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“Now the air is full of spooks.” With this verse from Goethe's Faust put as rubric in the forefront of Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud declared the hospitality of his science for the creatures of folk fantasy who had been rudely excluded from the libraries and laboratories of
professional Wissenschaft. Towards ghosts and their ilk he always maintained the generous posture of Hamlet when the prince replied to the outcry of his philosopher friend Horatio against the apparition of the former's father, “As a stranger, give it welcome.”
The welcome that psychoanalysis prepares for apparitions of all varieties is therapeutic as well as critical. It not only wonders what the stranger stands for; it inquires what it can do for the uncanny thing. A superb example of the application of Freudian method to demoniac phenomena is Dr. Fodor's On the Trail of the Poltergeist, the study of mysterious mischief which first brought him to personal acquaintance with Freud. (It is summarized in Chapter V of the present book.) In my own judgment, it is only by such work as Dr. Fodor performed in the case of the polter-possessed Mrs. Forbes that analytic psychology can take over and tame the wilds of the so-called occult, where the currents of the id establish contact with the procursors of the id in the outside world.*
The Haunted Mind presents us with a collection of Dr. Fodor's rambles in the spheres of the ultrasensuous, and his verdicts on things seen and heard there. We are introduced to various modern survivals of witchcraft, black magic, diabolatry, lycanthropy, and less melodramatic exuberances of the raw material of Psychic Research, or, as it is now termed, Parapsychology. The personal testimony of Dr. Fodor frankly invites our good-humored skepticism as well as our willingness to suspend disbelief in the presence of powers that have swayed the human mind ever since it was born. He avows his faith in extrasensory perception, telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (the men