Obit For A Pseudo-Scientist

Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross is dead. (Or is she?) Ron Rosenbaum gives her a very fair treatment in Slate.

During my junior year in high school I had an English teacher who forced us (and in particular, me) to write interpretations of death in literature according to Kuebler-Ross's nauseatingly saccharine DABDA theory. (This same teacher was fond of flashing her Harvard "Education Degree" [I use quotation marks advisedly--ed.] like bling-bling, which should have set off peremptory alarms.) At the time, I thought that Kuebler-Ross was a poseur/new age popularizer whose ideas were silly but harmless. It turns out, as Rosenbaum explains, that she was quite the headcase herself, and might have claimed a few victims from among her grieving test subjects:

What prompted my examination was a small—but stunning—news clipping I came across in the early '80s describing the completely bizarre sexual scandal at Kübler-Ross' retreat in Escondido, Calif., the mountaintop center she called Shanti Nilaya. The scandal concerned the involvement of Kübler-Ross—and some of the grieving widows visiting her retreat—with a self-proclaimed spirit medium who conned them all into believing he had the ability to channel "afterlife entities." Not only channel them but facilitate their having sex with the grieving widows.

I'd say that's rather damning. Almost enough to justify dropping her from high school English curricula, no?