psychic

Pluralpsychics

1. 1
   seernouncountable

   A person who has, or appears to have, extrasensory abilities such as precognition, clairvoyance and telepathy, or who seems open to paranormal or supernatural influences.

   The detective was skeptical when a self-described psychic called with a tip about the missing boy.

   As a child he was sure he was a psychic, because he often knew who was calling before the phone rang.

   Similarclairvoyant, seer

   Note

   The root is Greek psukhikós, "of the soul, spirit or mind", and the person sense is a late arrival: psychic first appeared as a noun in 1871. Every later meaning keeps that link to the inner life, whether the subject is second sight, a gnostic class of people or ordinary thought. Because the powers are in doubt, the word often travels with a hedge: a self-described psychic, a so-called psychic.

2. 2
   adjective

   Having the powers of a psychic, or relating to perception beyond the ordinary senses.

   Grandma swore she had a psychic gift for knowing when bad news was on its way.

   The lab ran a series of psychic experiments in which volunteers tried to guess hidden cards.

   Similarclairvoyant, telepathic, paranormal, extrasensory

   Note

   Everyday speech uses it as a joke: You must be psychic! tells someone they guessed exactly what you were about to say. Before a noun it can also name the field that investigates such powers, as when Arthur Conan Doyle sends a sportsman, tired of earthly adventure, into the dim, dark and dubious regions of psychic research.

3. 3
   spirit mediumnouncountable

   A person who is said to contact the dead; a medium.

   The widow hired a psychic to hold a séance and reach her late husband.

   Halfway through the evening, the psychic claimed that the house's former owner was speaking through her.

   Similarmedium, spiritualist

   Note

   Here the psychic works as a medium, a go-between with the dead, often at a séance. Scientific study has never confirmed such contact, so careful writers mark the claim rather than state it as fact: a self-styled psychic, a psychic who said she could reach the husband. The word itself carries no doubt, so the hedge has to come from the sentence.

4. 4
   mentaladjective

   Relating to the mind or psyche, or to mental activity in general.

   Years of bullying left psychic scars that took far longer to heal than her bruises.

   The novelist cares less about plot than about the psychic lives of her characters.

   Similarmental, psychological, emotional

   Oppositephysical, bodily

   Note

   Psychiatrists and critics use this meaning in phrases like psychic mechanisms, R. D. Laing's term in The Politics of Experience (1967), where it simply means mental. Because the "mind-reading" meaning lies so close, a clear noun beside it, such as psychic support or psychic scars, keeps a reader from hearing the paranormal.

5. 5
   middle type (religion)nouncountable

   In the threefold division of humankind taught by the gnostic Valentinus, a person of the second type, focused on intellectual reality rather than on matter or spirit.

   In the Valentinian scheme, the psychic stands above the hylic but below the pneumatic.

   A psychic, on this view, lives by reason and faith but has not yet reached the knowledge of the spirit.

   Note

   In the Valentinian scheme humankind falls into three kinds by which part of them rules: the hylic is bound to matter, the pneumatic to spirit, and the psychic stands between them, living by soul and intellect. The term keeps the old sense of soul at full strength and has nothing to do with the person with second sight.

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