You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The following is an example of a 'paranormal' occurrence during analysis such as has been repeatedly observed and reported by Freud, Hollos, H. Deutsch, Burlingham, Ehrenwald, Fodor, Eisenbud, Pederson-Krag, Gillespie, Rubin, myself, and others (see References at end). I consider it particularly interesting for the following main reasons: (1) Because of the admixture of 'telepathic' and 'precognitive' elements in the analytic material (a dream); (2) because it seems to me that the material itself can be satisfactorily explained and fully justified in a psychodynamic frame of reference only if we take the aforesaid elements into account; (3) because the case shows once more that the 'paranormal' material which inserts itself into a psychological situation is submitted—as Freud first indicated—to the laws and mechanisms of the primary process; (4) because the case itself shows the particular importance in such occurrences of the transference-counter-transference relation.
The dreamer, whom I shall call A, is a patient in his thirties, suffering from an obsessional neurosis and labouring under the delayed influence of an emotionally 'dry' childhood. His main symptomatic defences and phantasies concern ideas of contamination and infection by 'worms' and other intestinal parasites, of venereal diseases, etc. When he had the dream, analysis had just started afresh after an interval of about one month due to my summer holidays. A is in a phase of negative transference, and his main complaint is that the analyst is 'distant', 'aloof', 'academic', etc., and is not getting really deep into his problems. Interpretations of this attitude as being an unconscious repetition of his infantile dissatisfaction concerning his father (whose ways of thinking and behaving in fact indicated a notable lack of contact with reality) and his mother (who gave the patient plenty of food and material comfort, but little emotional warmth and very little understanding) have so far been unsucc