Stanley Krippner (born October 4, 1932) is an American psychologist and parapsychologist. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1954 and M.A. (1957) and Ph.D. (1961) degrees from Northwestern University.
From 1972 to 2019, he was an executive faculty member and the Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in Oakland, California. Formerly, Krippner was director of the Kent State University Child Study Center (1961-1964) and director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory in Brooklyn, New York (1964-1972).
Following his time at Saybrook, he continued on as an Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, professor of psychology at Akamai University, and as a research professor at the California Institute for Human Science, which he helped found in 1992.
Biography
Krippner has written extensively on altered states of consciousness, dream telepathy, hypnosis, shamanism, dissociation, and parapsychological subjects. Krippner was an early leader in Division 32 of the American Psychological Association (APA), the division concerned with humanistic psychology, serving as President of the division from 1980–1981. He also served as president of division 30, the Society for Psychological Hypnosis, and is a Fellow of five APA divisions. Krippner has conducted experiments with Montague Ullman into dream telepathy at the Maimonides Medical Center. In 2002, Krippner won the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology.APA webpage. Retrieved 26 December 2017.
Maimonides ESP Dream Studies
The dream laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Centre was established in 1962, and Krippner joined the staff in 1964 as the first dream telepathy studies were commencing. The design of the first experiment had already been established at this point, by Montague Ullman and Sol Feldstein. In total Krippner, Ullman and Alan Vaughan list ten dream telepathy experiments in their 1973 book Dream Telepathy, beginning with the first screening study in the summer of 1964 and ending with "The Second Bessant Study".
All ten experiments involved an 'agent' who would attempt to transmit the contents of an image to the sleeping target, usually an art print. Krippner, Ullman and Vaughan concluded that the majority of these studies produced statistically significant results, with the exception of three which did not. One of the better known studies involved a single subject, dream researcher Robert Van de Castle, and took place over 8 discontinuous nights over the course of 1967. This is the experiment which was later detailed and criticized by C. E. M. Hansel (see 'Reception' below).
Notable collaborations and relationships
Timothy Leary
In September 1961, at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in New York, Krippner attended a panel featuring Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, Frank Barron, and Gerald Heard on psilocybin and other psychoactive substances. Following the panel, he wrote a letter to Leary expressing his desire to volunteer as a test subject for the Harvard Psilocybin Project. In March 1962, he traveled to Harvard University to participate in a session of the experiment organized by Leary. Krippner took a 30-milligram psilocybin tablet, and afterwards reported his experience of the 'trip' to Leary. He has stated that this session led to his subsequent lifelong research interest in psychedelics, including a chapter in the 1968 book The Psychedelic Artist. Krippner remained in contact with Leary from 1962 until Leary's death in 1996, and attended Leary's wedding to Nena von Schlebrügge in December 1964. In 1965 he wrote a summary of several of Leary's psilocybin experiments for the journal Etc: A Review of General Semantics, in which he discussed the benefits of psychedelics in helping distinguish the "maps" formed by words from the "territory" of the experiential world.
The Grateful Dead
Krippner was introduced to Mickey Hart, one of the drummers for the Grateful Dead, at a birthday party for Alla Rakha in New York in 1967. Hart wanted to ask him about hypnosis, and its potential to improve his drumming. This meeting led to a long relationship between Krippner and the band. Krippner would hypnotize Hart and fellow drummer Bill Kreutzmann, in order to help them better sync their drumming. In 1971, the Grateful Dead collaborated with Krippner on a series of six "ESP Shows" at the Capitol Theatre in New York. At some point during the concert, slides projected on a screen above the stage would advertise to concertgoers that “YOU ARE ABOUT TO PARTICIPATE IN AN ESP EXPERIMENT”, then show them a picture and encourage them to use ESP to send the picture to a man named Malcolm Bessent, sleeping at the Maimonides lab 45 miles away. Krippner published the results of these "experiments" in an article titled An experiment in dream telepathy with "The Grateful Dead" in the Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine. A pair of judges were asked to match each of Bessent's six dream reports against each of the 6 images shown to the concert crowd, and score the similarity out of 100. Krippner reported in his article that the "correct" pairs received the highest ratings for 4 of the 6 images.
Alan Watts
Krippner first met Alan Watts in 1962 when he travelled to Harvard to participate in Leary's Psilocybin Project. At Leary's invitation he attended a dinner in honour of Watts, having previously read Watts' The Way of Zen. They were subsequently reintroduced by a mutual friend, Virginia Glenn. The two became friends and professional peers, and gave lectures and workshops together. Krippner credits him for contributing to his interest in Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism, and in 1966 Watts conducted a Buddhist wedding for Krippner and his partner Lelie Harris. Watts and Krippner also collaborated on campaigning for marijuana decriminalization, with Watts joining an advocacy committee created by Krippner which organised events and wrote to public officials.
Rolling Thunder
In 1970 Krippner was introduced to medicine man Rolling Thunder by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. Krippner subsequently invited him to the 3rd annual Council Grove Conference on the Voluntary Control of Internal States, where he introduced him to the audience. This has been described as the formal introduction of shamanism into the transpersonal psychology movement, although Rolling Thunder never described himself as a shaman. The two remained friends and occasionally presented together, including with Alan Watts at New Mexico State University in 1972. Krippner also became friends with Rolling Thunder’s grandson, Sidian Morning Star Jones, and the two of them co-authored a biography The Voice of Rolling Thunder in 2012.
Reception
Dream telepathy
In 1973, Krippner co-authored a book Dream Telepathy with Montague Ullman and Alan Vaughan, which detailed among other studies the results of dream telepathy experiments he conducted along with other researchers at Maimonides Medical Center. The summary of the Maimonides chapter concludes that the "procedure produced statistically significant results indicating the telepathic effects had been produced in the subjects' dreams". Krippner followed this book up with other writings on the Maimonides experiments, for example a 1993 article in the Journal of Parapsychology. The experiments have not been consistently replicated.Wiseman, Richard. (2014). Night School: Wake Up to the Power of Sleep. Macmillan. p. 202. Wiseman writes regarding Krippner and Ullman's experiments "Over the years, many researchers have failed to replicate their remarkable findings and, as a result, the work is seen as curious but not proof of the paranormal."Parker, Adrian. (1975). States of Mind: ESP and Altered States of Consciousness. Taplinger. p. 90. Hyman, Ray. (1986). Maimonides dream-telepathy experiments. Skeptical Inquirer 11: 91–92.Neher, Andrew. (2011). Paranormal and Transcendental Experience: A Psychological Examination. Dover Publications. p. 145. In a review of the research published in American Psychologist, professor Irwin Child, former head of the Department of Psychology at Yale University, concluded that 'the tendency toward hits rather than misses cannot reasonably be ascribed to chance'. But this favorable commentary has been criticized by a number of reviews and respondents, who argued that Krippner's work like most parapsychology severely lacked in rigor and instituting proper controls against bias.
In 1985, psychologist C. E. M. Hansel criticized the picture target experiments that were conducted by Krippner and Ullman. According to Hansel, there were weaknesses in the design of the experiments in the way in which the agent became aware of their target picture. Only the agent should have known the target and no other person until the judging of targets had been completed, however, an experimenter was with the agent when the target envelope was opened. Hansel also wrote there had been poor controls in the experiment as the main experimenter could communicate with the subject.Hansel, C. E. M. (1985). The Search for a Demonstration of ESP. In Paul Kurtz. A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 97–127. In 2002, Krippner denied Hansel's accusations claiming the agent did not communicate with the experimenter.Ramakrishna Rao, K, Gowri Rammohan, V. (2002). New Frontiers of Human Science: A Festschrift for K. Ramakrishna Rao. McFarland. p. 135.
An attempt to replicate the experiments that used picture targets was carried out by Edward Belvedere and David Foulkes. The finding was that neither the subject nor the judges matched the targets with dreams above chance level.Belvedere, E., Foulkes, D. (1971). Telepathy and Dreams: A Failure to Replicate. Perceptual and Motor Skills 33: 783–789. Results from other experiments by Belvedere and Foulkes were also negative.Hansel, C. E. M. (1989). The Search for Psychic Power: ESP and Parapsychology Revisited. Prometheus Books. pp. 141–152.
In 2003, Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe wrote a review that claimed support for dream telepathy at Maimonides. However, James Alcock noted that their review was based on "extreme messiness" of data. Alcock concluded the dream telepathy experiments at Maimonides have failed to provide evidence for telepathy and "lack of replication is rampant."Alcock, James. (2003). Give the Null Hypothesis a Chance: Reasons to Remain Doubtful about the Existence of Psi. Journal of Consciousness Studies 10: 29–50. "In their article, Sherwood and Roe examine attempts to replicate the well-known Maimonides dream studies that began in the 1960s. They provide a good review of these studies of dream telepathy and clairvoyance, but if one thing emerges for me from their review, it is the extreme messiness of the data adduced. Lack of replication is rampant. While one would normally expect that continuing scientific scrutiny of a phenomenon should lead to stronger effect sizes as one learns more about the subject matter and refines the methodology, this is apparently not the case with this research." However, in 2017 the same authors, along with Lance Storm, Patrizio E. Tressoldi, Adam J. Rock, and Lorenzo Di Risio, published an expanded meta-analysis of dream studies from 1966-2016, concluding with much the same wording as their 2003 review that "Combined effect sizes for both Maimonides and post-Maimonides studies suggest that judges may be able to use dream mentations to identify target materials correctly more often than would be expected by chance."
Psychics