I've actually been meaning to ask about "magical thinking" in a Magic Monday one of these days, for exactly this reason - the way the term is used in mainstream psychology is definitely describing something that happens and that it's helpful to identify - for example, beyond only "wishful thinking" the mental process of someone with OCD who believes that his failure to wash his hands will result in some calamity in the outside world is also often described the same way.

Mainstream materialism has a pat answer: expecting a causal or correlative link between actions without any physical explanation for their linkage is "magical thinking". Once you accept that there are non-material causal/correlative links, it seems like it might get rather harder to so simply define which ones are clearly erroneous, which ones deserve investigation, and which ones seem pretty clearly linked.

So, if JMG or anyone else has any thoughts on sorting out the wheat from the chaff in the materialist conception of "magical thinking", I'd certainly appreciate hearing about it.

Thanks much,
Jeff