Psychoanalysis and Telepathy

Dear Dr Hayley,

I should like to bring to the attention of your readers an interesting discovery about the actual date of the publication of Freud's 'Psychoanalyse und Telepathie'.

In the course of doing research on Walter Benjamin's theory of language, I came across the following remark addressed to Werner Kraft in a letter dated 30 January 1936 and sent from Paris:

Zu Ihrer Bemerkung über mein sprachtheoretisches Referat, dem seine Grenzen durch die Form vorgeschrieben waren: es präjudiziert nichts über eine 'Metaphysik' der Sprache. Und es ist von mir, wenn auch keineswegs manifest, so eingerichtet, dass es genau an die Stelle führt, wo meine eigene Sprachtheorie, die ich auf Ibiza vor mehreren Jahren in einer ganz kurzen programmatischen Notiz niedergelebt habe, einsetz. Ich war sehr überrascht, bedeutende Korrelationen zwischen dieser Theorie und Freuds Essay 'Telepathie und Psychoanalyse' zu finden, den Sie im psychoanalytischen Almanach auf 1935 finden (Benjamin, 1966, p. 705).

(About your remarks on my report on the theory of language, the outlines of which were prescribed by its form, it does not prejudice a 'metaphysics' of language. And it is so arranged, though hardly explicitly, by me that it leads to that area where my own theory of language was erected, the one I drafted many years ago in Ibiza in a very small report. I was quite surprised to find a significant correlation between this theory and Freud's essay 'Telepathy and Psychoanalysis' which you will find in the psychoanalytic almanach of 1935.)

According to the official bibliography, 'Psychoanalyse und Telepathie' was published for the first time in the Gesammelte Werke in 1941. It took me over a year to account for the discrepancy between the two dates.

Following up a footnote about Benjamin's 'ber das mimetische Vermögen' and 'Lehre vom Ähnlichen'—the two articles to which Benjamin refers in the above quotation—I went to a library to look up the remarks on these articles. The editors of Walt