Notes on Parapsychology and Parapsychological Healing

I think it is fair to say that a number of experienced analysts have met episodes in their practice which have struck them as probable cases of telepathy or extrasensory perception (called E.S.P.).1 Quite often these apparent cases of E.S.P. when subjected to a searching scrutiny reveal possibilities of other mechanisms, such as the emergence of a forgotten piece of memory already communicated; an interpretation of the analyst's behaviour, sentiments, or thoughts, by the patient based partly on consciously observed and partly on not quite consciously observed facts; the unexpected appearance in consciousness of identification with the analyst, based on intensive transference and counter-transference; the analyst projecting his own emotional involvement into the patient's material and interpreting it in this sense; analyst and patient who share experiences far beyond what can be expressed in words, coming unexpectedly to identical conclusions, etc.

To show what I mean I wish to report an event which, although almost certainly not a case of telepathy or precognition, illustrates some of the complications involved in clinical observations of this kind. In 1938, when the Szondi test was still in its experimental stages, and only very few people knew about it, I became interested and experimented with it myself. One evening when there was a party in my house we came to talk about this new test, and two sisters, not very closely acquainted with me, volunteered to be guinea-pigs. In an adjoining room I first tested the younger of the two, aged twenty-three and unmarried. After she had done the test, we began to chat, and she mentioned that it would be quite easy to indicate which pictures another person whom one knew fairly well would choose. (The test makes use of forty-eight photographs which are exposed in six sets of eight pictures each. The subject is asked to choose from each set two pictures that he likes and two that he dislikes, making a total of twelve lik