Etzel Cardeña

Etzel Cardeña (born 9 November 1957) is a Mexican-born psychologist and parapsychologist who holds the Thorsen Chair in Psychology at Lund University, Sweden, where he directs the Centre for Research on Consciousness and Anomalous Psychology (CERCAP).

Licensed as a clinical psychologist in Mexico, he earned his PhD from the University of California, Davis, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. His core academic expertise is in hypnosis, dissociation, and altered states of consciousness: he has served as president of the Society of Psychological Hypnosis and of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and edits the Journal of Parapsychology.

(Outside psychology he has also worked as a theatre director, actor, and playwright, serving as artistic director of the International Theatre of Malmö.) Cardeña is among the most academically credentialed contemporary parapsychologists, arguing that anomalous experiences — out-of-body states, apparent telepathy, exceptional human experiences — deserve rigorous, non-dismissive scientific study rather than reflexive debunking.

In 2018 he published a widely discussed review in the American Psychological Association’s American Psychologist, “The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review,” arguing that the cumulative database for psi is stronger than commonly acknowledged.

The paper drew sharp critical replies, and the underlying claims remain contested. The Atlas presents him as a serious, methodologically careful investigator working at the disputed frontier: his case for taking the evidence seriously stands alongside the equally honest fact that the field has not produced a demonstration that reliably replicates across independent labs.