Abstract

Unusual or out-of-the ordinary experiences that do not easily match a culture’s generally held understandings of what is real and what is not real tend to be dismissed and pathologised. People who hold beliefs that conflict with the common worldview are often viewed as either dangerous or mad, and those in power have often made great investments into the policing and eradication of such “aberration”, a prominent example being the Inquisition in much of the last millennium. In the wake of the anti-psychiatry movement, some would regard traditional medical psychiatry as having taken the place of the foremost belief-censoring authority in the Westernised world today. However, the discipline of psychology has also played its part in the oppression of what is regarded as “the other” by those in power. In particular, it has done this by unquestioningly upholding dominant assumptions about what counts as real and what does not and by not challenging the pathologisation of experiences that do not fit dominant definitions of reality.