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Throughout history, defining anomalous or exceptional experiences (ExE) and drawing the line between psychopathology and normality has remained a challenge. Today the field still remains shrouded in ambiguity. Whoever ventures to look at exceptional experiences from a clinical perspective may find two opposite problems. On the one hand, one may be criticized for pathologizing experiences that are normal, if not spiritual, enriching, and mind-expanding. On the other hand it is assumed that ExE are mere symptoms of a mental disorder that has to be treated accordingly, if one does not want to be accused of malpractice. This is a typical case example illustrating the problem:

Ms. F., a 50 year-old woman, owner of a beauty salon, asked for advice because she urgently needed help “to cut through the energy band” which connected her with an internet acquaintance she had met in a grief forum after the death of her father. About this relationship she told the following story:“Via chat, phone and email, I spent almost every night for several hours talking and chatting with this man and soon a “crazy closeness” developed:“We could mutually call each other telepathically. I could feel him and knew what he was doing. He was also able to feel me physically. To test our telepathic bond we set up experiments and found out it really worked. Pretty soon he tried to meet me in reality, but when I suggested to bring my husband along he didn’t want that and as a consequence we have never seen each other face to face.” Long before she met him through the Internet, a therapist gave her the idea of being a “survivor twin.” Whether there had ever been a twin …