The Conversion of K

From thanatology to seances 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 Kuebler-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 Kuebler-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 Kuebler-Ross's works for comfort.

The view of Kuebler-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," Kuebler-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 Kuebler-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 seances 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 Kuebler-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. Kuebler-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.''

A major complaint was brought up by the men: Why weren't female entities visiting them? Females were then given a role. Barham recruited them to engage in sexual relations by acting as "channels" for entities. Said one: "Jay told me if I practiced hard enough the entities would really come through me. He had me thinking it wasn't really me out there." Barham also taught participants that they had all lived during the time of Jesus and had been among his disciples. Says one woman, recruited as a channel: "He appealed to my ego and really hooked me."

Nearly as controversial as the sexual activity are the psychodrama sessions conducted at the ranch. A man broke a hand while beating on a rug-covered log to vent his anger. One woman received a black eye and a dislocated jaw after being hit in the face, and a month ago, another suffered head injuries in a fall.

Last year a group of angry defectors demanded an investigation into Barham's operations. The California department of consumer affairs looked into the accusation that psychodrama sessions were taking place without a trained therapist in attendance. The department cleared the Barhams: ordained ministers of Barham's church can legally supervise such sessions under California law. This spring the San Diego district attorney's office investigated a report that a ten-year-old girl had been molested by her entity, but no charges have been brought because of lack of evidence.

Kuebler-Ross's faith in Barham is unshaken. A friend, Deanna Edwards, says she attended two darkroom sessions in hopes of changing the psychiatrist's mind about Barham. In both sessions, her entity-guide "Pico" tried to solicit sex. Edwards says she ripped masking tape from a light switch and flipped on the lights, revealing Jay Barham wearing only a turban. "I never heard such screaming," says Edwards, who hastens to explain that it was not the sight of Barham that caused the alarm; the other participants believed that light destroyed an entity. Edwards was sure the demonstration would convince Kuebler-Ross that Barham was a fraud. No such luck. "This man has more gifts than you have ever seen," says Kuebler-Ross. "He is probably the greatest healer that this country has." The current furor does not appear to disturb her. Says she: "Many attempts have been made to discredit us. To respond to them would be like casting pearls to swine."

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