William Thetford

William Thetford (April 25, 1923 – July 4, 1988) was an American psychologist, medical psychologist and professor.

He is best known for his collaboration with Helen Schucman in typing the original manuscript and being on the editing team for A Course in Miracles (ACIM), a self-study curriculum in spiritual psychology.

Thetford was born on April 25, 1923, in Chicago, Illinois to John and Mabel Thetford as the youngest of three children.

At the time of his birth and early childhood, his parents were both regular members of the Christian Science church.

At the age of seven, the untimely death of his older sister caused his parents to disavow their affiliation with the Church of Christian Science.

Afterwards, for the next few years, Thetford sampled various other Protestant denominations.

At the age of nine he contracted a severe case of scarlet fever, which led to rheumatic fever and a debilitating heart condition.

These resulting health problems forced him to spend the next three years at home recuperating.

During his forced recuperation period he took advantage of the many free hours, using the time to satisfy his voracious appetite for reading.

Despite his absence from the classroom, he entered high school at the age of twelve.

Following graduation from high school, he was awarded a four-year scholarship to DePauw University in Indiana where he graduated with majors in psychology and pre-medicine in 1944.

After graduating from DePauw in January 1944 until the summer of 1945, Thetford had a job as an administrative officer at the University of Chicago working with the scientific team doing atomic research.

In his graduate studies he was fortunate to be one of the first students of the renowned psychologist, Carl Rogers.

During the course of his university studies, Thetford eventually settled on the idea of specializing in psychology, and in 1949 he received his PhD in this field from the University of Chicago.

For the five years following his graduation in 1949, Thetford worked as a research psychologist in both Chicago, and later in Washington, D.C. He was a research psychologist in the Institute for Psychosomatic & Psychiatric Research & Training at the Reese Hospital in Chicago from 1949 to 1951 and a senior psychologist for the United States government in Washington, DC from 1951 to 1954.

In 1953 he was a consultant in Beirut, Lebanon at the Foreign Service Institute.

He spent 1954 and 1955 as the director of clinical psychology at The Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut.

From 1955 to 1957 he was an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell University.

In 1958 he accepted an assistant professorship, which later developed into a full professorship, at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

During a portion of this same period he also served as the Director of Clinical Psychology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.

It was here that he would stay for the next 20 years, and it was here that he first met Helen Schucman, hiring her as a research psychologist and assistant.

A C.V. listing his positions, affiliations, grants, publications and papers is given as Appendix 2 in a biography Never Forget to Laugh by Carol Howe.

From 1960 to 1964, Thetford received several research grants from the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA funding front used for Project MKULTRA.

The Human Ecology Fund provided grants to social scientists and medical researchers to support covert research on brainwashing.

The funded social science research projects produced knowledge that was quietly harvested by CIA personnel to develop persuasion, interrogation and torture methods.

Together with Helen Schucman, he worked on comparative learning behavior of different personality types.

For example, in 1961, Thetford was researcher in Subproject 130 that explored the relationship between personality dimensions and clinical symptoms using the Wechsler intelligence scales.

This speech was given in June 1965.

The next four months were filled with a number of unusually vivid dream sequences and even some unusual waking experiences for Schucman.

Amongst her vivid dream sequences, she began to become familiar with a certain internal character who spoke to her as Jesus in her dreams.

Little did she know that the voice of this dream character would soon come to dominate the rest of her life.

Many of her unusual experiences during these four months are recorded in the biographical work, Absence from Felicity, by Kenneth Wapnick.

Schucman appears to have confided her experiences with Thetford, who acted as a sort of a calming, encouraging and stabilizing influence for Schucman during this period.

Some sources claim that Thetford was involved in Project MKUltra from 1971 to 1978.

However, MKULTRA was halted in 1973 and most documents were destroyed in the same year.

The working relationship between Thetford and Schucman was apparently often somewhat strained, yet throughout these difficulties they would always maintain a certain level of professional courtesy and respect for one another.

The story is often retold that it was into this environment of inter-relational strain between Thetford and Schucman that the ACIM material was in a sense first “invited” into this world.

This “invitation” came in the form of an exclamation by Thetford one day, in the midst of one of their periodic difficulties, in which Thetford exclaimed, “There must be another way!” This exclamation was followed by a certain speech he made to Schucman describing how he believed that it was time for them to try to refocus their energies on constructive and helpful agendas, rather than being forever hyper critical and hyper competitive with one another.

Expecting a typically condescending response from Schucman, the studied silence that followed his speech was then followed by a most surprising concurrence from Schucman, fully supporting his new proposal.

He died in 1988, aged 65, in Tiburon, California, after having made his involvement with the ACIM material and its study the most central focus of his life.