The Paranormal Triangle Revisited (or Euclid had it better)

In her 1958 paper, “The Paranormal Triangle in Analytic Supervision,” Marie Coleman Nelson attempted to make sense of certain data observed during her analyses and in the supervision of trainees by boldly applying the psi hypothesis (Coleman, 1958). This enabled her to take fullest advantage of psychoanalytic hypotheses in patients whose cases were being supervised. In one case she herself was the trainee. Because of psychosomatic developments in an analytic patient, she arranged to be supervised by a male psychiatrist. Immediately following her first control conference, the patient, who had already been in treatment for two years, began his analytic session with the cheerful exclamation, “I can't understand it, but I feel as though I have just acquired a good father!” In a second case, a patient whose analyst was in supervision with Coleman had a dream mirroring a highly specific set of events in Coleman's experience. In a third case, during an interval between a supervisory hour and the next therapeutic session, a patient appeared to act upon Coleman's supervisory recommendations concerning the handling of specific sexual material before the therapist had had an opportunity to engage the patient in exploring this material. In a fourth case, a patient's employer for the first time confronted him about a certain characterological problem just after Coleman had done so, almost as if he had heard what had transpired and had acted upon it. In the final example, the trainee analyst never had a chance to carry out the