Wilson van dusen and obituary templates
When Wilson Van Dusen wrote, The Presence of Spirits in Craziness he was Chief Psychologist luck Mendocino State Hospital in Calif..
David W. VanDusen, 77, of Wind Gap, passed away peacefully at home surrounded by family on Thursday, March 30,
In 1972, Wilson Van Dusen, a practicing psychiatrist, wrote a book about his patients and the eighteenth century scientist Emanuel Swedenborg. The relationship between Swedenborg and Wilson Van Dusen is founded upon the confluence of their respective researches. When Van Dusen wrote The Presence of spirits in Madness, he was Chief Psychologist at Mendocino State Hospital in California. He had spent 17 years there working among the mentally ill, and during his time at Mendocino State, he practiced standard psychiatric techniques. He was, however, a fan of Swedenborg and had read all of his writings.
Over the course of about ten years, he noticed a correlation between the hallucinations of his patients and the things that Swedenborg had written about his spiritual experiences.
Thus, he began to experiment with a phenomenological approach to his patients’ hallucinations. Although he did this in his free time, and this approach was aimed more at research