Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New Englang, East

June 11, 1984. THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE: A PSYCHOANALYTIC REVISIT. Samuel Silverman, M.D.

Dr. silverman presented his paper as the first in a series he plans to write on this subject. He narrowed consideration to a specific situation in which there is a "correspondence" between the unspoken thoughts of the analyst and spoken thoughts of the analysand, without any direct means of sensory communication. For many years, Dr. Silverman was aware of a particular phenomenon which occurred in some analytic hours. He would find himself briefly but intensely preoccupied with a personal train of thought and soon after would hear the patient reproducing the basic theme or key words of what had been preoccupying him. At first, Dr. Silverman dismissed these occurrences as coincidences, but he remained puzzled by their frequent intrusion into his analytic experience. This was particularly so during times when he was preoccupied with intense thoughts related to events in his personal life and also when he experienced sudden physical symptoms during an analytic hour. Relatively undisguised references to these would appear "almost immediately" in the patient's associations, although the physical symptoms were not necessarily experienced by the patient. Dr. Silverman noted much later in his exploration of this issue that the correspondence could be disguised, as, for example, when it appeared in a dream or in a transference derivative. Are these events to be understood as coincidence, or subliminal sensory perceptions on the patient's part, or thought transference?

Dr. Silverman discussed the fluctuations in Freud's thinking in regard to telepathy, as described in the major articles in which he addressed the subject directly or indirectly. Dr. Silverman stated that some people had mistinterpreted Freud as being a convert to telepathy, but that in fact he was not. Freud, however, was not as disassociated from the idea of telepathy as Ernest Jones would have had him be. Freud di