SOLSTICE CELEBRANT: Mayer was artistic director of California Revels, whose annual winter shows are seen by as many as 13,000 people in the Bay Area. Janet McMillian

when her daughter's harp was stolen from the Scottish Rite Center in Oakland, California Revels artistic director Elizabeth Mayer consulted a dowser in Arkansas after other attempts to find the instrument proved fruitless. He directed her to a specific intersection. Feeling ridiculous, Mayer posted a sign offering a reward—and recovered the harp. The incident fed her lifelong interest in plumbing the unknowable.

Mayer died on January 1 at her parents’ home in New Hampshire from complications of intestinal scleroderma, an illness she had battled for 18 years. She was 57.

Her death was unexpected. Only three weeks before, audiences had seen the contralto perform in the Revels, a theatrical celebration with traditional music and dance. She concluded the 2004 Revels’ shows as she had done since 1988—by reciting Susan Cooper’s poem “The Shortest Day” and enjoining the crowd: “Welcome, Yule.”

Mayer received her undergraduate degree in economics from Radcliffe. At Stanford, she first studied economics, but felt the discipline’s emphasis on rationality did not fully capture human motivation. She switched to the School of Education, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on resistance to meditation. She completed psychoanalytic training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and served on the faculty from 1986 until her death. (Hers was an important voice challenging Freud’s theory that girls are doomed to a sense of inferiority because they lack a penis and questioning whether psychoanalytic therapy was too detached.) From 1983, she was an associate clinical professor in the psychology department at UC-Berkeley.

Her forthcoming book, Extraordinary Knowing: Making Sense of the Inexplicable in Everyday Life, describes her quest to apply scientific methods to the study of the intuitive. “She would have liked to have provoked traditional thinkers by providing a new scientific lens into the apparently mysterious,” says longtime friend and colleague Dr. Phyllis Cath.

Mayer is survived by her parents, David and Pamela Mayer; ex-husband, Owen Renik (they divorced in 1999); daughters, Meg and Byrdie Renik; and three siblings, Rebecca, Anneke and Michael Mayer.