I happen to be in the final stages of writing a dissertation on channeling in Israel, so I thought I'd share my bibliographical findings with the list -

Not much has been written about channeling so far, and as far as I know, none of it is directly from a psychology of religion perspective. The exception I know of is Jon Klimo's book, but while he's an academic, it's not really an academic study of the phenomenon but rather a well-written and very thorough review from the inside:

    Klimo, Jon. 1987. Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information From Paranormal Sources. Los Angeles and New York: J.P. Tarcher (Distributed by St. Martin’s Press).

The only other psychological work I could find used Jung's theories to claim channelers are actually contacting their own unconscious minds, and suggests they seek more constructive ways of doing so:

    Corey, Michael A. 1988. "The Psychology of Channeling." Psychology: A Journal of Human Behavior 25: 86-92.

The best text on the subject is from anthropologist Michael Brown:

    Brown, Micahel F. 1997. The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Brown also wrote a few articles - "Moving Toward the Light" in a book edited by Jospeh E. Davies, Stories of Change; "On Resisting Resistance" in American Anthropologist 98(4): 729-735; "Who Owns What Spirits Share?" in PoLAR 17(2): 7-17; and "The New Aliensts: Healing Shattered Selves at Century's End" in the George E. Marcus edited Paronia Within Reason.

Another good article is

    Hughes, Durren. J. 1991. "Blending with an Other: An Analysis of Trance Channeling in the United States." Ethos 19(2): 161-184.

Hughes also has three more articles on the subject. The first aims to rule out explanations that channelers were frauds by checking brainwave activity:

    Hughes, Durren. J. and Melville, N. T. 1990. "Changes in Brainwave Activity During Trance Channeling: A Pilot Study." Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 22(1): 175-189.

The second, to rule out that they're suffering from multiple personal disorder:

    Hughes, Durren. J. 1992. "Differences between Trance Channeling and Multiple Personality Disorder on Structured Interview". The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 24(2): 181-192.

The third places the phenomenon within the context of shamanism and altered states of consciousness:

    Price-Williams, D. and Hughes, D. 1994. "Shamanism and Altered States of Consciousness." Anthropology of Consciousness 5(2): 1-15.

Another article is by Suzanne Riordan, and it discusses the major themes in channeled messages (without much social context):

    Riordan, Suzanne. 1992. "Channeling: A New Revelation?", in Lewis, J. R. and J. G. Melton. Perspectives on the New Age. Albany, State University of New York Press, 105-126.

Goodman offers an interesting comparison between ecstatic trance and channeling, based on neurophysiological changes recorded in laboratory setting:

    Goodman, Feliciatas D. 1999. "Ritual Body Postures, Channeling, and the Ecstatic Body Trance." Anthropology of Consciousness 10(1): 54-59.

While Spencer offers a more culturally-oriented comparison:

   Spencer, Wayne. 2001. "To Absent Friends: Classical Spiritualis Mediumship and New Age Channelling Compared and Contrasted." Journal of Contemporary Religion 16(3): 343-360.

Matthew Wood also wrote on the subject in his

    Wood, Matthew, 2001. "Playing with Spirits: Channeling and Nonformative Spirituality in Contemporary Britain" Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 37: 49–60.

Recently, Ann Taves has been studying channeling, and has wrote

    Taves, Ann. 2009. "Channeled Apparitions: On Visions that Morph and Categories that Slip." Visual Resources 25(1): 137-152.

Apart from these, there are several dissertations dealing with channeling: Michelle B. Golden wrote A Rhetorical Analysis of Channeling within the New Age Movement in Wayne State University, 1993; Valeire Kim Ducket wrote A Study of the New Age, Specifically the Phenomena of Channeling, Past-Life Recall, and Near-Death Experiences, From a Feminist Perspective in The Union Institute, 1997; and Kathleen Wise Barret wrote A Phenomenological Study of Channeling: The Experience of Transmitting Information from a Source Perceived as Paranormal at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, 1996.

Those are all the sources I know of that deal with the subject directly (although I should mention the extensive discussion of channeling in Hanegraaff's New Age Religion). I made the list as extensive as possible for the benefit of the list, but also, so that people could mention sources I missed.

Yours,

   Adam Klin Oron

---
Adam Klin-Oron
PhD candidate
Department of Sociology and Cultural Anthropology
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
+972-54-6222755
adam@...