In memoriam: Nick Spanos

On the weekend of June 4-6, 1994, Nicholas P. Spanos flew his own plane to his former home in Edgartown, Massachusetts. On his return trip to Ottawa, he ran into bad weather and crashed. His death, at age 52, is a terrible and tragic loss not only to his family and friends but also for the science of psychology and the humanistic and skeptical causes.

Nick was not only a productive and prolific scholar but also a great teacher and mentor, as well as one of the world's foremost authorities on hypnotic phenomena and social psychology. In a l991 article that examined eminence among social psychologists, Nick was ranked one of the hundred most eminent, and in terms of productivity he was ranked third in the world.

Although most of his professional career was spent at Carleton University in Ottawa, he was an American by birth and received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Boston University. After getting his doctorate in individual, group, and family psychotherapy, he joined the Medfield State Hospital and Medfield Foundation, working closely with T. X. Barber, before becoming the director of clinical services with Boston Psychological Associates.

Recognizing the lack of scientific underpinnings for so much of clinical psychology, he joined the Department of Psychology at Carleton in 1975, where he undertook an astonishing research career. Between 1975 and 1994, Nick wrote 183 journal articles, 19 chapters for various medical and psychological textbooks, and published two outstanding textsbooks: one with Barber and J. F. Chaves titled Hypnosis, Imagination & Human Potentialities (Pergamon, 1974), and was the senior editor, with Chaves, of the second, Hypnosis: The Cognitive-Behavioral Perspective (Prometheus, 1989).

He also contributed several articles to the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER over the years and has done as much as anyone to clarify the role of social factors and suggestion in cases of demonic and satanic possession, dissociative disorders, religious mania, glossolalia, past-lives regression, and alien abductions.

His most recent work was a brilliant paper showing the iatrogenic origin of so-called "multiple personality disorders" (MPD). At the time of his death Nick was also working on an edited volume dealing with the false memory syndrome. Had he lived he would have appeared on the Alien Abductions panel at CSICOP's Seattle Conference in June.

Life, as John F. Kennedy said years ago, is often unfair. The cause of truth has lost a major contributor; skeptics have lost a valuable friend.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning