Alongside the clinic and the laboratory there is a third approach to the extraordinary: sociology – the question of how many people have such experiences, how they interpret them, and what a society makes of them. In the German-speaking world this perspective is inseparable from Ina Schmied-Knittel: a researcher at the IGPP in Freiburg since 1998, co-author of Europe's first representative near-death experience survey – and the biographer of Fanny Moser.
Career: the researcher of constructions
Schmied-Knittel is a political scientist and sociologist and has been part of the IGPP's scientific team since 1998 – the cultural and social science branch we introduced in the institute portrait as the thematic field "society – knowledge – discourses". Her doctorate (Freiburg, 2008) says much about her way of looking: a discourse analysis of "ritual abuse" – the satanism panic of the 1990s, in which therapists, media and authorities constructed an occult crime network that could never be empirically confirmed. Someone who has studied how societies produce false certainties about the occult brings the best inoculation there is for researching genuine exceptional experiences: she knows how narratives arise, amplify and take on lives of their own – on the believers' side as much as on the sceptics' side.
2001: Europe's first representative NDE survey
Her internationally best-known research contribution appeared in 2001 – then still under the name Ina Schmied – together with the sociologists Hubert Knoblauch and Bernt Schnettler in the Journal of Near-Death Studies: "Different Kinds of Near-Death Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany" – the first representative population survey on near-death experiences in Europe. More than 2,000 Germans were surveyed; four percent reported a near-death experience. Extrapolated, that means millions of experiencers in Germany alone – the phenomenon is no exotic rarity but part of the reality of the population.
As important as the frequency was the content: the reported experiences were more diverse than the classic Moody schema would suggest, and they varied with cultural variables – most strikingly between the religiously shaped West and the post-socialist East of Germany, where the same experiences were less often given religious interpretations. The study thus provided German data for a question we met as the "culture question" in our article on the Greyson Scale: what part of the experience is a stable core, and what is cultural colouring of its interpretation? The sober sociological answer: both exist, and whoever sees only one of them makes a mistake.
2003: the Psi Report Germany
Two years later, with the sociologist Michael Schetsche, came the "Psi Report Germany" – a representative population survey on exceptional experiences as a whole, published in the volume "Alltägliche Wunder" ("Everyday Miracles", edited by Eberhard Bauer and Schetsche, 2003). The core result is in the book's title: more than half of the German population report at least one exceptional experience of their own – impressions of telepathy, precognitive dreams, apparitions of the deceased and the like. Statistically speaking, the "supernatural" is an everyday matter.
The significance of this finding is hard to overstate. It answers the most common objection to this whole field – "these are isolated cases of odd people" – with population data: it is the neighbours, the colleagues, one's own family, across all levels of education and age. And it explains why the IGPP's free counselling service and contact points such as those of IANDS are needed: if half the population has such experiences but our culture has no place for them, the result is precisely the speechlessness in which experiencers are otherwise left alone.
Heterodoxy: deviant knowledge
Her third field of work is the sociology of "deviant knowledge": with Schetsche she edited the 2018 volume "Heterodoxie: Konzepte, Traditionen, Figuren der Abweichung" – the question of how bodies of knowledge come to be declared "unscientific", who polices that border, and what happens along it. It is the same boundary work that has occupied us in our discussions of distancing gestures and the career risks of frontier research – Schmied-Knittel studies it systematically. Her involvement with the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik fits this, the society that with its Zeitschrift für Anomalistik sustains the German-language forum for these debates.
Science und Séance: Moser's biographer
Readers of this series already know her most recent major work: the biography "Science und Séance" (2022) about Fanny Moser – the zoologist and investigator of hauntings whose bequest carries the IGPP. That the institute's house biographer is of all people its sociologist has an inner logic: Moser's life between microscope and séance is itself a study in the boundaries of science, in women's history of science and in the price of engaging with the proscribed – Schmied-Knittel's core themes in a single person.
Context
Our portrait series has so far featured mainly clinicians, experimenters and case researchers. Schmied-Knittel represents the third pillar without which the picture would remain incomplete: the surveying of the extraordinary in the population. Her two big numbers – four percent near-death experiences, more than fifty percent exceptional experiences – belong to the foundation of almost every argument that appears on this site. And her double competence – the researcher of panics who maps genuine experiences – embodies the Freiburg style in its purest form: neither believing nor waving away, but counting, comparing, understanding.
Sources: Hubert Knoblauch, Ina Schmied, Bernt Schnettler, "Different Kinds of Near-Death Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany", Journal of Near-Death Studies 20 (2001), 15–29, full text; Ina Schmied-Knittel & Michael Schetsche, "Psi-Report Deutschland. Eine repräsentative Bevölkerungsumfrage zu außergewöhnlichen Erfahrungen", in: Eberhard Bauer & Michael Schetsche (eds.), Alltägliche Wunder. Erfahrungen mit dem Übersinnlichen – wissenschaftliche Befunde (Ergon, Würzburg 2003); Ina Schmied-Knittel, Science und Séance. Die Biologin und Parapsychologin Fanny Moser (1872–1953) (Ergon/Nomos, 2022); career and research fields on the IGPP team page and at the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.