked the remote again and a new picture of the same woman appeared. But now she was smiling, unbruised, and wearing dress pants and a cardigan. “This is the patient today. We were able to determine that both chemical imbalances in her brain and repressed childhood abuses had contributed to her illness. In spite of claims that her house was haunted, since her treatment there have been no recurrences of the events that led to her condition.”
    A hand in the audience shot up. A little taken a back, Evans squinted out at the man whose hand had broken his train of thought. “Yes?”
    “You suggest in your book that the first step to helping such patients is to approach such problems on their own terms,” The male audience member said. “Isn’t this essentially pandering to their delusions that such paranormal hocus-pocus is real?”
    Evans smiled. This question. Always this fucking question.
    “First of all, thanks for reading my book. If you’ll recall, I explained in my book that there is no use in initiating therapy from an attacking position if the patient sincerely believes what they are experiencing is paranormal. But the objective is to move them towards the recognition that such things are products of the subconscious mind in its effort to cope with painful memories or manifestations of complicated medical conditions.”
    Evans could read the unconvinced face of the man. But before he could continue, a second hand shot up on the other side of the room. Well, I guess it’s Q&A time already, he thought. Fine, let’s just get on with it then.
    “Uh, yes?” Evans turned to the new questioner.
    This time it was a middle-aged woman. “But, Dr. Evans,” she began, unable or uninterested in hiding her combative tone. “Is there any room in your thinking for the remote possibility that some paranormal events may in fact be legitimate? Or is every supernatural or spiritual occurrence to be explained away as just happening in the patient’s head?”
    The man who’d asked the first question emitted a groan. It was a loaded question. No doubt she’d been waiting for an opportunity to ask it. He wondered if she’d heard anything he had presented so far. He doubted that she’d ever read his book. She probably had just read a few witty customer reviews on Amazon and felt informed enough to relegate him to a particular category in her mind. Well, okay, thought Evans. He had not expected this question, but this might be good. This just might allow him to reinforce his commitment to empirical science that seemed so increasingly hard for many readers and critics of his book to grasp. Even some fellow psychiatrists and psychologists had begun to question his methods as he didn’t immediately throw out the profound shaping power of the subjective experience of his patients when it came to the “paranormal.” One day he’d write a book about American pop culture’s unhealthy fixation with insisting everything be seen as a system of hard facts with no mystery. But of course, even he thought most “paranormal” experiences were ludicrous. It wasn’t that science couldn’t explain such things. It was simply a matter that current science might not always be fully equipped to understand such things in the moment. After all, the pop-empirical crowd who loved to spout off facts in arguments about nutrition, vaccination, and even evolution seemed to constantly forget that the history of science is one of constant revisions and refinements as new evidence overturns old ideas.
    “My work in neuroscience and therapy are based on evidence and empirical data,” he said calmly. “I don’t think we help our patients by entertaining ideas of ghosts, or demons, or past lives, or little grey men from outer space.”
    “Then why not immediately address this with the patient?” the first questioner piped up again.
    Shit. Back to