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.
From its beginnings, the history of psychoanalysis has involved phenomena that go beyond the limits of everyday experience. Initially, these took the form of hysterical symptoms and hypnoid states, but as Freud and the early psychoanalysts developed their technique, they found that in the analytic setting their work began to resemble that of spirit mediums, reawakening the ghosts of the past and opening up previously hidden and unknown channels of communication between people. As Richard Reichbart describes in this book, the degree to which this was a metaphor, and the degree to which Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi took this literally, varied considerably. Freud’s views shifted over time, but by 1921 he was a believer and went as far as discussing with his patients possible telepathic connections that they might have had with each other and their motives for establishing these connections (p. 83).
Psychoanalysts continued to be interested in paranormal phenomena through the 1950’s and George Devereux’s Psychoanalysis and the Occult (1953) was a high point of this period. However, after the 50s, mentions of the paranormal significantly decreased in the analytic literature, which Reichbart implies is in inverse proportion to discussions of unconscious communication between patient and analyst by means of projective identification, empathic attunement, and so on.
In this book, Reichbart makes a strong claim that the paranormal (what he and other paranormal researchers call “psi”) is a critical part of human experience and especially relevant to psychoanalysis. Reichbart believes in no uncertain terms that humans are capable of intuitively predicting the future (precognition), receiving ideas from others (telepathy), and exerting force across distance through purely mental means (telekinesis). He feels that the trend in psychoanalysis to explore unconscious communication in the analytic setting scotomizes the truth of the existence of telepathy and psi phenomena.
Reichbart is a