Discussion

It is becoming more and more apparent that the analytic situation is the best laboratory for the study of the affective contexts in which psi, or telepathic, phenomena occur. The kind of material reported in the paper of Strean and Nelson seems to be far from rare but, for one reason or another, it is usually either denied or ignored by those analysts who come across it. Thus numerous analysts who have reported ‘amazing coincidences’ to me privately could not be induced to try to relate the next such observed coincidence to what was going on in the patient's life and analysis. Others have nervously reported such ‘coincidences’ en passant—some very similar to certain of the ones reported here—in papers on other subjects but have then gone out of their way to assert emphatically that while this or that bit of material might look like telepathy it was really only some kind of mirage, or ‘due to chance,’ as if they had an infallible way of knowing what was what upon simple inspection. Still others, judging from the behavior of colleagues whose sessions I have had occasion to adult, would seem to require something on the order of levitation a full three feet above the couch—and possibly with the patient bursting out in a flaming aura—before anything like nascent curiosity about what was going on would stir in their all too free-floating consciousnesses.

I mention these facts mainly to emphasize how important it is for observations such as those recorded by the authors of this paper to be recorded and, wherever feasible, published so that material from our growing stockpile of this kind of data can be studied at large, sifted, compared and criticized.

What the authors of this paper have tried to do is make relevant clinical hypotheses about the correspondences they have observed, and not merely report ‘striking coincidences’ as such, as if these had some intrinsic interest to analysts, which they do not (or at any rate should not have). To simply ooh and aah or goggle or ga