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In The Case for Possession Cynthia Pettiward suggests that depressed and psychotic states, both of mind and body, could sometimes be induced by agencies outside the psychological personality-structure. She believes that there are grounds for assuming that this hypothesis is worth studying. Her belief arises not only from the case-histories she has investigated but from personal experience and observation.

Pettiward leaves aside the question of demonic possession, although she does not reject it; instead, she summarises some of the evidence pointing to possession by discarnate human entities – the ‘earthbound’ dead. In order to posit this thesis it is inevitable that belief in survival of bodily death be accepted, and Pettiward is as much concerned to bring forward the evidence for survival as to study the case for possession.

In chapter 1 the author states: “Accepting, as I must, that not only do we survive bodily death, but that we cannot escape survival, I find plentiful evidence that the nature of the afterlife varies in quality as much as does earthly life. The saints of this world appear to find satisfaction and creative work on the next plane, and that almost immediately after death. Those who have led destructive lives have made a hell for themselves, and to that hell they are condemned. But outside the spectrum that ranges from the happy to the unhappy dead – there is another class – the earthbound.”

Cynthia Pettiward was a scholar of Lady Margaret Oxford and after taking a degree in Modern Languages she qualified as an architect. But her real abilities, she found, lay in teaching, and she taught in France and South Africa as well as in England. On retiring from teaching she concentrated on healing which, she felt, goes hand in hand with genuine teaching, along the road to wholeness, whether of pupil or patient. She was a practitioner of Radionics for some years, and a member of the Radionic Association. Personal experience brought her to postulate that the causes of ill-health, both mental and physical, occasionally lie outside the psycho-logical personality-structure, with its disharmonies and traumas. The impact of discarnate minds upon sensitives is, maybe, greater than we yet realise. In this book she has made an attempt to suggest that such a hypothesis is worth investigating.