Response to Dr O. Eshel’s letter

I am grateful to Dr Eshel for her comments about the paper “Projective Identification and Telepathic Dreams,” and I am driven to explain my thinking about this topic in further detail. She and I share an interest in this enigmatic topic, which is one of the mysterious phenomena that Freud left us as part of his epistemophilic legacy. Perhaps those of us who have addressed it have done so because of a repeated clinical encounter with these mysterious dreams throughout our clinical practice. As an analyst and as a supervisor, I have had several experiences of this type, yet I published only one case in order to be able to expand on its clinical details.

Eshel’s letter brings to mind some of Bion’s (1967) words about what happens when an analyst reads the work of another analyst:

How is the communication between the psycho-analyst reading and the psycho-analyst writing to be made at least as effective as the communication between analyst and analysand? What has to be communicated is real enough; yet every psycho-analyst knows the frustration of trying to make clear, even to another psycho-analyst, an experience which sounds unconvincing as soon as it is formulated. We may have to reconcile ourselves to the idea that such communication is impossible at the present stage of psycho-analysis. Transformations of the psycho-analytical experience into formulations which effect communication between psycho-analyst and reader, remains an activity to be pursued. (122)

Clearly, these difficulties remain, and much more so when it comes to strange topics such as telepathic dreams.

The main point of Eshel’s letter is related to her rejection of the notion that projective identification (PI) might be the central mechanism in these dreams. She says, “This seems to me a reductive explanation,” and later adds, “I believe that telepathic dreams impel us to go further, beyond projective identification, beyond intersubjectivity, into an enigmatic ‘impossible’ extreme of patient-analyst deep i