Phantoms of the Clinic: From Thought-Transference to Projective Identification 1855758814, 9781855758810

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CHAPTER TITLE

PHANTOMS OF THE CLINIC

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PHANTOMS OF THE CLINIC From Thought-Transference to Projective Identification Mikita Brottman

First published 2011 by Karnac Books Ltd. Published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2011 to Mikita Brottman. The right of Mikita Brottman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Cover picture: Theatre, Hellingly Asylum, Sussex. Photo by Howzey, 2008. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781855758810 (pbk) Edited, designed and produced by The Studio Publishing Services Ltd www.publishingservicesuk.co.uk e-mail: [email protected]

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER ONE Psychoanalysis and magic

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CHAPTER TWO A brief history of thought-transference

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CHAPTER THREE Residues of the uncanny

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CHAPTER FOUR Mothers and other ghosts

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CHAPTER FIVE What is projective identification?

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CHAPTER SIX Afterword

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REFERENCES

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INDEX

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of Chapter One appeared in under the title “Psychoanalysis and magic: then and now”, in American Imago, 66(4) (Winter 2009). Part of Chapter Three appeared under the title “Some thoughts on dream aesthetics”, in Image and Narrative, 23: Time and Photography/La Photographie et le temps, November 2008 (www.imageandnarrative.be). Figures 1.1, 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, 5.1 © Edmund Engleman, 1938. Figures 1.3, 1.4, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.3, 4.4, 5.4 © Jule Eisenbud Collection, Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County. Figure 2.2 © John Haynes, 1974. Special Collections, University of Glasgow, Scotland. Figure 3.1 © Masahiro Mori, 1970. Figure 5.3 © Prinzhorn Collection, University of Heidelberg (prinzhorn.uni-hd.de/index_ eng.shtml). Figure 5.2 © Wellcome Library, London. Thanks to all concerned for permission to reproduce extracts and images.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mikita Brottman is a psychoanalyst, author, and cultural critic known for her work on the pathological elements of contemporary culture. She received a DPhil in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. Formerly Chair of the program in Humanities and Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, she is currently a professor of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her articles and case studies have appeared in Film Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, New Literary History, and American Imago. She has written influentially on horror films, critical theory, reading, psychoanalysis, and the work of the American folklorist, Gershon Legman.

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Introduction

“What, then, is the part played by telepathy in man’s mental organization? . . . Is it a power stretching forward to the angels, or is it going back to the amoeba . . .?” (Ehrenwald, 1948, p. 196)

Before the nineteenth century, “mind-reading” was generally considered to be an occult technique, like prophecy, exorcism, or astral magic, associated with apparitions, phantasms, and spirit-haunting. In the shadow cast by Freudian psychoanalysis, however, “mind-reading”, like other subjects of popular fascination, was reconsidered according to a different theoretical paradigm. “It is clear”, writes Phillips, in reference to the reception of Freud’s work, “that sexuality and the unconscious were the new, scientifically prestigious words for the occult, for that which is beyond our capacity for knowledge, for the weird, unaccountable effects people have on one another” (1997a, p. 46). The occult, as Phillips implies, has never been “scientifically prestigious”. Freud, who had a lifelong interest in the supernatural, soon learnt to keep quiet about his fascination, which xi

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carried a weighty stigma in scientific circles. Similarly, psychoanalysis has been relegated to the sidelines of mainstream psychology, if it is recognized as a psychological endeavor at all (rather than, say, a current of thought in cultural studies, literature, or philosophy). Clearly, psychoanalysis and the occult have a great deal in common. Among other things, both fields of thought have a shaky relationship with academia, and a particularly fraught and anxious connection to science. Of course, in the psychoanalytic world, as in academia, there has always been widespread resistance to anything associated with the supernatural; very few practitioners—in their professional lives, at least—will admit to a serious interest in occult phenomena. As a result, paranormal traces have all but vanished from the psychoanalytic process, though not without leaving behind a faint but palpable residue. This fascinating residue is my subject in this book. Using methods and material from psychoanalytic history, theory, and criticism, my aim is to investigate the long-standing and complex association between psychoanalysis and the paranormal, going back to the early history of the psychoanalytic movement. After considering the literature on the paranormal by some of the earliest practitioners, including Freud, I explore how the links between psychoanalysis and the paranormal have been extended and developed during the twentieth century, and, ultimately, repressed. Although there may be plenty of analysts today with a private interest in the paranormal, few of them have incorporated this interest into their analytic work. The reason for this is clear. In order for psychoanalysis to fully embrace the paranormal, it would need to reject all claims to scientific empiricism, and this, by implication, would mean the end of all strictures, including licensing, high fees, rigorous training models, and insurance reimbursement. Instead, I argue, the residue of the paranormal has disguised itself in the aptly “clinical” cloak of projective identification, a concept first formulated by Melanie Klein, and widely used in contemporary psychoanalysis to suggest a different variety of transference and transference-like phenomena between patient and analyst that seem to occur outside the normal range of the sensory process. By exploring the nature and implications of projective identification, I believe, we can start to understand the complex web of associations between “ordinary”

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psychoanalysis and telepathy. First, however, we must understand the nature of magical thinking. While the human mind develops and adapts to different cultures and the impact of different technologies, our templates for understanding the world are formed in infancy, by certain recurrent concepts and situations, and in this deeper sense, I think it is fair to say that the human mind today is no different from those of earlier times and cultures. Essentially, there is no difference between the “modern” mind and the minds of the “savages” described in The Golden Bough (1890), Frazer’s outdated but exhaustive documentation of magical and religious beliefs across the world. In a notable section of his rich history, Frazer describes the kind of superstitious reasoning that people fall into when they do not understand, or are unaware of, the possible causes between separate events. According to Frazer, this kind of magical thinking—as he called it—depends on two laws. The first is the law of similarity, which assumes that an effect resembles its cause, as with eye-shaped amulets intended to ward off the evil eye, producing a desired effect by carrying out a similar action with symbolic value. The second is the law of contagion, which assumes that things once in physical contact maintain a connection even after the contact has been broken, as in the use of voodoo dolls made with the hair or nails of the person they are supposed to represent. The power of contagious magic is tied not to similarity, but to temporal contiguity. These two laws govern the operation of what Frazer calls sympathetic magic: the manipulation of effigies, symbols, or totems in order to produce or alter physical events. Magical thinking is a universal tendency, especially in childhood. In adulthood, it occurs most commonly in response to situations that are largely random or chaotic, such as a coin toss or the spin of a roulette wheel, as well as circumstances over which we have little or no control, particularly those in which we have a deep emotional investment. In psychoanalysis, the phrase is used to refer to the unconsciously held belief that our own thoughts can influence external events; it emerges from a misperception of self-boundaries. Everyday examples of such thinking include faith, superstition, taboo, paranoia, belief in the special power of words, and the confusion of symbols and their referents. In Chapter Three of Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), Freud suggests that the omnipotence of ideas in

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obsessive and paranoid patients may be a pathological version of the ordinary overconfidence we all have in our powers, desires, and fantasies. This excessive confidence often produces neurotic symptoms that, according to Freud, simultaneously strive both to counteract and to grant the desired result. Magic achieves its aim by representing what it desires, and the psychoanalyst, as Freud points out, is a kind of magician. In the analytic situation, speaking, naming, and interpreting are all magical tools; for Freud, word-magic held a special place in general magic. He emphasized the relationship between symbolism and archaic thinking, publishing an essay entitled “The antithetical meaning of primal words” (1910e). Magical thinking also manifests itself very commonly in the realm of the creative arts. In primitive, tribal, and collective societies, art has a predominantly magical function; however, in today’s western culture, art is closely tied to the cultural capital of its creator. In some instances, though, the magic still works—as when we open a book and let the words galvanize our mental life, leading us into a world of isolated fantasy. Whenever we read—especially when we read fiction—we experience the miracle-producing properties of language, which, as adults, we take entirely for granted, though children are less immune to the everyday marvel. Engrossed in a book, our desire for autarchic control and magical fulfilment is immediately satisfied, though in a profoundly internal and solitary way. Drawing from the work of Frazer, among others, Freud makes the case that human beings were pushed to create their earliest cosmic systems by their practical need to subjugate the world, and he draws a connection between “primitive” magical thinking (when nature is alive and the world peopled by gods) and the animistic stage of childhood, when the child endows inanimate objects with a life of their own. This animistic stage of life, according to psychoanalysis, is the basis for belief in the paranormal. Although in everyday speech the terms “paranormal” and “supernatural” are used interchangeably, there is, none the less, an important distinction between them. Supernatural phenomena cannot be perceived by natural or the empirical senses; they defy or contradict the laws of science. In order to explain them, we must refer to realms outside the known laws of science and nature: the realms of religion, magic, superstition, and otherwise non-rational areas of

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belief. Examples include the appearance of ghosts and spirits and the existence of gods. Paranormal phenomena, on the other hand, do not directly defy or contradict the laws of science; they simply lie outside the domain of currently plausible scientific or rational explanations. They are generally considered to be natural phenomena that science is currently unable to explain. Common examples of paranormal activity generally involve forces or mental processes such as extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. The academic discipline that seeks to demonstrate the existence and causes of paranormal phenomena is known as parapsychology. As an area of scholarly and scientific research, parapsychology emerged in the 1960s and reached a peak in the 1970s; however, the results of this research were rejected by mainstream science, and, since the 1970s, academic interest in the subject has waned considerably. Most of the parapsychology laboratories in the UK and the USA have now closed down. There are a small number of graduate-level courses on parapsychology at European universities, but most active scientific parapsychologists today are sponsored by private institutions and funded by private sources. As a legitimate field of academic study, in fact, parapsychology no longer exists— at least, not in the USA, where it has fallen into disrepute. There are only two parapsychology laboratories in the USA that employ more than two researchers, and there are currently no more than ten people employed in full-time professional research in the field. Nevertheless, the Journal of Parapsychology has been in publication for over sixty years, The International Journal of Parapsychology came back into print after a thirty-two-year hiatus in 2000, and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research has been in publication since 1882. According to a number of surveys, over 50% of adults in the USA claim to have experienced paranormal phenomena, and almost 75% believe that such things exist, even if they have never experienced them directly. Clearly, the larger mainstream culture subscribes to a non-rational, supernatural, quasi-religious view of the universe, as can also be seen in the popularity of film and fiction that features the fantastic and paranormal. In fact, the occult thrives in popular culture. Outside the boundaries of serious discourse—in television drama, video games, movie screenplays and digital entertainment—the paranormal continues to attract and generates huge financial returns.

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In the past fifty years, the areas once covered by parapsychology have been absorbed, at least in the west, by various New Age movements. They are also to be found, though in a rather different form, in the field of transpersonal psychology, which studies transcendent or spiritual aspects of the human mind. Jung occasionally used the phrase “transpersonal unconscious” as a synonym for the collective unconscious, and the term was picked up and adapted by the human potential movement in the 1960s, in particular by Abraham Maslow, who used the term in his research on self-actualization and the capacity for what he referred to as the “peak experience” (sudden feelings of euphoria, intense well-being, wonder, and awe). In his work on the subject, Maslow addressed not only psychological wounding and personal development, but also the study of inspired creativity, altruistic ideals, and personal actions that transcend the “ordinary” limits of personality, without crossing over into the supernatural or paranormal. Transpersonal psychology considers such issues as consciousness, near-death experiences, body–mind relationships, and spiritual transformation. In many ways, it is a reaction to science, and has far more in common with a kind of secular religion. In simple terms, the phrase “transpersonal” means “beyond the personal”, with reference to anything outside the limitations of the human ego. This may imply a mystical or spiritual realm of being, or it may simply refer to a deep awareness of oneself as part of a wider realm of humanity, or of living things. Vaughan (1979) offers a slightly more complex definition: The transpersonal level corresponds to the stage of self-transcendence, where the individual no longer experiences himself as separate and isolated, but as part of something larger . . . The individual in relationship to the universe comes into focus and the underlying unity of all life may be experientially realized. [p. 101]

In transpersonal therapy or analysis, mystical experiences are often regarded as a form of “regression in the service of the ego”, to use the term popularized by Ernst Kris. In this field, such experiences are generally believed to provide meaningful moments in the process of a personal life. In other words, the transpersonal school entertains the possibility that at least some kinds of mystical experiences may be genuinely numinous.

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Patients in transpersonal therapy generally work on developing their self-awareness beyond the limits of the body and the personal realm of experience. In earlier days, this kind of therapy was sometimes enhanced by the use of LSD and other psychedelics, but today’s practitioners generally limit themselves to less controversial methods, such as breath work or re-birthing. The field is currently gaining wider public acceptance, especially in California, although the exact nature and boundaries of transpersonal psychology are still subject to debate (see, for example, Aurobindo, 1939; Gebser, 1985; Grof, 2005; Murphy, 1993; Tart, 1994; Wilber, 1996). My study of the paranormal aspects of psychoanalysis is historical and conceptual, rather than empirical. The case studies, clinical material, and real-world examples referred to here are, in the main, taken from previously published material. There is an important reason for this. The experience of extra-sensory communication in the psychoanalytic setting is, by its very nature, so subjective and idiosyncratic that it did not seem feasible for me to fashion tools for empirical investigation; neither is it obvious what information such tools could produce, or what value such a study would have. Most paranormal experiences do not occur in the laboratory setting, but happen spontaneously, sometimes playfully, but usually under conditions of trauma or similar intense emotion. Methods of science, on the other hand, tend to objectify and domesticate, reducing meaning to matter and story to statistics. The first four chapters of the book are historical, tracing the vicissitudes in the relationship between psychoanalysis and thoughttransference over the twentieth century, especially since the death of Freud. Chapter Five brings us to the present day. Projective identification, as I discuss in this chapter, is a current term used to describe such a wide array of disparate and nebulous phenomena that no single research tool, or set of tools, would seem capable of dealing with them, especially since most of these phenomena are ephemeral, transitory, and unconscious. To complicate matters even further, anyone familiar with modern psychoanalysis must be aware that the field contains an almost limitless variety of treatment modalities, and, in this context, an experimental test seems highly impractical; any data accumulated would be impossible to evaluate objectively. Finally, since my book concerns the widespread resistance to intuitive, extrasensory, non-empirical manifestations of thought

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and emotion, the idea of developing an empirical tool to measure such phenomena would seem to defy the point. As I hope to explain, the very notion of the paranormal—even in its most benign, everyday forms—can generate especially powerful negative reactions and resistances, the most common of which is perhaps the attempt to measure and quantify, thereby incorporating these ephemeral phenomena into the safe, methodical world of scientific data. Of course, this is not to say that some aspects of the paranormal might not, at some future time, plausibly be reconciled with a scientific model not vastly different from the current one, but this has not yet happened. For now, most paranormal experiences remain outside the categories of science, and are therefore relegated to the fringes of academic life, often described as “crackpot” or “bizarre”. There is a common superstition that serious, upstanding people who become unduly interested in such phenomena often find their mental health deteriorating, their relationships breaking down, and their ultimate reason hanging in the balance, leaving them blind to any interpretation of the evidence other than their own. Rarely is it acknowledged that those interested in the occult are often ordinary, reasonable people with their own doubts and difficulties, their own intelligent hesitations and convictions based on real, lived experience. On the other hand, it is undeniable that paranormal experiences generally occur in situations of great emotional upheaval. Many clinicians seem to fear that to express an interest in the paranormal elements of psychoanalysis would mean to abandon the medical model. This would mean they would no longer be considered mental health practitioners, and their practice would consequently be relegated to the ranks of intercessory prayer, the laying on of hands, voodoo, and other forms of faith healing. As a result, most psychoanalysts who remain in practice today seem to feel compelled to present themselves and their work according to the medical model: blank, neutral, and depersonalized. Very rarely does psychoanalytic writing today express any sense of a personal aesthetic or the mysterious otherworldliness of analytic practice. This desperate adherence to the medical model suggests deep anxiety, and an ongoing denial of the fact that most members of today’s scientific establishment already believe psychoanalysis to be little more than antiquated juju.

Mental illness is a function of disorder; magic is a function of order. [Couliano, 1984, p. 125]

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CHAPTER TITLE

CHAPTER ONE

Psychoanalysis and magic

“. . . if I had to live my life over again, I should devote myself to psychical research, rather than psychoanalysis . . .” (Freud, letter to Hereward Carrington, 1921, quoted in Jones, 1957)

F

reud is often accused of secularizing the transcendental by suggesting that psychic material is simply the projection of mental content into the physical world. This, however, is a mischaracterization of Freud’s depiction of psychic reality, which he believed to be just as real as the material world, and capable of manipulating and infecting it in various fascinating ways. In this, he was influenced, like other seminal thinkers of the day, by the rapid spread of spiritualism in Europe and America in the 1850s and 1860s. Spiritualism, in its turn, quickly led to the rise of rationalist circles devoted to exploring the unexplained phenomena apparently produced by trances and séances. In Britain, one of these circles became the Society for Psychical Research, which was established in 1882 when a number of spiritualists and Cambridge scholars grew determined to place their belief in psychic phenomena upon a sound, unprejudiced footing grounded in the scientific 1

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Illustration 1.1. Freud’s study in Vienna. © Edmund Engleman, 1938.

method. A new model of the unconscious mind emerged in the many publications of this society’s members (see Koutstaal, 1992; Noll, 1997; Shamdasani, 1993), who considered such phenomena as trance states, crystal gazing, and automatic writing to be perfectly valid psychological methods for studying what they referred to as the “subliminal self”. Indeed, authors Léon Chertok and Raymond de Saussure, in their 1979 book The Therapeutic Revolution, draw a connection between the Victorian obsession with psychic phenomena and the “new science” of psychoanalysis—in particular, the Freudian concept of transference. The connection, according to Chertok and de Saussure, goes back to August 1885, when Freud first began studying hypnotism under the auspices of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Freud’s interest in the subject reflected the widespread public fascination with mysterious states of mind, including somnambulism, magnetism, catalepsy, nervous illness, and the fragmentation of personality. His later speculations about the unconscious mind were deeply influenced by the work of Charcot, especially his use of hypnosis to relieve the various automatic phenomena induced by hysteria. As the psychoanalytic movement slowly gained prominence, the earlier work of mesmerists and spiritualists on the “subliminal

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MAGIC

Illustration 1.2.

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“A Clinical Lesson with Dr Charcot at the Salpêtrière”, by

Pierre André Brouillet (1887), the print that hung above Freud’s couch.

self” was overshadowed and largely forgotten—though certainly not by Freud, who never lost his fascination with unconscious (but active) ideas, and, at least in his younger days, readily acknowledged the connections between psychoanalysis and magic. The following passage, from his essay “Psychical (or mental) treatment” (written when he was thirty-four), provides a neat summary of his position at this time: A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by “mere” words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words at least a part of their former magical power. [1890a, p. 285]

Obviously, Freud was well aware of the connections between words and magic, and the capacity of words to engage and reflect primitive

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ways of thinking. “When the riddle [that neurosis] presents is solved and the solution is accepted by the patients, these diseases cease to be able to exist”, he observed. “There is hardly anything like this in medicine, though in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits whose power is broken as soon as you can tell them their name, the name which they have kept secret” (1910e, p. 148). Language has always been intimately connected with magic, not least in the capacity of words to evoke deep and powerful emotions. This is the kind of magic that emerges on the couch—the magic of words, the “talking cure”. With its collection of fetishes, idols, and exotic fabrics, Freud’s consulting room was particularly appropriate for the summoning of magic. Indeed, Freud remarks in Totem and Taboo that the “ceremonial” element in psychoanalytic practice represents a “remnant of the hypnotic method out of which psycho-analysis was evolved” (1912–1913, p. 133). Quite clearly, anyone who expresses a belief in magic lays him or herself open to accusations of credulity, but Freud was careful to emphasize that he was not in the least bit superstitious. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), he wrote, “I believe in external (real) chance, it is true, but not in internal (psychical) accidental events. With superstitious persons it is the other way round” (p. 257).

From mesmerist to medic By 1918, Freud was no longer writing full-blown case studies, and his work, though interesting in other ways, never resumed the intriguing, mysterious tone it achieves in his earlier works such as Studies in Hysteria (1895d), where he and Breuer seem more like alchemists or Svengalis than a pair of respectable physicians. According to Swales (1986), in his essay on the early years of psychoanalysis, Freud was known as der Zauberer (“the Magician”) by the children of Anna von Lieben, a rich patient whom he treated at home in the 1880s. Not quite a “proper doctor”, he was, Swales informs us, generally received at the back door of his patients’ homes, rather than the front. It does not seem surprising, then, that in his early work, Freud cast himself as a magician of the word. At the beginning of his career, in fact, Freud considered himself ill suited to medicine. “As a young man, I knew no longing other than

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for philosophical knowledge”, he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in 1896. “I became a therapist against my will” (1985, p. 180). Thirty years later, at the age of seventy, he returned to the same theme. “After forty-one years of medical activity, my self-knowledge tells me that I have never been a doctor in the proper sense”, he wrote. “I became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path” (1926e, p. 253). At the beginning of his career, Freud believed he could merge his interests in thought-transference, telepathy, and precognition with his “new science” of psychoanalysis. During this period, however, the field of psychiatry was rapidly disentangling itself from the realm of the spiritual. Freud became concerned that if people began to associate psychoanalysis with the occult and supernatural, his new discipline—already controversial for its insistence on childhood sexuality—would be gravely endangered. His doubts were encouraged by his colleague Ernest Jones, who, openly embarrassed by Freud’s interest in the occult, urged him to forge closer affiliations between his “new science” and that of medicine—affiliations which, Jones felt, would considerably enhance the prestige of psychoanalysis. Jones worked hard to convince Freud that he was risking the reputation of their profession—and insulting their status as physicians—by continuing to dabble in the occult. Before long, Freud was persuaded. “We are physicians, and wish to remain physicians”, he told Otto Gross at the 1908 Salzburg psychoanalytic conference when Gross spoke on “the cultural perspectives of science” (cited in Schwentker, 1987, p. 488). Not long after this, however, psychoanalytic authors began publishing articles on European culture as a whole, its myths, fairy tales, literature, opera, and so on, attracting the attention of many readers and thinkers in fields far beyond that of science. Still, Freud remained anxious that his ideas about thoughttransference might be misunderstood, and possibly appropriated by spiritualists and mystics eager to prove the universe contains more than mere material forms. Consequently, during the writing of Totem and Taboo, he clashed famously with his close friend and colleague C. G. Jung, struggling to resist the seductive mysticism of the other man’s work. When Totem and Taboo was finally published

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in 1913, Jung was dismayed to discover that Freud came down stoutly in favour of a material, mechanistic theory of scientific rationalism. In his autobiographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1965), Jung observed that Freud’s fear of the occult sometimes verged on the histrionic (p. 84), and it does not seem outlandish to speculate that, for Freud, supernatural manifestations resonated with a particular significance. In defence, Freud began to rationalize spiritual belief as a form of primitive thinking typical of children and psychotics, which in Totem and Taboo he refers to as “animism”. According to Freud, “primitive races . . . people the world with innumerable spiritual beings both benevolent and malignant; and these spirits and demons they regard as the causes of natural phenomena . . .” (p. 76). Nevertheless, as his career took shape, Freud often expressed regret that he had not devoted himself more seriously to paranormal investigation. Jones, in his 1953–1957 biography, quotes a reflective letter Freud wrote in 1921, at the age of sixty-five, to the British spiritualist, author, magician and psychic researcher, Hereward Carrington. In this letter, Freud confesses that, “if I had to live my life over again, I should devote myself to psychical research, rather than psychoanalysis” (p. 392). The subject must have pressed heavily on his mind; that same year, he received offers to become the co-editor of three periodicals devoted to occultism. His decision to turn down these offers had nothing to do with his feelings about the occult, and everything to do with the politics of psychoanalysis. As his work had become increasingly well respected, he had finally realized that the two fields of study— psychoanalysis and psychic research—were mutually exclusive. In public, then, Freud worked hard to keep the boundaries of psychoanalysis distinct from those of the occult. In private, however, as Ernest Jones describes in his biography, Freud displayed “an exquisite oscillation between skepticism and credulity” (1957, p. 375) on the subject. It is interesting to note that even Jones, Freud’s staunchest supporter, was privately sarcastic about his mentor’s occult interests. To Jones’ dismay, however, not only did Freud express constant anxiety about the assimilation of psychoanalysis into the realm of science, he also continued to claim that the occult was inextricable from psychoanalysis, which, he believed, in order to be effective, had to embrace those manifestations of thought

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and emotion that are normally excluded from rational, scientific study. And while he remained ambivalent and conflicted about the more other-worldly reaches of occult belief, he always considered thought-transference to be the most respectable element in occultism, and the main “kernel of truth in the field” (1922a, p. 136). In fact, he believed the phenomenon would soon be incorporated into the realm of scientific fact. In an article entitled “A note on the unconscious in psycho-analysis”, published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1912g), he wrote that, as far as he was concerned, future evidence from analysts would soon “put an end to any remaining doubts on the reality of thought-transference” (p. 266). Freud was supported and encouraged in his occult investigations by his Hungarian colleague, Sándor Ferenczi, who had long been fascinated by the subject of thought-transference, and, as early as 1899, had published a paper—entitled simply “Spiritism”—in which he explained his conviction that the unconscious was an occult phenomenon that allowed access into the minds of others. Eventually, Ferenczi went so far as to actively erase the rigid frontier Freud had carefully traced between the “alloy” of suggestion and the “pure gold” of psychoanalytic practice. Consequently, as Freud heeded Jones’ advice and ceased to speak and publish openly on the paranormal, Ferenczi was cast out of the “inner circle” and his work—like Freud’s own publications on the occult—became something of an embarrassment to mainstream psychoanalysis. In his anthology Psychoanalysis and the Occult (1952), Devereux refers to 235 papers on telepathic experiences in psychoanalysis, of which he reprints thirty-one, including essays by Jule Eisenbud, Jan Ehrenwald, Nandor Fodor, and other notable scholar–practitioners. By the 1970s, however, at least in orthodox psychoanalysis, the subject had virtually disappeared from view. Today, psychoanalytic thinkers with an interest in such topics generally gravitate toward the field of transpersonal psychology, where paranormal experiences are generally believed to provide meaningful moments in the process of life. Some interest in thought-transference, unconscious communication, and even the paranormal continues to hover around current work on Ferenczi and Freud’s papers on telepathy, however, as well as in, more generally, the work of such figures as the late psychology professor Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. While the

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place of these subjects within mainstream psychoanalytic thought remains ambiguous, I want to suggest that magical thinking has always been the motor driving psychoanalytic practice—an opinion with which many in the field would, I suspect, readily disagree.

The secret laws of magic As Bernstein (2002) reminds us, the word “magic” originally meant “of the magi”—the wise men of the Persians reputed to be skilled in enchantment. Definitions of magic include “any mysterious and overpowering quality that produces unaccountable or baffling effects”, “the gratification of desires otherwise unobtainable”, and “that which takes us beyond the ordinary action of cause and effect which we regard as natural” (p. 235). With these definitions in mind, it seems clear that psychoanalysis is full of magical elements, especially in relation to the vicissitudes of the transference. The analytic encounter, with its deliberate quiet, low lighting and use of the couch as a liminal space, specifically encourages the evocation of magic. Although Freud grew increasingly wary about the place of magic in psychoanalysis, plenty of magical elements remain in his theory and clinical practice. As Whitebook argues (2002), the ambition to completely exorcise “enchantment” from human experience was one of the more misguided excesses of the Enlightenment (p. 1197). In Totem and Taboo, Freud explains how the logic of magical practices reflects the pattern of ideas underlying such practices, which is similar to the patterns of dreams and neurotic symptoms—that is, the logic of the unconscious: the primary process. “The world of magic”, he writes, “has a telepathic disregard for spatial distance and treats past situations as though they were present” (p. 85). “Magic reveals in the clearest and most unmistakable way an intention to impose the laws governing mental life upon real things” (p. 91), and, thereby, “replace the laws of nature with psychological ones” (p. 83). These psychological laws, however, are primitive and infantile, dominated by the governance of the pleasure principle: It is easy to perceive the motives that lead men to practise magic: they are human wishes. All we need to suppose is that primitive

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man had an immense belief in the power of his wishes. The basic reason why what he sets about by magical means comes to pass is, after all, simply that he wills it. To begin with, therefore, the emphasis is only upon his wish. Children are in an analogous psychical situation. [1912–1913, p. 83]

It would be wrong to assume that, in our “civilized” adult lives, magic no longer plays a part. On the contrary, the “infantile” magical orientation generally continues into later life relatively unmodified, existing side by side with more highly developed rational and “scientific” cognitive processes. Recent research suggests that otherwise reasonable people often act as though they believe they possess magical powers (though they may consciously deny it), a phenomenon which may be traceable to basic cognitive errors involving the perception of causal relationships. This kind of magical thinking occurs particularly in times of uncertainty or stress, and serves our need for control, especially our need to perceive ourselves as able to navigate a clear path through uncontrollable situations. Support for this explanation comes from studies showing that people display signs of magical thinking when they are faced with a combination of uncertainty about an outcome and a desire for control over that outcome (Bleak & Frederick, 1998; Friedland, Keinan, & Regev, 1992; Keinan, 1994; Matute, 1994). Magical thinking has been closely documented among Germans at the period of high unemployment and political instability in between the wars (Padgett & Jorgensen, 1982); police officers with jobs that put them in dangerous situations (Corrigan, Pattison, & Lester, 1980); HIV-infected men with no agency over their health (Taylor, Kemeny, Reed, Bower, & Gruenewald, 2000), and lottery players who possess illusions of control regarding their ability to influence chance gambles (Langer, 1975). In most cases, this magical thinking is opaque to those engaged in it. Even when people recognize that control over life events may be impossible to achieve, magical beliefs may arise out of a motivation to find “meaning” in that which they cannot control (Pepitone & Saffiotti, 1997). It is well known, too, that magical thinking can sometimes have equally magical results. Patients with metastasized cancer mysteriously may go into remission and make miraculous recoveries. Experiments with placebos show that, in some circumstances, people have

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the power within them to produce all the effects of drugs, both benefits and side effects. Freud always insisted that occult phenomena obeyed the same principles that underlie the psychodynamics of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and primary process thinking in general: the absence of “adult”, ego-generated logic and order, and a lack of attention to such details as time and money. Clearly, these hallmarks of adult reality have no place in the magical world of the unconscious. As Freud acknowledged in his work on dreams, primary process thinking is timeless. In our dreams, split seconds last for eternities, years pass in seconds, and chronologies are scrambled or reversed. This is the realm of myth, fairytales, and folklore, in which everyone is immortal. As Bergler and Róheim (1946) put it, [t]ime perception is an artefact built in the unconscious ego after the partial mastering of blows against the ‘autarchic fiction’. Therefore time and duty are associated. In every endeavor in which childlike omnipotence is fantasied, normal perception of time is disturbed. [p. 197]

The inability to react or respond in an “adult”, ego-directed way to time (and money) is also, of course, a classic hallmark of mental illness. Not unsurprisingly, time and money are key subjects in the psychoanalytic encounter, where they take on a symbolic weight very different from that which they bear in “reality”. This fact suggests that psychoanalysis takes place, at least in part, in the realm of magical thinking. Here, in this liminal world without shape or form, the ordinary proximity between two minds is narrowed and distorted, and mysterious transmissions can occur. Secrets make their way from one mind to another, sometimes without the use of words. On the couch, patients behave in magical ways, bringing the past alive in the present and merging with absent others. Psychoanalysts, too, act like magicians by offering themselves as contemporary objects to which the “ghosts” of the patient’s past can attach themselves, thereby initiating the process of transference. The appearance of these ghosts in the analytic session allows both analysts and patients to become familiar with them, and even to become, as Auden (1939) puts it, “enthusiastic over the night . . . for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer”. Regular exposure to the

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magic of the analytic session serves to disempower these ghosts of the past so that eventually, as Loewald explains, they can be “laid to rest as ancestors” (1960, p. 10). Their power is then available to be “taken over and transformed into the new intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects” (ibid., pp. 248–249; see also McDougall 1985, pp. 285–286).

Adepts, sages, and neophytes Freud (1919h) felt that people feared psychoanalysis because they felt there was something slightly sinister about it. What they really feared, he speculated, was the area of their minds over which they had no control: the unconscious. Patients are reluctant to use the couch, he believed, because they fear giving up ordinary social reality and turning themselves over to the power of another way of being. The analyst creates the conditions (low lights, couch, quiet), for the emergence of magic (or at least, of magical thinking), conjuring up the characteristic rapture and excitement attendant upon the beginning of a successful treatment. From this perspective, psychoanalysis can be regarded, like magic, as a ritual to produce astonishment, a way to catalyse the phantasm. In explaining how psychoanalysis “works”, analysts themselves often appeal to “experience”, arguing that one can truly understand the effect of the process only by undergoing it, with the aid of a seasoned analyst. This reliance on a specialist elite, initiated into secret, occult knowledge and relying on an essentially intuitive method, naturally inspired much criticism in the early days of the discipline. Experimental psychologist Woodworth (1916), in a letter published in The Nation, referred to Freudian psychoanalysis as an “uncanny religion”, and the prominent scholar Dunlap, in his polemical work Mysticism, Freudianism, and Scientific Psychology (1920), rejected analysis as an aesthetic and materialistic cult, claiming that “psychoanalysis attempts to creep in wearing the uniform of science” (p. 8). It is certainly true that, like most magic, psychoanalysis assumes the visible world is merely the outward manifestation of invisible forces and energies. It takes for granted the idea that everyday life is actually contingent on the operations of a secret, “inner” reality not accessible to the senses; it also assumes

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that only very rare individuals can master this hidden knowledge. Such mastery is a source of great power, since to understand the workings of the secret forces implies the ability to change them. To become an adept, in psychoanalysis as in magic, the neophyte must first learn to dissociate themselves from the “natural attitude” of laymen; only then can they begin their lengthy training, under close supervision by a designated sage, who has special insight into the obscure dimension. Over many years and at great cost, the neophyte learns secret skills in dealing with invisible forces (transference, projection, and so on), becoming acquainted with a world not known to the senses (including “common sense”), far beyond the range of “ordinary” knowledge. Both magic and psychoanalysis encompass a bewildering variety of groups, branches, and systems of belief, each with its own history, masters, and particular rituals, each dominated by a small, highly qualified group of elders, mostly male, whose private lives, outside of the particular space and time of their practice, remain largely secret. Both are mysterious realms of thought that can be understood only by the illuminated, whose practitioners in some way concern themselves with things that sociologist Truzzi, in an essay on the dimensions and definitions of the occult, describes as anomalous to our generally accepted “cultural storehouse of truths” (1971, p. 639). One of the reasons why there is so much resistance to acknowledging the role played by magical thinking in the analytic encounter is that, according to anthropologists, magical thinking is the most primitive mode of thought, which, in the course of human phylogeny, has been followed by religious thinking, and, finally, by scientific and analytical thinking (Frazer, 1890; Mauss, 1950). Indirect evidence for this claim comes from studies showing that people who have paranormal beliefs are somewhat less inclined to critical thinking than others (Brugger & Graves, 1997; Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj, & Heier, 1996; Pacini & Epstein, 1999), an issue explored in depth by Freud in Totem and Taboo. It would be quite wrong, however, to assume that development in thinking is a one-dimensional process, with magical thinking on one end and analytical reasoning on the other. In fact, we all have many different modes of processing information, which, for the sake of convenience, may be divided into two kinds: the intuitive and the analytical. These rely on different areas in the brain, and have

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different rules of operation (Evans, 2003; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich & West, 2000; Sun, Slusarz, & Terry, 2005). Evans’ research into dualprocess thinking suggests the presence of “two minds in one brain”: the rational, problem-solving stream of consciousness that Evans describes as “System 2 thinking”, and, underlying this kind of thought, “a whole set of autonomous subsystems in System 1 that post only their final products into consciousness and compete directly for our inferences, decisions and actions” (p. 458). This set of subsystems might be referred to in layman’s terms as intuitive thinking. Contrary to popular thought, critical thinking does not replace intuition as the mind matures; rather, Evans suggests, both types of thinking continue to exist and develop throughout an individual’s life. People can hold conflicting beliefs that are at once rational and verbally justifiable (“every number has an equal chance of winning the lottery”), and resistant to logical arguments (“my lucky number has a greater chance than any other”). As a result, there is a constant reservoir out of which magic can appear in personal and collective life, however “advanced” we may believe ourselves to be, and it is quite natural for us to resort to magical solutions to our distress and helplessness. Sociologist O’Keefe (1982), in his book Stolen Lightning, makes a forceful and convincing case for the omnipresence of magic in social life, even in western culture today. The coexistence of two cognitive systems in the human brain is consistent with the classic claim that followers of magic and religion believe in two different realities, a natural and a mystical reality (Bronowski, 1978; Lévy-Bruhl, 1949; Tambiah, 1990). Nevertheless, there is still a great deal of anxiety about occultism within the scientific community. Popular assumptions about those who believe in psychic powers have been borne out, some feel, by empirical studies showing that those especially inclined to paranormal beliefs generally use more intuitive (i.e., non-critical) thinking in everyday life (Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj, & Heier, 1996; Wolfradt, Oubaid, Straube, Bischoff, & Mischo, 1999). Furthermore, although differences between them are small, believers in the paranormal have been shown to be slightly less emotionally stable than sceptics (Wiseman & Watt, 2004). However, the same is shown to be true for those who believe in religion—a category that includes plenty of scientists among its ranks.

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Psychoanalysis and science Ever since the death of Freud—but especially over the past thirty years—a great deal of intellectual energy has been spent in attempts to explain the relation between psychoanalysis and science. As Gay (1988) has remarked, arguments about the scientific status of psychoanalysis have even been “venomous” in their intensity (p. 745). Discussions of the subject have been passionate and involved, and it is not my project to recite them at any length here. When considering the relationship between psychoanalysis and the occult, however, it is important to keep in mind a few elements of this extensive discussion. Clearly, in the light of his neurological training and practice, his involvement in research and its methods, and particularly his sense that hypotheses arise and are extrapolated from observations, it is not surprising that Freud considered psychoanalysis to be a science. “I cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves on the surgeon”, he wrote, “who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skilfully as possible” (1912c, p. 115). Psychoanalysis, Freud believed, could not be performed by “an approximately normal person” (ibid.), but only by those who have “undergone a psychoanalytic purification”, thereby becoming aware of their own complexes and neuroses which would otherwise interfere with their grasp of what the patient tells them (ibid., pp. 115–116). However, Zaphiropolous makes the point that Freud’s was more a matter of “scientism” than of science per se (2001, p. 164). His “ideal science”, Zaphiopolous believes, may have been only an abstraction, something remote and unattainable. Still, for Freud, it was still something to strive toward (ibid., p. 165). While it is true that classical psychoanalysis has always aimed to achieve the objectivity of classical science, the way we think about psychoanalytic treatment today has changed significantly from Freud’s model of the analyst as surgical, abstracted observer to what Wallerstein describes as “a two-person psychology focused on the always subjective interactions of the transferential internalized object relationships of the patient with the countertransferential (or equally transferential) internalized object relations of the analyst” (1998, pp. 1021–22). Since 1923, the influence of Ferenczi and the

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entire tradition of object relations theory have provided an alternative model to Freud’s “surgical” example of a self that is rooted in biology and motivated by unconscious physiological drives. In other words, the analyst’s subjectivity is no longer regarded as something that should be kept as objective as possible, but, instead, is cultivated as a primary tool of knowledge through empathetic identification with the patient. When the discipline is reformulated in this light, we need to reconsider whether psychoanalysis can still be seen, as Freud saw it, as a “natural science”, or whether it should be seen as more of a social–behavioural science, or as no longer a science at all, but a historical, cultural, or philosophical discipline, as many influential scholars and critics have argued, including Phillips (1997a). Tellingly, in the last years of his life, Freud turned away from his “scientific” position. In “Analysis terminable and interminable” (1937c), one of his final essays, he famously describes psychoanalysis as an “impossible profession”, calling it an “artisanal technique” in acknowledgement of the fact that the analyst has very little control over the forces they grapple with. There are, by most estimates, no more than three thousand graduated psychoanalysts practising in the USA today (compared to sixty-five thousand clinical psychologists, for example). Psychoanalysis may be slightly healthier in Europe and elsewhere, especially South America, but compared to more conventional forms of therapy and counselling, orthodox analytic treatment is virtually obsolete. Why, then, should this apparently abstract issue provoke such strong and uncompromising feelings? Why should it matter whether psychoanalysis is a science, or not a science, or one kind of science rather than another? What, precisely, is at stake here? Zaphiropoulos argues that, although psychoanalysts think a great deal about the practice of psychoanalysis, they have no tradition of analysing the concept of science as such; they regard this as a task for philosophers. Among professional philosophers, however, while there is a very long tradition of thinking about science, there has been relatively little attention given to the way in which the idea of science impinges on, and may be conditioned by, human emotions and needs—the very material of psychoanalytic engagement. One of the reasons for the intensity of this debate, I believe, is a struggle over the question of paranormal phenomena, which, at least in modern intellectual discourse, is not scientifically

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respectable. Yet, paranormal phenomena obviously have enormous relevance for the field of psychoanalysis, in as much as they involve issues of non-verbal communication and mutual influence between two people. It is no longer appropriate, I believe, for psychoanalysis to be considered a science. Some analytic scholars, such as Schafer (1980) and Sharpe (1988), argue that psychoanalysis is a form of interpretation of which no single one is true. In other words, it is a hermeneutic similar to those used in literary studies or in music (as Sharpe puts it: “There are many different ways to play a Beethoven sonata, many of which, in the hands of maestros, have equal validity” (p. 440)). This position is taken even further by the British psychoanalyst Phillips, who is deeply opposed to any attempt to defend the scientific “validity” of psychoanalysis, or even its coherence as a field of academic study, rather than simply, as Phillips puts it, “a set of stories about how we can nourish ourselves to keep faith with our belief in nourishment, our desire for desire” (1997a). Unsurprisingly, given the resistance to change in most psychoanalytic training programmes, Phillips is considered something of an outsider in the USA. If he is known at all, it is for his role as the general editor of the new Freud translations from Penguin Modern Classics, which began to appear in 2003, soon after copyright had run out on James Strachey’s original twenty-four-volume Standard Edition. In line with his beliefs about the nature of psychoanalysis, Phillips, as general editor, has rejected the technical language of psychoanalysis in favour of an accessible and vernacular Freud. His translations take the form of attractive paperbacks with surrealist artwork on their covers. There are no indexes, no scholarly footnotes, no attempts to standardize the translation from one volume to the next, and no consistency of technical vocabulary, which has been cut back to a minimum. He also rejects chronologies, proposing instead a thematic organization. Each volume has a different translator, and the introductory essays are all by non-psychoanalysts—scholars of literature, the history of science, and philosophy. In other words, Phillips treats Freud not as a scientist, but as an imaginative author, no different from other great modern writers in the series, like Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann. Freud is treated as a writer, philosopher, and cultural historian, a scholar whose theoret-

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ical work is rich in allusions to artists and writers like Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Botticelli, Wilhelm Jensen, Heinrich Heine, and many others (and he makes case studies out of literary characters, including Hamlet, Oedipus, Lady Macbeth, and Richard III). Even in his own lifetime, Freud’s literary achievements were acknowledged when he was awarded the Goethe prize in 1930 for his creative endeavours. A full account of the many approaches to the relationship between psychoanalysis and science is given in the final chapter of Rudnytsky’s Reading Psychoanalysis (2002). Here, Rudnytsky argues that, while this new formulation of psychoanalysis as a mode of therapy is a hermeneutic discipline (and thus not bound by the canons of natural science), psychoanalysis as an interpretative practice “should be based on a theoretical foundation where such restrictive canons are both necessary and appropriate” (p. 202). Closing the divide between hermeneutic and scientific practices, he makes the case that psychoanalysis is not autonomous, isolated from the other sciences, both natural and human (ibid., p. 227), but is sited at the crossroads between the two, marking the areas that both have in common, respecting both the claims of science as a theory and the claims of the individual as a therapeutic practice (ibid., p. 253). It is also important to remember that, in science as in psychoanalysis, principles are often understood tacitly, even unconsciously, just as we rely on our bodily processes to give us knowledge of the world without our being fully aware of how such processes work.

Jule Eisenbud: occult explorer A scholar who would clearly agree with Rudnytsky’s view of the analytic field is the psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and parapsychologist Jule Eisenbud (1908–1999), whose work plays a seminal role in all three fields. Eisenbud was a graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Medical School. He was a charter member of the Parapsychological Association and wrote numerous articles on psychiatry and psychoanalysis based on his experiments with telepathy.

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Illustration 1.3. Jule & Molly Eisenbud. © Stephen E. Braude.

Although he was interested in psychic phenomena as a young man, and recalls reading Freud’s “Dreams and the occult” (1932) during his medical internship, Eisenbud initially remained ambivalent about the existence of the paranormal. It was not until he had “painfully worked through” his resistance to the material that he began to encounter in his own analytic practice that he “was able to appreciate the penetrating insights into telepathy that Freud presented in his New Introductory Lectures” (1987, p. 10). He was also deeply impressed and strongly influenced by Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927), an influential book about precognitive dreams. Upon setting up in private practice, Eisenbud discovered that, almost from the beginning, his patients began to provide him with “striking examples of dreams and associations to which the telepathy hypothesis was reasonably applicable”. He observed, “It was as if psychoanalysis, exciting and demanding enough as it was, had suddenly become multidimensional . . . [and] opened up a vast subterranean landscape that I had never dreamed existed” (1987, p. 11). Eisenbud’s colleagues, however, found his work less exciting. As soon as he began speaking and publishing on the subject of the paranormal, he encountered rejection and ridicule. An attempt was made to oust him from the New York Psychoanalytic Society,

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and he was told that he would never become a training analyst. Despite this hostility, he continued to publish widely on his findings (cf. 1946, 1947, 1948), and his book Psi and Psychoanalysis (1970) was the first comprehensive presentation of the relevance of psychic phenomena to analytic practice. Eisenbud moved his family to Denver in 1950 where, although he was officially part of the academic community, few of his colleagues expressed sympathy with his interests, and it was many years before he was formally invited to speak on his research in parapsychology. Much of this research recounted his observations of telepathic communication between himself and his patients, as well as between patients unknown to one another. In this interplay of patient-to-patient telepathy, Eisenbud, on superficial examination, did not seem to be involved at all. Upon closer inspection, however, he recognized that his own repressed unconscious material—often something in his life that he was not particularly proud of—was dynamically related to the patient’s thought-transference. This part of the process was important to Eisenbud; he felt it forced him to examine his own personal issues, conflicts, and anxieties, thereby proving therapeutic for himself as well as for his patients. Eisenbud always considered telepathy to be an important tool in psychoanalysis, and stressed the advantages of its use in the therapeutic setting. In some cases, he believed a telepathic interpretation was necessary in order for him to understand what the patient was struggling with and attempting to convey. By revealing the telepathic nature of a patient’s dreams, for example, he might help overcome some transference or countertransference difficulty that had been impeding the analytic progress. In his best work (1970, 1982), Eisenbud tried to extend the theory that Freud (1922a) had ambivalently proposed, that telepathic data could enter the unconscious mind and be transformed, in the manner of a day residue, in the manifest content of a person’s dream. According to psychoanalyst Reichbart (1998), the theories and data Eisenbud produced are simply too threatening to fit into our current belief systems. “Jule’s work, if it survives at all”, he concludes, “will do so a hundred years hence, when it will be rediscovered in some fashion” (p. 428). Eisenbud was prepared for this resistance. He believed that most of us—and psychoanalysts in particular—unconsciously develop a rigid reaction formation

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against our more primitive tendencies. We enjoy stories and films about the occult and the supernatural, he points out, comfortably assuring ourselves there is no reality behind these dramatic occurrences. When faced with such things in real life, however, we maintain our composure by marshalling all our powers of dissociation and disbelief against the unexpected event, minimizing or disregarding it, and assuming an exclusively critical and objective approach: The so-called occult is no threat to us when we can view it with the comfortable assurance that it has no reality beyond that of the dramatic device. When it brushes by us in life itself, we have another problem on our hands entirely. [1946, p. 84]

He convincingly argues that the psychoanalytic community is especially hard-headed and sceptical when it comes to the paranormal because most analysts rigidly isolate and dissociate individual events, repressing and defending whatever they cannot examine hypercritically. He argues that the refusal of most psychoanalysts “to face certain facts full on, in all their implications” is “a defensive maneuver that allows business as usual to go on in the rest of one’s life” (1967, p. 156), which is especially ironic given that, as Eisenbud suggests, these defences may be an integral part of the mechanism that gives rise to paranormal events in the first place (1946, p. 86). Eisenbud himself often stated his belief that everyone is capable of thought-transference, and we may, in fact, be using it unconsciously all the time. In other words, like Freud, he believed that thought-transference was not an isolated, dissociated form of perception, but part of the human personality. According to Eisenbud, this form of communication was just one of the many complex facets of the unconscious, and in his 1946 paper “Telepathy and the problems of psychoanalysis”, published in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, he endeavoured to explain its method: The organism always acts with utmost economy of function, and the telepathic process can generally be observed to utilize whatever ordinary stepping stones lie to hand; but there comes a moment, just as when two electrodes approach that distance from each other at which the potential is able to snap the current across

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the intervening gap, when the spark occurs, and one can retrospectively observe that to achieve this spark, the patient, the analyst, or both—as influenced by some unseen force—have been pulled slightly (sometimes greatly) out of line with their expected individual orbits. [p. 86]

Other analysts sympathetic to this position include PedersonKrag (1947), Fodor (1951), and Mintz (1983). Where Eisenbud’s stance differed significantly from those of others working in the field, however, was in his firm conviction that paranormal events had long been proved to be scientifically valid. He argued, “the existence of telepathic functioning already rests on a foundation as firm as anything in the realm of empirical science” (1946, p. 83). Many, I imagine, would disagree with this statement, and likewise with his claim that “we do not today have to align ourselves with discredited crystal gazers and table-lifters; we are amply supported by researchers of the highest academic standing” (1946, p. 86). “All in all”, Eisenbud argues, “psychoanalysts may be assured that the study of so-called paranormal psychological phenomena can only strengthen that view of man and nature which science in general and psychoanalysis in particular has revealed to us” (1946, p. 87). He finds it baffling that what he regards to be “the wide-ranging data” on thought-transference and other paranormal procedures (within the field of parapsychology) is totally excluded from the domain from which psychoanalysis draws its case studies, theories, and evidence, and he believed the psychoanalytic prejudice against “paranormal” phenomena would be considerably undermined if analysts looked at the non-analytic literature on the subject, especially at the data provided in standard work in the field of parapsychology. Eisenbud is referring here to the Rhine experiments, summarized in the book Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years (Rhine, Pratt, Smith, Stuart, & Greenwood, 1966). In the late 1930s, psychologist J. B. Rhine, along with his wife Louisa and his colleague William McDougall, conducted an extensive series of experiments in parapsychology at Duke University. By 1940, Rhine and his team had accumulated a series of thirty-three experiments, involving almost a million trials, with protocols that rigorously excluded possible sensory clues. Twenty-seven of the thirty-three studies produced statistically significant results. Furthermore, positive

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results were not restricted only to Rhine’s laboratory. In the five years following Rhine’s first publication of his results, thirty-three independent replication experiments were conducted at different laboratories. Sixty-one per cent of these were statistically significant, where a total of five per cent would be expected by chance alone. Even in the current decade, scholars like Lazar (2001, p. 114) have complained that a sceptical attitude persists towards psychic phenomena “despite robust evidence demonstrating the reality of nonlocal phenomena such as telepathy and the impact of mind from a distance”. It is widely claimed among parapsychologists that mediums such as D. D. Home produced extraordinary effects that could not possibly be dismissed as fraudulent or attributed to observer suggestion. Yet, it is crucial to remember that, according to mainstream scientific thought, no such “robust evidence” exists. The Rhine experiments, although evaluated by the most rigorous statistical

Illustration 1.4. Jule Eisenbud, October 1989. © Stephen E. Braude.

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methods, used enormous numbers of subjects and huge numbers of guesses, and, as a result, have always been considered suspicious and controversial by the scientific establishment. In 1988, the US National Academy of Sciences published a report on the subject that concluded: “there is no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena” (Druckman & Swets, 1988, p. 22). In 1991, in an opinion poll of members of the National Academy of Sciences, ninety-six per cent described themselves as “sceptical” of ESP (McConnell & Clark, 1991). Finally, a study using neuroimaging published in 2008 is believed to “provide the strongest evidence yet obtained that paranormal mental phenomena do not exist” (Moulton & Kosslyn, 2008, p. 182). It seems fair to say, then, that the scientific community has rejected all claims of psychic phenomena, since, according to empirical criteria, no compelling evidence of such phenomena has yet been found. Eisenbud died in 1999. In the last thirty years of his life, the situation he described in 1946 has become even more confusing. Psychoanalysts today, marginalized by mainstream psychology, ridiculed by Freud’s detractors and dismissed as ineffective by his critics, are increasingly desperate for their practice to be considered empirically valid (and, therefore, “taken seriously”). Since science today is actively resistant to claims of the paranormal, most psychoanalysts strongly discourage the exploration of occult chains of investigation, such as incidents of telepathy or synchronicity, which are either seen as due to chance (and thereby dismissed) or regarded as infantile fantasies of omnipotence and superstition. Many analysts, no doubt, feel threatened by evidence of the paranormal, and react by either ignoring them altogether, dismissing them as coincidence, or isolating them in the realm of the supernatural, thereby assuming they are unrelated to anything else connected with the human world. Science has always regarded the paranormal as something to be handled with kid gloves, and, as the French analyst Roustang (1983) points out, “psychoanalysis wants to be irrevocably on the side of science and therefore rejects what it cannot account for” (p. 50). As Phillips (1997b) makes clear, however, psychoanalysis is not a science (not even a social science), at least, not as social science defines itself today. Psychoanalysis is devoted to the exploration of

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the individual, in a certain place and for a certain amount of time, which means that truly repeatable experiments are inherently impossible, since no two individuals are alike. It defies the entire purpose of psychoanalysis to provide an objective measurement of its “results” (or even a subjective measurement, for that matter). Indeed, any endeavour that is deeply reliant on magical thinking cannot, by definition, be scientific—or even, I would add, strictly rational. “One of the most remarkable facts in the history of the psychoanalytic movement”, complained Eisenbud in 1946, “is the indifference with which Freud’s publications on the subject of telepathy were received”. Eisenbud considered this neglect particularly significant in the light of what he terms “the obsessive, exegetical tendencies” of the early Freudians (p. 85). In an essay written almost forty years later, he was still acutely conscious of “the curious irony” that “the two disciplines which have most to do with unconscious factors in human affairs, parapsychology and psychoanalysis, have so little regard for each other, and play so little part in each other’s thinking” (1983, p. 11). It goes without saying that, even today, most practitioners of psychoanalysis would dislike analogies between their practice and the occult, which they may find emotionally threatening or disturbing. In the preface to his monograph Telepathy and Medical Psychology (1948), Ehrenwald remarks that, when embarking on research into the paranormal, it was pointed out to him “that whoever wants to expound his views on matters of psychical research would be best advised first to state his credentials” (p. 5). Things appear to have changed very little today, if they have changed at all. “To be interested in these data in psychoanalysis today”, wrote Reichbart in 1998 of Eisenbud’s experiments, “is more of a professional kiss of death, if possible, than it was in the 1950s when [Eisenbud] became involved” (p. 428).

CHAPTER TWO

A brief history of thought-transference

“The event might be extraordinary, changing the course of one’s life; or it might be a string of minute incidents just sufficiently clear to stand out in relief against one’s usual day and then shading off into still vaguer trivia as the aura gradually faded” (Nabokov, 1959, p. 625)

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he term “thought-transference” was first used in Phantasms of the Living (1886), a two-volume work of paranormal investigation compiled by three of the prominent scholars who founded the London Society for Psychical Research in 1882: Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore. In this extensive study, the authors present 702 verified cases of someone accidentally “tapping into” the thoughts, experiences, or emotions of another person not physically present, usually a loved one. A “phantasm of the living” is defined by the authors as the appearance, in a dream or vision, of someone who was either alive but would be dead within twelve hours, or someone who had not been dead for more than twelve hours. In each case, the authors suggest, 25

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the phantasm is taking advantage of the perceiver’s emotional state to express the secret of their deaths, filling the gap left by their loss. It is the “accidental” nature of such experiences that distinguishes them from “thought-reading”, which the authors describe as involving two minds, one active and the other passive. They explain, It is for the sake of recognizing this that we distinguish the two parties as ‘agent’ and ‘percipient’, and that we have substituted for thought-reading the term thought-transference. Thought must be taken here as including more than it does in ordinary usage; it must include sensations and volitions as well as mere representations or ideas. [Gurney, Myers, & Podmore, 1886, p. 11]

Later, Myers coined the word “telepathy” as “a single generic term which embraces the whole range of phenomena and brings out their continuity” (ibid.), from the Greek tele (distant) and patheia (feeling). In the first volume of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), Myers defines telepathy as “the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense” (p. xxii). Two other interesting and evocative terms used in Phantasms of the Living are “borderland cases”, a phrase used to refer to those experiences “which occur on the borderland between sleeping and waking” (p. 389), and “unconscious intelligence” (p. 69). This latter term is, the authors agree, a “somewhat equivocal phrase”, and “it is necessary to know in every case exactly what is meant by it”. Generally, however, it refers to “the unconscious cerebral processes whereby actions are produced which as a rule are held to imply conscious intelligence” (p. 69), meaning physical processes which are so ingrained in the unconscious as to have become automatic, such as driving a car or playing a musical instrument. It is also used, however, to describe psychic processes that are severed from the main conscious currents of an individual’s life. Such events, according to the authors, are outside the individual’s consciousness, as the events in another person’s consciousness are; but they differ from these last in not revealing themselves as part of any continuous stream of conscious life; and no-one, therefore, can give an account of them as belonging to a self. [p. 69]

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Sixteen years after the publication of Phantasms of the Living, Freud (1912e) first suggested that the analyst should “turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient” (p. 113). “It is a very remarkable thing that the unconscious of one human being can react upon another, without passing through consciousness”, he remarked in his essay “The unconscious” (1915e, p. 194). In later work, he began to discuss such experiences in terms of telepathy, though he continued to use the old term, thought-transference (gedanken übertragung) interchangeably with the new one, perhaps because it seemed less mystical, or perhaps because of its connections with “ordinary” transference (übertragung), in the psychoanalytic sense. In his first paper on the subject, “Psycho-analysis and telepathy” (1941d [1921]), Freud says he believes the phenomenon to be genuine, despite the fact that, as he admits, he has yet to observe it himself. He clarifies this statement by pointing out that such a process would be purely physical (that is, non-supernatural). Later, he describes telepathy as “a mental act in one person instigating the

Illustration 2.1. Freud’s study in Vienna. © Edmund Engleman, 1938.

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same mental act in another person”, adding that if telepathy were a real process, “we may suspect that, in spite of its being so hard to demonstrate, it is quite a common phenomenon” (1933a, p. 55). In the same essay, he describes telepathic messages as “that kind of psychical counterpart to wireless telegraphy” (p. 36). And in “Dreams and telepathy” (1922a), he remarks that scientists still have no idea how communication takes place in the insect community, and goes on to speculate that telepathy is the original method of communication between individuals and that in the course of phylogenic evolution it has been replaced by the better method of giving information with the help of signals that are picked up by the sense organs. But the older method might have persisted in the background. [p. 198]

Precognitive and collaborative dreams Freud may never have experienced a case of thought-transference himself, but other analysts were more fortunate. In a paper written in 1948, Eisenbud describes two dreams experienced by a pair of patients unknown to one another at the time. The first patient, Miss A, had a dream in which she sought refuge from the rain in a neighbour’s house. The following night, Miss B, the second patient, had a dream in which she gave shelter to a neighbour who came in from the rain. In Eisenbud’s analysis of the situation, Miss B was “telepathically acting out” through her dream. Jealous of the first patient, she unconsciously produced the dream “sequel” as a way of interfering in her rival’s analytic session, bringing the analyst’s attention back to herself. The paired dreams, then, appear to have been an unconscious collaboration between the two patients. Eisenbud reports a number of similar “echo” dreams, which, he claims, are generally expressive of “the patients’ unconscious need to gratify and thus secure in return the love and protection of the therapist” (1947, p. 202). Many other analysts of his acquaintance, he adds, have reported similar dreams. What seems particularly significant here is Eisenbud’s role as catalyst in the production of at least the second of this pair of apparently collaborative dreams. “The telepathic episode”, he claimed, “is a function not only of the repression of emotionally charged

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material by the patient, but of the repression of similar or related emotionally charged material by the analyst as well” (1946, p. 18). In other words, certain especially sensitive patients may have the ability to spotlight something the analyst is labouring (albeit unconsciously) to repress. This might take the form of a slip of the patient’s tongue, for example, or, as in this case, the production of an especially pertinent dream. In such cases, claims Eisenbud, it is as though the dream were directed at him specifically, as if to say: “there, there, your theses (doubts, superstitions, position, or whatever) are quite justified” (1947, p. 202). Psychiatrist Ehrenwald (1952, p. 24) describes such incidents as a combination of “autopsychic material” (that is, material derived from the patient’s own recollections, perhaps very early ones) mixed with “heteropsychic material” (that is, material of telepathic origin, often transferred directly from the mind of the analyst). Interestingly, in a posthumously published paper (“Psychoanalysis and telepathy”), Freud gives several examples of fortunetellers’ prophecies that, rather than predicting “real” future events, mirrored the unconscious wishes of their sitters (1941d [1921], pp. 177–182). He goes on to suggest that fortune-telling may be a common example of thought-transference, bearing in mind that the fortune-teller is not actually seeing the future, but reading the unconscious desires of the sitter. As Freud’s vignettes reveal, one of the difficulties of attributing unlikely co-incidences to thoughttransference is the impossibility of knowing exactly whose thoughts are being transferred to whom, especially when the unconscious is involved—not only the unconscious of patient and analyst, but of others who may not be present, as in the case of Eisenbud’s two patients’ “collaborative” dreams. After all, if we allow that the unconscious has effects on everyday life, sometimes startling ones, there can be no way of knowing where these effects begin and end; indeed, we can only estimate very roughly when conscious will begins and ends. This difficulty—known in parapsychology as the “source of psi” indeterminacy—can never be fully eliminated.

Thought-transference in fiction and medicine According to anthropologist and psychoanalyst Róheim (1955), all mental processes involving agency toward the external world are,

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by their very nature, magical (because they all derive, developmentally, from the early animistic stage). As Róheim explains, “magic in its first or original form is the basic element in thought, the initial phase of any activity” (p. 83). In other words, magic is the motivating and original principle in every mental process that has to do with agency, and that is directed toward the external world. Magical fulfilment, then, as Róheim sees it, is the ultimate goal of all practical thoughts and activities. It would follow that thought-transference—or, at least, a deeply held belief in the phenomenon—may be at the heart of much of our everyday mental activity. In creative contexts, such as art, poetry, and literature, the reality of such experiences is more or less taken for granted. As Nabokov puts it, “the monogrammatic interconnection of two individual brain-patterns is not unknown in so-called real life” (1981, p. 162). In this observation, made in a lecture on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina given at Cornell, Nabokov is referring to an incident in which Anna and her lover, Vronsky, appear to dream in unison. It is as if the intimacy of emotion between the lovers has opened up a level of connection transcending “ordinary reality”, claims Nabokov, allowing for a much deeper style of unconscious communication. Psychoanalyst Reichbart confirms this observation in his article “Psi phenomena and Tolstoy” (1976). “Tolstoy seems well aware of a fact that parapsychologists have learned through the years”, comments Reichbart, “that psi and precognitive phenomena are usually built up from the smallest, seemingly irrelevant details” (p. 256). Nabokov is one of many authors for whom thought-transference in its various forms had particular interest. The theme recurs elsewhere in his work, most notably in a short story entitled “Scenes from the life of a double monster”. In the following passage from this story, a Siamese twin considers the connected thought patterns he shares with his brother: The pattern of acts prompted by this or that mutual urge formed a kind of gray, evenly woven, generalized background against which the discrete impulse, his or mine, followed a brighter and sharper course; but (guided as it were by the warp of the background pattern) it never went athwart the common weave or the other twin’s whim. [1958, p. 162]

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As Freud often pointed out, most of his psychoanalytic observations had been anticipated, in some cases many hundreds of years ago, by the work of imaginative poets and writers, though in more creative, less systematic forms. He observed that the poets and philosophers before him had discovered the unconscious; his own contribution was of a method by which the unconscious could be studied. In the field of medicine, particularly in psychiatry, as in the realm of fiction, the existence of thought-transference is taken for granted, though it is usually given a different name, and considered to be a pathological (rather than supernatural) phenomenon. Psychiatric literature, like fiction, contains many well-known cases of folie à deux, formerly known as “contagious insanity”, and generally referred to today, according to the taxonomy of the DSM-IV, as DSM 297.3: Shared Psychotic Disorder, which reads, This psychotic mental disorder is diagnosed when delusions develop in an individual involved in a close relationship with another individual already afflicted with delusions arising out of a different psychosis such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder or psychotic major depression [and] is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (eg. a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition.

Rare cases have also been reported of the delusions being shared by three (folie à trois), four (folie à quatre), or many people (folie à plusieurs, sometimes known as mass hysteria). Within the category, cases generally fit one of three forms: imposed psychosis, simultaneous psychosis, or communicated psychosis, and there have even been cases reported where the delusions have communicated themselves to pets (Franzini & Grossberg, 1995, pp. 143–149). In medicine, however, the explanations given for such phenomena are always rational and empirical, and the transferred thoughts invariably described not as examples of thought-transference, but as hallucinations or delusions. It is well known that one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is the inability to distinguish the inner from the outer world. The schizophrenic patient will often have “unspoken conversations” with neighbours, friends, colleagues, and even people in other

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places, including people on television or in the media. The schizophrenic’s belief that he or she is being subjected to the influence of telepathy or radio waves, or that he or she possesses supernatural powers of thought, is so well known that it has almost become a cliché. As a result, psychiatrists almost automatically doubt the stability of anyone making such claims. According to psychiatrists, these are internal projections experienced as external stimuli. Ehrenwald explains how, during the paranoid phase of schizophrenia, the personality disintegrates, selfboundaries collapse, and the distinction between ego and environment is suspended. When the higher intellectual functions begin to break down, the patient may begin to experience a rushing up of unconscious material from a deeper layer of the mind, which he or she may battle painfully to resist, often in vain. The patient may complain that he or she is unable to tell him or herself from the outside world, and stops struggling to maintain the boundaries of his or her personality. Interestingly, Ehrenwald adds, “the projection hypothesis of paranoiac delusions . . . is nothing more than the reverse of the telepathy hypothesis, its photographic negative, as it were” (1948, p. 123). Ehrenwald has been particularly explicit about his own secrets of guilt, anxiety, and related preoccupations, which were apparently picked up and expressed by many of his schizophrenic patients. “The current system of clinical psychiatry”, concludes Ehrenwald, “fails to provide for the possibility that a person, besides suffering from a schizophrenic or paraphrenic psychosis, may in actual fact be subject to telepathic or ‘psychic’ experiences” (ibid., p. 160). Some may argue that flooding of thoughts and feelings regularly experienced by the schizophrenic is simply a heightened version of something that also occurs in more everyday circumstances—between identical twins, for example, members of the same family, lovers, or anyone sharing an unusually deep and close connection. Indeed, sensitive practitioners have suggested that those suffering from severe mental illness may actually have access to the levels of unconscious perception that are necessary in order to facilitate this communication of thoughts from one psyche to another. This insight was expressed succinctly by Ferenczi in his Clinical Diary of 15th March, 1932, where he made the following observation:

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I do not exclude the possibility that delusional productions contain more objective reality than we have assumed until now. From the very beginning I was inclined to think that the hallucinations of the insane, or at least a part of them, are not imaginings but real perceptions, stemming from the environment and from the psyche of other human beings, which are accessible to them—precisely because of their psychologically motivated hypersensitivity— whereas normal people, focusing only on immediate matters of direct concern to them, remain unaffected. [p. 58]

R. D. Laing: the reaches of inner space The enhanced perception that sometimes accompanies psychotic states is addressed explicitly by the work of the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Laing argues that fear of mental illness is rooted in a terror of losing one’s individual ego-boundaries. Like some other unorthodox thinkers, he pays serious attention to the experiences of individuals whose attunement to the world seems off kilter and

Illustration 2.2. R.D. Laing. © John Haynes, 1974.

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who, as a consequence, sometimes undergo intense and disturbing episodes. He does not dismiss these as defensive strategies, struggles with past developmental problems, or anomalies produced by the clinical situation; instead, he studies them closely as particular and unique ways of being in the world. In a way, argues Laing, the schizophrenic performs a sacred function by manifesting in himself the lunacy of the society that has cast him out. In other cultures, this would be the role of the shaman or tribal priest, but since western culture has no shamanic tradition, we are merely frightened and confused by the schizophrenic, who has no social role and no context for his experience other than what we call “insanity”. In his best-known book, The Politics of Experience (1967), Laing describes schizophrenia as a journey from outer (that is, “consensually validated”) space and time into “inner” space and time; the healing process, then, becomes a journey back from what Laing eloquently describes as the “infinite reaches of inner space” (p. 101). Some years later, Bateson (1979), heavily influenced by Laing’s seminal thinking, wrote about the way schizophrenics, reliant on primary process thinking, often say the opposite of what they mean—an appropriate response, suggested Bateson, when one cannot access one’s experience directly, or when one is unable to trust words in general. Although he may not have been aware of it, Laing’s thoughts about the schizophrenic state have resonant connections with the work of Myers, especially his two volume work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published in 1903 and 1904. In the first volume of this study, Myers makes the case that there is an intimate connection between the collapse of ego-functioning caused by psychological suffering (what Myers calls the devolutive state), and the transcendent states of genius, telepathic communication, possession, and spiritual ecstasy (what Myers calls the evolutive state). Shamanism and schizophrenia, as Laing points out, are two different paths to the same place, and both involve unique and particular ways of relating to others. There is a difference, however. The shaman’s talents are usually revered, but the psychotic’s uncanny ability to penetrate the thoughts and feelings of others, especially when these feelings are highly emotionally charged, is more often considered a curse than a blessing. Psychiatrists both before and since Laing have written

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about the fact that patients suffering from severe kinds of mental illness seem to have an uncanny capacity to “get under the skin” of those who live and work with them. And although Laing’s ideas may have been radical, he never discussed psychopathology in connection with the paranormal or the supernatural, and, in this if nothing else, his work adhered to mainstream models. The continued embarrassment around Freud’s work on thought-transference and precognitive dreams led to the development of a new vocabulary for anomalous experiences—a vocabulary more redolent of the clinic than the tilting table. For example, in a paper published in 1926, psychoanalyst Deutsch described a case in which her patient somehow apprehended that Deutsch was about to celebrate her eighth wedding anniversary, even though, according to the author, she had taken “great professional care” to disclose nothing about her personal life, not even the fact that she was married. Deutsch describes the incident as “an unconscious connection between patient and analyst” emanating from “infantile affective factors” (p. 430). This paradigm shift has significant implications for understanding psychoanalysis today, where, when confronted with examples of thought-transference, practitioners tend to consider them as either chance coincidences or unconscious acts of self-deception or self-fulfilment, driven by such engines as narcissism, the powers of magical thinking, or the repression and projection of hostile impulses. Other practitioners have come up with their own theoretical paradigms. Reik, for example, calls his process “listening with the third ear”—a method by which, he claims, he can focus on the patient while at the same time letting his own thoughts float into consciousness, thereby providing a clue not only to what the patient is not saying, but also things he does not yet know (1948, pp. 14–20). Psychoanalysts such as Reik take it for granted that certain situations, including (but not limited to) states of heightened emotion, can open up a mental space within which ideas can be communicated intuitively, and subsequently translated into conscious thoughts. This process is not considered supernatural, however, but is regarded instead as a rare epiphenomenon of the analytic encounter. Later instances of this kind of thinking are widespread. In a 1979 paper, Whipple makes the suggestion that certain patients

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may, in the analytic situation, attain unconscious knowledge of their own bodily processes that is not accessible to conscious thinking. “We might even entertain the possibility”, he suggests, “of inferring the presence of physical pathology, even if it does not yet appear as a physical symptom” (p. 41). He goes on to describe this possibility as “almost mystical” in the manner of Freud’s “puzzling leap” (1916x, p. 258) from mental process to somatic manifestation. Eleven years later, in a paper published in 1988 detailing his own experiences of odd events in the consulting room, Silverman comments that “it became increasingly difficult to write the correspondences all off as chance or coincidence” (p. 290). Whatever their clinical orientation, many analysts have surely experienced their patients’ uncanny abilities to hit on the analyst’s own personal weak spots. The literature is full of cases revealing how certain patients, especially those with paranoid or psychotic tendencies, seem to have the strange ability to ferret out repressed or subdued hostility in their environment, and often have a particular (though selective) sensitivity to other people’s unconscious anxieties. Such patients, it appears, have a heightened capacity for “crypto-inference”—the subliminal awareness of things that are not available to ordinary consciousness. It is almost as though, in the same way dogs can hear ultrasonic frequencies, certain patients (and, no doubt, certain analysts) can “hear” unconsciously expressive body movements or other means of non-verbal communication.

Illustration 2.3. Freud’s study & couch. © Edmund Engleman, 1938.

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Illustration 2.4. Freud’s office. © Edmund Engleman, 1938.

Such uncanny fusions between analyst and patient are familiar to any reader of the analytic literature. Indeed, Jung readily encouraged practitioners to seek out this state, promoting what he referred to as the “lowering of consciousness” (1954, pp. 180–181), a process whereby the intellect fades into the background, ceding its power to the influence of emotions and intuition. Balint describes this fusion as an “interpenetrating, harmonious mix-up” (1958, p. 66); he remarks that his patients sometimes seem to have an uncanny talent for “understanding” his motives and “interpreting” his behaviour, which, he demurs, “may occasionally give the impression of, or perhaps even amount to, telepathy or clairvoyance” (1968, p. 20). Money-Kyrle (1956, p. 366) refers to the use in the analytic dyad of “pre-verbal and archaic” communication, “similar perhaps to that used by gregarious animals in which a posture or call of a single member will arouse a corresponding affect in the rest” (1956, p. 362). Searles describes this state of fusion as “pre-ambivalent symbiosis” (1965, pp. 536–543). Jungian analyst Schwartz-Salant, using a scientific metaphor, recalls a case in which the “energy

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field” between himself and a patient “oscillated, separating and joining us in a kind of sine wave rhythm” (1984, p. 16). As these examples suggest, analysts in the post-Freudian climate tend to use such terms as “symbiotic” and “intuitive” when discussing unusual synchronicities between themselves and their patients. Any reference to thought-transference is now taboo.

“Delusional eccentrics” There is a great deal more at stake here, I suspect, than simple fashions in terminology. Thought-transference, to those who use the term, refers to something outside the bounds not only of sensory experience, but also of the current laws of science. There is still a huge stigma, in psychoanalytic circles, around those things that cannot be “proved” to exist (along with a strong tendency to deny any such stigma exists). The case of Stoller’s posthumously published work is indicative of this tendency. In 2001, the psychoanalyst Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer edited and published a 1973 paper by Stoller on the subject of telepathic dreams. Stoller, who died in 1991, did not submit the paper for publication at the time because his mentor and supervisor Ralph Greenson had, according to Mayer, informed him that “if he valued his career as a young and reputable psychoanalyst he would, at least for the moment, put it away and not try to publish it” (Mayer, 2001, p. 630). In his paper, Stoller confesses to a great deal of hesitancy in addressing the subject of telepathic dreams, admitting that anyone who reads it will be at the sort of disadvantage we all experience when confronted with alleged seers, psychics, and the rest of that mostly disreputable crew who inhabit this strange land—not to mention the many delusional eccentrics who also claim telepathic and like powers. [ibid., p. 632]

In her preface to the posthumously published paper, Mayer suggests that, “given the current psychoanalytic climate”, most people now accept that such experiences are part of “an anomalous area of human psychology”, rather than something that more properly belongs to “the realm of the occult and para-psychological”

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(p. 630). By defining these experiences as “anomalous”, Meyer is domesticating and taming them, implying that they are not—as they first seem—occult and frightening, but merely unusual phenomena that can be explained, if not readily, in psychological terms. In his paper, however, Stoller does admit that he finds such experiences frightening. Moreover, since they lie outside the domain of currently plausible scientific or rational explanations, the phenomena he describes do, in fact, fall into the category of the paranormal. This, however, is a word neither Stoller nor Meyer feels comfortable using. Perhaps they are worried that rather than being regarded as internationally esteemed professors and clinicians, they might be confused with that “mostly disreputable crew” of “delusional eccentrics” who claim to have telepathic powers. But what if esteemed professors and delusional eccentrics were not so far apart? Mayer believes that “significant experimental research has accumulated in recent years to suggest that telepathy—or remote perception, to use its more contemporary designation—may constitute a real and scientifically verifiable phenomenon” (ibid., p. 633). She summarizes this research at length in her book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (2007), and the authors whose work she cites—in particular, Dean Radin and Russell Targ—are well known in parapsychology. Outside their field, however, the works of Radin and Targ have encountered much criticism, particularly from psychologists Marks and Kammann in The Psychology of the Psychic (1980). From the perspective of mainstream psychology, it is widely accepted that statistically significant evidence of telepathy has yet to be discovered, and it is often pointed out that, although we have discovered a great deal about the mind over the past century, none of it has been due to contributions from the realm of parapsychology. In short, thought-transference is no longer discussed in the psychoanalytic world because the term smacks of the occult, and, as Totton has observed of all such dealings, “there is a very real flavor of psychosis, which many investigators try with difficulty to domesticate and conceal” (2003, p. 2).

CHAPTER THREE

Residues of the uncanny

“Under conditions that have not yet been sufficiently determined even inner perceptions of ideational and emotional processes are projected outwardly, like sense perceptions, and are used to shape the outer world” (Freud, 1912–1913, p. 43)

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hough psychoanalysis and the occult both deal in the realm of intellectual uncertainty, the main difference between them is that paranormal events cannot be fully explained using the language and criteria of material reality, and psychoanalytic events generally can. This is especially the case today, since most contemporary psychoanalytic theory presents itself as emerging from— and subject to—a consensually measurable version of reality, and a general understanding of what certain experiences and behaviors mean. To put it differently, psychoanalytic theory takes an intellectual uncertainty and claims to make it certain. Whan (2003) elaborates further on this point: What I experience may be due to unknown factors. I can of course name such factors ‘the Unconscious,’ thereby giving them a 41

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spurious explanation. When I psychologize in this way, I theorize the ‘unknown’ in terms of human subjectivity and interiority; I internalize the ‘unknown.’ Thus I render life’s unknowns ‘knowable’ and ‘psychological,’ reinforcing and expanding psychology’s explanatory domain. [p. 106]

As Whan suggests, categories can bring great relief and comfort. It is always reassuring to find a set of theoretical paradigms by which inexplicable things can be ordered and defined. Yet, this tendency to categorize may ultimately have the effect of creating an impenetrable barrier, when what we really need is a window—an experience that can be felt and lived without labels or theories— through which we can see through to the other side. Attributing thought-transference to “the unconscious” does not account for its frightening effects, nor does it help us to understand it more fully. When we name invisible forces—whether as brain waves, microwaves, gamma rays, or countertransference—we appropriate them into one of the disciplines of the western academy: physics, biology, chemistry, or, in this case, psychoanalysis. “The obscure recognition . . . of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious”, writes Freud, “is mirrored in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious . . .” (1901b, p. 259). To put it another way, the advance of Enlightenment thought meant that uncanny experiences started to be perceived as coming from within rather than without. As Castle (1988) points out, however, “[t]he problem with displacing the supernatural ‘back’ into the realm of psychology is that it remains precisely that: only a displacement. The unearthliness, the charisma, the devastating noumenon is conserved” (p. 59). After the eighteenth century, observes Castle, “one could . . . be ‘possessed’ by the phantoms of one’s own thought— terrorized, entranced, taken over by mental images—just as in earlier centuries people had suffered the visitation of real spirits and demons” (p. 60). The Enlightenment, as Castle suggests, turned spirits and demons into private phantoms, projected delusions, symptoms of mental disorder. Since Freud first established the field, psychoanalysis has been particularly charged with deep anxiety about borders, boundaries, and fears of “outside” contamination. This unease, I suspect, is

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somehow bound up with the underlying fear that if thought-transference is indeed possible, as Freud believed, then we are not—as we have always assumed ourselves to be—the masters of our own homes. This is especially worrying in the analytic situation because it implies that one can no longer be sure which thoughts “belong” to the analyst and which to the patient; we may have no idea, in fact, who is doing what to whom, or why certain experiences are happening, or even whether they are happening at all. If thoughttransference is possible, how can we distinguish between one consciousness and another? And if we cannot do so, does that mean the “Other”, which has so long been alien, may actually be a part of me?

Freud’s aetiology of the uncanny “All this is still uncertain and full of unsolved riddles”, observed Freud of his investigations into thought-transference, “but there is no reason to be frightened by it” (1933a, p. 55). Here, Freud admits—by denying it—that the idea of thought-transference is naturally scary. It poses an awful threat to the human proposition; it is, we feel, something abnormal, and, like other abnormal processes, we try instinctively not to think about it. It is frightening because it suggests that we may not be who we think we are, a prospect which opens the doorway to ontological uncertainty. The very idea of it summons a rupture in the fabric of everyday life, leaving us, like Freud, wavering on the verge of believing in things that we cannot explain by the laws of the world we have come to know. Simply put, the idea of thought-transference is fundamentally uncanny. To Freud, the uncanny has a very particular meaning; it is closely related to the concept of animism, discussed at length by Frazer (1890). In Totem and Taboo, a work closely influenced by The Golden Bough, Freud explains how “the assumptions of magic are more fundamental and older than the doctrine of spirits, which forms the kernel of animism” (1912–1913, p. 91). Magic, he explains, is “the technique of animism” that “reveals in the clearest and most unmistakable way an intention to impose the laws governing mental life upon real things” (ibid., p. 91). Those with an animistic

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view of the universe believe that “everything is inhabited by spirits and demons “constructed on the analogy of human souls” (ibid., p. 76). Animism, in other words, is the projection of mental life on to the external, inanimate world. As Freud explains in Totem and Taboo, primitive people, like very young children, transpose the structural conditions of their own minds on to their surroundings. “In the animate epoch the reflection of the internal world is bound to blot out the other picture of the world—the one which we seem to perceive” (ibid., p. 85). Freud cites Frazer’s claim that, through magic, primitive people sought control over things in the external world by controlling ideas about those things. “Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things” (ibid., p. 83). These ideas are developed in Freud’s essay “The ‘uncanny’” (1919h), which he begins by responding to an essay published in 1906 by psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch. Jentsch hypothesized that the essential factor responsible for the production of uncanny feelings is “intellectual uncertainty”, by which he means the doubts and confusions that are liable to arise when we come across something that is completely unfamiliar to us. Freud goes on to refine this notion of “intellectual uncertainty” into the idea of something familiar that has now become strange, which he then relates to the psychoanalytic concept of repression. His essay is more literary–historical than clinical; he approaches the phenomenon from various perspectives, notably those of literature, history, etymology, myth, art history, and aesthetics. This perhaps helps to explain why most of the writing on the uncanny since Freud has been in non-clinical, mainly aesthetic disciplines such as literary history, art history and criticism, and cultural studies. Specifically, Freud defines the uncanny as “that class of the frightening that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (1919h, p. 220), which can be traced back to those infantile beliefs and desires that have since been surmounted—beliefs in such things as the omnipotence of thoughts, the return of the dead, the miraculous power of words, and the coming to life of inanimate objects. Such experiences touch on unconscious content, thereby reconfirming previously surmounted beliefs and evoking

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the animistic conception of the universe prevalent in infancy. Part of the process of growing up, explains Freud, involves giving up these kinds of beliefs, and yet most of us—perhaps all of us—fail to do so, to a greater or lesser extent. Dolls, robots, puppets, and dummies often evoke uncanny sensations, especially when they unexpectedly begin to speak and move around. When faced with such things, we instinctively begin to wonder whether they are alive; if not, we wonder whether they once were alive, and, if so, whether they might be able to return to life at any moment. Kohut (1972) suggests such experiences evoke the theme of “apprehension about the aliveness of self and body, and the repudiation of these fears by the assertion that the inanimate can yet be graceful, even perfect” (p. 361). Bach (1975), on the other hand, connects the uncanny to the vital dialogue of action and response between mother and baby, in whose absence there is nothing but a rigid unresponsiveness. The fear of this unresponsiveness—on the part of either mother, child, or both—is the source, according to Bach, of “anxiety reactions to this or that inanimate object” (p. 86) and in some cases a fascination with “ghosts, ghouls and vampires”—alter egos that can provide a “kind of ‘life insurance’ against ego dissolution” (p. 89). When something inanimate improbably comes to life, it gives the frightening impression that something (even, in certain cases, a part of one’s own body) has suddenly been taken over by a hostile, alien, or merely indifferent outside force—an impression which confuses everything we think we understand about perception and cognition. Japanese roboticist Mori has given this confusion a local habitation and a name: the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is a dip in the graph on which emotional response is plotted against similarity to real-life appearance and movement. The more lifelike something appears (a doll, robot, or manga character, for example), the more we respond to it emotionally. This affective connection continues right up to the point just before the object attains a completely lifelike look, when, suddenly, the graph line takes a deep plunge. At this point, the object is so close to real life that, rather than identifying it as a lifelike object, our mind acknowledges it as an object-like life form. Because our brains are so accustomed to recognizing living things, these animate creatures can evoke a frightening cognitive dissonance: they

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Figure 3.1. The uncanny valley. © Masahiro Mori, 1970.

seem unhealthy, asymmetrical, genetically unfit. There seems to be something slightly wrong with them, something that does not fit— an odd surface texture, an asymmetrical facial expression, exaggerated proportions, or body parts that move in concert without being directly connected. Eerily, something that has promised to be familiar, responsive, and animate is suddenly discovered to be unfamiliar, unresponsive, or inanimate. What seemed to be alive is suddenly revealed to be an unreal, autonomic machine, functioning according to some unpredictably discontinuous principle, and incapable of genuine reciprocation. Today, the uncanny is most often found in the secret pockets of popular culture and in works of the everyday imagination. Unlike the academic world, larger mainstream culture has long subscribed to a non-rational, quasi-religious view of the universe; this is reflected in movies, television, graphic novels, digital art forms, and tabloid newspapers (for a further examination of this fascinating subject, see Nelson’s The Secret Lives of Puppets). This confusion of inner and outer, of animate and inanimate—the disturbing sensation of an outside force invading the private, living psyche—is, I believe, at the heart of our anxieties about the frightening potential

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Illustration 3.2. Ted Serios. © Jule Eisenbud Collection.

of thought-transference. It finds a particularly appropriate objective correlative in the fascinating “thoughtographs” of Ted Serios.

Theodore Judd Serios Eisenbud’s best-known (and only commercially successful) book was The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind (1967). In this book, Eisenbud describes his many years of work with Ted Serios, an elevator operator from Chicago, who had the uncanny ability to create what he referred to as “thoughtographs”. By holding a Polaroid camera and focusing very intently, Serios was able to produce dream-like images of his thoughts on the Polaroid film that subsequently emerged from the camera. His working method varied considerably—with Eisenbud,

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he produced images using various different kinds of camera and in many different situations, sometimes under stringent test conditions. On occasion, for example, volunteers were asked to attend the experiment with a photograph sealed in a cardboard-backed manila envelope; Serios then managed to reproduce the image with no prior knowledge of it. Eisenbud, who began as a sceptic, gradually became convinced that Serios had a genuine psychic gift, though the experiments were often difficult because Serios, an alcoholic, seemed to get better results the more he drank. Eisenbud’s book details the frustrating complexities of the case; my interest here is in the uncanny quality of the images themselves. Most often, Serios would get no results at all. At other times he would get what he called “blackies”, in which the film would look as though it had not been exposed at all, or “whities”, in which the film would appear overexposed. In a few rare cases, however, bizarre images would emerge, perhaps in a fuzzy circle of light or a ghostly shape. Sometimes they would be quite clear, particularly when Serios was attempting to produce the image of a specific physical monument or building; still, even the clearest images had an uncanny texture and quality. Despite a great deal of controversy about the authenticity of these images, no one has been able to duplicate under the same conditions the images that Serios obtained on film, and later on videotape.

Illustration 3.3. Ted Serios “Thoughtograph” (1965). © Jule Eisenbud Collection.

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What is so uncanny about these images—in the Freudian sense of the term—is the way real objects or places appear to have merged with (or been altered by) the material of Serios’s unconscious mind, in the manner of dreams. Some of them juxtapose the target images with what appear to be images of day residue, haunting shadows of unfamiliar structures. Others seem to incorporate both past and future events. On one occasion, for example, the target image appeared superimposed on a second image that looked like the space probe, Voyager-2. Serios, a space buff, confessed he had been preoccupied with the space mission at the time, and was unable to clear it completely from his mind. On other occasions, the images were affected by Serios’s own perspective, as in the case of an image he produced of a hangar used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The image was conspicuous for the misspelling of the word “Canadian,” which, in Serios’s “thoughtograph” was spelt “Cainadian” (his own incorrect spelling of the word). Other images could only have been obtained as a result of knowledge or perspectives currently unavailable. For example, after seeing magazine photographs taken from Voyager-2 of Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, Eisenbud suddenly recognized some of Serios’s previously unidentified “thoughtographs”. This made sense, since Serios had been obsessed with Voyager-2; however, Serios’s “thoughtographs” were produced years before the Voyager-2 pictures were taken. Another retro-”thoughtograph” featured the image of a shop front in Chicago named “The Old Wells Fargo Express Office”. In the picture produced by Serios, however, the building was called “The Old Gold Store”—which turned out to be an earlier incarnation of the same shop front. He also occasionally produced pictures that would be possible only from a mid-air perspective, including an exposure showing part of Westminster Abbey, and an image of the Denver Hilton Hotel. In some ways, the Serios images make a fascinating visual analogy with the contents of the unconscious. Experiments in telepathy have shown that it is often precisely what someone does not think of transmitting that is transmitted most clearly. This is often the case in these images, which often contain parts rather than the whole, or elements distorted enough to be barely recognizable.

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Illustration 3.4. Ted Serios “Thoughtograph” (1965). Jule Eisenbud Collection.

Sometimes, they seem to contain “leakage” from unconscious wishes and expectations—not only those of Serios, but also those of the observers who happened to be present at the time. Emotionally powerful material is particularly liable to emerge in telepathy, as well as repressed thoughts and memories. Although Serios was working with photography, it has often been pointed out that the unconscious deals with symbolic representations rather than photographic likenesses, which may explain why the images he produced were rarely “accurate” reproductions, but often slipped from the central image to a fringe element, from the essential to the accidental. One of the most fascinating aspects of these “thoughtographs” is the way they appear to merge the individual “inner” and the collective “outer” world exactly in the manner suggested by the phenomenon of thought-transference. In the early seventeenth century, metaphysician Robert Fludd pictured the interior of the brain containing an eye in the same position as the imaginative soul, labelled the “oculus imaginationis”. It is this inner “eye of the

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imagination” that seems to be responsible for Serios’s uncanny images, which superimpose a private psychic reality on a world outside the boundaries of the individual ego. Following the clues in the Serios “thoughtographs” leads from the everyday to the bizarre and the ineffable, confusing matter, space, form, motion, and time— yet traces of the everyday are still retained. This, in part, is what makes them so uncanny. Not everyone found the story of Ted Serios equally compelling, however. A review of Eisenbud’s book by Hans Eysenck in the New York Times concluded, “Dr. Eisenbud seems to have little notion of what experiments are and less liking for the rigors and methodological niceties of scientific research”. Yet, in his obituary of Eisenbud published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, psychoanalyst Richard Reichbart had a different appraisal of the Serios research: In all the useless searching since for the repeatable experiment, the palpable, physical evidence of one of Ted’s photographs, often an amalgam of the past and the present or of different events or of impossible perspectives, with the extensive protocols and the numerous scientific witnesses, is as firm evidence as we have ever had or maybe that we will ever get, and by far it is the most fascinating. It is to the shame of parapsychology that the discipline has all but abandoned these data, or in some places, approved the observations of one or two cynics at the time. [1998, p. 429]

The imp of the perverse and the “influencing machine” Thought-transference does not always involve a second party; alien thoughts sometimes intrude, quite terrifyingly, into everyday life. How many of us, for example, when standing on a railway platform, have not had the experience of thinking how easy it would be to take that extra step off the edge, into the path of the oncoming train? For some people, this temptation is so real that they are unable to bring themselves to use the subway. Edgar Allan Poe, in a short story of the same name (1845a), describes this peculiar kind of compulsion as “The imp of the perverse”. The unnamed narrator observes,

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We stand at the brink of a precipice and because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we most impetuously approach it. There is no passion so demoniacally impatient as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. [1845a, p. 285]

There is, I suspect, a significant connection between Poe’s notion of “the imp of the perverse” and the question of thought-transference, particularly in relation to where the boundaries of the individual mind begin and end. In “The imp of the perverse”, more philosophical essay than fictional work, the narrator explains how he has managed to commit the perfect crime: a murder that allowed him to inherit a large fortune, which he has enjoyed for many years, until the day he started muttering to himself the words, “I am safe—I am safe— yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!” (p. 287). The moment this thought crosses his mind, he starts to feel sudden pangs of suffocation. He gets the sense he is confronting his own double, his “perverse self” who seems to be “the very ghost of him I had murdered . . .” (ibid.). From the time it first comes into his head, the narrator cannot stop thinking about the idea of “being foolish enough to make open confession”. Finally, unable to stop himself, he rushes madly through the heavily populated streets to confront the proper authorities, before whom “some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back”, and “the long imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul” (ibid., p. 288). This odd spirit of self-injury, according to the story, seems to emerge fully formed from the ghostly borderland between waking daylight and the world of sleep and dreams. “With certain minds, under certain conditions, it [perversity] becomes absolutely irresistible”, Poe’s narrator explains. “It is a radical, a primitive impulse—elementary” (ibid., p. 284). Note that “perversity” does not necessarily mean that which we know to be wrong. After all, confessing a crime is the right thing to do, morally speaking. In this context, wrong is wrong not for moral or ethical reasons, but “because it is perverse . . . because it is damaging to the personality who initiates the action”. What is “wrong” is that which goes against the grain of our rational interest and better judgement. “We might, indeed, deem this perverseness a direct instigation of the

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archfiend”, the narrator clarifies, “were it not occasionally known to operate in the furtherance of good” (p. 286). This is a theme that clearly intrigued Poe, and it forms the basis of stories like “William Wilson” (1939), about a man and his double; “Ligeia” (1838), about a woman who seems to exert her will from beyond the grave; and “Morella” (1835), in which a woman is reborn in the body of her own daughter. This last story refers explicitly to the work of the philosopher Locke, who, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), asks how people can know themselves to be the same entity from one moment to the next. Identity, Locke concludes, has to rest in consciousness itself, measured in terms of memories and of the exercise of will. In stories like “Morella” and “Ligeia”, Poe seems to have Locke’s ideas in mind, since he is questioning where the boundaries of consciousness can be said to begin, and where they end. Is it possible, he seems to be asking in these stories, that individual will can extend beyond the boundaries of the body, even of the grave? There is a well-established tradition of reading Poe’s stories through a Freudian lens, partly because of the wealth of analytic material they contain, and partly because of the apparent psychological instability of their author. Significantly, according to Bonaparte (1949) in her psychobiography of Poe (to which Freud contributed a brief introductory paragraph), Freud himself was very interested in Poe’s work, which he considered to be of similar analytic importance to, say, the tales of Hoffmann. Wilbur (1967), in his essay “The house of Poe”, considers Poe’s stories as journeys away from “this temporal, rational, physical world” into the inner world of “unfettered vision” (p. 110). Similarly, Bloom (1988), in his book on Freud and Poe, argues strongly that much can be learnt from considering Poe’s tales in the light of Freudian psychoanalysis: . . . considered as types of narrative, the two discourses are curiously able to intermesh—it is quite possible to use a Poe tale as an analytic text—they become not just a peculiar parody of psychoanalysis but a mirror image of psychoanalysis where reversal and reflection condition the response of the discourse of analysis . . . [p. 4]

The central text here is Poe’s (1845b) tale, “The purloined letter”, which the French theorist Jacques Lacan famously took as the

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starting point for his series of seminars. The purpose of these seminars was to comment on and explicate Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), particularly the notion of the wiederholungszwang or “repetition automatism”. Freud had observed the tendency of many of his patients to mechanistically repeat unpleasant experiences (such as dreaming of previous war trauma), a tendency that was, he believed, a direct contradiction to what he had earlier named “the pleasure principle”. The idea of the “repetition compulsion” that found expression in Beyond the Pleasure Principle first appears in the 1895 essay “Project for a scientific psychology” (1950a), in which Freud conceives of the unconscious as being preoccupied with finding some irretrievably lost object—a preoccupation which takes the form of an unconscious repetition of the loss. Later, in his essay “Mourning and melancholia”, Freud returned to this notion of the “irretrievably lost object” in the contrast he drew between melancholia and ordinary mourning. Unlike normal grief, Freud argued, melancholia is pathological and self-punishing, characterized by numbed disconnection and a self-loathing whose logical conclusion is suicide. Melancholia, according to Freud, can lead to “selfreproaches and self-revilings”, and—as if the mourner had desired or even caused the loss—culminates in “a delusional expectation of punishment” (1917e, p. 125). Like Poe, Freud was deeply interested in the impulse that compels us to engage in self-sabotaging behaviour. While Poe presents this impulse as “perverse” and “demonic”, Freud finds a rationale for its existence in his notion of the repetition compulsion. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud argues that humans are not gentle, but creatures born with a powerful sense of aggression. Elaborating further, he explains that we are sometimes driven to repeat a trauma in an attempt to attain mastery over it, as in the case of the fort/da game played by the anxious child awaiting his mother’s return. This “perpetual recurrence of the same thing”, says Freud, relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned; it manifests itself as “an essential character trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences” (ibid., p. 22). Like the child with his toy, Freud speculates, we repeat unpleasant experiences because we feel we can master a powerful

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impression far more thoroughly by being active than by merely experiencing it passively. It was the recognition of these violent and destructive impulses in human life, in fact, that led him to revise his theory of the pleasure principle to embrace the notion that our tendency toward pleasure is “opposed by certain other forces or circumstances” (ibid., p. 9); that the road to pleasure, in other words, may not be a straight one, but may take “long and indirect forms” (ibid., p. 10). As Freud puts it, the ego embraces a number of “mysterious masochistic trends” (ibid., p. 14), and it is this apparent masochism, he suggests, that leads certain people to suffer an unusual number of accidents, for example, or to relive traumatic experiences night after night in the form of horrible dreams (ibid., p. 13). In his 1924 essay “The economic problem of masochism”, Freud returns once more to his contemplation of this mysteriously perverse tendency, making the case that the masochistic impulse sometimes reveals itself as “a sense of guilt which is mostly unconscious; but it can already be completely explained and fitted into the rest of our knowledge” (1924c, p. 161). In “Some character types met with in psychoanalytic work”, he describes people who are “criminals out of guilt feeling” who commit criminal acts because unconscious anxiety troubles them so severely that they hope some kind of punishment may bring relief (1916d, p. 324). This kind of man is, as Poe says of a character in his short story “The man of the crowd”, “the type and genius of deep crime” (1839, p. 91). On the face of it, then, Poe and Freud seem to have very different explanations for the human tendency to self-sabotage. Poe is less interested in his characters’ criminal acts than in their inexplicable compulsions to expose them. “Examine these and similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the Perverse”, he argues in “The imp of the perverse”, making the case that there is a normal, “healthy” sort of organ of perverseness in the human mind. “We perpetrate them merely because we feel we should not. Beyond or behind this, there is no intelligible principle” (1845a, p. 286). Freud, equally fascinated by these apparently retrograde impulses, decided on closer examination that they were, indeed, subject to an “intelligible principle”— that of the repetition-compulsion, the attempt to defeat trauma by repeating it. So sudden and violent can such impulses be, that when they occur in the lives of otherwise “normal” people, Freud

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observes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, those people often feel that they are “being pursued by a malignant fate, or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power” (1920g, p. 21). Freud’s explanation, however, has more in common with Poe’s than might at first appear. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he goes on to explain that, while our attempts to master an unpleasant experience by repeating it is a reasonable idea, the fact that we then continue to repeat it makes no sense at all. The activities motivated by this instinct are intended to lead to satisfaction, but, as Freud says, “no lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities having led instead only to unpleasure. In spite of that, they are repeated, under the pressure of a compulsion” (p. 21). In this, Poe and Freud agree. An integral part of human nature, the “imp of the perverse” manifests itself as the compulsion to repeat a painful process over and over again, long after it has become clear that what is done cannot be undone and that further repetition of the original trauma leads only to further pain. This kind of alienation from the self, which suddenly reveals the fragility of socialization and the random contingency of the conventions accompanying self-knowledge, could be considered as a pathological style of thought-transference. Sometimes, it takes a psychical form, manifesting itself as, for example, the sensation that our hands and feet are not our own, that our limbs have their own agency, that our skin has been invaded by strange sensations, or that our face and facial expressions have become estranged and originate from a foreign and possibly hostile force. These uncanny sensations are described most vividly in Tausk’s classic study of the “influencing machine” (1933), a delusion experienced, as Tausk explains, by “a certain type of schizophrenic patient” (p. 519). Tausk, a Viennese psychiatrist, was a student and colleague of Freud’s. In his well-known paper, Tausk describes patients who believe they are being influenced by a “diabolical machine” just outside their technical understanding, usually operated by a group of persecutors who, Tausk suggests, are “to the best of my knowledge, almost exclusively of the male sex” and are “predominantly physicians by whom the patient has been treated” (ibid., p. 519). This terrifying machine is, according to its victim, believed to produce (and remove) thoughts and feelings by means of waves, rays, electricity, magnetism, air-currents, or other mysterious forces, and

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also to “drain off” the patient’s thoughts and feelings one by one. It sometimes also produces motor phenomena such as erections and seminal emissions, with the aim of weakening the patient and depriving him of his potency. The most famous example of an “influencing machine” is probably that imagined by Daniel Schreber, whose case served as a point of departure for Freud’s theory of paranoia. Among his other delusions, Schreber believed that the Sun was a symbolic representation of his physician, Dr Flechsig, who was responsible for the horrible tortures Schreber was forced to undergo. As anyone familiar with the symptoms of schizophrenia will know, this experience has many analogies with the profound disruptions in cognition and emotion typical of this illness, which disturb language, thought, perception, affect, and sense of self. These disruptions frequently include the hearing of inner voices or the experiencing of other sensations not connected to an obvious source, and the tendency to assign personal significance to general events. Other symptoms include stereotyped body movements, expressions, or postures which the patient may attribute to an alien force or will acting upon his or her body. An especially common and related delusion is that the patient’s thoughts are either being broadcast into the mind by a malign individual or a conspiracy of enemies via television or radio networks, or that they are not enclosed in the patient’s head but can be read by anyone else, or that they are simultaneously in the heads of everyone in the world. Tausk suggests that the delusion of the “influencing machine” is rooted in anxieties about the mechanical functioning of the human body, especially in relation to sexuality. Often, to the schizophrenic, the machinelike character of human responses and feelings comes to dominate all aspects of human life. Tausk explains that the idea “originates in the need for causality that is inherent in man” (ibid., p. 521), which is also, he suggests, the explanation for delusions of hidden persecutors who act by means of suggestion or telepathy. “Clinical psychiatry”, he adds, “explains the symptom of an influencing machine as analogous to the ideas of persecution in paranoia (which, it is known, the patient invents in order to justify his delusions of grandeur), and calls it paranoia somatica” (ibid.). As an example, Tausk refers to the case of a paranoid patient named Staudenmayer, who

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. . . described his sensations during his bowel movements from the beginning of the movement to its conclusion, and attributed every single peristaltic motion coming to his awareness to the activity of special demons allegedly located in the intestines and entrusted with the performance of each separate motion. [ibid., p. 522]

Interestingly, Tausk makes the point that “[m]achines produced by man’s ingenuity and created in the image of man are unconscious projections of man’s bodily structure” (p. 532). The lack of agency suggested by the delusion of the “influencing machine” thereby suggests the underlying truth that we are not, in fact, in control of our bodies, and that many of their motions and inner activities occur outside our agency and outside our own will. The “influencing machine”, in brief, is the human body—including the unconscious, which regularly produces thoughts, dreams, desires, and images that are outside and beyond our conscious control. The “influencing machine” is generally believed to be “manipulated by enemies” (p. 533)—a telling evocation of the uncanny fears underlying the phenomenon of thought-transference. As Ehrenwald asks in relation to the Schreber case, however, [i]s it not ridiculous to state that Dr. Flechsig should in actual fact have harbored sadistic–aggressive tendencies against his paranoiac patient? In short, is not any intimation of a telepathic reading of the case of paranoia likely to appear as a concession to the patient’s own point of view and, therefore, itself suggestive of mental derangement? [1948, p. 124]

To put it another way, evidence supporting the projection hypothesis is no more conclusive that evidence supporting the notion of thought-transference. To believe the latter, however, would be to think like a schizophrenic. And if the doctor thinks like the patient, where are the grounds for their “medical authority”?

Poetry and dreams These matters—the uncanny, “thoughtographs”, and the “influencing machine”—highlight some of the broader difficulties involved in this project, in which I am, essentially, calling the operational

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term “self” into question. By considering the notion of thoughttransference, we are essentially asking ourselves: where do “I” begin and end, and at what point do “I” become Other? Such questions are difficult even to formulate; human language is neither subtle nor flexible enough to describe the ontological flow of events, or to rationalize and domesticate different metaphysical states. Words and textual messages are the product of the secondary process; the primary process, as Freud pointed out, more naturally expresses itself in the form of symbolism, music, and images. Ineffable experiences, by their very nature, cannot be shared; they partake of no matrix of value and meaning, no common system of speech or thought. This, in fact, is the realm of the dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud makes the case that the dream experience is all primary process; the umwelt of dreams, he claims, is not something that can be put into language. Hartmann (1996) concurs, reminding us that, “though we are often forced to work with verbal dream reports, we need to keep in mind that these are only attempts to render the dream experience in a preservable and reproducible form” (p. 113). When we talk about a person’s dream, then, what we really mean is the account of their dream given after the fact. It was through his study of dreams that Freud maintained an interest in thought-transference. Ehrenwald puts it well. He writes of The Interpretation of Dreams, After having spent a life-time in building up a system of psychology from which the last trace of the irrational element had been stamped out, he thus opened up a back door, as it were, through which the old Mischief Maker could sneak in again, and there it was, much to the embarrassment of his more strictly Freudian followers. [1948, p, 76]

Most of today’s dream researchers, however, are not “Freudian followers” but neuroscientists, who gather data from research in sleep laboratories, where EEG scans are made while the sleeper is dreaming. The main debate in the field today is whether the primary function of dreams is psychological or physiological. The leading theorist in the field, Hobson (1998), champions the physiological model, arguing that dreams are an epiphenomenon of

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neuronal firings in the brainstem during the REM cycle. Dreaming, argues Hobson, is adaptive; the healthy brain continues to “tick over”, sending out electric impulses even during sleep, like a screensaver keeping an idle computer from crashing. Dreams occur when the cortex struggles to “confabulate” the random images, thoughts, and memories that are activated during the sleep cycle. In his thorough and thought-provoking work on the notion of authorship in dreams, States (1994) makes the argument that the virtual world of the dream usually takes the form of fragmented, broken episodes created from current memories (Freud’s “day residue”) combined, as in the waking creative process, with elements evoked by associational memory. As Freud acknowledged (1900a), the same narrative capacity that helps us to make sense of waking experience also operates when we try to make sense of a dream. In order to understand the data it encounters during the night, the mind needs to orientate itself in terms of space, time, social context, and ongoing events. This is why most people recount their dreams in narrative terms. Yet, these narratives, like the images produced by Ted Serios, are not photographic replicas of the unconscious, but coded ciphers representing the original in a new and different form. Much of the work that has been carried out on the form and style of dreams considers how they relate to narrative, perhaps because the dream’s waking analogue is usually considered to be fiction. The pattern of dreams is an interesting subject that has been written about at some length as a way of enquiring into cognitive aspects of narrative structure. Briefly, according to States (1994), dreams work according to the same basic system as conscious storytelling, and rely on the same fundamental skills, which include so-called “double-mindedness” (that is, the ability to split the mind into the writing/dream and the reader/dreamer). States explains that while creating a narrative, the writer is, essentially, dreaming under different circumstances. In other words, while the dream is an original creation, its invention is made possible by the extrinsic structures (scripts, characters, plot elements, and so on) that we borrow from waking life. Walsh (2006) has challenged the widespread assumption that narrative, capable as it is of expression in different media, is constituted by a medium-independent content. Walsh interrogates both the role of the medium in narrative and the foundational narrative

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concept of “the event”, elaborating a concept of narrative recognition as a cognitive faculty. To reflect on the narrative qualities of a dream, according to Walsh, we would need to take into account the enormous variety of narrative forms, from epics to graphic novels and stream-of-consciousness-style fiction, not all of which have a causal connection between episodes, which is often considered to be the one quality that all narratives share. Indeed, dreams, even when retold as narratives, do not always have such causal connections. They may contain episodes that are randomly linked, or not linked at all. They may consist of sudden moments in time, or of broken, non-linear fragments. Their point of view may be displaced and sporadic; there may be no protagonist, no consistent viewer perspective. Yet, while the logic connecting these episodes may not be obvious to the waking mind, the dreaming brain has a special kind of associational power; it has the capacity, as Kahn and Hobson put it, “to jump from one class of images/ thoughts to another” (1993, p. 153). The waking mind, looking back on a dream, may see no causal connections, only incongruity and discontinuity. Yet, there may be an implicit, hidden logic of condensation or over-determination; the episodes may be connected according to the principle of resemblance; they may constitute a series of variations on a theme, or they may be ordered according to some other process whose logic remains unknown to the waking mind. While narrative is generally considered to be language-based, dreams, for the most part, are formed from images, with language as a secondary consideration. Whether the creation of narrative is a linguistic process or a cognitive process independent of language is a matter of long debate; I would like to suggest, however, that in the unconscious, word and image are not necessarily as distinct as they are generally considered to be in waking life. There is an important reason for this. When we try to remember our dreams, and to describe them, we use the left hemisphere of the brain, the part that is involved primarily in speech processing, written language, and the encoding and recall of verbal, temporal, sequential, and language-related memories. But these memories have been created and stored in the right hemisphere of the brain, using primary process functions. The right brain is unable to establish sequences, which accounts for the often sporadic and

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non-sequential “order” of dreams. Moreover, when we sleep, the language processing part of the brain is “off-line”, with the result that the language of dreams involves speech, names, and narrative less often than it involves emotions, memories, and associations. While dreaming, the mind uses the toolbox of the unconscious, with its symbols, puns, metaphors, and allegories. Nevertheless, the dreaming mind has the capacity to form ideas and images quite fluidly, sometimes even simultaneously, in representational terms. Often, in a dream, no sooner do we think of something than it has already happened. As in the Ted Serios images, dreams are rarely composed of well-defined concepts, but often consist of vague, symbolic, or complex representations in which a part may stand for the whole, or vice versa. Lakoff (1993) has argued convincingly that language develops as a reflection of conventional ways of thinking within a culture. Over time, Lakoff suggests, the metaphoric properties of words become unconscious, so a word like “understand” no longer has the obvious correlate of “standing under”—that is, supporting or bearing by dint of one’s own power. Lakoff suggests that most metaphors are grounded in bodily experience that is then projected on to the outside world in the form of a cognitive map. He writes, “correspondences in real existence form the basis for correspondences in the metaphorical cases, which go beyond real experience”, adding that conceptual metaphors have the capacity to impose themselves on real life “through the creation of new correspondences in appearance”. Much language, then, functions as a code, whose individual elements, if isolated and made conscious, would be the equivalent of a unit of thought. These isolated units of thought form the language of dreams, just as their shorthand equivalents form verbal language in waking life, except that in dreams, the personal material is mixed with the cultural in a way that gives the dream a uniquely private resonance. Hobson (1998) argues that dreams are less like the languagebased narratives of fiction than like films and “multimedia events”. More recently, McGinn (2006) has suggested that our immersion in dreams and films are similar experiences, in that both offer us a transformed reality in which the body is stripped of its material bonds and becomes united with “our essential nature” as centres of consciousness. When we are watching a film, explains McGinn, the

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images on the screen lose all bodily mooring and become sheer figments of our imagination, indistinguishable from the images we dream. Some may argue that, unlike dreams, films seem real, but McGinn points out that dreams seem real too, while we are dreaming them, if not in retrospect. In fact, dreams are normally more vivid than memories, since, as Walsh explains, “any inhibiting awareness of our actual somatic sensory environment is radically attenuated during sleep”. In waking life, language is a form of taxonomy by which we classify and categorize experience. Without language, we are largely unable to communicate, even with ourselves, which often leaves us feeling alienated and lost. As our dreams can teach us, however, control over language does not necessarily imply mastery over perception, experience, or understanding. By giving an ineffable experience a name, we build a frame with which to process, proscribe, contextualize, comprehend, and compare it. One useful approach to this question is through the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In his work On the Way to Language (1982), Heidegger proposes we lay aside the notion that language comes from “within” the human mind and reflects “inner” human intentions. Instead, Heidegger sees the human as a state of being-in-the-world, through which language speaks to “us”, a definition which transcends clear distinction between “within” and “without”. According to Heidegger, ordinary language—whether journalistic, technological, symbolic, or mathematical—can only describe and mediate objects. Poetic language, on the other hand, is ambiguous, not defined by meanings that are wholly present, not static or frozen, but open to relational flexibility and the manipulation of the poet. Poetry, in Heidegger’s way of thinking, is the kind of language in which the unknown can appear without being translated into a knowable form. Through an encounter with language that is enigmatic and inscrutable, then, we learn that death—or, as Heidegger puts it, “withdrawal of being”— permeates our existence in the world. Poetry registers and reveals this “withdrawal of being” by leaving itself open to relations with other things in the world. To put it another way, the poet uses a language that is itself relationally defined, neither self nor Other, which leads us into inextricable relations with the world.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mothers and other ghosts

“Let us at least take seriously what somnambulists and the possessed, prophets and mediums, have never ceased repeating: ‘I am not myself, I am an other’” (Borch-Jacobsen, 1987, p. 206)

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f thought-transference is uncanny, what kinds of infantile beliefs and desires—long since surmounted—does the process evoke? How does it lead us back to “what is known of old and long familiar”? What unconscious content does it touch upon? Consider the bond between Siamese twins described in Nabokov’s story. Here, it is easy to see how the link between two minds is part of the tie between two bodies; there is no need to evoke a non-empirical, supernatural reality to make sense of this connection. For an even more commonplace example, think about the relationship between a pregnant mother and her child in utero. Thought-transference seems far less remote from ordinary experience when we recall that every one of us begins life with our minds—and bodies—forming inside another human being. In his classic paper “Primary maternal preoccupation” (1956), the child analyst Winnicott makes the claim that actually neither 65

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infant nor mother exists separately; instead, there is a virtually synchronous unit: mother–child. Winncott argues that the healthy mother gradually achieves a high degree of identification with her child, which heightens during the pregnancy and reaches a peak just before the infant’s birth. No one sees this as a supernatural phenomenon; on the contrary, the failure of such bonding is widely considered to be pathological. According to Winnicott and other child analysts, even after the baby is born, the boundaries of his or her personality are not clearly delineated, and the child’s ego is still fused with that of the mother. It is well known that recordings of sounds from within the womb, such as the mother’s heartbeat and watery body noises, have a marked soothing effect on the newborn infant in early weeks of life, and this sense of fluidity is also reinforced by the liquid nature of food and excrement. Naturally, the mother and her newborn baby are deeply attuned to one another’s presence and state of mind; their spontaneous, direct, and unmediated entanglement is taken for granted. In his article “Mother–child symbiosis: cradle of ESP” (1971), psychiatrist Ehrenwald points out that whereas telepathy is generally considered to be “a freakish and ambiguous means of communication, without an apparent goal or discernible purpose”, symbiotic preverbal communication between mother and child is widely believed to provide an adaptive means for bridging a potentially lethal communication gap. Ehrenwald observes, Viewed in the developmental perspective, ESP seems to be an intrinsic feature of the ontogeny of the human child—a corollary of his prelogical or preoperational ways of thinking. But with the passing of that stage, telepathy becomes more and more incompatible with the logical, Aristotelian mind of the adult. And more than that: telepathy holds the threat of what Freud has called the ‘Return of the Repressed’. [1971, p. 460]

The extra-sensory connection between mother and baby gradually begins to break during the weeks and months after birth, as the infant develops autonomy. This separation is always difficult, causing deep injuries to the ego, upsetting the child’s self-image, and fracturing object relations. These first wounds never disappear

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completely, but are generally repressed, only to re-emerge later in life following developmental stress, particularly during adolescence. This fits Freud’s theory that Time is an artefact of the ego, and, therefore, foreign to the primary process. If this is indeed the case, it also makes sense that, to a large degree, the unconscious should retain its ability to merge with the mind of another, though to most of us this ability remains inaccessible. Yet, there are rare cases when mother–baby ESP extends into childhood. Ehrenwald refers to the case history of Ilga K, published in 1935 by Ferdinand von Neuriter, a professor of forensic medicine from Riga. Ilga K was a nine-year-old mentally defective girl unable to read or write. When Ilga’s mother, separated from her in another room, read a text to herself under her breath, Ilga, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, would speak the same words aloud in a flat, uncomprehending monotone. “The tests confirm that she was able to reproduce fluently any passage read by her mother, whether it was written in Lithuanian, in German, in English, French or even Latin”, Ehrenwald informs us. “When she was reading in a foreign language,” he adds, “she made the mistakes which were in keeping with her mother’s level of education” (1971, p. 464). He suggests that telepathic sensitivity may be compensation for some kind of deficiency on the higher cognitive levels, a hypothesis that would also hold true for Ted Serios, whose education was limited and whose unusual abilities were enhanced by the disinhibition produced by alcohol. Ilga’s case is clearly an anomaly. Most young children cannot read their mother’s thoughts. Yet, they often believe that she can read theirs. “Until the child has been successful in its first lie, the parents are supposed to know everything, even its most secret thoughts”, observes Tausk (1933, p. 534, adding that “[t]he striving for the right to have secrets from which the parents are excluded is one of the most powerful factors in the formation of the ego, especially in establishing and carrying out one’s own will”. Even as adults, at the edges of our awareness remains a vestigial memory of our early relationship with the parents—a memory that comes back into consciousness every time we encounter a magical sense of being influenced or manipulated by another. These unconscious memories manifest themselves in the form of uncanny feelings about the loss of personal agency—a loss that we sometimes

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violently dread, and at other times desperately desire. Psychoanalyst Asch expresses it well: [T]emptations to fuse again and give up one’s separation and individuation exist to a greater or lesser extent in all people. The conflict over being influenced then becomes manifested in the fascination and dread of being manipulated and controlled. The greater the innate regressive pull to the earlier symbiotic relationship, the greater the excitement and the anxiety. [1991, p. 190]

In other words, once the mother–infant bond begins to weaken, the child internalizes his or her magic feelings of connection, and then projects them on to the external world. In the child’s fantasy life, wordless communication and feelings of omnipotence are commonplace. Most children feel they have a special connection with a hidden, secret reality. The association between paranormal thought and childhood fantasy helps to explain why phenomena such as thought-transference tend to be relegated to the fringes of society: most adults who consider themselves intelligent and respectable do not want to be associated with childish credulity. It has even been suggested by Kohut (1972), in his work on narcissism, that people who are prone to paranormal experiences have a particularly narcissistic personality profile. Their ability to relate to themselves and others, suggests Kohut, is locked into the idealized mirror of the mother–infant bond. This inability to relate to others in an adult fashion, Kohut argues, is an unconscious impediment to full development and individual autonomy. When such types enter analysis, the analyst will generally represent a magically endowed parent figure with whom symbiosis is possible. When it is successful, Kohut suggests, this psychoanalytic dyad may achieve a fundamental connectedness, whereby analyst and analysand—like mother and baby in utero—become a new, interconnected entity or unit beyond their separate existences, blending together at a deep emotional and experiential level. It is difficult for many of us to believe that messages can be transmitted in ways that bypass the five senses because we experience ourselves as separate individuals; after all, we look and feel separate. Yet, when any two people are deeply bonded—whether

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mother and child, analyst and patient, twins, lovers, or close friends—it sometimes appears to be possible that the two connect in a way that cannot be fully explained. This kind of connection seems to occur especially when at least one of the pair is undergoing great emotional stress and the other is open to what Stoller refers to in his article on telepathic dreams as a sort of “psychic friction”. In such circumstances, the unconscious, especially during sleep, may function as what Eshel (2006) calls a psychic “search engine” that, in desperation and to prevent a terrifying collapse into trauma, will seek out the unconscious of the other party. In the words of Hitschmann (1924, p. 438), the unconscious will function as a “psychic prosthesis, a stretched-out arm, which reaches out mystically towards that which is far off and cannot by approached in actuality through physical means”. Ehrenwald puts it differently: “telepathy is not an actual transmission of sensory perceptions or cognitive material from one person to another”, but involves “the temporary fusion of two emotionally linked individuals into one functional unit, re-establishing the original mother–child unit as it existed at an early developmental stage” (1960, p. 53). It seems especially interesting that thought-transference often seems to occur during dreams, since Freud (1900a) noted that the most dense, opaque part of the dream—the part that most resists meaning—always carries the most significance for the dreaming subject; he referred to this as “the navel of the dream” (p. 536). This is particularly relevant since the navel is, of course, the private place on our body where we were once joined to another, the sign that although we may now be separate individuals, it has not always been that way. Incidentally, although it is vital to our psychic wellbeing that we recall our early connection with the mother as a mutual, symbiotic experience, nature normally ensures that we do not remember that, while every baby has an exclusive relationship with its mother in utero and at the breast, the mother’s relationship to her baby is not so exclusive. Most mothers are devoted to their newborn infants, but they may also have other children to take care of, and the needs of a husband or partner to meet. Moreover, a baby cannot satisfy a mother’s needs in precisely the same way she satisfies those of her child. We may not remember it, but we were not our mother’s only love.

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The “oceanic feeling” In one of his letters to Freud, the historian Romain Rolland describes having “several brief and staggering” mystical experiences that caused him to feel as though he had merged into the natural environment (1990, p. 23). These episodes, he wrote, convinced him that life is constituted by “billions of sensations, little droplets that grow, come closer together, and disappear in order to come back again to the Ocean of Being” (1947, p. 27). Nature, for Rolland, is not an abstract, amoral entity but a “living presence”, the fundamental matrix by which all life is connected. As he puts it elsewhere, “[a]t bottom each mind and what is convenient to call nature share the same reality, have the same origin, are the issue of the same cosmic energy” (1985, p. 348). Writing to Freud, he referred to this mystical sense of unity as “the oceanic feeling”. Rolland’s experiences evoke William James’s (1902) description of mystical phenomena as transient, ineffable experiences of unity. To James, along with many other thinkers, these experiences offer access to a particular kind of enlightened wisdom. For Kohut, for example, they signify the beginning of a gradual decathexis of the individual self and a growing participation in “supraindividual ideals and the world with which one identifies” (1978, p. 458), which is another way of expressing Rolland’s ultimate belief that “the very object of life, of individual life . . . is the gradual elimination of the Screen [of Maya]” (1985, p. 252), the Hindu concept of a “veil” which manifests, perpetuates, and governs the illusion of a phenomenal Universe. The relationship between Freud and Rolland was long and complicated; they corresponded for many years, from 1923 to 1936, always in warm and cordial tones, although Freud disagreed with Rolland about mystical experience. According to such scholars of the subject as Mekur (1989), Hood (1976), and Zaehner (1960), Freud considered the “oceanic feeling” to be indicative of the “common man’s” religion that he condescendingly mentions in The Future of an Illusion (1927c). Such experiences, he believed, signify a defensive, regressive descent into primordial states and a return to the pre-Oedipal stage of psychic development (or, as Nabokov slyly puts it, “the fish wish of the womb”). Civilization and its Discontents (1930a) opens with a debate on the nature of this feeling, which

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Freud describes as “a sensation of ‘eternity’, a regressive feeling as of something limitless, unbounded— . . . a feeling of ‘oneness with the universe’ that seeks the ‘restoration of limitless narcissism’ and the ‘resurrection of infantile helplessness’” (1930a, p. 72). It would be wrong, however, to assume that Freud interpreted all mysticism as temporary regression. Parsons (1999) has persuasively demonstrated that Freud’s views on the topic are far more subtle, nuanced, and appreciative of mystical modes of knowing than has heretofore been assumed. Parsons plausibly asserts that Rolland, who rejected life after death and the notion of a personal god, ended up impressing on Freud that not every religion is a “common man’s” religion and that one can be a mystic and also, at the same time, an intellectual and a cultural critic. To some, it may seem counterintuitive to approach mystical experience from the perspective of exclusively psychological meanings and processes, but as Meissner (1980) explains, this perspective is fundamental in the pioneering work of Freud, and also in the seminal writing of William James, whose interest in such experiences likewise focused on affectivity and states of consciousness. For both thinkers, the mystical domain was translated into (and reduced to) terms of psychic processes that could be identified and analysed in relation to their respective theoretical paradigms.

Synchronicity and the participation mystique The relationship between Freud and Jung has been much discussed, especially in relation to the unconscious, which is one of the important areas in which their work diverged. Jung, of course, understood the unconscious in collective terms, in relation to symbols and archetypes. Partly in consequence, he is widely considered to be less of a “scientist” than Freud, since his work ventures into areas that Freud considered taboo for a psychoanalyst, such as religion and spirituality. Indeed, in his semi-autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962, p. 99), Jung mentions having read seven volumes of the spiritualist author Emanuel Swedenborg, and, according to his close colleague and collaborator Marie-Louise von Franz, “[f]rom his early youth, Jung kept a watchful eye on

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parapsychological . . . phenomena, reading more on these subjects than is perhaps evident in his works” (1970, p. 192). Nevertheless, like Freud, Jung considered himself a bona fide scientist, increasingly so as he grew older. As Bair states in her admirably comprehensive biography, Jung “insisted—often in high dudgeon—that he was an empirical scientist and should be regarded as such” (2003, p. 5). Even in his early years, Jung was convinced that spiritualistic phenomena and parapsychological experiments, when considered dispassionately and objectively, had a place within scientific discourse. Jung, unlike Freud, believed science to be an all-inclusive and non-particularized discipline that included the kinds of spiritual phenomena that most people consider incompatible with a solidly entrenched foundation of materialism. His dissertation was a study of the psychic talents of his cousin Hélène Preiswerk, a local medium, entitled “On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena” (1901, pp. 3–88). His intention in this dissertation was to make the point that psychic powers emerge from psychological states of mind, and have nothing whatever to do with the so-called supernatural. He hoped to demonstrate clear connections between apparently occult phenomena such as psychic powers and the subjects usually considered appropriate for research by the medical and psychological professions. Nevertheless, Freud’s speculations about thoughttransference share common ground with two of Jung’s most important ideas: the participation mystique and synchronicity. Participation mystique is a phrase first used in 1922 by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a French anthropologist and philosopher, with reference to the inability of the “pre-logical” mind to differentiate between the supernatural and the real, to address contradictions, and to distinguish between subject and object. Lévy-Bruhl’s posthumously published notebooks reveal that he actually revised his opinions on this subject, finally dropping the idea from his thought (1949, par. 62). But Jung, in his essay “Psychology and religion: East and West” (1938), claimed this was a mistake. Of Lévy-Bruhl he wrote, It is rather to be regretted that he made such a concession to rationalistic superstition, since ‘mystique’ is just the right word to characterize the peculiar quality of ‘unconscious identity’. There is

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always something numinous about it. Unconscious identity is a well-known psychological and psychopathological phenomenon (identity with persons, things, functions, roles, positions, creeds, etc.), which is only a shade more characteristic of the primitive than of the civilized mind. Lévy-Bruhl, unfortunately having no psychological knowledge, was not aware of this fact, and his opponents ignore it. [par. 817, n. 28]

Jung went on to appropriate Lévy-Bruhl’s term, using it with reference to any situation in which one person attains such an influence over another that, at an unconscious level, the two become merged. This applies especially to the psychoanalytic dyad, in which, Jung claimed, “the subject . . . does not feel himself into the object, but the object felt into appears rather as though it were animated and expressing itself of its own accord . . .” (par. 359). He always believed this to be a nexus of both dangerous and creative possibilities, where two separate minds could be mysteriously brought together. Since it was unbound by place or time, Jung believed the participation mystique could have genuinely transformative and lasting effects. Ideally, he felt, the analytic consulting room can be a liminal zone in which the couple drop their everyday roles and social personae. On such occasions, a special levelling can occur, leading to a direct relationship that is anti-structural, undifferentiated, spontaneous, and direct, albeit temporarily. Many Jungians connect the notion of the participation mystique with that of the collective unconscious, pointing out that according to Jung, the individual psyche is encompassed by the collective psyche, meaning that, although we appear to be separate individuals on the surface, we are connected to each other at a deeper level. Significantly, however, Jung grew highly ambivalent about the participation mystique. He felt it could develop between individuals or groups, and that while it could often be useful, productive, and satisfying to experience, it could also be damaging and pathological. Elsewhere, he described it as a sort of mental contagion—the kind of adverse effect that one personality might have on another, to which analysts are particularly vulnerable. It was, he claimed, a form of “going queer” in the consulting room, a situation in which “your conscious runs away with the patient’s unconscious”.

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The participation mystique is similar to thought-transference in that it breaks down the social and cultural structures that separate us in waking consciousness. Lacanian analysts Major and Miller (1981) refer to this space–time as the lieu of the Interpretand: “an intermediary space belonging neither to the analyst’s sphere of mental activity, nor to that of the analysand, but to a medium where the drift of the one’s unconscious is caught up with the other’s” (p. 449). This field is particularly fruitful, Jung felt, for the cultivation of synchronicity. Synchronicity is an idea Jung picked up from a friend and colleague, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. According to Bair (2003, p. 554), Pauli provided both the source and the interpretation that Jung subsequently used as his own when he wrote his essay on the subject in 1952 (in which, however, he credits Schopenhauer as the “godfather” of synchronicity). The concept first appears simple, but turns out to be difficult to pin down, mainly because Jung himself changed his definition of the term substantially (see Samuels, Shorter & Plaut, 1986, p. 146). Essentially, however, he described synchronicity as a “meaningful coincidence” or a “meaningful cross-connection” (Jung, 1952, par. 426) of events “that do not always obey the rules of time, space and causality” (par. 427). According to his colleague Barbara Hannah, who gives credit for this definition to von Franz, Jung’s informal explanation of a synchronistic event was “the coincidence between an inner image or hunch breaking into one’s mind, and the occurrence of an outer event at approximately the same time (1991, p. 305). Elsewhere in his 1952 essay, he describes it as an “acausal correspondence” and “the felicitous conjunction of seemingly unrelated incidences” that operates independently and autonomously, “without the participation of the human psyche” (1952, par. 168). As Braude has pointed out, however (1979), it is difficult to understand how “meaningful incidents” can occur in the absence of the human psyche, since the notion of “meaning”, like the concept of an “incident”, is a human construction. Today, Jungian thought tends to be considered more spiritual and holistic than is Freudian psychoanalysis; to some people, the latter may seem reductive and materialistic in comparison. Since Jungian thought allies itself more readily with the areas of myth and aesthetics than with the natural sciences, Jungian thinkers are

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more comfortable with such concepts as synchronicity and the participation mystique; in general, they do not feel strongly driven to “legitimize” their profession, and seem less beholden to what Jungian analyst Paris (2007) calls “the language of insurance companies and social services” (p. 32). It is worth recalling, however, that Freud—far more than Jung— continued to be ambivalent about the role of psychoanalysis. After making the case for his new discipline as a branch of medicine, he later argued in favour of lay analysis, pointing out that his case histories were more like short stories than medical reports and that his theories were not amenable to experimental confirmation. This truth sits uncomfortably with modern psychoanalysis, which, where it still exists, has been embraced under the banner of “mental health practices”. Psychoanalysis today, like all the psychotherapies, is presented as a form of “treatment” that is scientifically objective, yet many believe that various forms of psychotherapy have little innate healing capacity and that the benefits they bring have more to do with the personality of the therapist than with the method of “treatment” employed. Evidence suggests to many that the therapist often merely mobilizes the general effects of suggestion (Warner, 1980). There is even research to suggest that the longer a person spends in training, the less effective they are as a therapist. In 1994, researchers Christensen and Jacobson conducted a study whose results showed that therapy delivered by non-professionals was more helpful than that delivered by those with years of experience and credentials. Unsurprisingly perhaps, what had the most effect were such qualities as empathy, life experience, and willingness to help. In the future, Chertok and Stengers predict, “historians of medicine will try to understand why research, medical training, even the criteria of professional selection have in our time left in the shadows the ‘subjective factor’ only on account of its uncontrollable character” (p. 278). Still, if we are unhappy, or have a problem we are unable to discuss with friends or family, we are encouraged to “get help” from a “professional”, which generally means a person whose hourly fee can be charged to an insurance company. Such “professionals”, having invested many years and thousands of dollars in their training and education, naturally believe that their work is

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useful. All studies confirm that for therapists to be maximally effective, they must believe in themselves, in the value of their services, in the truth of their educations, and in the power of their particular methods. As a result, most therapists, even transpersonal ones, will claim that their understanding of a patient is based on “clinical intuition” and “wide experience” rather than a strong capacity for guesswork, feeling, sensitivity, or—worst of all—telepathy. Without such distinguishing criteria, how would we know the therapist from the table-tilter? The more complex and civilized the culture, the more marginal is the status of those who engage with the occult, and the more direct this engagement, the lower their social stature. In the USA, medical doctors are high-status individuals, at the opposite end of the scale from psychics, gypsies, mystics, and fortune-tellers (especially those who offer readings online or over the phone). To suggest that psychoanalysis is a kind of magic is to blur boundaries and distinctions (who is in charge, analyst or analysand?), bruising the professional ego and questioning hard-earned credentials. In a society that promotes rationality and encourages us to see ourselves as discrete, independent entities, such a suggestion can be very disturbing. Part of this unease, however, relates to the similarity between what goes on between analyst and patient and what goes on between psychic and client. Both involve a specific kind of encounter, often in a quiet room with lowered lighting, and both involve one “reading” the other for hidden information that gives clues to the future as well as the past. Having so much in common with the lowly psychic, it is hardly surprising that most psychoanalysts prefer to ally themselves with “real” doctors, who are (perhaps unconsciously) experienced as more worthy, since their cures are capable of bringing the patient clear-cut physical relief. It is not unusual for psychoanalysts to defend against this sense of deficiency by fantasies of grandiosity.

Destructive wishes: the Aberfan disaster In the wider community, there may also be another, more subtle and far more threatening reason for the deep defensiveness that is widely experienced in relation to the notion of thought-transference.

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This relates to the concept of magical thinking, with its confusion between the physical and the mental, the material and the immaterial. To explore this idea in more detail, I will use the example of the Aberfan disaster. On 21 October 1966, 144 people—128 of them children aged between seven and ten—were killed when a coalmine on Merthyr Mountain collapsed into the valley of Aberfan in South Wales. The landslide devastated more than twenty houses, and destroyed Pantglas Junior School while the school was in session. An aspect of this tragedy that has fascinated psychic researchers is that many of these children seemed intuitively to know something was going to happen, sometimes weeks in advance. A London psychiatrist named John Barker, intrigued by the children’s chilling premonitions, appealed through the media for those claiming foreknowledge of the event to communicate with him and describe their experiences. Of the seventy responses he received, twenty-four contained sufficient detail to warrant analysis. In these cases, Barker interviewed the children’s friends and families independently, and was surprised by the accuracy of their predictions, which ranged from prognostications of doom involving dead or dying children to “astonishingly accurate pictorial impressions of screaming children buried by an avalanche of coal in a Welsh mining village” (1967, p. 170).

Illustration 4.1. Talgarth Asylum, Wales.

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For example, on the morning of the disaster, according to her mother, ten-year-old Eryl Mai Jones had a horrible dream about a barren wasteland where her school should have been. Another child told her mother, “I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it”. One child had a nightmare that he was suffocating in “deep blackness”; another dreamed of a schoolhouse being buried by an avalanche of coal and rescue workers digging frantically for survivors; another woke up from a nightmare in which she was being buried alive. A woman named Sybil Brown woke from a dream in which she saw children being overcome by “a black, billowing mass”, and a woman named Carolyn Miller had a disturbing dream of a flood of blackness heading towards a school. Miller was so disturbed by her dream that she described it in front of a group of witnesses at church, and the following morning, forty-five minutes before the disaster occurred, she described it to her sister. In his article “Premonitions of the Aberfan disaster”, Barker discusses these apparent omens in the light of the several criteria necessary to establish a connection between a precognitive experience and a future event. Subsequent researchers discovered that seemingly sensitive people are susceptible to what they describe as “pre-disaster syndrome”—that is, a growing sense of general unease close to the time of a tragedy. Barker concludes his article by recommending that a central registry for premonitions be established. The following year, he set up the British Premonition Bureau, established to collect and screen premonitions of future accidents and disasters. A year later, the Central Premonition Registry was established in New York City, but neither organization was successful for various reasons, including under-funding, public misunderstanding, and the fact that the premonitions that were registered were never detailed enough to prevent future disasters. Eisenbud (1983) suggests that Aberfan has some disturbing implications about the human impulse for destruction—an impulse which, when directed towards children, is seen as unconscionable (and which must, therefore, be repressed). In brief, Eisenbud is suggesting that adults in the village of Aberfan may, through unconscious aggression, have somehow “triggered” the disaster that was inflicted upon its children by somehow collectively “activating” the direct cause, which was many days of heavy rain falling

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Illustration 4.2. Hellingly Asylum, Sussex.

on a slag heap (three years before the disaster, local authorities had raised specific concerns about slag being dumped on the mountain above the village school—concerns which were largely ignored by the National Coal Board). This notion is one that many of us would, no doubt, consider too bizarre, horrible, or ridiculous to contemplate. The fact that we refuse to credit such an account is important. Eisenbud believes that there may be a connection, however difficult to fathom, between resistance to the powers of the unconscious and fear of the magical fantasy of omnipotence, especially the “omnipotence of thought” that influences the way many people think and act. Perhaps, if this fantasy is powerful enough, it is enacted, transferring guilt on to cultural scapegoats (in this case, the children) who then bear the misfortune and sins of the whole community. If it seems difficult to understand the disaster in this way, it is because, as Eisenbud argues, even those who see and acknowledge defences tend to see them as individual reactions rather than as forces rooted in the patterns of human existence. Here, he makes the point more forcefully: We know that human beings are capable of horrible destruction: The only question is whether there is a hidden part of the average,

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well-acculturated human being, who cannot consciously imagine himself battering a child or bombing a school building, that is subject to the same impulses that actuate persons who are openly destructive. [1982, p. 175]

If so, might the repression of these impulses unconsciously stimulate their enactment? In short, Eisenbud appears to be suggesting that the “primitive” idea of “omnipotence of thought” might not be so primitive after all, and that there may be real connections between our unconscious thoughts and events of which we are consciously unaware. He found it fascinating that Freud, who made the inward-turning death-wish one of the great governing principles of life, never made the leap from simple “thought transference” to the transference of destructive thoughts—ones that aimed their death-wishes at others (ibid., p. 226). In principle, if thought-transference exists, if we can access the thoughts of others, foretell dreams, and communicate through nonsensory means, why should we not also be able to cause events, even large-scale disasters? If, as many people seem to believe, thoughts can be used to intercede, to bless and heal, might they not also have the power to curse and harm? Braude tackles the issue clearly and succintly: [T]here seems no escaping the conclusion that if [psychokinesis] can be triggered by unconscious intentions, then we might be responsible for a range of events (in particular, accidents and other calamities) for which most of us would prefer merely to be innocent bystanders. Moreover, we would all be potential victims of psychically triggered events (intentional or otherwise) whose sources we could not conclusively identify and whose limitations we could not assess. [2008, pp. 103–104]

Braude believes that speculations such as these can cause sceptics to go into a kind of “conceptual panic”, which causes “their reason and integrity to go by the wayside” (p. 111). To admit into consciousness the existence of even something as transitory and ephemeral as thought-transference is, essentially, to open the floodgates of havoc on the world at large. The notion that people may be able to harm each other unconsciously or from a distance—especially when this can never be “proved” beyond doubt, or even “proved” at all—is extremely unsettling.

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These considerations raise vast ontological questions, and it is not my project here to follow them at any length. At the very least, though, we must take seriously the exhortation to ask ourselves more closely: if thought-transference is possible, whose thoughts are being transferred to whom?

Quantum theory and morphic fields In his essay “Dreams and telepathy” (1922a), Freud wonders whether telepathy might be the original method of communication—still used, perhaps, among insect communities—which has persisted in human beings in some remote, vestigial form (p. 198). In more recent years, biochemist Rupert Sheldrake has expanded on this speculation of Freud’s, developing a theory he calls “morphic resonance”, defined as “the basis of memory in nature . . . the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species” (1981). Sheldrake eschews the boundary between science and metaphysics, and has been widely criticized for doing so (2005), though his theories are backed up by descriptions of the many experiments he has performed with the assistance of dogs, parrots, and human beings (1999, 1994). He is currently the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project at Trinity College, Cambridge—a venture established “absolutely for the purpose of psychical research” and funded by a bequest as a memorial to Frederick Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. Sheldrake argues that animal communities contain cultural and social “morphic fields” that embrace and organize everything inside them and respond to stimuli as a unified whole, rather like magnetic fields. These fields may also include a cumulative sense of memory based on the group’s past experiences, enabling each to retain particular rituals, paradigms, and archetypes (1999). This collective memory, Sheldrake claims, exists “outside” the individual mind, not unlike the Jungian collective unconscious, and forms a background against which individuals develop their own unique memories and experiences. It would not be unusual, according to Sheldrake, for individuals in the same morphic field to share an emotional connectedness or “sixth sense”.

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Illustration 4.3. Target image for “thoughtograph”. © Jule Eisenbud Collection.

Creatures without an ego cannot have ego-boundaries, a circumstance which allows them to communicate at a very direct level. This can be seen in creatures like ants or bees that share a “hive mind”, or schools of fish or flights of birds that will turn suddenly at once, as if all share a single consciousness. Although humans no longer communicate this way, Sheldrake believes the morphic field of the human mind extends beyond our conventional understanding of time and space. In other words, thoughts, images, and dreams are located not “inside” the brain, as modern man conceives of it, but “outside” the brain, “in the air”, the way that children, primitives and psychotics think of it (field theories, as Sheldrake rightly points out, take us far beyond rigid definitions of “inside” and “outside”). This, he believes, may account for certain kinds of magical thinking, including the feeling that we can influence events by thinking about them or by watching them unfold.

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It also accounts for the phenomenon of geomancy (the spirit and feeling of certain places) as well as the emotions and qualities we attach to particular times (of day, of the month, and of the year), since geomantic and temporal memories are accessible to anyone who is “tuned in” to that particular morphic field. As Sheldrake explains it: The morphic fields of mental activity are not confined to the insides of our heads. They extend far beyond our brain through intention and attention. We are already familiar with the idea of fields extending beyond the material objects in which they are rooted: for example, magnetic fields extend beyond the surfaces of magnets; the earth’s gravitational field extends far beyond the surface of the earth, keeping the moon in its orbit; and the fields of a cell phone stretch out far beyond the phone itself. Likewise the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains. [1999, p. 26]

Illustration 4.4. Ted Serios “Thoughtograph” © Jule Eisenbud Collection.

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Primitive cultures took such things for granted, claims Sheldrake, but in the West, today more than ever, anyone who believes in or engages in practices based on the power of thought is considered deviant (or, at the very least, “unscientific”, a word that is commonly used of Sheldrake himself). Like the work of Laing, Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance connects him to the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who argues that “mind” is not limited to the human skull, but exists in nature, in ecological systems, and in the patterns that connect within any large-scale system or network. Like Freud and Eisenbud, Sheldrake considers telepathy to be neither paranormal nor supernatural but perfectly commonplace, especially among people who know each other intimately, and he notes that it has long been accepted by many cultures outside the sphere of mainstream Western materialism. Yet, this materialism, he claims, rests on a very shaky foundation. In A New Science of Life (1981), he argues that, since quantum physics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers, minds cannot be reduced to physics. Physics presupposes minds. He goes on to point out that the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality—superstring and M theories—assume the existence of ten and eleven dimensions respectively, taking science into completely new territory. He adds that the kinds of matter and energy known by science constitute only about four per cent of the universe, while the rest consists of dark matter and dark energy—in other words, it is literally obscure. Plenty of psychoanalytic thinkers have tried to make sense of quantum theory. The first was perhaps Jung, who, in his discussion of the relationship between modern physics and psychoanalysis in “On the nature of the psyche” (1947), describes “the no-man’s-land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious . . .” as “the most fascinating and yet the darkest hunting ground of our times” (par. 514); he also describes “new physicists” like Pauli as “the only scientific minds honestly interested in borderland phenomena and thoughts” (par. 515). In this essay, Jung considers the possibility of an “unconscious, i.e., objective reality . . . [that] behaves at the same time like a subjective one—in other words, like a consciousness” (par. 47). He suggests that there may be parallels “between psychic and psychophysical events” (par. 48), speculating

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that “psychic energy influences living or inert objects in such a way that, as though ‘animated’ by a psychic content alien to them, they are compelled to represent it somehow or other” (par. 49). Years later, in “The structure and dynamics of the psyche” (1960), he wrote, Not only the findings of parapsychology, but my own theoretical reflections . . . have led me to certain postulates which touch on the realm of nuclear physics and the conception of the space-time continuum . . . open[ing] up the whole question of the transpsychic reality . . . underlying the psyche. [par. 600, n.15]

To put it in its most reductive form, “reality” in the realm of quantum physics is often regarded as an engagement between the mental and material, dependent for its form on the relationship of the observer’s consciousness to space and time. Very simply, according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, what is observed in the physical realm is changed by, or affected in fundamental ways by, the very act of being observed or measured. This principle suggests that we cannot observe anything, even at the most fundamental levels of physical nature, without having a direct impact on the object of our observation. Does the Heisenberg principle have any application to the psychoanalytic field? Many people think so. Bass (2001) explains that the Uncertainty Principle has been frequently cited as part of an interpersonal/relational critique of classical transference theory and as part of the development of a relational paradigm for psychoanalysis that emphasizes the codetermination of analytic experience. In other words, analysts, however hard they strive to maintain neutrality, do not observe their patients in a vacuum. Their engagement with each patient inevitably affects and changes both participants. Essentially, every analytic session is only and always “about” the present relationship. By focusing exclusively on what is happening right at the moment between patient and analyst, the clinical dyad can approach the “eternal now” of Zen Buddhism. Moving beyond the unconscious of the individual patient, there are also implications that, at some level—as with Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance and Jung’s notion of the Collective

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Unconscious—our unconscious may already be merged with others. Likewise, according to some strains of Buddhism, human consciousnesses are already fused; it is separateness, not union, that is the universal illusion. To Freud, of course, this “union” is another way of describing the “oceanic feeling”, but as Buddhist scholar Epstein (1990) points out, this notion was Freud’s only attempt at explaining meditation practice, Hindu or Buddhist, and, while it does capture some truth about techniques that involve fusion with meditation objects, it takes no account of the investigative or analytical practices most distinctive to Buddhism. Indeed, early psychoanalytic investigations into Eastern religions were mainly derogatory and pejorative, in the line of Alexander’s well-known article “Buddhistic training as artificial catatonia” (1931), though in the past thirty years a number of psychoanalytic studies have taken Buddhism very seriously. These include important works by Masson (1980), Kakar (1982), Kripal (1995), and Rubin (1996). Moreover, a number of psychoanalysts, including the Jungian scholar Tresan (2006), have been involved in research at the interface of neuroscience and psychotherapy. Other analytic thinkers have made direct connections between quantum physics and psychoanalysis. Analyst Ullmann (2003) suggests that the unconscious is closely connected to what physicist Bohm (1987), in his writing on wholeness, has described as the “implicate order”, a seamless ground of interconnectedness that, in turn, gives rise to the seeming discreteness of the explicate order. The unconscious, argues Ullmann, is closer to the implicate order than to the discursive mode of waking consciousness, since it organizes experience along the lines of emotional (rather than, say, spatial or temporal) contiguity (p. 41). Ullman considers whether the interactions between analyst and analysand—the essence of the therapeutic process—might not be part of this implicate order, out of which the explicate order of discrete space–time processes evolves. At this point, I think, we need to stop and pause. What exactly is Ullman claiming here? That time and space disappear in the analyst’s consulting room? This highly dubious claim is typical of attempts to connect psychoanalysis with quantum physics; in this eager over-reaching, I see more futile attempts to make psychoanalysis seem “scientific”. Consider these arguments more closely, and most of them turn out to be superficial assertions that take for

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granted the validity of unproved ideas and mistake metaphors for facts. The term “quantum physics” has accrued an almost unassailable power in some circles, and is used like a trump card to “prove” just about anything, from time travel to reincarnation. In fact, the impressive-sounding claims about quantum physics and neuroscience made by Ullman, Tresan, Bass, and others basically come down to the simple fact that all interactive processes have a neuro-physiologial basis. This does not explain them, however, any more than pointing out that dreams have a neuro-physiological basis explains their complex images, especially when these prove precognitive or prophetic. Very few neuroscientists, I imagine, would agree with Bair’s claim in her 2003 biography of Jung that discoveries are being made today showing “that many of Jung’s notions of how the unconscious operates mirror actual changes in the physiology of the brain”, and that “some of his more esoteric theorizing can be mapped objectively by modern medical machinery” (p. 5). Does the discovery of mirror neurons really corroborate, as some have claimed, the notion of transference and countertransference? How does it do so, exactly? Assertions of this kind are rarely supported by evidence, if they are supported at all. What is more, preliminary speculations in neuroscience and quantum physics are regularly trumpeted as though they are known scientific certainties; yet, while there have certainly been studies showing the impact of the observer’s presence on an experiment, these studies do not make the connection persuasive or scientifically legitimate in all cases. In the end, it seems, the intoxicating phrase “quantum physics” is being used to mean nothing more advanced or complicated than a simple fact stated with admirable simplicity by Gurney, Myers, and Podmore in their comprehensive 1886 study, Phantasms of the Living: The man who first hears of thought-transference very naturally imagines that, if it is a reality, it ought to be demonstrated to him at a moment’s notice. He forgets that the experiment being essentially a mental one, his own presence—so far as he has a mind— may be a factor in it; that he is demanding that a delicate weighing operation be carried out, while he himself, a person of unknown weight, sits judicially in one of the scales. [p. 51]

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Mental and material magic In this chapter, I have been considering how, as Freud (1933a) puts it, “mental processes in one person . . . can be transferred to another person through empty space without employing the familiar methods of communication by means of words and signs” (p. 39). Of course, any complete investigation of this subject is going to raise more complex questions that are beyond the scope of this project: is mind a “real” component of the universe, outside the individual brain, and even outside matter? Is consciousness as a primary element of reality? Can the mind have an effect on the material world? It has often been observed that the human mind, across various times and cultures, shows certain similarities in terms of the tendency to magical thought. Different societies and periods discover different ways of refining and articulating this tendency; Frazer was the first to make this observation, in The Golden Bough. While the order of succession in human thinking may have progressed, as Frazer speculates, from magic to religion to science, the magic is always still there, alongside the science and sometimes wearing its guise. In other words, the three levels of thought exist coterminously. Psychoanalysis began as a natural science because of the way the sciences were structured during Freud’s lifetime. In its early days, it was considered to be a way of bringing relief from pain and of curing mental illness. It was widely held to be a rational process, based on objective identification, capable of reliable projection and reproduction. Today, while practitioners may regard themselves as scientists working in the clinical field, psychoanalysis no longer fits dominant scientific paradigms. “Although most clinicians perceive psychoanalysis as a body of scientific knowledge”, claims Wilson in his article “Magic in contemporary life and psychoanalysis” (1972), some, particularly when discussing specific points of theory or technique, sound more like the faithful in a magical cult than like scientists . . . There seems to be a subtle and hardly perceptible tendency to move from a scientific to a magical cult-like orientation. [p. 13]

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Wilson goes on to point out that the reputed clinical success of the psychoanalytic masters may be as much a result of the magical aura that surrounds them—immediately affecting their patients’ transferences and projections—than of any of their procedural or theoretical innovations. And yet it is difficult—perhaps even impossible—to preclude the development of narcissism in analytic training, particularly since the hermetic process of being selected can itself foster competition and arrogance. Moreover, the patient, both consciously and unconsciously, so often brings to treatment the desire for a “magic cure” (a desire which is enhanced by the ritual of the appointment and the spell of the darkened room and the couch) that—to adapt the line from Erasmus that Jung had carved above the door of his consulting room in Küsnacht—magic may be present, whether summoned or not.

CHAPTER FIVE

What is projective identification?

“Theory is all very well, but it doesn’t prevent things from existing” (Freud, 1893f, p. 13}

I

n Terrors and Experts, Phillips points out that “psychoanalysis has always struggled to distance itself from supposedly discredited things like religion, glamour, mysticism, radical politics, the paranormal, and all the scapegoated ‘alternative’ therapies” (1997a, pp. 18–19). This distance is established in many ways, perhaps the most common of which is the development of a specialized theoretical idiom. Klein first used the phrase “projective identification” in her 1946 paper, “Notes on some schizoid mechanisms”. She coined the term with reference to mother–infant object relations. The process, she claimed, . . . derives from anal and urethral impulses and implies expelling dangerous substances (excrements) out of the self onto the mother or, as I would rather call it, into the mother . . . In so far as the 91

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mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self, she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self. Much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed against the mother. This leads to a particular form of aggression which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object relation. I suggest for this process the term projective identification. [p. 99]

Klein developed this idea more than a decade after Freud’s final publication on identification in the context of what she refers to as the “paranoid–schizoid position”, although the concept was not really discussed outside Kleinian circles for another decade, when Segal, in her Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (1964), expanded on Klein’s original use of the term. Projective identification, wrote Segal, . . . is the result of the projection of parts of the self into an object. It may result in the object being perceived as having acquired the characteristics of the projected part of the self, but it can also result in the self becoming identified with the object of its projection. [p. 126]

Kleinian analyst Joseph (1987) provides a more straightforward and contemporary definition. Projective identification, she explains, generally refers to a process whereby the patient elicits an unconsciously desired resonance from the analyst’s own emotional repertoire. To put it in other words, when the patient has certain unconscious beliefs or preconceptions about the analyst, he or she may relate to the analyst in such a way that the analyst alters their thoughts or behaviour so as to make that belief a reality. The “identification” in projective identification, then, refers to the analyst, who, influenced by the patient’s projection, identifies with the projected thoughts or beliefs. Notably, this is an unconscious process; neither patient nor analyst is aware of the dynamic involved. Essentially, it is a fantasy of the patient’s, acted out via verbal and non-verbal communication, designed to unconsciously evoke the analyst’s reactions. Of course, like all such processes, projective identification can occur outside the analytic situation, but it most often and most frequently arises between analyst and patient because, as Searles (1978) explains, both patient and analyst have privileged access to

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one another’s unconscious processes. The analyst, presumably, is alert to minor variations in the patient’s posture, facial expression, vocal tone, and so on. The patient, on the other hand, especially if neurotic or psychotic, has learned to adapt to the feelings of others and to be alert, like the analyst, to nuances of behaviour. The process of projective identification, then, involves a combination of unconscious communication and ordinary sensory evidence. Like most psychoanalytic experiences, it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to verify, as it does not lend itself to experimental study or to any kind of test whose outcome includes the possibility of its being definitely refuted. Like similar transient phenomena, it occurs in the liminal zone between the “I” and the “not-I”, the conscious and the unconscious.

Illustration 5.1. Freud’s Desk. Photograph by Edmund Engleman, 1938.

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It is no coincidence, I believe, that the notion of projective identification became common currency only in the 1970s, after the repression of Freud’s publications on thought-transference. At this time, analysts began speaking and writing more widely about clinical processes, and psychoanalytic theory broadened to include regular discussions of such transference-like phenomena as “preconscious communication” and “selective attention”. Since the death of Melanie Klein, various scholars have expanded on her original definition, differentiating “normal” from “pathological” aspects of projective identification and elevating it to the status of an ordinary developmental process. Those who have suggested new definitions of the term include Malin and Grotstein (1966), Meissner (1980, 1987), Ogden (1982), and Kernberg (1987). Yet, it seems to me that rather than clarifying the concept, these expanded definitions have created further confusion. In seeking to explain this difficulty, Grotstein (1995) argues that Kleinian theory underwent a “sea change as it crossed the Atlantic” (p. 492), so that its current understanding among American practitioners differs significantly from that of its originators and from the earlier use of the term in European psychoanalysis. More specifically, he argues

Illustration 5.2. Melanie Klein. © Wellcome Library.

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that American analysts have arrived at an inaccurate distinction between projection and projective identification. In the last twenty years, the term has been taken up very widely, and is currently used to refer to an enormous range of experiences and situations, both within and without the psychoanalytic dyad, so that its original meaning has become increasingly dilute. Most often, I suggest, it is misunderstood as projection that takes the form of simple scapegoating, and is applied to the subject (the analysand) rather than the object (the analyst). This might be an attempt to turn obliquely away from the question that matters most: the paranormal dimension of the experience. In this chapter, I consider the psychodynamics of this cognitive dissonance, and the many different circumstances in which this complex and ambiguous term is used today. I want to discover whether projective identification is essentially a new name for thought-transference.

Projective identification and unconscious communication Jungian analyst Gordon (1965) has observed that Jung’s use of the term participation mystique—as well as other, related terms such as “unconscious identity”, “psychic infection”, “induction”, and “feeling-into”—are actually synonymous with what we now call projective identification (p. 128). I would argue that the same is also true in reverse. When psychoanalysts today refer to projective identification, they are often using the term to refer to induction, intuition, and other kinds of unconscious communication. The following examples illustrate this point and show how broad and diverse are recent definitions of the term. Psychoanalyst Scharff (1992) describes a case in which a patient’s use of projective identification allowed both patient and analyst to experience “profound unconscious communication” (p. 234). Scharff says she has often been aware of “an atmosphere” during sessions, which she thinks of as “a coloration of the transitional space in which therapist and patient are at play” and which can sometimes become “almost tangible” (p. 291). Similarly, in an article published in 1997, psychoanalyst Feldman notes that on occasion, his patients have expressed observations that, oddly enough, seemed to apply to his own unexpressed thoughts. Such

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incidents, claims Feldman, illustrate “the patients’ unconscious belief in the effectiveness of a concrete process by which (usually) undesirable and threatening parts of the personality can be split off and projected” (p. 230). The motives for this projection vary, he explains, but the involvement of the object (i.e., the analyst) as a recipient of this projection “is a defining characteristic of projective identification, as is the belief in the transformation of the object by the projection” (p. 236). In his article “Projective identification: some clinical considerations”, Waskax (1997) gives the following example of the eponymous process: With one psychotic patient, there were multiple occasions when I would reference a topic we had discussed in a recent meeting and he would give me a particular type of stare that would launch me into a state of anxiety in which my thought was, ‘Oh my God, we never talked about that before, I must have just made it up in my head. I must be going insane!’ I was experiencing the patient’s lifelong experience of his thoughts and feelings never being acknowledged by his mother, leaving him floating in a disorganized state of nothingness. [p. 445]

Spiegelman (2003) remarks that, when he first experienced bodily symptoms while listening to his analysand, he attributed them to his “complexes being activated”, or to the presence of “what Kleinian and Object Relations analysts refer to as projective identification—the unconscious of the patient ‘putting into’ the analyst contents the analysand needs to have carried, or made conscious and healed” (p. 149). Sandler (1993), in a discussion of projective identification, describes it as “. . . the reflex evocation in the observer of the behavior and feelings of the person observed, an automatic process linked with perception, and quite distinct from conscious imitation” (pp. 1098–1099). He continues, It is something that can be connected with the concept of primary identification, but in one sense it is unlike Freud’s concept in that it is a form of primary identification which persists into later life. . . . The boundaries between self and not-self, between the self representation and the representation of the object, should not be regarded as being set in concrete. They are not fixed entities which, once they have been formed, stay permanently in place. [ibid.]

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Greatrex (2002), in an article published in the journal NeuroPsychoanalysis, makes a connection between projective identification and Freud’s theory of the repetition compulsion, referring to projective identification as a force that eludes our perception and control. “In fact”, she continues, the suspicion begins to dawn on us that the more painful the experience, the more we were injured by it, the more likely it is to be woven into something we find ourselves compulsively repeating. This is more than a little unsettling. It feels spooky; Freud used the word ‘daemonic’. [p. 189]

Jungian analyst Field (1991) describes projective identification as the feeling between analyst and analysand that their “personal auras have merged and are flowing in harmony” (p. 105). Later in the same paper, he adds that projective identification “would seem to operate outside the laws of cause and effect” (p. 106). Elsewhere, he describes the experience of growing angry with a patient in similar terms: “I did not know it at the time, but she had succeeded in pouring her aggression into me and I had become the receptacle for a massive quantity of projective identification” (1996, p. 9). Psychoanalyst Coltart recalls a patient who “exuded strong black waves of hatred and despair”, which he transferred to Coltart, until she began to experience “dark and heavy projective identifications” (1986, p. 32). Sometimes projective identification takes a bodily form. Psychiatrists Major and Miller (1981) describe a patient with bad body odour, noting that “[t]his odorous effusion seemed to be like a somatic illustration of projective identification” (p. 453). In an article entitled “Sensory empathy and enactment”, Italian psychoanalysts Zanocco, de Marchi, and Pozzi (2006) describe a case one of them experienced in which a patient’s belly gurgled noisily every session. After a while, the analyst found his own belly gurgling in sympathy, and his listening was, therefore, “interspersed by the use of intestinal noises” (p. 151). The analysts conclude that “these ‘belly exchanges’ seemed to be reassuring for the patient and allowed for a reactivation of the associative stream” (ibid.), a conclusion that, were it not for the serious context in which the article appears, would seem to be risible and overreaching. (One wonders

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if this sympathetic “belly exchange” would have been so significant had both patient and analyst eaten more substantial breakfasts.) Some analysts use a combination of clinical and metaphoric language in their descriptions of projective identification. For example, in describing one of his analytic sessions, Emery (2003) writes, I am in a spell. I begin to intimate in relation to this entrancing erasure of self that is the other, a correlative presentation of myself, as if I am listening in the way an analyst might, but in fact I am becoming a simulacrum of my image as an analyst. I am becoming, I gradually realize, ghosted. [p.174]

Emery is one among a number of contemporary analysts whose description of projective identification makes it sound like a supernatural experience; others include Jungians Gordon (1965), Field (1991), and Schwartz-Salant (1998). Schwartz-Salant, for example, claims that projective identification takes place in “an imaginal world, a mundus imaginalis that has its own process and can also transform” (1998, p. 26). Gordon describes it as “a process which, if sufficiently primitive and elemental, may really break down the boundaries and separateness between persons and lead to truly shared experiences” (1965, p. 13). Field believes it can be “a mysterious but deeply agreeable condition which feels healing and nourishing to both parties” (1991, p. 100). To such thinkers, projective identification operates outside the laws of cause and effect and beyond the five senses. Some analysts go even further. Allik (2003) describes how the process of projective identification makes it feel as though the analyst is reading the patient’s mind, a strange experience, she remarks, but not nearly as strange as those times when the process occurs the other way round, and it is the patient who appears to be reading the mind of the analyst. She writes, It is disconcerting to find a patient exhibiting knowledge (whether consciously or unconsciously) of one’s own unexpressed thoughts or feelings (whether these thoughts were conscious or unconscious to oneself). It is even more disconcerting if the unexpressed thoughts and feelings are something that one is ambivalent about and might want to hide. [pp. 7–8]

In his book Breakdown and Breakthrough (1996), Jungian analyst Field describes a series of sessions in which emotional states are

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spontaneously “transferred” to him from a patient. In each example, he attributes this transference to the workings of projective identification. When, in one instance, he enters an odd state of disequilibrium, he suddenly realizes that his patient has “succeeded in inducing . . . through the process of projective identification, the paranoid–schizoid state she herself was in” (p. 10). In her 1991 article on projective identification in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, analyst Grayson makes the case that the supernatural events of the play are not, in fact, supernatural at all, but hallucinations and delusions attributable to Macbeth’s own toxic introjects and projections—the apparent magic of human consciousness. According to Grayson, Shakespeare’s cursed protagonist “wants to commit murder without responsibility; projective identification offers him the means” (p. 46). Again, this seems to be over-reaching; it would be more appropriate to suggest that, as in the case of the fortune-tellers’ prophecies mentioned by Freud, the witches are sensitive to Macbeth’s own unconscious desire to become Thane of Glamis. A similar example to Grayson’s can be seen in Mack’s work with alien abductees. Here, as in Grayson’s example, something most people would consider supernatural is “explained” in terms of projective identification. In certain cases, claims Mack, “the extraterrestrials themselves can appear as a split-off part of the soul or ego of the kidnapped person” (1994, p. 496). Along similar lines, perhaps, Grotstein (1997) claims that projective identification produces “unconscious phantasies of phantom monster chimerae” (p. 47). When reading such oblique passages, I cannot help thinking that this was the kind of thing Jones was so worried about when he wrote to Freud in 1925 warning him, yet again, of the dangers involved in dabbling with the occult. He pressed upon Freud that “a great part of the opposition to psycho-analysis is based on the imaginary idea that psycho-analysis operates with agents (‘the psyche’) which are supposed to be independent of the body” (1957, p. 393). Many contemporary analysts, it would seem, appear to share this assumption.

Contradiction and confusion While it is not unusual for the use of a psychoanalytic term to change over time, in the case of projective identification the changes

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have been so extensive, and use of the term so widespread and disparate, that the concept has become almost impossible to pin down. The original meaning of the term, already imprecise, has become still more confounded as various authors have attempted to redefine it to support their own views. The ensuing accretions and refinements have created such baffling conceptual contradictions and confusions that the phrase now seems to have as many different meanings as it does users. The only thing that seems clear is that those who use the term appear to take for granted the existence of psychic energies or forces in the form of projections and transferences that, like electricity or atomic rays, have the ability to mobilize, circulate, and flow from one person to another, or to split themselves off, according to the subject’s unconscious motivation. Nevertheless, as is often the case in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, the notion of projective identification is widely used in the literature as though its meaning were transparent, or at least widely accepted, when in fact it has become so mired in uncertainty that some believe it involves one person and others assume it involves two (see Meissner, 1987). Moreover, there is no clear agreement about where the “identification” in projective identification is actually taking place. Who is identifying with whom? Is analyst identifying with analysand, or vice versa? Or is one of them identifying with something else? Rozen, in her article “Projective identification and bulimia” (1993), uses the term to describe her patient’s feelings about items of food in the fridge: When this patient turned to food, the use of projective identification continued, and the food became the recipient of the projection. She had a relationship with food that was similar to her relationship with her objects. She described feeling not that she was hungry but that she really had no interest in food. She said “something in the food” drew her to the refrigerator. Desire or need was projected into the food, and she felt burdened by it, just as she felt burdened by her bosses. Once she consumed the food, she felt trapped by it because she felt it would take her over and make her fat. So, like her jobs, she rejected it. [p. 80]

At the heart of this confusion, I believe, are the particular circumstances in which the process of projective identification is supposed to occur. Here again, everything seems blurred. According to

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Spillius (1991), it is the trauma of separation and loss that triggers the projective identification mechanism; others drive it down the developmental continuum to a more primitive level. Olsson (1980) believes it to be a process typical of adolescence; he refers to the “rebellious externalizations or projective identifications of adolescent intrapsychic struggles”, which, he argues, “are really recapitulations of pre-Oedipal and Oedipal themes and their distortions” (p. 175). Meissner (1980) believes the concept is often used simply to exonerate the analyst, so that rather than the analyst admitting to his or her countertransference, he or she can blame the patient for his or her inappropriate feelings. At the same time, according to Dorpat (1985), it reifies the patient, crediting him or her with the ability to impose his or her will on the analyst, and to transform his or her analyst’s emotions, albeit unconsciously. In this sense, it is unclear how the process is distinct from schizophrenia, which also typically involves the belief of having thoughts put in one’s head by someone else. In the case of paranoid schizophrenia, the process is considered to be a compensation for emotional isolation (the person nobody knows is convinced others know all about them). It is unclear whether “ordinary” projective identification is supposed to be similarly compensatory. Many analysts consider projective identification to be a more primitive process than either projection or identification—a kind of confusion of subject and object, a retrograde blurring of inner boundaries (and, in this sense, almost the opposite of projection). Some regard it as a pathological method of defence, and others, such as Catherall, consider it to be a creative mode of communication. In his essay “Aggression and projective identification in the treatment of victims” (1991), Catherall describes a case in which Mr R, the victim of “unfair Treatment at the Hands of the Law”, found himself, as a result of projective identification, “once more experiencing the rage he struggled with as a child”, which, in turn, led him to being “restrained and involuntarily hospitalized”. It is unclear (at least to me) how Mr R’s “creative mode of communication” functioned in this case. As a brief experiment, I sent a questionnaire to a small group of ten licensed, practising clinicians, asking them to give me their definition of projective identification. The (anonymous) responses, as I expected, varied widely. Some were succinct and precise

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(“invoking feelings or behaviors in others”); others brief and vague (“it’s a defence mechanism. I think it’s not one of Freud’s, but Annas??? No?”). Some provided a hesitant definition (“I think it is used to describe instances where a person transfers feelings toward another person or object that reflect their internal world”), and others were very specific (“This defense mechanism is commonly employed by individuals who have borderline or narcissistic personality organizations”). The other responses ranged equally widely, as shown below. “Unconscious communication for experiences or affects that are not yet represented in the verbal realm and that attach to another person who then changes their thoughts and or behavior.” “I understand the term to mean when one person is unconscious of thoughts/feelings, that unconscious material may be projected onto another person. The second person will then unconsciously act out/feel/think the unconscious material of the first person against them.” “An example would be of a client who was unconsciously angry (and therefore did not express it) and the therapist, while sitting with the client, would then unconsciously feel the client’s unconscious anger and inadvertently act it out in private.” “When someone projecting on me causes me to feel and act out in accordance with their projection, which I am unconscious of, e.g. their projection is powerful enough that it elicits the precise feelings and behavior from me.” “In psychoanalytic literature, this is commonly understood as a process whereby the client deliberately projects their positive or negative introjects, or beliefs about oneself, onto the other (usually the therapist).” “Experiencing aspects of a client’s own unverbalized, often unmentalized experience.”

Fantasy, reality, or metaphor? Is projective identification real? Klein treated the process as if it appeared only in unconscious fantasy. Grotstein (1982) agrees,

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arguing that projective identification is actually an imaginary process—he describes it as a “mental mechanism whereby the self experiences the unconscious phantasy of translocating itself, or aspects of itself, into an object for exploratory or defensive purposes” (p. 123). Other analysts, however, believe projective identification to be a real process that can actually break down psychic boundaries between individuals—a process that has a genuine and powerful impact in the analytic setting and elsewhere. For example, Cimino and Correale (2005) argue against the common psychoanalytic assumption that projective identification is a “mere” fantasy, making the case that it actually involves the direct transmission of experiential contents from unconscious to unconscious. The authors conclude, In fact, it is our belief that the most conspicuous characteristic of projective identification phenomena is the fact that it does not stay in the patient’s mind as pure unconscious contents but always tends to take form, to manifest, to incarnate itself in an active modality. [p. 58]

Indeed, Marshall (2006) goes as far as to make the claim that not only is projective identification real, it can be “explained” by neuroscience. He states, with reference to the work of “mirror neurons”, We have identified some of the neurological correlates of emotional communication. Those who question the seemingly mystical concepts of induced counter-transference and projective identification can breathe easier and feel on more solid ground. The mystery is being solved. Freud and his cohorts who hesitantly discussed telepathy, mind reading, and other forms of nonverbal communication would appreciate the current findings. [p. 303]

Yet, those who make the case that projective identification is “real” do not explain how a part of one person’s psychic world can lodge itself in the mind of another. Can patients really “put” part of their minds into their analysts, or is this only a figure of speech? If they can do so, how does it cross the intervening space? What force propels it? What kind of energy moves it? How does it know where to go? Is it processed through our normal sensory channels of communication, or is it a kind of unconscious connection?

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Illustration 5.3. Illustration by psychiatric patient. © Prinzhorn Collection.

Some claim the process involves subtle physical cues. Gabbard (2004) refers to “the broad consensus that projective identification relies on interpersonal pressure or ‘nudging’, rather than a mystical or supernatural exchange of psychic content” (p. 134), but provides no evidence to support the existence of this consensus. Similarly, Carpy complains that, in discussions of projective identification, “analysts sometimes talk as if they believe . . . [that] feelings leave the patient’s mind and are inserted in the analyst’s mind”, an assumption he believes to be deeply misguided, although he does acknowledge confusion among analysts “as to exactly how the analyst’s mind is affected in this way” (1989, p. 287).

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Others, however, argue that projective identification actually occurs in the transpersonal dimension of experience. Dieckmann (1986), for example, describes projective identification as a silent but parallel tracking process, which “sounds mystical” (p. 78) because it is. Dieckmann, a Jungian analyst, regards the process as a fundamentally synchronistic phenomenon analogous to ESP that, like Bollas’s idea of the “unthought known” (1987), has little or nothing to do with cause and effect. Along the same lines, Duncan (1990) talks about projective identification as a form of “intersubjective knowing” (p. 344). According to this view, projected impulses travel from the mind of one individual to the mind of another, with neither party aware of what is happening. Even more curiously, these projected impulses always hit their target and “enter the object” as introjects, as Simenauer puts it (1985, p. 174). This poses the question of how analysts can ever know for sure that what they are experiencing is, in fact, the split-off, rejected aspect of the patient’s self, rather than something they are feeling on their own account. In other words, how can we ever know what comes “from” the patient and what “from” the analyst him or herself? The answer is simple: we cannot. Indeed, the more closely we investigate this fraught and nebulous concept, the more curious and ineffable it seems to be. The “forces” at work in projective identification are not measurable by any instruments, nor are they recognized by modern science. Nevertheless, according to the clinical literature, these “energies” are constantly “in motion” and “at play”—descriptions that brings to mind such practices as the channelling of spirit voices and the charging of sacred crystals. This view of the world certainly seems a long way from the static, stable universe inherent in most people’s everyday assumptions. It would be wrong to deny that some of the most useful concepts in psychoanalysis are highly ambiguous; indeed, in many instances this ambiguity is precisely what makes them so compelling and so useful. And even the most rational analyst would have to agree that the unconscious has a logic (or illogic) of its own, guided by the symbolic displacements, substitutions, and associative transformations that can be seen in art, poetry, metaphors, dreams, jokes, and symptom formation. The primary process could not be further from the empirical, linear logic of scientific fact.

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Nevertheless, there is so much confusion around the idea of projective identification that it seems fair to say the term is simply no longer useful, serving only to complicate and mystify a process that could be more clearly described in other ways. Most of the articles I have read about projective identification are dragged down by a kind of methodological piety and pseudo-scientific fussiness, an obsessive fiddling with theoretical concepts that seems to have the effect of distracting the author (and, perhaps, the reader) from the fact that the subject of the paper is in fact anomalous, unpredictable, nebulous, and, in the end, completely ineffable. A number of analysts have, in fact, called for the term to be abandoned (see, for example, Meissner, 1980, 1987). Grotstein (1982) believes there is essentially no difference between projective identification and ordinary projection. Whipple (1986) describes the concept as confusing and unnecessary. A study by Abend, Porder, and Willick (1983) arrives at the same result—and does so with a clarity and concision rare in psychoanalytic writing. They write, In the end, we concluded that projective identification was another poorly defined term with more potential for confusing clinical issues than for clarifying them. The actual behavior it attempts to describe is commonplace and can be understood well enough without postulating this ‘special defense’. [p. 167]

Anxiety and terminology Certainly, I do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I am convinced that the psychoanalytic situation, under certain circumstances, can produce unique connections between two minds. At special moments in this highly charged situation, thoughts do appear to cross the boundary that separates one individual from another. Most psychoanalysts have experienced such moments. They are very difficult to describe, and almost impossible to pin down. They often involve phenomena that seem embarrassingly trivial or unattainably fleeting. Paying close attention to their tone, quality, and texture is a tricky business, but it is the only way to understand them more deeply. One thing is clear: these kinds of ephemeral, numinous experiences cannot be defined in

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empirical terms. To try to do so, it seems to me, would be the equivalent of throwing out a positivist or objectivist anchor as a defence against accusations of relativism. Not only is such ambitious objectivism implausible, it may be powered by a disguised defence against existential anxiety (see Fancher, 1995; Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999). All we can do is describe the tone, texture, coherence, and consistency of the strange event. We cannot even say whether or not it is “real”. When a momentary connection between two minds is called projective identification, there is an unstated assumption that it is an empirical incident, something that may even occur—as similar natural processes are supposed to do—independent of content. Projective identification is a reassuring phrase, comfortably clinical, distancing the modern practitioner from such unprofessional concepts as thought-transference, telepathy, and other paranormal elements that seem to belong to the distant past. In fact, however, it is a form of sleight of hand, a theory that functions as a magician’s lure, distracting the attention of the audience from the actual trick that is operating in the background. In the modern era, we no longer believe in possession or magic, but we do believe in clinical science. “Projective identification” is, I believe, one of philosopher Bertrand Méheust’s “stop concepts”, which he defines as “notions which, no doubt possessing an incontestable heuristic power, have at the same time a strategic function, that of limiting, by tacit convention, an obscure domain of experience, thus stopping the flight of thought into the unknown” (1999, p. 208). The term acts as a buffer between the frightening world of thought transference and the secular rationalism of clinical psychiatry. Is projective identification the new name for thought-transference? Has thought transference been domesticated, refashioned, and incorporated into psychoanalytic theory? That is impossible to say, mostly because projective identification refers to so many different circumstances. In some instances, it may describe the process Freud referred to as thought-transference; in other cases, it may describe something else entirely. This, in fact, is the heart of the problem. Thought-transference allows us to engage with the mystery of unknowing; projective identification does not. To put it another way, when we attribute feelings or emotions to projective identification, we are using a metaphor, a form of

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Illustration 5.4. Advertisement for a lecture on Thoughtography by Jule Eisenbud. © Jule Eisenbud Collection.

semiotic representation that, in this case, is underpinned by science: the authoritative signifying system of modernity. Terminology, itself a form of interpretation, can actually reshape and revise the way things are experienced. It can also reform the cultural and moral values those experiences reflect. True, metaphors allow us to

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understand things from different perspectives, but they can also serve as a limitation and a trap. Why has Klein’s original notion of projective identification grown so grotesquely swollen and out of shape? Why has it come to embrace all kinds of abstract phenomena? The answer, I think, has to do with anxiety about the inability of psychoanalysis to investigate interpersonal mental phenomena in an empirical context, however rigorously theorists may define the domains and entities that concern them. There are just too many variables present, too many contradictions and subjective factors affecting observations. As Kirsner puts it in his book Unfree Associations (2000), “psychoanalysis is an experiential, subjective, personal and interpersonal exploration for which there are no validating objective criteria. If anything, psychoanalysis is about unknowing, about the unconscious which is not known, about the uniqueness of individual discovery” (p. 25). Yet, as Kirsner goes on to observe, psychoanalytic education has come to depend on the justification of its truth claims through authoritarian approaches reminiscent . . . of some organized religions rather than through the kind of open, critical inquiry which, at least in theory, can take place in universities . . . [ibid.]

In Freud’s day, the status of psychoanalysis was highly elusive. It is also elusive today, as I believe it should be. It is unfortunate that many clinicians exploit this elusiveness to “have it both ways”, using subtle, intangible concepts like projective identification to explain clinical experiences, then discussing these concepts as though they can be accessed unbidden and unmediated, like chemical processes. To ward off suspicion of their unusual inductive process of investigation and understanding, today’s psychoanalysts seem desperate to validate the subjective dimension of their work whose results are impossible to chart, graph, or delimit. This desperation, I believe, has fuelled the drive for psychoanalysis to ally itself with medicine and neuroscience, reflecting a need for common identity in the face of outside threat and criticism. Ironically, this common identity is reinforced mostly by endless debates and schisms over such matters as the orientation of one’s training analyst and the duration of the control case. This is precisely what Freud meant by “the narcissism of small differences”.

CHAPTER SIX

Afterword

“It is difficult to imagine a theory of what they call the unconscious without a theory of telepathy. They can be neither confused nor dissociated . . . Telepathy is the shadow of psychoanalysis” (Derrida, 1988, p. 14)

W

e desperately want to maintain a separation between “rational” practices and those that originate from the emotions, the heart, or the spirit. These we connect not to science and reason, but to passion, sorcery, magic, and miracles. We are anxious most of all to defend our territory against what Chertok and Stengers refer to as the “creators of reality”: “not only hypnotists but also shamans, magicians and other conjurers, practitioners of ‘soft’ medicine, animal tamers, fortune tellers and sorcerers” (p. 269). The liminality of psychoanalysis is, as Whitebook observes, “undoubtedly one of the reasons [it] evokes so much anxiety and animosity in the general population” (2002, p. 1216). As I have tried to make clear in this book, contemporary psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, the latter often working in mental 111

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health clinics, seem to be trapped in a quest for legitimacy, for the acceptance of their work in the wider psychiatric world. In October 2009, for example, a meta-analysis of twenty-three studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy was more effective than short-term treatments. Such studies imply that psychoanalysis is replicable, scientific, a materialist field of study rather than a doorway to the unconscious with its obscure and often disturbing communications and connections. Yet, psychoanalysis—as Freud originally intended, at least— cannot be empirically verifiable. What happens in the clinic responds to, and is shaped by, the ideas, beliefs, and anxieties of the two people involved in the process, as the analyst evokes and, like a conjurer, juggles the invisible forces of transference and resistance. For those undergoing the treatment, contact with the larger world may very well become more, not less, difficult. None of this is to downplay the real impact of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the psychoanalytic process, as it has evolved over the past century, has made possible a form of human encounter unlike any other, a unique relationship charged with intimate feelings, personal resonance, a sense of care, vulnerability, openness, and mutual personal and interpersonal knowledge. The relationship between analyst and analysand is, ideally, more than merely a very deep connection; indeed, the joining of two selves at an unconscious level is essential to the process. Both analysts and analysands regularly experience moments of deep connection that challenge ordinary assumptions about what we are capable of knowing and perceiving about each other. Perhaps this is enough; perhaps nothing more can be said about the psychoanalytic relationship. By its very nature, psychoanalysis does not permit easy enquiries; its process, like that of much creative art, is made up of thoughts, dreams, images, and affects that seem not actively invoked, but rather spontaneously received. This is not to say that tacit thoughts and memories may be activated incidentally or subliminally; indeed, as I have been arguing, many of the essential aspects of the analytic set-up are designed specifically to induce magical thinking. But even the most everyday kind of clinical work can involve odd undertones. Emotions and experiences that have been repressed often take an uncanny colour

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when they reappear. Particulars we cannot attend to, and may not be able to specify or define, often contribute silently, in unrecognized ways, to the mystery of the analytic process. In this strange and unique fifty minutes, the external world is bracketed and set aside, and something else is allowed to emerge. The time and place are turned over to the unconscious with its magical beliefs, odd rituals, and deep shadows. The order and connections of “reality” are temporarily replaced by the order and connections of thoughts, fantasies, wishes, and dreams. The associative process allows missing, hidden, or taboo memories to return. Psychoanalysis has developed a theoretical language for this process, which includes terms like projection, transference, regression, internalization, incorporation, and, of course, projective identification. Such experiences occur all the time, absent the theoretical terms, but they grow especially involved in relationships that are emotionally intense—in love, in family relationships, and between analyst and analysand. The more heavily involved the relationship, the more intricate the psychological dynamics. At the very heart of our complexity, it seems, are the most important (and most perplexing) elements of human life—our relationships with one another. As Bowlby concludes at the end of his trilogy Attachment and Loss, “intimate attachments are the hub around which a person’s life evolves” (1980, p. 56). These attachments, however, are endlessly difficult, complicated, and often painful—a result, according to Mitchell, of “adhesion to the loved ones of the past, an inability to separate from the familiar and the familial” and “an active striving to maintain old attachments” (1988, p. 181). The German philosopher Schopenhauer captures this conflict very nicely in a parable first published in his collection Studies in Pessimism (1893): A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature. [p. 48]

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However complex and distinct their particular nuances, all psychoanalytic theories are essentially attempts to make sense of our ongoing, ultimately irresolvable relationships with one another. As Schopenhauer’s parable of the porcupines suggests, we all have both a powerful need for others and an urge to be separate and distinct. These mutually conflicting tendencies in human nature are at the heart of the dilemma posed by the question of thoughttransference. Are we, in fact, separate from others, or are we connected? This is a question raised—and, to a certain extent, acted out—by the psychoanalytic process. The relationship between analyst and analysand evokes a space that is neither inside, nor outside, nor between, neither wholly real nor completely imaginary. As Jung puts it, “this process leads into the regions of inner psychic experience which defy our powers of scientific description” (1946, par. 182). In essence, it is closer to a superstitious tradition or religious observance than a medical practice, and, like similar rituals, it has only a vestigial relationship to its founding principles. However objective or scientific its disguise, psychoanalysis is, at heart, a matter of faith. And as with all the best spells and prayers, if the believers (both analyst and analysand) are faithful enough, it works. At its best, psychoanalysis can provide real insights and deep epiphanies. It can reveal blind spots, behaviour patterns, relationship dynamics, and character armour, freeing us to think—and, ideally, to live and love—differently. For the magic to work, however, there must be a real opening up of minds, a mutual transparency. In this, the functioning analytic dyad is among the most open and honest of all adult relationships. Ironically, however, it is at the same time a “false” relationship in the sense that during the session, neither analyst nor analysand are talking to one another, but are actually “addressing” phantoms, ghosts, half-formed beings, unfulfilled wishes, long-dead but still active possibilities. Psychoanalysis is about the shape of our relationships, not just with the present and the living, but with the past and the dead. Loewald (1960) describes the unconscious as “a crowd of ghosts” forced to live “a shadow life”, making their appearances only malignantly, in the “darkness” of symptoms and character pathology. “Our present, current experiences have intensity and depth”, Loewald continues, “to the extent to which they are in communication (interplay) with the unconscious, infantile

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experiences representing the indestructible matrix of all subsequent experiences” (p. 251). For Loewald, then, ghosts are not exorcised but transmuted into ancestors—that is, loved and hated parts of ourselves, with whom we maintain vital ongoing relationships. The task for analysis is not to get rid of childhood fantasies and archaic love-objects, but to link them up with, and integrate them into, present reality. I have been characterizing the relationship between analyst and analysand as particularly intimate—so intimate, in fact, as to constitute a temporary fusion. Yet, at the same time, paradoxically, the space between the two has room enough to accommodate a whole range of liminal phenomena, from imaginary companions, alter egos, and transitional objects to spirits, gods, and unrecognizable phantoms. In this sense, the experience of psychoanalysis—when it “works”—allows analyst and analysand to understand themselves both as themselves (who they really are), and as whom they are not: the Other.

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INDEX

Abend, S. M., 106, 117 Aberfan, 76–78 affect, 35, 45, 57, 71, 89, 102, 112 aggression, 54, 58, 78, 92, 97, 101 Alexander, F., 86, 117 Allik, T., 98, 117 ambivalence, 7, 18–19, 37, 73, 75, 98 American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV), 31, 117 anxiety, xii, xviii, 5–6, 13, 19, 32, 42, 45–46, 54, 57, 68, 96, 106–107, 109, 111–112 unconscious, 36, 55 Asch, S., 68, 117 Auden, W. H., 10–11, 117 Aurobindo, S., xvii, 117 Bach, S., 45, 117 Bair, D., 72, 74, 87, 117 Balint, M., 37, 117 Barker, J., 77–78, 118 Bass, A., 85, 87, 118 Bateson, G., 34, 84, 118 Beethoven, L. van, 16

behaviour, 37, 41, 54, 92–93, 96, 102, 106, 114 Bergler, E., 10, 118 Bernstein, J., 8, 118 Bischoff, N., 13, 131 Bleak, J., 9, 118 Bloom, C., 53, 118 Bohm, D., 86, 118 Bollas, C., 105, 118 Bonaparte, M., 53, 118 Borch-Jacobsen, M., 65, 118 Botticelli, S., 17 Bower, J., 9, 129 Bowlby, J., 113, 118 Braude, S., 18, 22, 74, 80, 118 British Premonition Bureau, 78 Bronowski, J., 13, 118 Brugger, P., 12, 118 Buddhism, 85–86 Carpy, D. V., 104, 118 case studies Daniel Schreber, 57 Ilga K, 67 133

134

INDEX

Miss A, 28 Miss B, 28 Mr R, 101 Staudenmayer, 57–58 Castle, T., 42, 118 Catherall, D. R., 101, 118 Central Premonition Registry, 78 Chertok, L., 2, 75, 111, 119 Christensen, A., 75, 119 Cimino, C., 103, 119 clairvoyance, xv, 37 Clark, T. K., 23, 125 Coltart, N., 97, 119 conscious(ness), xvi, 13, 24, 26–27, 29, 35–37, 43, 53, 58, 60, 62, 67, 71, 73–74, 80, 82, 84–86, 88–89, 93, 96, 98–99 see also: unconscious(ness) pre-, 94 Correale, A., 103, 119 Corrigan, R., 9, 119 Couliano, I., xix, 119 countertransference, 14, 19, 42, 87, 101, 103 see also: transference crystal gazing, 2 da Vinci, L., 17 de Marchi, A., 97, 131 Denes-Raj, V., 12–13, 120 Denver Hilton Hotel, 49 Derrida, J., 111, 119 de Saussure, R., 2, 119 Deutsch, H., 35, 119 development(al), xiii, xvi, 12, 30, 34, 66–70, 85, 89, 91, 94, 101 Devereux, G., 7, 119 Dieckmann, H., 105, 119 Dorpat, T. L., 101, 119 Druckman, D., 23, 119 Duncan, D., 105, 119 Dunlap, K., 11, 119 Dunne, J. W., 18, 119 ego, xvi, 10, 32–34, 45, 51, 55, 66–67, 76, 82, 99, 115 see also: unconscious

Ehrenwald, J., xi, 7, 24, 29, 32, 58–59, 66–67, 69, 119 Eisenbud, J., 7, 17–24, 28–29, 47–51, 78–80, 82–84, 108, 120 Emery, E., 98, 120 Enlightenment, The, 8, 42 Epstein, M., 86, 120 Epstein, S., 12–13, 120, 126 Erasmus, 89 Eshel, O., 69, 120 Evans, J., 13, 120 extrasensory perception (ESP), xv, xvii, 23, 66–67, 105 Fancher, R., 107, 120 fantasy, xiv, 68, 79, 92, 102–103 Feldman, M., 95–96, 120 Ferenczi, S., 7, 14, 32, 120 Field, N., 97–98, 121 Flechsig, Dr, 57–58 Fliess, W., 5 Fodor, N., 7, 21, 121 Fowers, B. J., 107, 127 Franzini, L., 31, 121 Frazer, J. G., xiii–xiv, 12, 43–44, 88, 121 Frederick, C., 9, 118 Freud, S., xi–xiv, xvii, 1–8, 10–12, 14–20, 23–24, 27–29, 31, 35–38, 41–45, 49, 53–57, 59–60, 66–67, 69–72, 74–75, 80–81, 84, 86, 88, 91–94, 96–97, 99, 102–103, 107, 109, 112, 121–122 Friedland, N., 9, 122 Gabbard, G., 104, 122 Gay, P., 14, 122 Gebser, J., xvii, 122 Goethe prize, 17 Gordon, R., 95, 98, 122 Graves, R., 12, 118 Grayson, G., 99, 122 Greatrex, T. S., 97, 122 Greenwood, J. A., 21–22, 127 Grof, S., xvii, 122 Gross, O., 5

INDEX

Grossberg, J. M., 31, 121 Grotstein, J. S., 94, 99, 102, 106, 122–123, 125 Gruenewald, T., 9, 129 Guignon, C., 107, 127 Gurney, E., 25–26, 87, 123 Hannah, B., 74, 123 Hartmann, E., 59, 123 Heidegger, M., 63, 123 Heier, H., 12–13, 120 Heine, H., 17 Heisenberg, W., 85 Uncertainty Principle, 85 Hindu, 70, 86 Hitschmann, E., 69, 123 Hobson, J. A., 59–62, 123–124 Hoffman, E. T. A., 17, 53 Home, D. D., 22 Hood, R., 70, 123 hypnotism, 2, 4, 111 International Journal of Parapsychology, The, xv Jacobson, N., 75, 119 James, W., 70–71, 123 Jensen, W., 17 Jentsch, E., 44 Jones, E., 1, 5–7, 99, 123 Jorgensen, D. O., 9, 126 Joseph, B., 92, 123 Journal of the American Medical Association, 112 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, xv, 51 Jung, C. G., xvi, 5–6, 37, 71–75, 81, 84–87, 89, 95, 97–98, 105, 114, 123–124 collective unconscious, xvi, 73, 81 Kafka, F., 16 Kahn, D., 61, 124 Kakar, S., 86, 124 Kammann, R., 39, 125 Keinan, G., 9, 122, 124

135

Kemeny, M., 9, 129 Kernberg, O., 94, 124 Kirsner, D., 109, 124 Klein, M., xii, 91–92, 94, 96, 102, 109, 124 Kohut, H., 45, 68, 70, 124 Kosslyn, S. M., 23, 126 Koutstaal, W., 2, 124 Kripal, J. J., 86, 124 Kris, E., xvi Lacan, J., 53, 74 Laing, R. D., 33–35, 84, 124 Lakoff, G., 62, 124 Langer, E., 9, 124 law of contagion, xiii of similarity, xiii Lazar, S., 22, 124 Lester, D., 9, 119 Lévy-Bruhl, L., 13, 72–73, 124 life, xiv, xvi, xviii, 7–9, 11, 13, 20, 26, 29–30, 35, 43–45, 51, 55, 57, 59–63, 65–68, 70, 75, 80, 88, 96, 113–114 Locke, J., 53, 124 Loewald, H., 11, 114–115, 125 LSD, xvii Mack, J., 99, 125 magic, xi, xiii–xiv, xix, 3–4, 8–13, 24, 30, 35, 43–44, 67–68, 76–77, 79, 82, 88–89, 99, 107, 111–114 Major, R., 74, 97, 125 Malin, A., 94, 125 Mann, T., 16 Marks, D., 39, 125 Marshall, R. J., 103, 125 Maslow, A., xvi Masson, J., 86, 125 Matute, H., 9, 125 Mauss, M., 12, 125 Mayer, E. L., 7, 38–39, 125 McConnell, R. A., 23, 125 McDougall, J., 11, 125 McGinn, C., 62–63, 125

136

111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 711 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 511 6 7 8 9 311 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 911

INDEX

Méheust, B., 107, 125 Meissner, W., 71, 94, 100–101, 106, 125 Mekur, D., 70, 125 Michelangelo, 17 Miller, P., 74, 97, 125 mind-reading, xi Mintz, E., 21, 126 Mischo, J., 13, 131 Mitchell, S., 113, 125 Money-Kyrle, R., 37, 126 Mori, M., 45–46, 126 mother, 45, 54, 65–66, 69, 78, 92 –child, 66–69, 91 Moulton, S. T., 23, 126 Murphy, M., xvii, 126 Myers, F., 25–26, 34, 81, 87, 123, 126 Nabokov, V., 25, 30, 65, 70, 126 narcissism, 35, 68, 71, 89, 102, 109 National Coal Board, 79 Nelson, V., 46, 126 Neuro-Psychoanalysis, 97 New Age movement, xvi New York Psychoanalytic Institute, 17 New York Psychoanalytic Society, 18 New York Times, 51 Noll, R., 2, 126 object, xiv, xvii, 10–11, 45, 49, 63, 70, 72–73, 83, 85–86, 92, 95–96, 100–103, 105, 115 lost, 54 love, 115 relations, 14–15, 66, 91–92, 96 objective/objectivity, xvii, 14–15, 20, 24, 33, 47, 72, 75, 84, 87–88, 107, 109, 114 occult, xi–xii, xv, xviii, 5–7, 10–14, 17–18, 20, 23–24, 38–39, 41, 72, 76, 99 Oedipal ideas, 70, 101 Ogden, T. H., 94, 126 O’Keefe, D. L., 13, 126

Olsson, P. A., 101, 126 Other, 43, 59, 63, 115 Oubaid, V., 13, 131 Pacini, R., 12–13, 120, 126 Padgett, V. R., 9, 126 paranoia, xiii–xiv, 32, 36, 57–58 paranoid–schizoid position, 92, 99 paranormal, xii, xiv–xviii, 6–7, 12–13, 15–16, 18, 20–21, 23–25, 35, 39, 41, 68, 84, 91, 95, 107 Parapsychological Association, 17 parapsychology, xv–xvi, 19, 21, 24, 29, 39, 51, 85 Paris, G., 75, 126 Parsons, W. B., 71, 126 participation mystique, 71–75, 95 Pattison, L., 9, 119 Pauli, W., 74, 84 Pederson-Krag, G., 21, 126 Penguin Modern Classics, 16 Pepitone, A., 9, 127 phantasm, xi, 11, 25–27, 87 Phillips, A., xi, 15–16, 23, 91, 127 Plaut, F., 74, 128 Podmore, F., 25–26, 87, 123 Poe, E. A., 51–56, 127 Porder, M. S., 106, 117 Pozzi, F., 97, 131 Pratt, J. G., 21–22, 127 Preiswerk, H., 72 projection, 1, 12, 35, 41–42, 44, 58, 62, 68, 88–89, 92, 95–96, 99–102, 105–106, 113 hypothesis, 32, 58 internal, 32 projective identification, xii, xviii, 91–107, 109, 113 psyche, 32–33, 46, 73–74, 84–85, 99 psychic, 1–2, 6, 13, 18–19, 22–23, 26, 29, 32, 38, 48, 51, 56, 69–72, 76–77, 80–81, 84–85, 95, 100–101, 103–104, 114 Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20 psychokinesis, xv, 80 psychosis, 31–32, 39

INDEX

111 2 3 4 5 6 711 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 211 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 911

Radin, D., 39 Reed, G., 9, 129 Regev, Y., 9, 122 Reichbart, R., 19, 24, 30, 51, 127 Reik, T., 35, 127 religion, xiv, xvi, 11, 13, 70–72, 86, 88, 91, 109 repression, xii, 19–20, 28–29, 35–36, 44, 50, 67, 78, 80, 94, 112 Rhine, J. B., 21–22, 127 Richardson, F. C., 107, 127 Róheim, G., 10, 29–30, 118 Rolland, R., 70–71, 127 Roustang, F., 23, 127 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 49 Rozen, D. L., 100, 127 Rubin, J. B., 86, 128 Rudnytsky, P., 17, 128 Saffiotti, L., 9, 127 Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, 2–3 Salzburg psychoanalytic conference, 5 Samuels, A., 74, 128 Sandler, J., 96, 128 Schafer, R., 16, 128 Scharff, J. S., 95, 128 schizophrenia, 32, 101 Schopenhauer, A., 74, 113–114, 128 Schwartz-Salant, N., 37–38, 98, 128 Schwentker, W., 5, 128 Searles, H., 37, 92, 128 Segal, H., 92, 128 self, xiii, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 5, 15, 26, 35, 45, 52, 54–57, 59, 63, 66, 70, 91–92, 96, 98, 103, 105 Serios, T. J., 47–51, 60, 62, 67, 83 thoughtographs, 47–51, 58, 82–83, 108 Shakespeare, W., 17, 99 Hamlet, 17 Macbeth, 17, 99 Richard III, 17 Shamdasani, S., 2, 128 Sharpe, R., 16, 128

137

Sheldrake, R., 81–85, 128 Morphic Resonance, 81, 84 Shorter, B., 74, 128 Silverman, S., 36, 129 Simenauer, E., 105, 129 Sloman, S., 13, 129 Slusarz, P., 13, 129 Smith, B. M., 21–22, 127 Society for Psychical Research, 1, 7, 81 American, 51 London, 25 Spiegelman, J. M., 96, 129 Spillius, E., 101, 129 spiritualism, 1 splitting, 60, 96, 99–100, 105 Stanovich, K., 13, 129 States, B. O., 60, 129 Stengers, I., 75, 111, 119 Stoller, J., 38–39, 69 Straube, E. R., 13, 131 Stuart, C. E., 21–22, 127 subject(s), 69, 72–73, 95, 100–101 subjectivity, xvii, 15, 42, 75, 84, 109 Sun, R., 13, 129 supernatural, xi–xii, xiv–xvi, 5–6, 20, 23, 27, 31–32, 35, 42, 65–66, 72, 84, 98–99, 104 superstition, xiii–xiv, xviii, 23, 29, 72 Swales, P., 4, 129 Swedenborg, E., 71 Swets, J. A., 23, 119 symbol(-ism), xiii–xiv, 10, 50, 57, 59, 62–63, 71, 105 Tambiah, S. J., 13, 129 Targ, R., 39 Tart, C., xvii, 129 Tausk, V., 56–58, 67, 129 Taylor, S., 9, 129 telepathy, xi–xii, 5, 7, 17–20, 22–24, 26–29, 32, 37, 39, 49–50, 57, 66, 69, 76, 81, 84, 103, 107, 111 Terry, C., 13, 129 The Nation, 11

138

111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 711 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 511 6 7 8 9 311 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 911

INDEX

Tolstoy, L., 30 Totton, N., 39, 129 transference, xii, 2, 8, 10, 12, 19, 27, 29, 31, 79–81, 85, 87–89, 94, 97, 99–100, 102, 112–113 see also: countertransference thought-, xvii, 5, 7, 19–21, 25–31, 35, 38–39, 42–43, 47, 50–52, 56, 58–59, 65, 68–69, 72, 74, 76, 80–81, 87, 94–95, 107, 114 Tresan, D., 86–87, 129 Trinity College, Cambridge, 81 Perrott-Warrick Project, 81 Truzzi, M., 12, 129 Ullman, M., 86–87, 130 unconscious(ness), xi, xiii, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 7–8, 10–11, 15, 17, 19–20, 24, 26–32, 35–36, 41–42, 44, 49–50, 54–55, 58, 60–62, 65, 67–69, 71, 73–74, 78–81, 84–87, 89, 92–93, 95–96, 98–103, 105, 109, 111–114 see also: anxiety, conscious(ness) ego, 10 identity, 72–73, 95 intelligence, 26 University of Colorado Medical School, 17 US National Academy of Sciences, 23

Vaughan, F., xvi, 130 von Franz, M.-L., 71, 74, 130 von Neuriter, F., 67, 130 voodoo, xiii, xviii Voyager-2, 49 Walsh, R., 60–61, 63, 130 Warner, R., 75, 130 Waskax, R. T., 96, 130 Watt, C., 13, 130 West, R., 13, 129 Westminster Abbey, 49 Whan, M., 41–42, 130 Whipple, D. W., 35, 106, 130 Whitebook, J., 8, 111, 130 Wilber, K., xvii, 130 Wilbur, R., 53, 130 Willick, M. S., 106, 117 Wilson, A. W., 88–89, 130 Winnicott, D. W., 65–66, 130 Wiseman, R., 13, 130 Wolfradt, U., 13, 131 Woodworth, R., 11, 131 world, xii–xiv, xvii–xviii, 1, 7–8, 10–12, 23, 33–34, 44, 46, 50–53, 60, 63, 70, 88, 98, 103, 107, 112 external, 29–32, 41, 62, 68, 113 internal, 44, 102 Zaehner, R. C., 70, 131 Zanocco, G., 97, 131 Zaphiropoulos, M. L., 15, 131