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.
The editor of this collected work points out that he has not attempted to aggregate simply general contributions by persons who are psychoanalysts but that these are actually psychoanalytic studies of the so-called psi phenomena and the problems of thought transmission, and such should be considered “as contributions to the theory and practice of clinical psychoanalysis.” He has collected in the anthology probably all or, at any rate, nearly all of the entire thought of expert psychoanalysts in this specific problem and has made available in English a tremendous range of literature generally inaccessible to the average student. He has limited his selection to three types of observed or alleged concordances:
“(1) ‘Correspondences’ between the thought of the analyst and that of his patients. (Telepathy?)
“(2) ‘Correspondences’ between the thoughts of patients and events external to the actual analytic situation. (Telepathy and/or clairvoyance?)
“(3) ‘Correspondences’ between the thought of the analyst and events external to the actual analytic situation. (Telepathy and/or clairvoyance?)”
His adherence to inclusion of papers concerned only with these areas has, no doubt, eliminated all sorts of other interesting articles, but has yielded a text of special value. The editor concludes an excellent introduction by emphasizing the problem of attitudes towards parapsychology and stresses the lack of knowledge which is our current possession. He rightly hopes that this collection will focus interest on this problem and stimulate further investigation.
The book itself is divided into several parts, and begins with an article by Eisenbud which is a review of the psychiatric contributions to psychology. A chapter on psychoanalytic epistemology by Devereux concludes this section and indicates there is no organized psychoanalytic attitude towards psi phenomena.
The second section is devoted to reprints of Freud's material, and covers his writings on dreams, telepathy and the occult.
Par