Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - Academic Career

Academic Career

She moved to the United States in 1958 to work and continue her studies in New York.

As she began her psychiatric residency, she was appalled by the hospital treatment of patients who were dying. She began giving a series of lectures featuring terminally ill patients, forcing medical students to confront people who were dying.

In 1962 she accepted a position at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Kübler-Ross completed her training in psychiatry in 1963, and moved to Chicago in 1965. She became an instructor at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine. She developed there a series of seminars using interviews with terminal patients, which drew both praise and criticism. She sometimes questioned the practices of traditional psychiatry that she observed. She also undertook 39 months of classical psychoanalysis training in Chicago.

Her extensive work with the dying led to the book On Death and Dying in 1969. In this work she proposed the now famous Five Stages of Grief as a pattern of adjustment. These five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In general, individuals experience most of these stages, though in no defined sequence, after being faced with the reality of their impending death. The five stages have since been adopted by many as applying to the survivors of a loved one's death, as well.

Kübler-Ross encouraged the hospice care movement, believing that euthanasia prevents people from completing their 'unfinished business'.

In 1977 she persuaded her husband to buy forty acres of land in Escondido, California, near San Diego, where she founded "Shanti Nilaya" (Home of Peace). She intended it as a healing center for the dying and their families. She was also a co-founder of the American Holistic Medical Association.

In the late 1970s Kübler-Ross became interested in out-of-body experiences, mediumship, spiritualism and in other ways attempting to contact the dead. This led to a scandal connected to the Shanti Nilaya healing center where she was duped by the medium Jay Barham, founder of the Church of the Facet of the Divinity. Claiming he could channel the spirits of the departed and summon ethereal "entities", he encouraged church members to engage in sexual relations with the "spirits". He may have hired several women to play the parts of female spirits for this purpose. Kubler-Ross' friend Deanna Edwards attended a service to ascertain whether allegations against Barham were true. He was found to be naked and wearing only a turban when Edwards unexpectedly pulled masking tape off the light switch and flipped on the light.

Kubler-Ross may have thought that Christianity taught transmigration of the soul (reincarnation).

She conducted many workshops on AIDS in different parts of the world. In 1990 she moved the healing Center to her own farm in Head Waters, Virginia to reduce her extensive travelling.

Kübler-Ross suffered a series of strokes in 1995 which left her partially paralyzed on her left side, and the healing Center closed around that time. In a 2002 interview with The Arizona Republic, she stated that she was ready for death. She died in 2004 at her home in Scottsdale, Arizona, and was later buried at the Paradise Memorial Gardens cemetery.