Contributions on Parapsychology: Introduction

… In matters of occultism I have become humble ever since the great lesson I received from Ferenczi's experience. I promise to believe everything that can be made to seem the least bit reasonable. As you know, I do not do so gladly. But my hubris has been shattered….*

The thought of that sour apple makes me shudder, but there is no way of avoiding biting into it.†

Lest we interminably forgo the sour apple in our zeal to polish the rosy one, the ten contributions that follow are devoted to various aspects of psychoanalytic parapsychology and the altered states of consciousness associated with psi phenomena.

This is a topic toward which the “official” psychoanalytic community has long manifested an aversion as intense as that met by psychoanalysis when it first undertook to illuminate the darker corners of sexuality. Ernest Jones makes abundantly clear that the prohibitive attitude settled in long ago when Freud—himself ambivalent—was repeatedly dissuaded by some of his colleagues, notably Jones and Eitingon, from pursuing the lines of inquiry urged by Ferenczi and Jung.‡ Quite apart from the challenge posed by the paranormal vector