Research and Activities
Bender had been skilled in depth psychology and oriented himself mostly by approaches of Pierre Janet and Carl Gustav Jung. From this, it follows that on the one hand, he used mostly a qualitative approach instead of a quantitative one. On the other hand, he held an "animistic" approach in parapsychology instead of a "spiritualistic" one. In parapsychology this means that paranormal phenomena were not treated as influences of spirits, but as a result of the great strain of the "focus person". Because of this approach concerning parapsychological phenomena, he associated the experiments of a sensitive approach with the analysis of an affective approach to parapsychology and neurotic faulty attitudes.
Another feature of his work was his close contact with astrologers, such as Thomas Ring, a friend of his. He was consulting him in astrology both in private and scientific matters. Beside this, he was convinced that his wife had a telepathic connection to him. Seeing in case of doubt in apparently unexplainable experiences something paranormal brought him into criticism. This was not only because of his specialty or his close relation to the mass media, but also his assistants occasional observance that he was not always making thorough research. As an example, he explained in 1982 the haunting case "Chopper" that was proven to be a manipulation of a dental nurse in Neutraubling near to Regensburg headily as authentic to the magazine Die Aktuelle.
His critics alleged him already before this of overseeing manipulation attempts by his focus persons. For instance, the criminal marshal of Herbert Schäfer of the Land Office of Criminal Investigation in Bremen effected a confession of the focus person. Bender had seen the haunting issue "Heinrich Scholz" as authentic in 1965. The focus person, who was a trainee in a china store back then did not only manipulated deliberately in the store, but also during the screening in his laboratory. Bender's assistants countered with expertise that at least some of the manipulations should not have occurred.
The problem of manipulations also exists in the most known haunting case of Bender, "the haunting of Rosenheim", that occurred in an attorney's chancellery between 1967 and 1968. This case was not only documented by Bender and his assistants, but by technicians of the Post Office and the power plant, by the police and physicists of the Max Planck Institute in Munich. Notwithstanding the fact that the physicists wrote in their expert opinion that not all the phenomena observed could be explained with the laws of physics, at least in one case, a manipulation of the focus person, a clerk, could be detected. Bender and his assistants explained the case such that the often psychologically labile focus persons manipulate in order to have the focus of attention, when the real parapsychological phenomena fail to appear.
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