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The appearance of this book coincides with a more general and explicit engagement of the psychoanalytic field with religion and spirituality and is not, I think, disconnected. For myself, I hope this indicates a coming
together of the poles that seemed to fly apart with Freud and Jung's split nearly a century ago, both of whom ‘lend’ their epigraphs to this book. In bringing together this anthology of essays by contributors of varying orientation, Nick Totton is arguing for an openness with regard to paranormal events by psychoanalytic practitioners. It has been something of a tradition, he writes, begun by Freud, for workers in this field to conceal their own opinions or to ‘express high-minded agnosticism’ (p. 12) despite, often, personal experience and/or a fascination with the subject. He and other contributors have had ‘experience enough to render the question of belief superfluous’ (p. 12). Taking Freud's familiar quote about the ‘apparent fact that the mental processes of one person … can be transferred to another person through empty space without employing the familiar methods of communication by means of words and signs’, Totton says this transference is variously called countertransference, projective identification or unconscious communication, all as if they answered the question of what is going on here.
Montague Ullman, an American psychoanalyst, became interested in telepathy by close encounters with the paranormal in his life and work. This led him to devote his time to experiment in order to gain scientific validity and his chapter explores some of his experiments in dream and telepathy. He concludes significantly that there are gains to be had from explicit recognition of the telepathy hypothesis, around disclosure and ‘a fairminded openness towards patients about the reality of telepathy rather than a denial or bias that confirms their fear of self-disclosure’ (p. 44). This is especially important as telepathic experience often occurs at critica