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<\/a>So near and yet so far. \u00a0We didn\u2019t have enough minutes to do Yellowstone even approximate justice today; this has been, for at least two of us, a working vacation, one of whom has fixed hours of employment geared to a different time zone. \u00a0So the eventual choice today wasn\u2019t to go into the National Park but to take the grandchild who is with us here to the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center<\/a> right near our lodging. \u00a0It was a real hit with the Third-Generation Unit. \u00a0(I obscure the gender so as to render him\/her\/it a more difficult target for the tender mercies of my obsessive anonymous internet critics; to choose an example of past behavior, one of them, a still-active stalker, once found my then-very-young son\u2019s Christmas wishlist on an online site and used its contents to frame an attack on my parenting.) \u00a0Now, though, we have an excuse to come back to Yellowstone.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve shared some material here in the past from Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer\u2019s posthumously-published 2008 book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human <\/span><\/em>Mind<\/em>, which impressed me very much. \u00a0To refresh memories, I share the biography for her that appears at the end of the book:<\/span><\/p>\n Known as Lisby by her many friends and colleagues, Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was an internationally known psychoanalyst, researcher, and clinician, the author of groundbreaking papers on female development, clinical technique, the nature of science, and intuition. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she received her doctorate from Stanford University and graduated from the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, where she later became a training and supervising analyst. She was associate clinical professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the psychiatry department at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco. She was also a fellow of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories at Princeton and on the research faculty of the Institute for Health and Healing at California Pacific Medical Center. She maintained a private practice in Berkeley for thirty years. Dr. Mayer served on the editorial boards of many of the major journals in her field, including the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association<\/em>, International Journal of Psychoanalysis<\/em>, Gender and Psychoanalysis<\/em>, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly<\/em>, and Contemporary Psychoanalysis<\/em>. She was the first winner of the American Psychoanalytic Association\u2019s prestigious Menninger Award. A contralto with a long-standing interest in traditional folk and classical music, she was a founder of the California Revels and its artistic director for many years. The mother of two daughters, she was also the producer of an award-winning video series on music education for children and was named Alameda County\u2019s Woman of the Year for Arts and Culture in 1995. Dr. Mayer died on New Year\u2019s Day, 2005, shortly after completing Extraordinary Knowing<\/em>. \u00a0(263)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019ll be on the road for pretty much the rest of the day, heading home, so here are today\u2019s passages:<\/p>\n Clearly, Professor Mayer herself was not obviously and na\u00efvely gullible. \u00a0But, as she puts it, \u201cI had to doubt my existing models of reality or I had to doubt myself\u201d (214). \u00a0In the \u201cEpilogue\u201d to Extraordinary Knowing<\/em>, she refers back to the surprising personal story with which her book opens (and which I very briefly summarized here<\/a>):<\/p>\n<\/a>\n
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