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I would like to refer to Sanchez-Medina's paper “Projective Identification and ‘Telepathic Dreams’” (2018), which, as its very title indicates, focuses theoretically and clinically on projective identification and projective counter-identification as the basic explanation for the profound mystery of telepathic dreams.
It is with the deepest respect that I would challenge this explanation. Twelve years ago, when my paper on the enigma of telepathic dreams (Eshel 2006, to which Sanchez-Medina also refers in his paper) was accepted by the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the editor asked me if I could link my explanation to projective identification. I replied that I could not, because in my view the mystery of telepathic dreams goes beyond projective identification, even when this powerful concept is stretched to extreme limits After the paper was published, a letter to the editors characterized my attitude as “daring.” I strongly felt, and also related in my response, to the ‘daring' of the appreciative anonymous reviewers, and especially that of the editor Paul Williams, to allow me to present a paper that truly described my analytic experiences and my own thoughts on this disturbing topic in psychoanalysis, which until then had rarely been addressed in the IJP.
I was therefore sorry that Sanchez-Medina's thought-provoking paper returns the topic of telepathic dreams to the domain of projective identification, a concept that has been widely accepted for decades. This seems to me a reductive explanation that shies away from fully embracing the most mysterious, unknowable and inexplicable aspect of the telepathic dream, where informational details, not merely experiential-emotional details, seem to be mysteriously transferred between patient and analyst (as in the dream of Sanchez-Medina's patient).
Let me explain this briefly. The subject of telepathic phenomena in psychoanalytic thinking has been highly controversial and disturbing ever since it was introduced