There was no need for a term like ‘magical thinking’ in the Golden Age of Man…there was only genuine everyday magic and mysticism. Children were not mocked or scolded in those days for singing to...

Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.

magical reason”—pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor.

Too many people confuse real magic with magical thinking. Real magic isn’t a trick and it transforms our lives. Magical thinking is denial.Real magic is what happens when we break old belief patterns and have...

If I shut everything else out and filled the room with memories, the past could become the present, and I could live there, with him. I would never leave.

Escape from reality. In some instances, dissociation induces people to imagine that they have some kind of mastery over intractable environmental difficulties. Dissociation is often implicated in magical thinking or self-induced trance states. This aspect...

It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating...

In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic will deny till the very last moment that anything magical is...