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.
Tennes in the dark, anyone?
Nasrudin was found by his students on his knees looking for his house keys under a streetlight. Joining in, they asked where exactly he had lost them. ‘Over there, in the dark’. ‘Then why are you looking under the streetlight?’ ‘There's more light here’. Tennes' well-written theoretical and clinical paper is an intelligent and systematic attempt to explain clinical phenomena that cannot be understood under the light of the rational, but force one instead to look for answers in dark places that have been largely out of bounds and perennially disdained by psychoanalysis. Home for psychoanalysis has long been under the streetlight. Home for reality, truth, and the quintessentially human seems elsewhere, or so Tennes' examination has led her to think.
Tennes' data are charged, meaningful, and highly improbable occurrences that she and a patient experience together, occurrences which seem to be extensions of issues in the consulting room into material daily life. She supports her experience from many similar sources. Jungians (and Tennes also) know such events as instances of synchronicity. There are many such reports in the literature by now, but what is unusual is that Tennes goes undauntingly further to draw logically compelling conclusions categorically inimical to Enlightenment reason. She postulates an objective ground