Editorial

So often elided, or told symptomatically - in brief glimpses, or stutters, or projected elsewhere - the mapping of how and where psychoanalysis has overlapped, or at least encroached on, domains of parapsychology, esotericism and the occult is still being pieced together (following the inroads made by Georges Devereux and Nandor Fodor in the 1970s, and more recently in the work of Júlia Gyimesi and Mikita Brottman). During the early years and pre-years of psychoanalysis, prominent physicians, psychologists, philosophers and psychiatrists, including Frederic Myers, William James, Joseph Babinski, Théodore Flournoy and Baron von Schrenk-Notzing, were applying themselves to the task of giving credible (psychological or physiological) explanations for the manifold accounts of seemingly ‘occult’ phenomena emerging out of the practices of professional spiritualists and mediums. And yet psychoanalysts seem to have been extremely wary about entering the disputes - perhaps over-sensitive to the danger of finding themselves identified with the parapsychologists, as themselves too credible, too prone to attribute psychical processes with a mysterious life and presence of their own, one which could not be adequately captured within conventional medico-scientific epistemological frameworks and experimental studies.

Two articles in this issue focus on this awkward and historiographically contested ground. Richard Skues brings us into the ambience of the ‘Harz Meeting’ of September 1921, at which Freud presented case notes on psychoanalysis and telepathy to his inner circle of followers, the so-called secret ‘Committee’. This ‘Preliminary Report’, drafted a month earlier while holidaying in Austria, was never published during his lifetime and consisted of an introduction rehearsing some of the complex considerations psychoanalysis must bring to the topic of telepathy and other occult phenomena, and three case studies, the third of which Freud had inadvertently left behind in Vienna