Behavior: The Conversion of K

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From thanatology to séances and sex

Her surprise bestseller of 1969, On Death and Dying, made her well known. The thanatology boom of the 1970s made her famous. Until recently, Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 53, traveled 250,000 miles a year as a star of the U.S. lecture circuit. Her outline of the five phases of death—from angry denial to final acceptance—is routinely taught at school and hospital seminars. Readers of the Ladies' Home Journal chose Kübler-Ross as one of eleven "women of the decade" for the 1970s. Even the movies are beginning to take account of the phenomenon: Bob Fosse's forthcoming film, All That Jazz, features a death-obsessed dancer-director who turns to Kübler-Ross's works for comfort.

The view of Kübler-Ross's canon as solid began to change several years ago, when the psychiatrist raised eyebrows by concluding that death is not so final, after all. "When people die," Kübler-Ross declared, "they very simply shed their body, much as a butterfly comes out of its cocoon." Her growing conviction that the living could communicate with the dead led her to dabble in spiritualism at her retreat north of San Diego. Now Kübler-Ross, who refers to herself as an "immortal visionary and modern cartographer of the River Styx," has apparently lost any remaining credibility with her professional colleagues. The reason: her close association with Jay Barham, who claims to be a psychic and conducts séances that include sexual intercourse between participants and "entities" from the spirit world.

Barham, 50, is a former sharecropper and aircraft worker who founded the Church of the Facet of Divinity four years ago. In his first meeting with Kübler-Ross, he introduced her to her own personal entity, Salem. Greatly impressed, she talked her husband into buying 42 acres of land just across a lake from a nine-acre ranch used by Barham and his wife Martha. Kübler-Ross called her property Shanti-Nilaya ("Home of Peace" in Sanskrit) and made it a center for workshops on death and dying. One result, says a defector from the center, is that "she is so emotionally dependent on the Barhams that she can't see."

Barham conducts group sessions where, he says, spirit entities materialize by cloning themselves from cells of his body. The entities are unusually interested in sex, sometimes pairing off the living participants for fondling or mutual masturbation. In private sessions women are selected for sexual intercourse with an entity. Participants in the sessions, many well-educated, if gullible, middle-class professionals, have had occasional doubts about the entities. One woman says her entity burped during sex, raising the question of whether spirits can have stomach gas. Four women in the group developed the same vaginal infection after visiting an entity on the same night. A few of the participants noticed that entities made the same mistakes in pronunciation (such as "excape" for escape) that Barham did. But most put aside their doubts. "I needed to believe," admitted one woman in the group. "It was a sense of being loved unconditionally.''