Overview

Elisabeth Targ occupied a distinctive position in late-twentieth-century parapsychology: a psychiatrist embedded in a major medical center, conducting randomized controlled trials on distant healing rather than laboratory-based psi experiments. Targ’s career was marked by a commitment to clinical rigor and double-blind methodology applied to questions that mainstream medicine had largely abandoned or dismissed. Her work at the California Pacific Medical Center represented an attempt to bring the evidentiary standards of clinical research to bear on anomalous healing phenomena, particularly in the context of advanced AIDS, a disease for which conventional medicine offered limited options during the 1990s.

Targ’s approach differed fundamentally from much parapsychology research of her era. Rather than recruiting volunteer participants for laboratory experiments, Targ worked with patients facing terminal illness, asking whether distant healing (intentional mental focus directed toward another person’s wellbeing) could produce measurable improvements in clinical outcomes. This clinical orientation, combined with her psychiatric training and her family connection to parapsychology research (her father was physicist Russell Targ, a pioneer in remote-viewing research at Stanford Research Institute), positioned Elisabeth Targ as a bridge between medical science and anomalous-cognition research.

Targ’s career was tragically shortened by her own illness. She died in 2002 of glioblastoma at age 41, cutting short a body of work that was still developing. Nevertheless, her published research and her methodological contributions, particularly the application of double-blind, randomized-trial design to distant-healing research, left a mark on how parapsychology engages with clinical populations and medical outcomes.

Life and career

Elisabeth Targ was born in 1961 into a family already engaged with parapsychology research. Her father, Russell Targ, was a laser physicist at Stanford Research Institute who became known for pioneering work in remote-viewing research during the 1970s and 1980s. However, Elisabeth’s own path led toward medicine and psychiatry rather than physics or laboratory parapsychology. She earned her medical degree and specialized in psychiatry, eventually joining the faculty and research staff at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.

At CPMC, Targ established herself as a clinical researcher with interests in both psychiatric phenomenology and anomalous healing. During the 1990s, as the AIDS epidemic reached its peak in the United States and antiretroviral therapies remained limited or unavailable for many patients, Targ began designing clinical trials to test whether distant healing (a practice with roots in various spiritual and religious traditions) could produce measurable clinical benefit. This work represented a deliberate choice to investigate parapsychological phenomena not in the laboratory but in the clinic, using patients with a serious medical condition as the study population.

Targ’s position at a major medical center gave her access to patient populations, institutional review boards, and the infrastructure necessary to conduct rigorous clinical trials. It also exposed her work to scrutiny from mainstream medicine, which remained skeptical of distant healing and parapsychology generally. Nevertheless, Targ persisted in designing and executing studies that met the methodological standards expected of clinical research: randomization, double-blinding, control groups, and pre-specified outcome measures.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Targ also contributed to the parapsychological literature on psi-related experiences, examining how individuals report and interpret anomalous cognition and healing experiences. This work situated her within broader conversations in parapsychology about the phenomenology of psi and its relationship to psychological constructs.

Targ’s career was cut short by illness. She was diagnosed with glioblastoma in the early 2000s and died in 2002 at age 41. Her death marked the end of an active research program that had only begun to establish itself in the medical literature.

Research

Distant healing in advanced AIDS

Targ’s most significant published contribution was a randomized double-blind study of distant healing in patients with advanced AIDS. In collaboration with Friedman Sicher, Diane Moore, and Harris Smith, Targ designed and executed a trial in which patients with advanced HIV disease were randomly assigned to receive either distant healing or a control condition. The study employed rigorous methodological controls: participants and clinicians were blinded to treatment assignment, and outcome measures were specified in advance.¹

This work was notable for several reasons. First, it brought the randomized controlled trial (the gold standard of clinical research) to bear on a question that mainstream medicine had not seriously investigated. Second, it worked with a vulnerable population (patients with advanced AIDS) rather than healthy volunteers, raising both ethical and methodological questions about how to conduct parapsychology research in clinical contexts. Third, the study reported measurable clinical outcomes, suggesting that distant healing, if real, could produce effects detectable by standard medical measures.¹

The distant-healing trial represented Targ’s signature methodological contribution: the application of clinical-trial design to parapsychological questions. Rather than asking whether psi could be detected in a laboratory setting, Targ asked whether it could produce clinically meaningful changes in a real-world medical population. This reframing of the research question (from laboratory detection to clinical utility) was distinctive and remains influential in discussions of how parapsychology might engage with medicine.

Psi-related experiences and phenomenology

Beyond the distant-healing trial, Targ contributed to the parapsychological literature on how individuals experience and report anomalous cognition. In a chapter on psi-related experiences, Targ examined the phenomenological characteristics of such experiences and their relationship to psychological and parapsychological frameworks.² This work situated Targ within broader conversations in parapsychology about the subjective experience of psi and how such experiences are interpreted by individuals and researchers.

Experimental investigation of psi phenomena

Targ also contributed to empirical investigation of psi phenomena using controlled experimental protocols. In work conducted with her father Russell Targ and O. Lichtargf, Elisabeth Targ participated in studies employing experimental methods to investigate psi-related phenomena.³ This work contributed to the empirical characterization of psi phenomena and to understanding how methodological variables in experimental design affect the detection and measurement of anomalous cognition.

The combination of laboratory-based psi research (represented by the experimental work with her father) and clinical distant-healing trials (represented by the AIDS study) gave Targ’s career a distinctive breadth. Few researchers in parapsychology have worked across both laboratory and clinical domains with equal rigor.

Influence and reception

Elisabeth Targ’s work has had a complex reception. Within parapsychology, her distant-healing trial is frequently cited as a methodologically rigorous example of how clinical research can be brought to bear on parapsychological questions. The study’s use of randomization, double-blinding, and pre-specified outcome measures set a standard that subsequent distant-healing research has attempted to meet or exceed. Her work demonstrated that parapsychology research could be conducted within mainstream medical institutions and published in medical journals, lending credibility to the field.

Within mainstream medicine and psychiatry, Targ’s work has been treated with cautious skepticism. The distant-healing trial, while methodologically sound by parapsychology standards, remains controversial in medical circles, where the plausibility of distant healing is questioned and alternative explanations (placebo effects, spontaneous remission, regression to the mean) are preferred. Nevertheless, Targ’s work has been cited in medical literature on complementary and alternative medicine, and her methodological approach (rigorous double-blinding and randomization applied to healing interventions) has influenced how such research is designed.

Targ’s early death in 2002 meant that her research program did not continue to develop as it might have. Had she lived, she might have conducted additional distant-healing trials, refined her methodology further, or expanded her work to other clinical populations. As it stands, her published work represents a snapshot of late-1990s and early-2000s parapsychology research at its most methodologically sophisticated and clinically engaged.

In recent years, Targ’s work has been revisited in discussions of how parapsychology might contribute to integrative medicine and how clinical research methodology can be applied to anomalous healing. Her distant-healing trial remains one of the most frequently cited examples of parapsychology research conducted in a medical setting with rigorous controls. Whether one views her results as evidence for distant healing or as a methodologically sound null result that requires explanation, her work has established a template for how such research should be conducted.

Targ’s legacy is also personal and institutional. Her presence at the California Pacific Medical Center demonstrated that parapsychology research could be conducted within mainstream medical institutions by credentialed medical professionals. This institutional legitimacy, even if contested, opened space for subsequent research on anomalous healing and complementary medicine within academic medical centers.