Psychoanalysis and

the Occult
Edited by
GEORGE DEVEREUX, P h .D.

CONTAINING PAPERS BY:

Dorothy T. Burlingham Fanny Hann-Kende, M.D.
Helene Deutsch, M.D. Edward Hitschmann, M.D.
George Devereux, Ph.D. Geraldine Pederson-Krag, M.D.
Jule Eisenbud, M.D. Geza R6heim, Ph.D.
Albert Ellis, Ph.D. Sidney Rubin, M.D.
Ndndor Fodor, LL.D. Leon J. Saul, M.D.
Sigmund Freud, M.D., LL.D. Paul Schilder, M.D., Ph.D.
W. H. Gillespie, M.D. Emilio Servadio, M.D.
Hans Zulliger

INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES PRESS, INC.

N e w Y o rk N e w Y ork
'V

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 To
RALPH LINTO N
Teacher and Friend
for his Sixtieth Birthday
 CONTENTS

I n tro d u ctio n ix
A c k n o w led g m en ts x iii
B ib l io g r a ph ic N o t e xv

I. HISTORICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL SURVEYS

1. J u le E isenbud —Psychiatric Contributions to Parapsychology:
A Review ................................................................................ 3
2. G eo rg e D ev er eu x —Extrasensory Perception and Psycho­
analytic Epistemology 16
II. FREUD'S STUDIES
3. S ig m u n d F rjeud—A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled 49
4. S ig m u n d F reud —Premonitions and Chance (An Excerpt) 52
5. S ig m u n d F reud —Psychoanalysis and Telepathy 56
6. S ig m u n d F reud —Dreams and Telepathy 69
7. S ig m u n d F reud —The Occult Significance of Dreams.............. 87
8. S ig m u nd F reud —Dreams and the Occult 91
III. STUDIES BY PSYCHOANALYTIC PIONEERS
9. E dward H it sc h m a n n —A Critique of Clairvoyance 113
10. E dward H it sc h m a n n —Telepathy and Psychoanalysis 117
11. E dward H it sc h m a n n —Telepathy During Psychoanalysis? 128
12. H el e n e D eu tsch —Occult Processes Occurring During Psycho­
analysis 133
13. G £ za R 6 h e im —Telepathy in a Dream 147
14. F a n n y H a n n -K en d e —On the Role of Transference and
Countertransference in Psychoanalysis 158
15. H ans Z u llig er —Prophetic Dreams 168
16. H ans Z ullig er —A “Prophetic” Dream 183
17. D o r o th y T. B u r lin g h a m —Child Analysis and the Mother
(An Excerpt) 188
18. L eo n J. S a u l —Telepathic Sensitiveness as a Neurotic Symp­
tom 192
 IV. THE HOLL6S—SCHILDER—SERVADIO
CONTROVERSY
19. G eorg e D ev er eu x —A Summary of Istv&n Hollas' Theories.. 199
20. P a u l S c h il d er —Psychopathology of Everyday Telepathic Phe­
nomena 204
21. E m il io S ervadio —Psychoanalysis and Telepathy 210
V. THE EISENBUD—PEDERSON-KRAG—FODOR—
ELLIS CONTROVERSY
22. J u le E isenbud —Telepathy and Problems of Psychoanalysis.. 223
23. J u le E isenbud —The Dreams of Two Patients in Analysis as
a Telepathic Reve-a-Deux 262
24. G er a ld in e P ed erso n -K rag — T e le p a th y a n d R e p re s s io n ..............277
25. N and or F odor —Telepathy in Analysis 283
26. a . A lb er t E llis —Telepathy and Psychoanalysis: A Critique
of Recent “Findings” ..................................................... 297
b . J u le E isenbud —The Eisenbud Findings ............ 314
c. G er a l d in e P ed erso n -K rag — T h e P e d erso n -K rag F in d in g s 326
d . N A ndor F odor —The F o d o r F in d in g s ................................. 330
e . A lb er t E llis —Comments on the Discussants' Remarks.. 332
f . J u le E isen bu d , G er a l d in e P ed erso n -K rag , N and or F odor
—Letter to the Editor of the Psychiatric Quarterly... 337
27. J u le E isenbud —Analysis of a Presumptively Telepathic
Dream 339
28. A lb er t E ll is —Reanalysis of an Alleged Telepathic Dream .. 363

VI. NEW CONTRIBUTIONS

29. W. H. G il l e s p ie —Extrasensory Elements in Dream Interpre­
tation * 373
30. S id n ey R u b in —A Possible Telepathic Experience During
Analysis 383
VII. EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION AND
PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE
31. G eo rg e D ev er eu x —The Technique of Analyzing “Occult”
Occurrences in Analysis 391
B ib l io g r a ph y 419
I ndex 427
 INTRODUCTION*

The essays published in this anthology are not, in their essence, con­
tributions by psychoanalysts to problems of parapsychology. They are,
quite specifically, psychoanalytic studies of so-called “psi phenomena,”
and must therefore be viewed primarily as contributions to the theory
and practice of clinical psychoanalysis. With the exception of Dr. Jule
Eisenbud's historical survey of the entire problem, the editor's meth­
odological chapter, and Dr. Albert Ellis' critical paper which served as a
point of departure for a controversy involving clinical material, all
papers deal directly with data derived either from the analysis of pa^
tients, or else from the self-analysis of practicing psychoanalysts.
The data under consideration pertain 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 ex­
ternal to the actual analytic situation. (Telepathy and/or clairvoy­
ance?)
(3) “Correspondences” between the thought of the analyst and events ex­
ternal to the actual analytic situation. (Telepathy and/or clairvoy­
ance?)
In so far as the selection of papers was concerned, “true” corres­
pondences, and “claimed” correspondences were treated as data of the
same type. Thus, we reprinted Leon J. Saul’s paper “Telepathic Sensi­
tiveness as a Neurotic Symptom” (XVIII),1 even though Saul specified
that, in his opinion, his woman patient displayed a great deal of empathy
rather than genuinely convincing telepathic and prophetic gifts.2
The criteria of selection in terms of content were adhered to most
rigorously. Thus, we did not include Allendy's paper on premonitions
(4),z Servadio’s many nonclinical contributions to psychoanalytic para­
psychology (168-176), von Winterstein's books on telepathy and clairvoy­
ance (202, 203), Bernfeld’s theoretical paper (13), Levi-Bianchini's works
* From Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, Topeka, Kansas.
1 Roman numerals refer to the corresponding chapter in this volume.
2 The problem of differentiating between true and claimed correspondences is dis­
cussed in Chapter II of this volume.
3 Arabic numerals refer to the Bibliography at the end of this volume.
(115-121), etc., because of all of these works deal primarily with historical
or theoretical problems, and contain no new factual clinical data. For
the same reason we did not include Hitschmann's two excellent essays
on the telepathic and visionary experiences of Swedenborg (94) and Ham­
sun (97), nor Silberer’s studies of divination, which are summarized in
the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse (178). Berne's work on intuition (11,12)
was not included because the data were not obtained in a psychoanalytic
situation.
Equally rigorous were the criteria applied to the selection of authors
to be included in this anthology. In principle, every author had to be a
psychoanalyst, i.e., either a member of one of the several societies con­
stituting the International Psychoanalytical Association, or else a senior
candidate in a recognized training institution. The two exceptions to
this rule can be easily justified. Two papers, written respectively by Al­
bert Ellis, a clinical psychologist, and by Nandor Fodor—the value of
whose work was recognized by Freud himself (85)—were included be­
cause they are parts of a controversy which involved also two analysts:
Eisenbud and Pederson-Krag.
Ehrenwald's best papers (33-38, 4046) are (39) or will soon be (47)
available in book form, and were therefore not included.
In its final shape, the anthology contains all but one of the papers
which represent clinical psychoanalytic contributions to the problem of
so-called “psi phenomena." The one exception is Istvdn Holl6s’ paper
(98), which both the advocates and the opponents of the reality of psi
phenomena recognize as one of the principal inquiries into this much-
vexed problem. Unfortunately, it was impossible to obtain permission to
reprint this paper, which forms the basis of a controversy between Holl6s,
Schilder (XX), Servadio (XXI) and Grete L. Bibring4. In order to pro­
vide a starting point for the rest of the papers constituting this contro­
versy, the editor attempted to fill the gap, in part at least, by means of a
brief and noncontroversial presentation of Holl6s' views.
In view of these strict criteria of selection, it may, perhaps, be felt
that this volume reflects the psychoanalytic attitude toward the problem
of so-called psi phenomena. However, a brief glance at the papers them­
selves will reveal that there is no “official” psychoanalytic attitude toward
psi phenomena. It is hoped that, by bringing together all existing clinical
psychoanalytic contributions to this problem, this anthology would stim­
ulate further research in this perplexing field of inquiry which—because
of its great analytic implications, and also because of the important role
which belief or disbelief in the reality of psi phenomena plays in the his­
4 Bibring's contribution to this controversy was never published. It was read before
the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. A final draft of this lecture could not be obtained
in time for inclusion in this volume.
tory and thought of mankind—deserves to be investigated most carefully.
In this sense the anthology is not so much a presentation of results as an
invitation to hard work. If it accomplishes this purpose even to a limited
extent, the editor's efforts, and perhaps also those of the authors, will
have been worth while.
It is perhaps desirable to clarify at this juncture the editor's own at­
titude toward the problem of psi phenomena, which arouses intense emo­
tional reactions both in its advocates and in its opponents. As far as the
editor is concerned—and regardless of what interest anyone else may
have in this compilation—the present volume is primarily a contribution
to one aspect of psychoanalytic technique: The problem of transference
and countertransference, in so far as it influences the analyst's “in­
tuition," which is defined here in the most conventionally realistic and
naturalistic sense of the word. Otherwise expressed, the anthology deals
with one aspect of a special kind of interpersonal relationship—that ob­
taining between analyst and analysand. In this sense, the anthology is
also a contribution to the sociological problem of human relations in
general, and of the social “dyad" (8) in particular. This may partly ex­
plain why the editor, who is a psychoanalytic social scientist, felt impelled
to compile this anthology.
The editor's interest in this material is, thus, limited in scope. At the
same time he is quite aware of the fact that this anthology will mean dif­
ferent things to various readers. Specifically, he does not harbor the il­
lusion that many of the readers will share his neutrality, which borders
on disinterestedness, regarding the existence or nonexistence of telepathy,
clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, or whatever else one may wish to
call certain occurrences. It must be understood, however, that the re­
sponsibility for focusing one's attention upon this problem rests with the
reader, and not with the editor.
The manner in which the idea of this anthology came into being will,
perhaps, substantiate the genuineness of the editor's overt attitude to­
ward this topic. One day, while he was attending a seminar in the Topeka
Institute for Psychoanalysis, the discussion veered to the problem of tele­
pathic occurrences in analysis, certain of those present expressing belief
in the reality of such incidents. In joining the discussion, the editor made
approximately the following remarks, which still reflect his attitude: “I
do not know whether or not telepathy exists, and, if it exists, whether
it ever manifests itself in the analytic situation. I hold, however, that in
the analytic situation we are functioning as therapists. Therefore, our
sole concern with such occurrences is the exploration of their unconscious
significance for the patient. Regardless of what scientific importance this
problem may have, any interest displayed in the course of the analytic
hour itself in the reality or nonreality of telepathy represents a deviation
from the therapeutic attitude, and a temporary abandonment of the pur­
suit of the analytic goal. During the analytic hour our sole raison d*etre
is the analyzing of the patient/*5 The editor then outlined the uncon­
scious problems which, in his estimate, should be explored on such occa­
sions, and stressed that this undertaking required both the regular analy­
sis of the patient and the continuous self-analysis of the analyst—the fo­
cus of the latter being the problem of countertransference.6
Yet, as stated above, one would delude oneself, were one to assume
that all readers, or even all analytic readers, will view this anthology
merely as a contribution to psychoanalytic technique. So austere a view
will not be acceptable to many. In fact, one might even admit—albeit
reluctantly—that a complete and wholehearted adherence to this nar­
rowly sober point of view may be indicative of a certain intellectual sloth­
fulness, and may possibly also constitute an attempt to represent oneself
as a “perfectly analyzed”—and therefore perfectly objective—person,
who is totally immune to the fascination which the weird and uncanny
(81) exert upon “the lesser breeds without the law.” No such claim is ad­
vanced here. Even Dr. Hitschmann, a great analyst and sober skeptic, did
not deem it beneath- his dignity to confess that, in narrating one of his
own “clairvoyant” experiences, he systematically failed to impart to his
listeners also his very matter-of-fact and completely unromantic inter­
pretation and explanation of that incident (IX). Encouraged by Dr.
Hitschmann's example, the editor would not repudiate as illegitimate or
presumptuous the interpretations that, despite his consciously austere at­
titude toward problems of telepathy, both in analysis or outside it, the
very fact that he chose to undertake the task of compiling this anthology
clearly reveals that he, too, is not insensitive to the appeal of the weird
and uncanny. It would, therefore, be nothing more than pretentiousness
—an expression of scientific Tartuffism—were he to refuse, in the name
of scientific sobriety and of his interest in analytic technique, to express
any opinion whatsoever about the reality or unreality of telepathic phe­
nomena, whose investigation^—regardless of what the final results may be
—is as legitimate a scientific undertaking as any. The editor’s views on
this problem are presented in Chapter II of this anthology.
The final impression which this anthology seeks to convey may be
expressed as follows: The scientist must be skeptical of everything—even
of his own skepticism. Until he has a genuine and final answer to a prob­
lem, he should abide by Moses Maimonides* maxim: “Teach thy tongue
to say, ‘I do not know.' ”
5 In other words, the editor, though ignorant at that time of Schilder's paper on
this subject (XX), merely repeated Schilder’s contention that the problem of telepathy
per se may conceivably be of no concern to the analyst. *
6 These problems are discussed in Chapter XXXI of the present volume.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editor is greatly indebted to the authors who submitted original

papers for this anthology, or else permitted the republication of their
earlier papers. Dr. Fanny Hann-Kende revised her earlier paper espe­
cially for this anthology, and checked the editor's translation of her
essay. Mrs. Dorothy T. Burlingham checked the editor's summary of
that portion of her paper which is not reprinted in full in this volume.
Dr. Helene Deutsch, Dr. Edward Hitschmann, Professor Emilio Servadio
and Mr. Hans Zulliger checked the translations of their papers. The
translation of Freud’s hitherto untranslated essay, “Psychoanalysis and
Telepathy” was checked by Mr. John Rodker, and that of the late Dr.
Paul Schilder by Dr. Lauretta Bender. Several of the authors also pro­
vided bibliographic data and many useful suggestions.
Help, advice, encouragement, and reprints were provided also by Dr.
Eric Berne, Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld, Dr. Jan Ehrenwald, Dr. Ernst Kris,
Professor Marco Levi-Bianchini, Dr. R. G. MacRobert, Professor J. B.
Rhine, Dr. Richard Sterba, Dr. Robert Waelder, Dr. Edoardo Weiss, the
Laboratory of Parapsychology of Duke University and the American So­
ciety for Psychical Research.
Special thanks are due to Miss Anna Freud, whose generous and pa­
tient help enabled the editor to clarify copyright matters connected with
the republication of Freud's papers and of various other papers originally
published in German psychoanalytic periodicals.
Dr. W. Hoffer, Editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analy­
sis, informed the editor of the existence of Dr. W. H. Gillespie's im­
portant manuscript, which is published for the first time as Chapter
XXIX of this volume.
Dr. Karl A. Menninger, Chairman, Dean's Subcommittee on Neuro­
psychiatry, Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, Dr. Robert H.
Jokl, Training Analyst, Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Dr.
Robert S. Wallerstein, Psychiatric Reader, Editorial Board, Winter Vet­
erans Hospital, kindly read the chapters written by the editor, and by
Dr. S. Rubin, and provided valuable suggestions for their improvement.
The following publishers, periodicals and holders of copyrights gave
permission to republish certain papers in this anthology: Citadel Press,
Hogarth Press, Imago, Imago Publishing Company, International Jour­
nal of Psycho-Analysis, Internationale Zeitschrift fiir Psychoanalyse,
Journal of Parapsychology, The Macmillan Company, Psyche, The Psy­
chiatric Quarterly, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Psychoanalytische Be-
wegung, Mssrs. Sigmund Freud Copyrights Ltd., and the Wiener Klini-
sche Rundschau. The name of the organization which permitted the re­
publication of a given essay is mentioned in the footnotes to the indi­
vidual papers.
It is also a pleasure and a privilege to acknowledge the friendly and
constructive help, understanding and interest of Dr. A. Kagan, President
and Miss Lottie M. Maury, Editor of International Universities Press.
Despite the great amount of help received, the anthology has, no
doubt, many shortcomings. For these the editor alone is responsible.
George Devereux, Ph.D.
Topeka, Kansas, November 1951.
 BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

Every paper was reprinted in its original form, except as follows:

(1) Dr. Fanny Hann-Kende prepared a special revision of her paper
for this anthology.
(2) With the consent of the authors, misprints, factual errors, slips of
the pen and minor stylistic awkwardnesses were corrected, and the spell­
ing was made uniform throughout the book.
(3) Every direct quotation was collated with the original text, or else
with the authorized English translation thereof, and, whenever the quo­
tation deviated from the standard text, it was amended accordingly.
(4) A footnote, pointing out the significance of an important slip of
the pen, was added to Freud's “Dreams and Telepathy.”
(5) With the consent of the author, an interpretative footnote was
added to Zulliger's paper, “Prophetic Dreams,” and a reference to
Potzl's work was inserted into the bibliography of his paper, “A
‘Prophetic* Dream.”
(6) Individual bibliographic footnotes were consolidated into a single
alphabetically and chronologically arranged bibliography appended to
this volume.
(7) Bibliographic citations were made uniform in style.
(8) Whenever a book was published both in Great Britain and in the
United States, the bibliography lists the American edition.
(9) Whenever a book or paper, originally published in a foreign lan­
guage, was also available in an English translation, the bibliography lists
the translation instead of the original.
(10) Whenever possible, bibliographic references were verified by the
editor.
(11) Italicized roman numerals in parentheses refer to the corre­
sponding chapters of this book.
(12) Italicized arabic numerals in parentheses refer to the terminal
bibliography.
 Part 1
Historical and Methodological
Surveys
 Chapter 1
PSYCHIATRIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO
PARAPSYCHOLOGY: A REVIEW*
By JULE EISENBUD, M.D.

Considering the potential significance of psi phenomena in any view

of man’s personality and behavior that aims at comprehensiveness, it
may appear somewhat strange that psychiatrists have taken so little no­
tice of and have made so few contributions to parapsychology. But this
is looking at things from the side of the parapsychologist. From the psy­
chiatric point of view there is every reason to be suspicious of a field of
study which takes seriously a group of alleged phenomena and a set of
propositions which correspond closely to delusions that have always char­
acterized the mentally ill. These delusions, moreover—of thought trans­
ference, of influencing and being influenced by minds at a distance
through means that transcend the recognized senses—invariably disap­
pear as the mentally disturbed regain the capacities, the balance
and the relationships to people and things that are generally accepted as
normal conditions of mental health.
Psychiatry—particularly the dynamic psychiatry of Freud and his
beneficiaries (if not always followers)—has always taken pride in its dis­
covery of the origin of these delusions of the mentally ill. They are re­
garded as residues of a phase of infancy through which everyone passes,
a phase characterized by “omnipotence of thought” and destined to be
superseded by a less magic, less wishful type of thinking as the demands
of “reality” force the maturing individual to adapt to the world “as it is.”
These residues, it is known, are latent in all of us, and may emerge to
warp one's entire thinking if the mind under stress is forced to regress
to infantile modes of functioning.
One may see, thus, why psychiatrists on the whole have been leery of
• Originally published in The Journal of Parapsychology, 13:247-262, 1949. Pub­
lished here by permission of Dr. Jule Eisenbud and of the editor of The Journal of
Parapsychology.
claims that have, according to their teaching, the distinct taint of morbid,
disturbed thinking. One might as well expect jurists and officers of the
law to find the values and rationales of the underworld reasonable and
perhaps worthy of serving as the basis of a new system of ethics.
Nevertheless, a number of psychiatrically trained observers have made
contributions to the field of parapsychology, several of them of signal
importance. It is the purpose of this paper to review this work. The
intent of the reviewer, however, is not simply to list, outline or para­
phrase every mention of psi phenomena or parapsychology made by
psychiatrists in various literatures, but to describe those contributions
which have been oriented toward unifying or at least bridging the gap
between the subject matters of psychiatry and parapsychology. Thus,
papers or statements by psychiatrists who have simply described psi
phenomena much as any nonpsychiatric observer might have—that is,
without using any special psychiatric technique to effect such observa­
tions or deriving therefrom no suggestive hypotheses relating to either
field—will not be mentioned in this review. Nor will, for that matter,
any number of oblique or direct statements of favorable opinion on the
reality of psi phenomena or unsupported generalizations as to their
nature made by psychiatrists, however eminent, who have had nothing
else to offer. These would not be psychiatric contributions to parapsy­
chology, but merely “contributions” by psychiatrists. On the other hand,
there are instances of contributions by workers who are not psychiatrists
but whose observations have been at once psychiatrically oriented and
significant. These, of course, should be mentioned.
It is now somewhat disconcerting to find that* an exception must im­
mediately be made. I must begin this review with the observations of a
psychiatrist who failed to bring his special training to bear in studying
and reporting one of the most remarkable series of phenomena in the
annals of parapsychology. But this work, even in its inadequacy from
the psychiatric point of view, is highly instructive in that it illustrates,
by implication at least, the tremendous resistance in a scientifically
trained person to viewing psi phenomena with any sort of detachment.
The psychiatrist was none other than Pierre Janet, and the phenomena
he was called upon to witness were not such as had to be smoked out
by patient and devious methods of investigation. They hit him broad­
side on.
In 1884 Janet, then a young psychiatrist of growing eminence, was
invited to Havre to witness the experiments of a Dr. Gibert with his
subsequently famous subject, L£onie. L£onie was a French peasant
woman whom Gibert claimed he could hypnotize at a distance in the
same room—that is, without saying anything or doing anything percep­
tible, but merely willing the entrancement. Janet found that this was
apparently so, and that he himself was able to do the same thing. Later,
distances up to 500 meters were attempted before witnesses and under
well-controlled conditions—for instance, the time for each trial being
determined by lot by one of the observers. In two papers read in 1885
and 1886 before the Society of Physiological Psychology in Paris, the great
French neurologist and psychiatrist Charcot presiding,1 Janet reported
on his and Gibert's work with L£onie (104, 105). In all, twenty-two dis­
tance experiments were attempted, of which six were failures and sixteen
were successes “precis et complet.” (All incomplete trials were counted
as failures, as were also attempts when sleej>—usually catalepsy—did not
come on after fifteen minutes.) In certain of the trials posthypnotic sug­
gestions mentally given (for example, taking a lamp into another room
and lighting it in broad daylight) were successfully carried out. “Are we
to believe," writes Janet (106), “that on sixteen occasions there was a
rather exact coincidence? Such a supposition is a little unreasonable.
Were there at any time involuntary suggestions on our part? All I can
say—and I say this with utmost sincerity—is that we took every possible
precaution to avoid this. We can conclude only one thing: that such
phenomena should be reproduced and studied."
The point of the story, however, is that this is exactly what did not
happen. True, several people, including Richet (157-159) subsequently
worked with L6onie, but in effect did nothing more than confirm what
had already been done. Janet himself, after stopping at the brink of
originality and perception, suddenly found the hysterical patients of the
Salp£tri£re much more interesting, and hied himself thither to the com­
plete neglect of any further work with L^onie. Nowhere in his two
papers does he tell us anything that a psychiatrist might contribute to
the understanding of this most remarkable subject—nothing about her
history, her personality, her peculiarities (if any), or any of the truly
psychological correlates of her gift and performance. He hit the jackpot
but walked away without picking up his winnings.
All he did was to stimulate a few further anecdotal papers on the
same subject—hypnotism at a distance, so-called—by others in the same
year (7, 87, 90). But then came a great calm, and nothing more was heard
of this apparently fruitful area of investigation. (Richet himself did not
pursue it, suddenly finding himself more interested in the calculus of
chance.) In 1925, Janet, writing from a safe eminence (after, that is, he
had circumspectly missed, besides the implications of his work with
i It is almost a certainty that Freud, who was studying with Charcot at this time
in Paris, was at these meetings, although he never in his later papers on telepathy or
anywhere else made reference to this work.
L£onie, the facts of the genetic, dynamic unconscious which he had in his
grasp from his work with hysterics) confessed to a certain puzzlement
(106): “Such a decadence, so rapid a disappearance after such high en­
thusiasm and such extensive developments is certainly surprising.” One
may well be surprised that Janet and others did not follow this prelimi­
nary work with all sorts of experimental variations and correlative
studies, especially when such a rare and willing subject as Leonie lay
to hand. But this illustrates as well as anything the tremendous, covert
resistance of even psychiatrists to the subject. A hit-and-run attitude has
characterized a good deal of the work done generally in parapsychology,
and with very few exceptions psychiatrists who have touched so-called
paranormal phenomena have made single contributions and have then
retired from the field.2
Most observations by psychiatrists in the field of parapsychology have
been concerned with telepathy and clairvoyance. Undoubtedly presump­
tive instances of these capacities must always have presented themselves
in the ordinary course of psychiatric practice. But not until compara­
tively recently—not, really, until the work of Freud began to catch on
around the beginning of the second decade of this century—was psy­
chiatry liberated from its almost exclusive preoccupation with the frankly
insane, where such occurrences might easily have passed unnoticed among
the many odd and bizarre manifestations that constituted the psy­
chiatrist's field of observation. With the growing acceptance of Freud's
work, psychiatrists turned more and more to the study of people who
were not actually deranged but who, in full possession of their mental
faculties, suffered nevertheless from a variety of more or less disabling
inner problems broadly termed “the neuroses.” In this context—the lives
and behavior of ordinary, average people who have a difficult struggle
with personality imbalances and societal pressures—psi occurrences may
be a little more readily recognized for what they are.3
2 Such resistance is characteristic not only of the “goats,0 who are reluctant to take
the psi hypothesis seriously, but even of the "sheep,” who appear to work most in-
defatigably to strengthen or broaden the hypothesis. Resistance, viewed psycho­
analytically, may take many forms, of which the inhibition of scientific enterprise and
ultimate withdrawal of interest is merely one. Excessive “scientificism” and method­
ological perfectionism are others which, although more easily rationalized, may be
just as obstructive. It is safe to say that no worker in the field is free of unconscious
resistance to psi, that insidiously narrows his perspective and impedes his best efforts.
3 It is still a moot question, as a matter of fact, whether the very ill and frankly
deranged sufferers, the so-called psychotics, actually possess, latently or in manifestly
observable form, the psi capacities that more normal people exhibit. The experimental
findings on record all agree in showing evidence of about the same order of ESP
capacity in psychotic patients as in the general normal population. (See the work of
Margaret M. Price, Robert Shulman, and S. S. Van Wiemokly as reported by J. B.
Rhine (754) . The recent work of Urban and Kock may be cited to the same effect (6).
 At any rate, not until 1921, when Dr. Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna
published his monograph on The Telepathic Dream (182), was any
official psychiatric cognizance taken of the problem since the initial
observations of Janet.4 In this small monograph, Stekel cites a number
of presumptively telepathic dreams observed in the course of his work
with neurotic patients. His main observations have to do with the sensi­
tizing effects of strong emotion, particularly love, jealousy and anxiety,
in predisposing the agent and percipient to the telepathic event. Sleep,
he felt, merely facilitates the reception of telepathic data, since in this
condition the disturbances of the outer world are minimized. He believed
that most people possess telepathic capacities which never show up in
obtrusive ways, but which occasionally can be observed in dreams or in
some of the manifestations occurring between people bound by strong
emotional ties. “It is a well-known, often observed fact that women in
love know when they are betrayed by their beloved partner.” He states
that he has observed women who experience a pain or some other
symptom at the very moment they are being betrayed by their husbands.
“Every individual emanates energy which charges the environment, im­
pregnates it, so to speak. All of life's events are expressed in vibrations
and rays which communicate themselves to the environment, ‘charge’ it.
People emanate good and evil, love and discord.”
Stekel deals in this monograph rather ambiguously with the possi­
bility of prophetic dreams. One of the dreams he cites was his own, of
the sudden death of his son three months before the actuality. Here,
however, as in some of his other examples, the dream occurred in such
highly symbolic terms that the actual element of prophecy would ordi­
narily be considered very dubious. And it is precisely at this point that
Stekel, more the poet and gatherer of quick impressions than the pene­
trating, analytical thinker, missed (though just barely) the one insight
that would have made his contribution, for all its fuzzy mysticism, out­
standingly significant: he failed explicitly to establish the principle of
symbolic identities, or to tie in with telepathic phenomenology the known
facts of dream distortion. This remained for Freud himself to do.
Freud published his first paper on telepathy in 1922 (VI),* shortly
after the appearance of Stekel's monograph, to which, as a matter of fact,
4 In the first edition of his Die Sprache des Traumes (181, Vol. 2, p. 552) Stekel
cited several presumptively telepathic dreams he had observed in cases of siblings and
married couples sleeping in the same room. Here, however, he brought no psychiatric
point of view to his observations beyond noting that the telepathically transmitted
material was always charged with affect (a broader and deeper term for the more
subtle emotions).
5 Editor's note.—Earlier papers include (III, IV, V) dated respectively 1899, 1904,
and 1921.
he makes a casual reference in a slight footnote. It is not unlikely that
Freud at this point could no longer refrain from bringing his bold, pene­
trating, incisive attack publicly to bear on a problem which he avowedly
had been turning over in his mind for years. Not that he was at this time
convinced of the reality of telepathy. He claimed that he himself had
never had a telepathic dream and that he had never, during his twenty-
seven years of work as an analyst, been in the position to observe a truly
telepathic dream in any of his patients. Nevertheless, he had one observa­
tion at his disposal which, he felt, was provocative enough to justify the
application of the psychoanalytic approach for whatever it was worth.
This concerned a correspondent who had written that he had dreamed
that his second wife had had twins and a day later found out that his
daughter by his first wife, who lived some distance away, had that night
given birth to twins, the confinement occurring about a month earlier
than the expected datei.
Now these facts—even assuming the correctness of them and excluding
the usual avenues of knowledge and prediction—would in themselves
be nothing to excite the interest of the ordinary psychical researcher.
They would most likely lead only to the question as to why the proud
grandfather had thought them significant enough to report in the first
place. The correspondence between the dream and reality was at best
tenuous, since the dream represented the wife as giving birth to twins
whereas in reality it was the daughter. Everything considered, there
would be little here to provoke a second thought.
But Freud did give the matter a second thought. If, he reasoned, it
could somehow be assumed, on the basis of the coincidence in time and
subject matter, that the dream was telepathic, then the application of
psychoanalytic principles could very well explain the troublesome substi­
tution of the wife for the daughter.
One of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory was the well-known
fact of distortion in dreams in order to conceal an unconscious desire
or wish which, if represented in direct terms, the dreamer would find
disturbing and unacceptable. This distortion, as well as whatever sec­
ondary elaboration of it was necessary to complete the disguise, is known
as the dream work. With few exceptions, all dreams are brought to their
final, manifest form by the alteration of their latent content through the
dream work.
In the case in hand, one might well imagine the dreamer's uncon­
scious wish to have been not that the wife give birth to twins, as repre­
sented, but that the daughter take the place of the wife, a wish that
psychoanalysis has found to be very common on the part of middle-aged
fathers. The dreamer, thus, might have had the latent wish to have been
the father of his daughter's child. This would certainly have been unac­
ceptable to consciousness. But assuming that the father had had telepathic
percipience of his daughter's premature confinement, an event which
would have threatened the not-too-stable repression of this latent uncon­
scious desire, this wish would not have been represented as such but
would have been denied and replaced in a dream by precisely the sort of
thing which did emerge: “It is my wife after all whose offspring I wish
to father."
It was thus feasible, asserted Freud, for psychoanalysis to unmask a
possible telepathic event which otherwise would never have been rec­
ognized as such. If telepathy was a fact, he concluded (and he was still
not unreservedly committed to the acceptance of this proposition), then
the laws of unconscious mental life could be taken for granted as apply­
ing to data telepathically perceived.
With this sweeping, brilliant generalization, Freud marked the path
for a whole new development in the investigation of psi phenomena.
Skeptical and reserved though he was at this time, and with only the
flimsiest data to work with, he nevertheless made the one incisive stroke
that Stekel had failed to make. Heretofore errors, misses and near
misses—any departure from the strictly veridical—had been the bugbear
of investigators in psychical research and had occasioned no end of
trouble in both experimental work (for example, telepathic drawings,
mediumistic utterances) and in the collection of spontaneous material
(for example, apparitions, dreams, etc.). What Freud says, in effect, is:
“Distortion of perception is one of the characteristics of mental function­
ing dominated by unconscious needs. But this distortion is purposeful
and occurs along dynamic, deterministic lines. There is no reason to
suppose that telepathic perceptions should be free from this universal
effect. If one can, with the help of psychoanalysis, understand the reason
for these distortions, one can uncover a much wider range of presump­
tively telepathic material than heretofore thought possible."
In this reviewer's opinion, there have been two major developments
in the study of psi phenomena in recent years. One has been the careful
refinement of statistical techniques for nailing down the evidence, as
exemplified in the work of Dr. Rhine and his Duke co-workers. The
other has been the application of a technique enabling psi phenomena
to be viewed as part of man's total, needful, behavioral context. The
credit for the impetus toward the second development, which is still but
slowly getting under way, belongs clearly to Freud.
Freud returned to the subject of telepathy in 1925 with a somewhat
more positive attitude (VII). He centers his discussion around the
analysis of a prophecy that had been given to one of his analytic patients
by a fortune-teller some years before. The patient had been told that by
the time she was thirty-two years old she would have two children, but
the prophecy had remained unfulfilled. At forty-three the woman was
still childless. Freud found, however, that at the time the prophecy had
been given, the patient's strongest unconscious wish was to duplicate
the feat of her mother who too had remained childless till almost thirty
but who, long after hope had been abandoned, had had two children by
the time she was thirty-two. The reading handed up by the fortuneteller,
suggested Freud, had less to do with actual future events than with the
unconscious wish of the sitter which was picked up telepathically and
handed back as the most satisfying prophesy.6
In this paper Freud also touched on certain conditions favoring the
telepathic process. “I have often had an impression, in the course of
experiments in my private circle, that strongly emotionally colored recol­
lections can be successfully transferred without much difficulty. If one
has the courage to submit to an analytical examination the associations
of the person to whom the thoughts are supposed to be transferred, corre­
spondences often come to light which would otherwise have remained
undiscovered. On the basis of much experience I am inclined to draw the
conclusion that thought transference of this kind comes about partic­
ularly easily at the moment at which an idea emerges from the uncon­
scious, or, in theoretical terms, as it passes over from the ‘primary process'
to the ‘secondary process/ ” “All of this,” concludes Freud, “has only
this much to do with dreams: if there are such things as telepathic
messages, the possibility cannot be dismissed of their reaching someone
during sleep and coming to his knowledge in a dream. Indeed, on the
analogy of other perceptual and intellectual material, the further possi­
bility arises that telepathic messages received in the course of the day
may only be dealt with during a dream of the following night. There
would then be nothing contradictory in the material that had been tele-
6 Priority for this explanation of an indeterminate number of errors on the part of
professional sensitives must actually go to the psychiatrically oriented French physician,
Dr. Eugene Osty who, in his Supernormal Faculties in Man (143) (Chap. V: “Psy­
chological Determinism of Errors in Metagnomy”) cited several cases of this sort and
concluded that in most instances the sensitive merely voiced the repressed wishes of
the client. ‘‘I commend to my fellow practitioners in psychiatry," he wrote, “the utiliza­
tion of metagnomic subjects even in erroneous exercise of their faculty as more reliable
and speedy methods of psychoanalysis than the tedious procedure recommended by
Freud.”
Osty, who was a prolific writer on psychical research, but who never made any par­
ticularly psychiatric contributions to the subject, here had more than the germ of an
idea which would have gone far in introducing some order into the chaos of research
with professional sensitives. It is not known whether Freud had seen Osty’s contribu­
tion when he published his own data.
pathically communicated being modified and transformed in the dream
like any other material. It would be satisfactory if with the help of
psychoanalysis we could obtain further and better authenticated knowl­
edge of telepathy."
Freud published nothing more on telepathy for eight years. Then,
in 1933, he took up the subject again in his New Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis (VIII). Here he reviewed what he had already written
on telepathy and cited a few more prophecies where analysis revealed
that the fortuneteller had merely given expression to the thoughts and
particularly the secret, repressed wishes of the clients. The particular con­
tribution at this time, however, was the demonstration of the use of the
psychoanalytic method to disentangle from the threads of a patient's
free associations during the analytic session evidence of the patient's
unconscious, and presumably telepathically garnered, knowledge of a
current event in Freud's life which was provoking in the patient con­
siderable anxiety. Freud did not take the final step of attempting to liqui­
date the patient's anxiety by bringing to his consciousness the facts upon
which this ostensibly irrational feeling was based, as he would have in
the case of “transference" material normally elicited during the analysis.
But he concluded by citing similar observations reported by Deutsch
(XII) and Burlingham (18) and stating that as far as he was concerned,
further observations of this sort by other analysts, if confirmed, would
“put an end to any remaining doubts of the reality of thought trans­
ference."
Of course, Freud was looking in the wrong place for his evidence.
Data of this kind, however impressive they might be to analysts, would
never measure up to the best standards of evidence demanded by the
modern parapsychologist. But they do point in the right direction for
the broader study of the complexities of telepathic functioning, once
telepathy is assumed as a fact, in the relatively unhampered, unstruc­
tured, unfactitiously oriented in vivo situation.
Deutsch, in her paper, attempts to explain the mechanism of the
emergence of the telepathic event in analysis in terms of then current
psychoanalytic theory. Unfortunately, although she mentions the condi­
tioning factor of the transference situation,7 her theorizing was vitiated
by an imperfect observation of what actually went on. She did not per­
ceive the significance of what lay behind the seeming correspondence of
7 The “transference” is the emotional dependency which develops during the analy­
sis on the part of the patient toward the physician. An integral part of the transference
situation is the living out by the patient of his repressed unconscious strivings in rela­
tion to the analyst as if the latter actually represented the important figures in the pa­
tient’s early life. The phenomenon of transference, discovered by Freud, is still largely
unexplained.
her conscious preoccupations with those of the patients, since she
attempted to explain events solely in terms of the unconsciously deter­
mined needs of the patient. This, as we shall see, is only half of the
picture.8
In 1933 Holl6s of Budapest published a paper embodying the most
significant observations about the other half of the picture (98). Holl6s
found, from years of observation, that the telepathic event, as it mani­
fested itself in the psychoanalytic situation, revealed just as much of the
repressed unconscious material of the analyst as it did of the patient—as
if the occurrence represented a merging or intersection of forces from
both unconscious sources. In his examples he traces the distortions which
make the end result of the telepathic process between the patient and
the analyst a jointly elaborated event where the phenomenon represents
a dynamic, unconscious interplay between the two and not simply an
isolated act of perception on the part of one or the other. Similar obser­
vations, apparently independently arrived at, were published a couple
of years later by Servadio (XXI);9 and in 1942 Fodor10 published a num­
ber of dreams analyzed in considerable detail to illustrate “that the clue to
a complete understanding of a dream sometimes lies in an event which we
cannot know about through the patient's associations alone and that, in
8 Other analysts have attempted psychoanalytic explanations of telepathic phe­
nomena. R 6 heim (XIII) has emphasized the importance of the so-called primal scene
“fixation” (secret, guilty observation of or fantasies about parental coitus) in its re­
lationship to the need to function telepathically (seeing secretly, as it were) and
Lietaert Peerbolte (124, 125) , in the same connection, has stressed the need to recap­
ture the early mother-child relationship. While such explanations are necessarily lim­
ited in singling out one or another component from what must ultimately be a com­
plexly overdetermined process, they at least attempt to relate psi phenomena to the
deep, unconscious strivings of the personality. However, it is likely that the psi func­
tion can, from the proper observational standpoint, be related to any known psy-
chobiological adaptive process, just as respiration is not simply the result of the action
of the chest muscles or of the periodic discharge of the phrenic nerve or of the con­
centration of COa in the medulla oblongata but is related to all these plus, ultimately,
everything else that goes on in the body.
9 Servadio, an eminent Italian psychoanalyst and also a trained observer and in­
defatigable worker in psychical research, has addressed himself to other problems
shared jointly by the two fields. In a paper in 1932, part of which was given private
circulation only (169) , followed by a similar paper in 1933 (171) » he made the first
(and probably only) truly psychoanalytic observations on mediumistic productions and
dissociative phenomena. He has also brought keen psychoanalytic insight to the psy­
chological problems of telepathic hallucinations (170) and dowsing (172) , and in
1940 he wrote on psychoanalysis and yoga (174) •
10 Fodor, a former Research Officer of the International Institute for Psychical Re­
search in London, has also applied his psychoanalytic insight to the problem of the
poltergeist (62) which he considers an extrojected, transient manifestation of a
schizophrenic disorder that can be understood “only in the terms of the dynamic psy­
chology which is based on the discoveries of Freud.” The physical phenomena, even
though actual, are nevertheless expressive of deep-lying psychological conflicts.
some instances, we may find the missing clue by analyzing our own
dreams in relationship to our patient” (60). (See also XXV.)
Quite apart from .the value of these contributions of Holl6s, Servadio
and Fodor to parapsychology, they assuredly form the basis of a whole
new approach to the psychoanalytic understanding of the patient's pro­
ductions.
The psychiatrist who has concerned himself most with the theoretical
aspects of telepathy is Ehrenwald. In a series of papers (34, 35, 37, 38)
culminating in a book on the subject in 1947 (39) he puts forward views
which may be summarized as follows. A necessary condition for telepathic
functioning in the agent and/or the percipient is a state of psychobio-
logical inadequacy or deficiency such as loss or clouding of consciousness
(sleep, hypnosis, .trance, fever, etc.), brain defect (for example, feeble­
mindedness), endocrine imbalance, physiological exhaustion, or the like.
This Ehrenwald terms the theory of “minus function." To account for
the errors and distortions in telepathic functioning he posits a “scatter"
theory in which some inherent lack of precision is attributed to the tele­
pathic process. Addressing himself to the question of the schizophrenic
psychoses, he suggests that paranoid psychotics may be unable to differ­
entiate in consciousness the material arising from their own psychological
metabolism (autopsychic sources) from ideas, emotions, etc., coming from
outside (heteropsychic sources), and that paranoid delusions may actually
have a basis in telepathically perceived fact.11 If this is so, Ehrenwald
argues, it is possible that catatonic stuporous conditions might represent
a refractory phase, a complete shutting-out process on the part of the
organism whose barriers against the invasion of anxiety-provoking
heteropsychic material would otherwise be too weak and ineffectual for
normal mental functioning.12
Ehrenwald’s speculations have met with some criticism from his
fellow workers in the field (48, 188, 200). It has been pointed out that
the “minus theory" is a somewhat too narrow conception which does not
take many contrary facts into account, and that the “scatter theory"
ignores the dynamic determinants of the errors and distortions that
occur. As for his speculations on the role of psi in the schizophrenic psy­
choses, it has been generally held that the meager evidence at hand does
not warrant such conclusions.
Several papers by Eisenbud have been concerned mostly with the
further delineation of the phenomenology of telepathy as it manifests
ii This possibility had also been suggested by Fodor (6o) .
i 2 Bendit (p) has discussed the possibility in the neuroses of unbidden invasions
of anxiety from outside sources. He claims that making the patients aware of this pos­
sibility is in itself a considerable therapeutic aid.
itself in the psychoanalytic situation, as well as with the possible applica­
tion of such knowledge to the technique of psychoanalysis. In a paper
published in 1946 (XXII) he attempts to demonstrate the far-reaching­
ness of telepathic interplay in analysis, not only between patient and
analyst but between the several patients as well.13 He also* illustrates in
considerable detail the involvement of the analyst's own repressed uncon­
scious material in such interplay,14 not only in dreams but in “free"
associations and “acting out" as well, and even in the telepathically
conditioned interplay between patients where the analyst does not, on
superficial inspection, appear to be involved at all. Concluding that the
psi process is a thorough going part of the total behavior of the indi­
vidual, and as much of a determinant in the actions and thoughts of the
patient as other types of stimuli, Eisenbud attempts to demonstrate the
technical value in psychoanalytic procedure of making the patients aware
of what is going on at this level. He suggests that the proper handling
not only of transference reactions but also of the counter transference
(the unconscious attitudes of the analyst towards his patient) can best
be facilitated by the fullest use of presumptively telepathic material for
both self-insight on the part of the analyst and interpretation to the
patient.15
Current psychiatric work with parapsychological phenomena seems to
be dividing itself into two main approaches, the microscopic and the
macroscopic. It is certain that the “microscopic" psychoanalytic investiga­
tion of the modes of manifestation and the conditioning role of psi in the
everyday affairs of life will continue to be a fruitful field of inquiry for
an indefinite period ahead. On the macroscopic front, personality studies
on sensitives, such as suggested by Ehrenwald (39, 40), and score correla­
tion studies by means of the projective technique method of personality
appraisal employed by Schmeidler (167) and Humphrey (99) will prob­
ably be vigorously pushed. Investigations such as those being carried out
by Urban of Austria are also promising. In a preliminary report of this
work (6) it would appear that there is a significant correlation between
13This last was best brought out in the publication the following year of a pair,
of interlocking dreams of two patients where the exquisitely precise nature of the tele­
pathic process, once the distortions were psychoanalytically unmasked, was revealed
(XXIII) .
14 The thesis that the telepathic episode in analysis is a function not only of the
repressed unconscious material of the patient but of the analyst as well is amply con­
firmed by Pederson-Krag (XXIV) who also attempts to deal with the question of why
psi has developed as such an inhibited function in the human species.
is The analytic contributions of Eisenbud, Fodor and Pederson-Krag, as well as the
telepathic hypothesis itself, were severely attacked by Ellis, a clinical psychologist
(XXVI a ). The defendants were given an opportunity to reply in the same issue.
(See also XXVII) .
various forms of psychiatric treatment and scoring success on ESP card
tests. Such attempts* at correlation of mental and physical disorders with
aspects of psi phenomena, also begun by Hyslop (101) and Ehrenwald
(42), are indicative of the current trend toward viewing psi phenomena
as not above and beyond the corporeal side of man but as inextricably
linked with all aspects of his psychobiological functioning.
Continued work in parapsychology from the psychiatric point of view
and continued work in psychiatry from the parapsychological point of
view can only prove mutually helpful. It is conceivable, moreover, that
such cross-fertilization might even prove mutually revolutionary. Nothing
would be lost in such a shuffle beyond a certain amount of method­
ological rigidity on both sides.
 Chapter 2
EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION AND
PSYCHOANALYTIC EPISTEMOLOGY*
By GEORGE DEVEREUX, Ph.D.

I n tr o d u c t io n
In the course of its evolution every science is periodically obliged to
consider certain phenomena, or certain attributes of its subject matter,
which seem to have a special meaning, not fully understandable in terms
of the characteristic methodology of that science. Thus, both Eddington
and Jeans concluded from the study of electrons that God exists. How­
ever, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, one of these eminent scientists was
led to this conclusion by the “finding” that atoms do not obey the laws
of mathematics, whereas the other drew the same inference from the
“finding” that they do obey the laws of mathematics. Similarly the
highly ego-dystonic second law of thermodynamics has, time and again,
been “abolished” in one way or another, even by so eminent a scientist
as Sir James Jeans (29). The existence of very genuine differences between
the psyche of animals and that of man has been held to disprove the
theory of evolution in at least a limited domain (21). Even sciences
studying the properties of logical systems have been confronted with
such problems: Kronecker considered integers as “given,” while Maine de
Biran demonstrated to his own satisfaction that language is of “divine”
origin (192), Another “language,” i.e. mathematics,1 has also given rise
to seemingly extramathematical speculations: We assign special meanings
to such numbers as 3, 7 or 13. American Indians consider 4 or 6 as sacred
numbers, and the Moi of Indochina believe that even numbers are some­
how associated with the dead, and odd numbers with the living. In fact,
one of the first true mathematicians, Pythagoras, was, in a sense, also a
numerologist. Likewise, the designation of such numbers as 6, which
* From Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, Topeka, Kansas.
1 According to Josiah Willard Gibbs “Mathematics is a language."
can be constructed either by adding or by multiplying the same set of
numbers (1+2+3= 1X2X3) as “perfect," and the labeling of other num­
bers as “surds" (from absurds) may be viewed as survivals of a period
in which valuative or extramathematical meanings were assigned to cer­
tain numbers. This is not surprising, since most sciences and arts began
as nonscientific systems of thought and practice. Needless to say, this
lowly origin does not impair the value of the objective findings of science,
any more than the anal-sadistic death wishes connected with counting
abolish the validity of the table of multiplications. In fact, both in terms
of psychoanalytic reasoning and in terms of considerations wholly inde­
pendent of the psychoanalytic point of view (2), it is probable that no
discoveries of a scientific nature would have been made, had there been
no subjectively and unconsciously motivated interest in these phe­
nomena.2
The concern of various psychoanalysts with certain peculiar occur­
rences, which may be broadly designated as “psi phenomena," is, there­
fore, nothing unusual. Time and again the difference between the rate
at which factual knowledge is accumulated, as against the rate at which
it is explained and systematized, creates in every field of knowledge
clusters of unexplained facts, which seem to call for a radical expansion
of the systematic theory characteristic of that science. In fact, more often
than not, this residue of unexplained data actually seems to indicate the
direction in which the further development of systematic theory should
proceed. However, one usually discovers that this direction is suggested
not by the facts—since they never “speak for themselves"—but by the
significance which the specific needs of the unconscious assign to that
body of data. These needs are usually identical with those archaic inter­
ests and wishes which were originally responsible for the creation of that
domain of magic which eventually became the corresponding branch of
science.
This finding suggests that we have no right to discount or to minimize
a priori these new—and possibly “outrageous" (128)—hypotheses or
theories, since their psychological characteristics and unconscious impli­
cations are usually identical with those which led to the growth of that
science in the first place. These theories may conceivably be wrong, if
they happen to be irrational and premature explanations which reflect
primarily some relatively unmodified unconscious wish. Yet, even if they
2 An eminent analyst reported that, in analyzing a very reputable and nonpsychotic
gynecological surgeon, he was repeatedly compelled to show him an anatomical atlas,
to persuade him that women had no penis—a fact which this surgeon was able to
verify, and act upon, day after day in his own professional work, which, though of the
highest quality, was motivated by the wish to find a female penis.
are nothing but the direct expression of a wish of this kind, they none­
theless represent precisely the kind of psychic material which has to be
sublimated if it is to provide us ultimately with a truly scientific explana­
tion of these hitherto puzzling data. In brief, this relatively unsublimated
psychic material, expressed in the form of unsound and premature
theories, often contains the seeds of the ultimate sound explanation, and
is ca thee ted with the energy which provides the impetus for, and makes
possible an interest in, the discovery of an objectively valid explanation,
which is compatible both with the canons of scientific inquiry and with
the existing body of theory.
It is also important to bear in mind that it is precisely this turbulent
cluster of unexplained facts which invariably provokes, and provides the
means for, sudden major advances in systematic theory, even though the
final rational interpretation of these phenomena often resembles the
wish-fulfilling preliminary explanation as little as Freud’s theory of
dreams resembles an “Egyptian Dream Book.” In fact, the least one can
say of such preliminary wish-motivated explanations is that they provide
a needed irritant for their refutation and revision.
I. N oesis vs. N o e m a : T h e “ P sych o lo g y of P a ra psy c h o lo g ists ”
Psychoanalysis and anthropology alike have shown that the desire to
possess telepathic or telekinetic or prophetic gifts is a very archaic one
(75). From earliest antiquity up to the present, from childhood to ma­
turity, so-called psi phenomena have attracted man’s attention, because
they seem to gratify wishes and needs connected with infantile fantasies
of omnipotence. As Holl6s rightly points out (98), both the advocates and
the opponents of the existence of psi phenomena must control this wish.
He emphasizes that the elaborate experimental precautions of parapsy­
chologists represent such an attempt at control,3 but points out that
external and formal precautions fail to achieve their avowed purpose,
since they allow the wish to slip past these formal safeguards unobserved,
because the latter are not reflections of real insight, but merely represent
unconscious ego defenses. Holl6s is also right in stressing that those who
haughtily disdain to examine such phenomena simply seek to bolster by
all means, both legitimate and illegitimate, their non-too-solid ego
defenses against incompletely sublimated infantile omnipotence fantasies.
In fact, he views this skeptical aloofness as a manifestation of a lack of a
real and unshakable faith in natural science and in scientific method.
3 Freud, too, felt repelled by such elaborate precautions, whose sole purpose is the
elimination of fraud, and of errors of observation and recording (85).
He therefore rightly postulates that the wish must be controlled within
the observer, by means of constant self-analysis.4
Be that as it may, one thing is certain. Data and theories pertaining to
“psi phenomena" cannot and should not be brushed aside with haughty
skepticism. They cannot be disposed of by ironical and invidious remarks
about the sanity or objectivity of those investigators who wish to persuade
us of the reality of “psi phenomena." An argumentum ad hominem does
not constitute a refutation of a given thesis. In fact, even if it could be
shown to the entire satisfaction of a board of experts of unimpeachable
integrity and competence that a given investigator of “psi phenomena" is
a psychopathic liar or else a paranoid schizophrenic, it would not prove
that his factual findings and theoretical formulations are therefore false.
Two separate considerations will prove this point:
(1) It is a well-known axiom of logic that the correctness of the noema
(conclusion) may be independent of the correctness of the noesis (reason­
ing). Thus, I may feel impelled to conclude that the Platonic theory of
prototypes is false, “because" Plato's political philosophy happens to dis­
please me. This line of reasoning is obviously false. Yet many sober
philosophers of great competence and originality, who were not in the
least disturbed by Plato's political views, have reached the same conclu­
sion about his theory of prototypes. On a somewhat homelier level, I may
unreasonably conclude that a certain analyst is a fine therapist “because"
his behavior at the last meeting of the analytic society seemed admirable
not merely to me, but also to others. The inappropriateness and lack of
cogency of my “reasoning" is, however, no proof that this analyst is not,
in fact, an excellent therapist.
(2) The demonstration that a person is a psychopathic liar is likewise
not to be viewed as prima facie evidence that his statements are false.
Impelled solely by his unconscious, a man may assert that just at this
moment the Dalai Lama is taking a nap. This does not prove, however,
that the Dalai Lama is not, in fact, sleeping at this particular time. He
may be doing just that. All we can say, then, is that the correctness of
the psychopathic liar's statement is not a result of his thought processes,
although the substance of his statement, and the fact that he felt impelled
to make it is, in fact, a product of his neurotic way of thinking.
It is my thesis that the proper study and analysis of the “incredible"
or “outrageous" statements of certain investigators can serve as a stimulus
for important advances in science. A hypothetical example—pertaining
to matters less fraught with emotions than is the field of parapsychology—
may enable us to justify this point of view.
4 The validity of these considerations is not impaired by the fact that Holl6s may
not always have been successful in his attempt to practice what he preached.
 Let us suppose that a reputable explorer, whose statements are usually
taken rather seriously, reports the occurrence of rat-sized ants in Central
Africa, but produces no specimens of such ants for inspection. The nar-
cissistically omniscient entomologist, who starts to argue a priori against
the genuineness of this observation, will simply waste his time and that
of others, and will not contribute to the advancement of knowledge. By
contrast, in the absence of specimens the scientific entomologist will try
a Gedankenexperiment. He may, for example, seek to solve the problem
of how an insect, whose distinctive respiratory system limits its size, can
reach such large dimensions. If this entomologist is a man of unusual
brilliance, he will reach one of two conclusions: He will either explain
the manner in which so large an insect might breathe despite the limita­
tions of insect-type respiration, or else he will affirm that the observed
being was not a true insect, but a member of a hitherto unknown phyl-
lum, e.g., perhaps a creature with an insect body upon which a reptilian
respiratory system had been grafted. This last hypothesis is admittedly an
“outrageous” one, in Lynd's sense (128), but—if one recalls the “weird­
ness” (in terms of the mammalian Weltanschauung) of the insect life­
cycle, or of the reproductive system of the platypus—it is not a hypo­
thesis too outrageous to merit further inquiry. Weirder things by far have
been found true.
In the same sense the analyst, when he is confronted with reports of
“psi phenomena,” may attempt to think about these data in terms of
psychoanalytic theory in general, and may, or may not, come up with a
plausible explanation thereof, in terms of psychoanalytic theory. If he
does, then “psi-phenomena” are not sui generis occurrences, and do not
call for a modification of the basic structure of psychoanalytic theory, but
merely for a suitable elaboration of certain hitherto ignored implications
thereof. In fact, in principle at least, if “psi phenomena” do indeed exist,
it should be possible for an ideally gifted analyst to discover an intima­
tion of their existence, and some of the laws governing their occurrence,
simply by an elaboration of psychoanalytic theory, and without ever
having even heard of such occurrences. He may then, on the basis of his
conclusions, go and look for such phenomena in reality. What is more,
he will find them, because he knows exactly where to look for them, and
knows in advance some of the laws to which phenomena of this kind
conform.6 If this happens, then psi phenomena are not sui generis; they
6 This demand is not unreasonable. Henri Poincar£ reports that, for '‘aesthetic*’
reasons, Maxwell grafted on his famous equations—which accounted for everything
known at that time of the electromagnetic field—certain small additional terms. Herz,
in seeking to discover whether anything “real” corresponded to these supposedly
‘‘ornamental” terms, discovered radio waves (147). A similar example is the discovery,
are only a special subdivision of the class of phenomena studied by
psychoanalysis. These considerations fully justify Freud's assumption
(VI) that even if telepathic dreams did, in fact, exist, their existence
would not require a basic revision of the classical psychoanalytic theory
of dreams.
In the alternative the analyst may find that such phenomena are
sui generis, in that they require a basic revision of psychoanalytic theory,
i.e., because they cannot be deduced from a systematic elaboration of
existing psychoanalytic theory. In that case he may decide that these
phenomena are not a part of the subject matter of psychoanalysis proper,
and are no concern of his qua analyst. This is precisely what Schilder felt
to be the proper analytic attitude toward “psi phenomena" (XX).
A third alternative is that the analyst may wish to investigate the
psychology of the parapsychologist who reports and explains “psi phe­
nomena." He may assume perhaps that the parapsychologist is a drunk,
a liar or a fool, just as the entomologist may suppose that the above­
mentioned hypothetical explorer is a drunk, a liar or a fool. As a working
hypothesis, leading to an investigation of the parapsychologist's psyche,
this too is permissible; but as a flat affirmation it is both unscientific and
arrogant—not to say libelous. Furthermore, once the focus of the inquiry
is shifted from the report to the observer, one no longer deals with “psi
phenomena"—be they phenomena of the type which can be studied
psychoanalytically, or phenomena sui generis—but with psychoanalytic
psychopathology—with the theory of neurosis. It is, of course, always
permissible in scientific epistemology to shift one's attention from the
study of the object to the study of the true or putative observer (113) even
if the observer is manifestly sane, and his data absolutely correct. This last
specification—that the scientist is of interest to the epistemologist and to
the analyst even when his findings are manifestly correct (126)—shows the
manner in which epistemology and dynamic interpretations differ from
a libelous argumentum ad hominem type of parlor psychoanalysis (183)
—even if the “libel" merely reflects the actual truth.
To be even more specific, the psychology of the investigator is a
legitimate field of study at all times, regardless of whether he is sane or
psychotic, and regardless of whether his findings and conclusions are true
or false. It must, however, be understood that such an inquiry is not a
contribution to the field of science which the investigator studies, but
a contribution to the psychology of professions. This point can be illus­
trated by means of a simple example:
by mathematical means only, of a new planet, whose position and orbit were so com­
pletely described in advance that one merely had to point the telescope in the pre­
scribed direction to confirm the discovery visually.
 Let us assume that, at some future date, absolutely irrefutable proof
of the existence of “psi phenomena’* will be forthcoming. Even in that
case the scholar's legitimate interest in such phenomena and, in fact, his
very capacity to notice such “real” occurrences, will have to be viewed
as a result of the sublimation of an infantile wish for omnipotence, in
precisely the same sense in which Abraham’s chemist patient’s interest in
the chemical problems of the status nascendi was derivable from a scop-
tophilic infantile interest in the origin of babies (1). Indeed, Ackerknecht
has shown that we observe and notice only that for which we have a
predisposing interest. This, according to him, explains why cannibals
know so little about human anatomy (2). Thus, even if the science of
parapsychology should turn out to be a bona fide natural science, the
parapsychologist’s interest in this field of study, his attitude toward the
phenomena which he investigates, and the method whereby he investi­
gates them, would nonetheless have certain unconscious roots, which are
probably related to his infantile wish for omnipotence. This finding will
not affect the validity of his conclusions, any more than the unconscious
infantile motives underlying one’s choice of the profession of psycho­
analyst or mathematician need affect the validity of one’s work and dis­
coveries. In bluntest terms: The disclosure of the unconscious sources of
interest in parapsychology is not name calling, nor is it an argumentum
ad hominem. It is merely a contribution to the psychoanalytic study of
the professions, and of sublimations.
Be that as it may, a sense of relative values would—or should—induce
one to inquire into the nature of alleged “psi phenomena” before one
seeks to gain insight into the psyche of those who affirm that such phe­
nomena exist. The latter inquiry is in order, and is a proper subject for
investigation only after the first inquiry has failed conclusively—but
certainly not when it merely yielded the negative result that present-day
knowledge is unable to account for these phenomena in familiar terms.
It is precisely for this reason that several excellent discussions of the
analytic significance of superstitiousness have not been included in this
anthology, so as not to shift the focus of the anthology from the reported
phenomena to the person reporting them.
A final consideration which militates against the study of the uncon­
scious motives of the observer before one has studied his reported obser­
vations, is that ordinary good manners are not merely not out of place
in scientific discussion, but should be a cornerstone thereof. Indeed, if
we brush aside with a self-satisfied smirk the writings of eminent analysts,
just because they happen to express belief in the reality of psi phenom­
ena, we might miss a chance to reach—possibly very different—conclu­
sions of our own about this subject.
 Nothing further need be said in this chapter about the problem of
the psychology of parapsychologists. Our proper task, at this point, is a
careful elucidation of the epistemological and methodological problems
arising in the study of “psi phenomena," and, especially, the examination
of the problem of whether they are sui generis, or belong properly to
the group of phenomena studied by psychoanalysis. In other words, we
must seek to reason with our intellect, rather than with our infantile
wishes or with our defenses against these wishes. We must seek to display
our reality testing rather than our powers of invective and sarcasm.
On the whole, the situation is a simple one: Many apparently sober
scholars predicate the existence of a nexus between two phenomena
which, were a known mechanism involved in an obvious manner, one
would readily recognize as congruent, and as mutually relevant. Were
these same scholars to make a psychologically less uncongenial statement,
e.g., about a new aspect of avian ovulation, we would promptly retest it,
and would then either reject it, or else integrate it with the rest of our
ornithological knowledge. It is true, of course, that most of these sober
scholars explain the nature of this nexus in a manner which we find
uncongenial. However, such things also happen in workaday zoology or
psychoanalysis. If we do not like these explanations, it is up to us to
offer more “natural" or familiar explanations, or to admit that, for the
time being, we can find none of our own, while continuing to be reluc­
tant to accept those of others. This wait-and-see attitude is also legit­
imate—as legitimate as are brakes on cars. The fact that brakes can be
wrongly used—as can engines—does not make either brakes—or engines—
illegitimate components of cars.
II. T he L o g ic a l Sta tu s of the E xtrasensory P er c e pt io n H y po th e sis
Do “Psi Phenomena*’ Exist? Perhaps the core of the entire debate
over the “phenomena" under consideration is the problem of their exist­
ence. The problem ardently fought over is: “Do psi phenomena exist?"
It is the cornerstone of our methodological inquiry that the problem,
when formulated in this manner, is a fallacious one, and that the ques­
tion is “loaded," regardless of whether it is asked by advocates or oppo­
nents of the “extrasensory perception" (ESP) hypothesis. “Psi phenomena"
do not “exist" in nature any more than physical or psychological phenom­
ena exist. When Romeo whispers his declaration of love to Juliet, this
is inherently neither a physical (acoustic) phenomenon, nor a biological
(sexual), nor a psychological (perception), nor a psychoanalytic (libido)
phenomenon. Only the manner in which we decide to describe, analyze
and interpret it makes it into e.g., a physical as against a biological, or
psychological, or psychoanalytic phenomenon, from which certain con­
clusions of a general order may be drawn. The falling of an apple is not
a priori an “illustration” or ‘‘manifestation” either of gravitation, or of
overripeness, or of the presence of a wind. The assertion that the falling
of the apple “is” a gravitational phenomenon must be justified before we
can ask: “Do gravitational phenomena exist?” The question “Do psi
phenomena exist?” is of this type. It does not merely affirm the existence
of certain occurrences, but—implicitly at least—also makes a predicative
statement about the nature of these occurrences. No one in his right
mind will deny that certain feelings—possessed of the quality which the
subject calls “premonitory” (III)—are occasionally experienced, nor that
sometimes there occurs in reality—either simultaneously with, or sub­
sequently to this “feeling”— an event which “corresponds” to the con­
tent of this feeling. This, however, merely establishes the simultaneous
occurrence of two events: a subjective feeling and a nonsubjective hap­
pening. Only if we interpret these two happenings in a certain manner—
by predicating an efficient nexus between them, and by defining the
nature of this nexus—can we ask the question: “Do psi phenomena
exist?” Until that time we can only ask, first: “Did the two events take
place?” and, second: “Are the two events somehow connected?” The
query: “Do psi phenomena exist?” purportedly pertains to the existence
of something substantive, whereas in reality it pertains to the predication
of a certain kind of relationship or nexus between two phenomena, whose
coexistence is implicitly taken for granted a priori, as is the existence of
“a” relationship between them. In other words, this question “jumps
the gun.” It may, therefore, be considered as “loaded,” quite as much as
the traditional question: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” is
loaded, if it is followed by the instruction: “Answer yes or nol”
For this reason we propose to undertake the somewhat tedious, but
extremely necessary, procedure of examining in detail, from the epistemo-
logical and methodological angle, a hypothetical occurrence, in order to
ascertain precisely at what point the “psi phenomenon” or ESP hypothesis
is introduced into scientific discourse. Before doing so we must, however,
first define the branch of science to which such phenomena are assigned,
at least implicitly, so as to specify the frame of reference which will be
called upon to provide us either with a confirmation or with a refutation
of this interpretation.
“Psi Phenomena” Are Psychological Phenomena. Regardless of the
reality or spuriousness of “psi phenomena,” the events submitted to our
scrutiny invariably involve at least one being possessed of a nervous
system. Either men or animals are always mentioned in descriptions of
“psi phenomena,” regardless of whether these phenomena are “tele­
pathic,” “telesthetic,” “telekinetic” or “precognitive” ones. No one views
as a “psi phenomena” the temporal coincidence of the falling of a plum
from a tree in Normandy and the occurrence of a cyclone in Kansas—at
least not parapsychologists who do not believe in animism. In brief, only
occurrences in which men or animals are involved are ever defined as
“psi phenomena.” This clearly indicates that they are viewed as psycho­
logical phenomena, which must be studied in terms of the psychological
frame of reference.
Precisely What Is a “Psi PhenomenonV9 Let us suppose that, at
8:00 P.M., E.S.T., John Doe's Chevrolet collides with a Ford on the
corner of Tenth Avenue and 34th Street in New York. Also at 8:00 P.M.,
E.S.T., Mrs. John Doe, who remained in Boston, exclaims: “My hus­
band's car has just collided with a Ford on the corner of Tenth Avenue
and 34th Street.” Let us, for good measure, suppose that this exclamation
occurs while the family is recording the voices of its members on a
phonograph, and that ten reliable witnesses take note of this statement
and testify to the time of its occurrence. Let us suppose, in brief, that all
these facts have been ascertained as carefully and completely as any fact
on earth. These, then, are our data.
From here on, our investigation develops in four steps:
(1) Fact Finding. The full details of the two events are ascertained.
Scientifically speaking, we are not yet dealing with a “psi phenomenon.”
We merely have at our disposal reliable reports of two “discrete” events,
—we dare not even call them as yet a “pair” of events—to do with as
we please. At this point these two events are of no greater significance
to the parapsychologists than is the fact that at the time of Mrs. Doe's
exclamation—or of the accident—Richard Roe went past Smith's drug­
store. To think otherwise would be “jumping the gun.”
Our raw data are two events, whose description and verification are
the tasks of epistemology and descriptive science. The observer uses his
(conventional) senses, and his behavior is understandable in terms of the
psychology of perception.
For some reason most arguments seem to concern the genuineness of
the reported facts, and their relative position in time and space. Experi­
mental precautions against fraud and error also pertain primarily to the
process of fact finding. It is, however, our thesis, that this type of argu­
ment is both wasteful and inconclusive, since the demonstration that
phenomenon A did not occur at all, or did not occur as reported, does
not preclude in the least the logical possibility that another phenomenon
B, of an identical character, may occur some other day and in another
place. For this reason, in the following discussion the facts, as reported
above, will be accepted as conclusive and correctly reported. In so doing,
we yield to the evidence of our senses, and to our experience with the re­
liability of this type of evidence. We have no choice but to believe that
the events occurred simultaneously, and exactly as described above.
At this point we may make certain specifications regarding the nature
of our data, and as regards their reliability, in so far as this may affect
their use as raw material for the study of ‘‘psi phenomena.”
(a) Genuine vs. Spurious “Reception.” Let us begin with an imag­
inary example and suppose that, on the morning of July 29, 1951, I am
in the mood to perpetrate a hoax upon a distinguished colleague and
friend, who is interested in parasychology. I therefore send him a tele­
gram, in which I falsely allege that I dreamed the previous night that he
would have kippers for breakfast, although I know full well that I had no
such dream. Let us now suppose that this colleague promptly wires back,
stating truthfully that, contrary to the habits of a lifetime, he did indeed
have kippers for breakfast. Despite the fact that my telegram was a lie,
because I had no such dream, a congruency between my ideation and his
actions continues to exist, since the false report of a dream contained in
my telegram is quite as genuinely a product of my autistic mentation as
the dream would have been, had I actually had it. In other words, despite
my knowing untruthfulness, there is a genuine congruence between my
mentation and his actions which one could—if one were so inclined—
examine in terms of the telepathy hypothesis.6
(b) Conscious vs. Unconscious Material. Analysts firmly believe in
psychic determinism. Consequently, they believe that, from the view­
point of the problem of the existence or nonexistence of telepathy, it
makes no difference whatsoever whether it is the manifest or the latent
content of an utterance, act, dream, vision, fantasy or hallucination
which is congruent with the thought of the analyst, or with some event
in the external world. In other words, the depth of the psychic level on
which “reception” may occur does not affect appreciably the nature of
the theories which one may formulate regarding the nexus between
“sender” and “receiver” in order to account for this observed congruence.
Indeed, the difference between manifest or latent “receptivity,” or re­
sponse to “reception,” has no bearing upon the problem of the existence
or nonexistence of extrasensory perception. It interests the analyst only
from the dynamic, economic and topographic point of view, and the stu­
dent of parapsychology only in terms of the construction of experimental
setups, and of the discovery of certain concrete instances of reception,
which, without the assumption that reception was unconscious, would
pass unnoticed (VIII).
The case of Mrs. B., reported by Freud (III) , is also somewhat of this order,
though less extreme.
 An application of these conclusions to our hypothetical example will
be found in the next section.
At this point we leave the realm of sense data and enter the field of
logical induction and generalization.
(2) Postulation of Congruency. Upon the arrival of the telegram in­
forming Mrs. John Doe of all the details of her husband’s car accident,
all those present may decide that the content of her exclamation was
identical with the details of the accident in question. At this point all we
have established is a formal congruency between two possibly discrete
events. Specifically, we have not shown at this time that Mrs. Doe’s nar­
rative exclamation actually referred to the real accident. Logically speak­
ing, and regardless of the frequency of such congruencies, nothing has
been revealed as yet about extrasensory perception, nor about any other
kind of perception, nor even about the possibility that Mrs. Doe’s state­
ment actually pertained to Mr. Doe’s accident. We have merely postu­
lated the existence of a similarity, and nothing else. The statement “the
two events are similar,” is the result of a very elementary kind of induc­
tion, the results of which cannot be challenged except by the overly cap­
tious. It must also be specified that it does not matter in the least, as far
as the similarity established between the two events is concerned, whether
Mrs. Doe made this utterance in all sincerity, and as a result of an ir­
resistible impulse, or whether she made it as a very hostile joke, knowing
it to be a “lie.” In fact, it makes no difference whatsoever whether she
actually made this utterance, or whether it was merely the latent thought
behind a dream which she had at that time, and which became conscious
to her only during her next analytic hour, after her analyst interpreted
this thought to her. We can even go to the extreme of saying that—if
Mrs. Doe did make this utterance—it makes no difference, as regards the
discovery of a similarity, whether her husband actually had such an ac­
cident, or had merely sent her a telegram containing a description, un­
truthful from beginning to end, of an accident which he never had,—
perhaps in order to be able to stay away from his wife a few days longer.
The similarity “is” there, plain to see.
All we have to do at this point is to specify that the finding of a
similarity or congruency between the two events does not deprive them,
for the time being, of their discrete character. Two things can be similar
to each other, without being connected in any way.
(3) Postulation of Relevancy—or of “a” Nexus. At this point the stu­
dent of the two phenomena makes the first truly inductive and inde­
pendent step: He may affirm that Mrs. Doe did more than vocalize autis-
tically. He may affirm that her narrative pertained to the accident. Thus,
two discrete occurrences are defined as mutually relevant. They are
viewed as connected, because, had a familiar form of perception or com­
munication taken place—i.e., had Mrs. Doe actually witnessed the acci­
dent—she would have said something similar, and her utterance would
therefore have been deemed to pertain to that event. This is an act of
induction and generalization. More specifically, it is, so far, only a rea­
soning by analogy, which, a priori, is neither necessarily correct, nor
necessarily false. At this point one postulates only the mutual relevancy
of, or nexus between, two discrete events. This is done in order to as­
similate such observed congruencies to other, more familiar, types of
congruencies. This act may be motivated as follows: After a study of the
evidence, a professor of philosophy may postulate the existence of “a"
nexus between the two phenomena, and their mutual relevancy. He may
do so in order to conform to the principle of parsimony. At this point a
logical principle of heuristic value—the principle of parsimony—is intro­
duced into the study of the phenomena, and the existence of “a” nexus
is adopted as the hypothesis to be tested. We repeat: Only the existence
of “a” nexus is predicated. The nature of the nexus is, as yet, not speci­
fied. At this point the “pair" of events is of interest only to a small group
of unusually hard-headed parapsychologists, who have no tacit commit­
ments to any thesis regarding the nature of such connections. The inves­
tigator has only paired the two events, deprived them of their discreteness,
and predicated “a” nexus between them, because of an impulse to strive
for parsimony and for coherence, and in order to discover causality and
structure in the external world—be it only for heuristic reasons. If he is
cautious, he will, however, be mindful of Mach’s dictum: “There are no
laws in nature. We put laws into nature.” He will, in other words, rec­
ognize that he predicated the existence of an unspecified nexus for logical,
though subjective, reasons which are connected with his need to master
reality. His act is understandable in terms of ego psychology. This view
implies that logical and scientific methods are means whereby man's al­
legiance to the painfully acquired sense of reality is strengthened and
bolstered against the recurrent attacks of the autistic world which is gov­
erned by the pleasure principle.
Although this procedure is methodologically unimpeachable, a rather
tricky situation arises. I refer to the possibility that, impelled by the de­
sire to conform to the principle of parsimony, we may have neglected to
examine the alternative hypothesis that the two phenomena, though
similar, are not in the least mutually relevant, i.e., that they are not di­
rectly connected by some meaningful nexus “external” to the investi­
gator.
In order to understand this matter properly, it must be specified that
the term “nexus” (or “relevancy”) automatically implies the concept of
causation. The mechanism of the causation process is ignored for the
time being, because it would lead us too far afield at this point What
we propose to consider instead is the difference between the type of cau­
sation subsumed in ESP theories, and the type subsumed in psycho­
analytic theories pertaining to the same set of events. The former is es­
sentially of the “simultaneous causation’* type, in that it is assumed that
event A directly influenced or “caused” event B. On the other hand, one
psychoanalytic view may be that the causation involved is of the “ante­
cedent” type, the two congruent events being thought of as the end
products of two processes diverging from a common root, but running
parallel thereafter. Let us now examine our hypothetical case in terms
of this second theory.
If it can be shown that Doe’s accident and Mrs. Doe’s utterance were
both determined by their previous matrimonial difficulties, and by their
entire life histories—i.e., if both were due to psychic determinism, then
the ESP hypothesis becomes unnecessary for the psychoanalyst. It is self-
evident, of course, that the explanation of the temporal coincidence of
the utterance and of the accident is likely to be an extremely difficult
task for the psychoanalyst—at least as long as the utterance is held to
pertain to the accident.
I now propose to show that it is not necessary to make this assump­
tion. If we assume that the utterance reflects, with hallucinatory inten­
sity, an endogenous death wish, which finds verbal expression after being
processed by the unconscious, preconscious and conscious, which deter­
mine the form and content of the manifest expression of the wish, the
situation changes entirely. Perhaps Mrs. Doe fantasied that John Doe had
a collision only because she knew his habit of driving his Chevrolet reck­
lessly, his tendency to get drunk when away from home, etc. This much
is, then, partly an endogenous death wish, and partly an elaboration of
that wish in terms of known habits. This leaves us only a small residue of
not obviously endogenous material, which can often be reduced still fur­
ther, if symbolic material is also taken into consideration. Thus, 34th
Street may represent Mr. and Mrs. Doe’s age. Tenth Avenue the number
of years they were married, and 8:00 P.M. may be the hour of their last
quarrel. A Ford may have been chosen as the means of “retribution,” be­
cause on her honeymoon Mrs. Doe read, and was much impressed by, Al-
dous Huxley's Brave New World, in which men piously exclaim: “Ford's
in his Flivver, all’s right with the world.” If some such explanations can
be obtained by means of a psychoanalysis, not one individual compo­
nent element of Mrs. Doe's utterance can be held to possess a priori the
characteristic of relevancy, i.e., to pertain to, and be a description of, Mr.
Doe’s accident.
 Remains to be explained the co-occurrence and simultaneous emer­
gence of these various endogenous elements in Mrs. Doe’s utterance, i.e.,
their pattern or Gestalt. It is legitimate to suppose that a detailed analy­
sis could perhaps reveal a close unconscious connection between these
various elements. In fact, we have already intimated that all of them
were related to the theme of an unhappy marriage. The fact that they
were combined into a coherent narrative, a Gestalt, may be a result of
the processing of this material by the secondary process, ex'actly in the
manner in which the coming into being of neurotic Gestalten (complexes)
has been described elsewhere (26).
If this demonstration can be made, Mrs. Doe’s utterance must be
viewed as endogenous and, thus, as no longer relevant to, nor a descrip­
tion of, Mr. Doe’s accident. At that moment, the need for an ESP hypo­
thesis disappears altogether. The two events become “discrete" once
more, at least in terms of simultaneous causation. They are mutually
relevant and connected only in terms of the past, and of psychic deter­
minism, i.e., only by means of antecedent causation and within a psycho­
analytic frame of reference. A moment of thought will show that Freud’s
finding that sometimes it is only psychoanalytic investigation which dis­
closes the presence of a “telepathic" occurrence (VIII) also implies its
reverse, and therefore not only does not contradict this view, but actually
confirms it.
Summing up, the moment all details of Mrs. Doe's productions, and
the pattern thereof as well, are traced to endogenous sources, i.e., the
moment it is shown that they need not be “heteropsychic" in Ehrenwald’s
sense (39), the simultaneity of the two occurrences loses its significance.
It becomes mere coincidence, as is the temporal co-occurrence of the fall­
ing of a plum in Normandy and a Kansas cyclone. An interesting case
of this type was described by Hitschmann (XI).
It is conceded that this task is seldom accomplished in its entirety.
This, however, need only be thought of as a technical, and not as an es­
sential limitation—at least until proof to the contrary has been adduced.
Nothing said hereinabove constitutes an a priori denial of the pos­
sibility that at least one bona fide case of ESP may exist and, as said
earlier, if one exists, then any number of other cases may exist as well.
We merely hold that the task of the analyst is to seek first a psycho­
analytic explanation, in terms of the theory of psychic determinism. It is
true not merely of psychoanalysis, but of all sciences, that one is occa­
sionally obliged to stop short of one’s goal, and to assume a wait-and-see
position. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it: One is not to resort to super­
natural explanations until all natural explanations are exhausted. Since
it is never possible to show that all natural explanations have indeed
been exhausted, the use of supernatural explanations is, in this sense
only, i.e., in a dogmatic manner, never permissible.
It is an entirely different matter, however, if one uses the ESP hy­
pothesis as a purely heuristic one, after one has gone as far as one could
go with other explanations, and if one uses this hypothesis with the ex­
pectation that, by leading the way to further inquiry, it will eventually
abolish itself. That is scientifically legitimate, and certainly justifies the
use made of this hypothesis by the more sober analysts, who—as a con­
venience—tentatively “believe” in, and make an “as if” use of, the ESP
hypothesis. Although one may quibble about the extent of various
analysts' belief in the ESP hypothesis, on the whole they seldom lose
sight of the analytic goal, and many of them have used the ESP hypothesis
with commendable restraint and moderation.
An entirely different situation arises if one believes from the outset in
ESP, including precognition, and re-examines the problem of causality in
the light of this belief.
At this point the entire problem imperceptibly fuses with the prob­
lem of the status of the causality principle in science.7 Indeed, the scien­
tific statement: “A is the cause of B” is not a nonspecific one. It is im­
plicitly also a specific predicative statement regarding the mechanism in­
volved in this causation. The entire parapsychological argument, which
predicates a hitherto unknown form of causation whose nature is often
not specified, stands or falls by this statement.
It is therefore rather surprising that advocates of telepathy and
precognition have not advanced the theory that the current concept of
causality and determinism is a defense against the recognition of the phe­
nomenon of precognition. Once precognition is held to occupy a basic
position in the structure of the Universe—as it does in the “serial uni­
verse” concept of Dunne (30, 31)—the need for the current conception of
causality, and the place of the existing theory of causality in scientific
discourse are abolished. I speak here, of course, of succedaneous or tem­
poral causality, which is once and for all replaced by, or fused with, si­
multaneous or structural causality,' there being but a universal present.
(This is a figurative mode of expression, since the concept of present has
a meaning only by contrast to past and future). In that case the distinc­
tion between telepathy and precognition disappears altogether, and ESP
7 In view of recurrent claims on the part of those unsophisticated in physical
science, it may not be inappropriate to mention in passing that—as Niels Bohr (14)
and others have stressed ad nauseam, and with appallingly little result, as far as some
strata of the general reading public are concerned—the Heisenberg principle of inde­
terminacy does not mean that electrons are not subject to the laws of causality. It
merely states that, because of certain realities, the position and the momentum of the
electron cannot be determined simultaneously with any degree of precision (110, 111) .
 becomes but a special instance of perception—a quantitative rather than
a qualitative problem. In such a theory, causality and psychic deter­
minism of a historical kind are replaced by, or are identical with, a type
of structuring of perception. Cause and effect are simultaneously present.
All perception (including ESP and prophecy) is then of one type only,
and concomitant “perception" alone decides whether two phenomena are
viewed as causally or structurally connected, or else as discrete events.
(4) Predication of the Nature of the Nexus. The fourth step in the
analysis of this set of events—which is now assumed to form a mutually
relevant “pair" of occurrences—is the predication of the nature of the
nexus, at least in the form of a hypothesis to be tested. It is at this point
that various schools of thought part company. Several schools of thought
may be distinguished:
(a) The Negative Nexus. The nexus between the two events is de­
fined as negative, i.e., the co-occurrence and congruence of these events
are attributed to “chance." One may even become pugnacious about it
and, with a curl of one's lip, affirm that it is one of the deceptions prac­
ticed by Fate upon scientific—but not too scientific—man. Further para-
psychological inquiry stops at this point, since the subject is now of in­
terest only to the student of the calculus of probabilities. However, as
the theory of probability shows, chance too is amenable to a conceptual
analysis. Thus, the affirmation that such events are due to chance may be
correct, but it is, for that reason, not yet science. Not until the specific
conceptual structure of that particular universe of “chance" (or chaos) is
explored, and the mathematical laws thereof are formulated, is the state­
ment: “This pairing of events is due to chance," a scientific, predicative
one. Since this is seldom done, the statement in question is merely a pro­
fession of faith in “Science" and, therefore, like all professions of faith,
unscientific. In addition, in order to be accepted as a valid explanation,
it must be proven that chance is the sole, or almost the sole, factor in­
volved, excluding error and fraud. On the whole, the “chance" theory
comes close to being an evasion, at least in the present state of our knowl­
edge.
(b) Suspended Judgment. The existence of a nexus of an unspecified
kind between the two events is viewed as a hypothesis to be first tested,
and then accepted or rejected. The actual testing of the hypothesis is
preceded by an attempt to outline the logical characteristics which any
adequate explanation of the nature of the connection must possess. This
attitude is exemplified by Moses Maimonides’ dictum: “Teach thy
tongue to say: ‘I do not know/ " It is scientifically the most satisfactory
attitude in the present state of our knowledge, but requires not merely
intellectual ingenuity in the outlining of the logical characteristics which
explanations of the nature of the nexus must possess, but also a tremen­
dous ability to tolerate frustration, since, as the late Professor L. J. Hen­
derson once pointed out to the writer, few persons can obtain the same
amount of release of tensions by saying “I do not know/' than they can
obtain by saying “Yes,” or “No.” In so far as possible, we will seek to ad­
here to this point of view.
(c) The Predication of a Subjective Nexus. Regardless of whether
one accepts or rejects the hypothesis that the two phenomena may repre­
sent unconnected discrete events, one may decide to investigate primarily
the psychological factors which impel an observer to assume that the two
events are connected. This type of inquiry is legitimate, but yields little
or no additional insight into the problem under study. It is merely a
study in ego psychology. It will not be elaborated further, the problem
having been dealt with rather fully in Section I.
(d) The Predication of a Latent Familiar Nexus. The nexus is as­
sumed to be of a basically familiar type, which has not been recognized
as such, because this recognition requires too much thought and effort.
The nexus is assumed to be a “natural” one, and the phenomena are not
viewed as being essentially sui generis. It is affirmed that the proper in­
vestigation of the phenomena will disclose conventional means of com­
munication via the sense organs, combined with a refined, but likewise
conventional, psychological processing of percepts. The erroneous im­
pression of parafamiliarity is held to be due to an inadequate, insufficient
or improper study of the events under consideration. One typical the­
ory of this type is rooted in the assumption of a preconscious or uncon­
scious reception of subliminal sense impressions, which are perceived but
not “registered,” and are processed first in the unconscious and in the
preconscious, ultimately emerging into the conscious in a form which
still bears the imprint of the primary process.
(e) The Predication of a Parafamiliar Nexus. The existence of a nexus
is conceded, and its “nature” is defined in a manner compatible with the
rest of our thinking about natural phenomena, it being specified that
the nature of the nexus, and the processes responsible for the nexus, are
of a natural but hitherto unknown type. This type of theory may predi­
cate the existence of hitherto undiscovered effector and receptor organs,
of previously unknown radiations, of compensatory “minus functions”
(39) etc., all within the framework of natural science (110,111), and sus­
ceptible of being explored by special but conventional experimental
methods. The percept is usually—though not always—held to be directly
accessible to the conscious, without a preliminary processing in the un­
conscious and the preconscious, and without inductive or deductive
work. This specification of direct accessibility to the conscious mind is,
however, not a necessary and indispensable, but merely a traditional'
feature of the theory. In terms of this theory the nexus is not truly sui
generis. It is merely a special form of natural processes of a known type,
in the sense in which ultraviolet rays are a “special form" of more fa­
miliar kinds of radiation.
(f) The Predication of a Metafamiliar Nexus. The nexus is defined
as “natural” but sui generis, i.e., not as parafamiliar, but as metafamiliar.
This view implies that the real essence, or distinctive characteristics of
the phenomena in question cannot be reduced by any amount of analy­
sis and study to known and conventionally understandable phenomena,
or to mechanisms which, while new, are not, in their essence, different
from already known mechanisms. If this view is adopted, no attempt will
be made to connect telepathic phenomena with, e.g., the remote orienta­
tion of migrating birds, etc. This approach does not, however, exclude
the supplementary hypothesis that the metafamiliar may be linked, in its
peripheral and nonessential aspects, with certain familiar or parafamiliar
processes, such as clouded states of consciousness and the like. The causal
principle is also retained in an unmodified form.
Approaches (d), (e) and (f) are the proper domain of scientific para­
psychology, although only approaches (e) and (f), which predicate a para­
familiar or metafamiliar nexus, view the pair of events under considera­
tion as genuine “psi phenomena.” These are bold hypotheses indeed. It
must, nonetheless, be admitted that some hypotheses regarding these new
types of connections are not less implausible logically than were, once
upon a time, theories pertaining to invisible radiations, quantum
mechanics and the like. As Lynd pointed out long ago, there is nothing
a priori objectionable in “outrageous hypotheses” (128). The question
in such cases is simply this: “Can one make them ‘stick*?”
This being said, a severe criticism must be leveled at many of the ex­
ponents of hypotheses (d), (e) and (f). They often devote all their time to
the devising of experiments which simply seek to establish the validity
of step three in the chain of induction described above. They attempt to
prove that “a” nexus does exist, or, briefly expressed, that “psi phenomena
exist.” By contrast, they frequently give relatively little attention to the
problem of the nature of this nexus, which is the real crux of the matter,
since the entire basic thesis of parapsychology hinges precisely on this
point, rather than upon the prediction of an unspecified nexus, which,
methodologically, need be viewed as nothing more than a situational
working hypothesis, to be defined, tested and explored. Indeed, it is
legitimate to assume the existence of an unspecified nexus between any
two occurrences on earth—be it the nexus between John Doe's fate and
the position of the stars at the time of his birth—provided only that one
proceeds immediately to the elucidation of the nature of this nexus, and
to the demonstration that the nexus is an effective and significant one. It
must also be explicitly specified that inquiries which seek only to eluci­
date the conditions under which such connections may exist—or may be
assumed to exist—are far from adequate, since they too pertain only to
the trite problem of the existence or nonexistence of these phenomena,
rather than to the problem of their nature, which is not merely the real
problem, but, in a sense, the only one.
(g) The Paranormal or Metanormal Nexus. This hypothesis is men­
tioned only for the sake of completeness, since it is dogmatic rather than
heuristic. It is predicated—quite dogmatically and for autistic reasons
only—that the nexus is not of a “natural” type, and cannot be thought
about constructively and fruitfully in terms of the general methodology
and frame of reference of natural science. The phenomena under study
are not viewed as natural phenomena, but as supernatural or miraculous
ones. When viewed in this manner, they cease to be “psi phenomena,” as
defined by parapsychologists, and are of no concern to science. We need
not examine in detail the various theories of this kind. They can be com­
pletely characterized by a metaphor: All proponents of the various meta­
normal theories agree that the moon is made of green cheese, but the
individual proponents of this view display great ingenuity in “proving”
that it is made of Roquefort rather than of Gorgonzola, or vice versa.
The only scientific investigation possible is the psychoanalysis of the pro­
ponents of such theories.
All the above hypotheses are the results of the investigator's logical
activities, which can be fully understood in terms of the synthetic func
tions of the ego.
III. E v a lu a t io n o f V a rio u s H y po th eses
We now propose to evaluate the usefulness of various hypotheses re­
garding the nature of “psi phenomena” in terms of the principle of
parsimony.
The predication of a given type of nexus between two paired events
is motivated by the need to understand, which, like the need to predicate
“a” nexus, is part of man's attempt to master reality.
The predication of an ESP nexus [hypotheses (e) and (f)] between
the two events is, however, optional. It is but one of many possible ex­
planations, the word “possible” meaning in this context: That which is
possible to a perfectly rational being. The ESP explanation is quite often
the “simplest” one, as regards each separate pair of events. However, the
totality of these separate “simplest” explanations may ultimately oblige
one to formulate a general theory which is infinitely more complex than
any of the theories underlying other types of explanations which, with
regard to any separate pair of events, are more complex than is the ESP
explanation.
In other words, parsimony on the proximate and concrete level (i.e.,
as regards the separate explanation of each concrete pair of events) may
ultimately result in a lack of parsimony in the formulation of a general
theory, and vice versa, of course. Furthermore, even if we make a choice
between various types of possible explanations in terms of the principle
of parsimony, we cannot ascertain in advance whether the ESP theory,
or some other hypothesis will be the most economical in the long run.
It is also well to remember in this context that the quest for parsi­
mony is but a matter of convenience, and is not a safe guide to the dis­
covery of "the” correct—or “more” correct—formulation. Indeed, as a
famous mathematician once put it: “Nature is not concerned with
analytical8 difficulties.” The advice of another great mathematician:
“Seek simplicity but distrust it,” is also relevant at this juncture.
What other alternatives, also specifying the nature of the nexus, are
there to the ESP theory? This question can be answered only in formal
terms. The ESP hypothesis postulates a nexus between two events, which
is limited to the consideration of the possibility of a nexus occurring
within the short period of time which includes both events.
An alternate hypothesis may postulate that the nexus is most evident,
that it “manifests” itself most clearly—i.e., that it “exists”—prior to the
occurrence of the two events under consideration. A theological sample
of such a theory regarding the nature of the nexus is the concept of pre­
destination, as exemplified in the legend of the “Appointment in
Samarra”: A servant, fleeing Death, “escapes” to Samarra, which is pre­
cisely where Death expected to meet him all along. A psychoanalytic the­
ory of the co-occurrence of John's Doe's accident and of his wife's ex­
clamation may—as suggested above—postulate that the long-brewing
latent hostility and self-aggression characteristic of this couple's marriage
came to a head simultaneously, causing John Doe to have an “accident”
on purpose, in the manner described by Karl Menninger (136), and also
causing Mrs. Doe's death wishes toward John Doe to reach an intensity
sufficient to enable them to find a but slightly disguised hallucinatory ex­
pression in the vision of an accident. This interpretation is, admittedly,
less parsimonious as regards this particular pair of events than is the
ESP hypothesis. However, it requires as a theoretical background only
the relatively simple traditional theory of psychoanalysis, whereas the
8 Not psychoanalysis, but calculus is meant in this context.
“simpler” ESP explanation of this particular occurrence presupposes the
extremely complex background theory of parapsychology, which con­
tains large numbers of undefined concepts and heuristically postulated
processes.
We must, in all fairness, repeat at this point the warning that the
relative simplicity and complexity of explanations provides no indication
of whether one theory is more correct than the other. However, there is
one criterion which, heuristically at least, enables one to make a provi­
sional choice between two explanations. This criterion is that of fruit­
fulness.
The principle of fruitfulness may be illustrated by an imaginary ex­
ample which, because it contains a rather bad pun, irresistibly appeals to
the primary process and therefore carries conviction. This is not alto­
gether unfortunate, since the co-operation of the primary process often
facilitates the task of the secondary process: “Let us imagine that a man
slips in the street and falls down. We can suppose that he was tripped by
the devil. This is an unfruitful hypothesis, because it brings to a full stop
both further inquiry and remedial and/or preventive measures. In the
alternative we may assume that he slipped on a fruit rind, perhaps on a
banana peel. This is a fruitful hypothesis, since it permits verification,
and enables one to take remedial and/or preventive steps.”
It is the writer's thesis that the psychoanalytic theory, which postu­
lates a specific nexus but places the effective and important portion of
the nexus into a period of time which antedates, i.e., which does not in­
clude, the actual events, is, in the last resort, more fruitful than is the
ESP hypothesis.
In simplest terms, my own position regarding the pair of events under
study is as follows: I believe, and, in fact know that they occurred as spe­
cified. I am impelled to believe that they are connected. I do not feel
under any obligation to believe that they are connected by means of
extrasensory perception, which is but one possible explanation. Rather do
I feel obliged to seek for an explanation in psychoanalytic terms, if for no
other reason than because I happen to be a student of psychoanalysis,
and adhere to the adage: Schuster bleib bei deinem Leisten (cobbler,
stick to your last).
The above considerations, regardless of whether they are right or
wrong in their totality, do yield at least one unassailable result: Do “psi
phenomena” or ESP exist, i.e., do they exist in nature, as tables or chairs
exist? The answer must be an unqualified “No.” They do not exist in
nature anymore than—according to Mach—physical laws “exist” in na­
ture. An event, or pair of events, does exist objectively. It becomes a “psi
phenomenon” when we choose to define it as a “psi phenomenon,” by
explaining the nexus between two events in terms of ESP. The same pair
of events, if we choose to define the nexus between them otherwise, i.e.,
in terms of psychoanalysis, is not a “psi phenomenon” but a psycho­
analytic phenomenon. This view is perfectly compatible with Poincare’s
statement: “La methode, c’est pr£cisement le choix des faits” (“method
is essentially the choice of one’s facts”); the choice being made specifically
in terms of a given frame of reference, which defines the area, content,
and structure of one’s universe of discourse.
We hasten to add that it is equally correct to say that “psychoanalytic
phenomena” do not exist. Psychoanalytic “phenomena” are simply real
phenomena viewed psychoanalytically.
The same conclusion may also be reached if, in addition to the prob­
lem of causation, we offer also a tentative theory of communication or
“reception” in psychoanalytic terms.
The core of such a theory is the relationship of “psi phenomena” to
the potentialities and qualities of the unconscious. Indeed, both the psy­
choanalytic advocates and opponents of the reality of “psi phenomena”
agree that whatever the nature of these occurrences may be, they involve
primarily the unconscious, and that, therefore, the truly significant part
of e.g., a “telepathic” dream is not the manifest but the latent content
thereof.
Broadly speaking, the defenders of “psi phenomena” postulate that the
unconscious possesses certain hitherto ignored potentialities, and that
these potentialities are related to extrasensory perceptions, which cannot
intrude into the conscious sphere without first overcoming strong ego
defenses. Hence, when they finally do intrude into the conscious, they
usually appear in it in a distorted form; in a highly distorted form in the
case of “normals,” and in an almost undistorted form in dreams and in
psychoses.
The opponents of “psi phenomena” also believe that man’s uncon­
scious possesses certain hitherto ill-defined and insufficiently known prop­
erties, which include the capacity to perceive almost subliminal cues, as
well as the subtler meanings of sensations perceived by ordinary means,
and the unconscious or preconscious capacity to reach, with the help of
these cues, conclusions paralleling the thought processes of one’s inter­
locutors, or of persons of whom one has a certain amount of knowledge.
In other words, these investigators believe that “psi phenomena” are, by
and large, only aspects of what Ferenczi so aptly termed “the dialogue of
the unconscious.” On the whole, the opponents of parapsychology seem
to postulate that the unconscious has a great perceptivity for subliminal
stimuli, and that, due partly to the psychic unity of mankind (XX) and
partly to the limitations imposed upon the general direction of thought
processes by the ethos of the culture area (133, 134), the unconscious and
preconscious of the “receiver” can reach certain conclusions from these
basic cues, which—as in Sherlock Holmes' case—are similar to those
reached by the “sender,” or which reconstruct from these cues the current
or past experiences of the “sender” (VIII) : This feat of the unconscious
would, thus, parallel the intuitive skill of great diagnosticians. The
process of intuition has been formulated most wittily by the great mathe­
matician Gauss: “I have had my results for a long time now; however, I
do not know, as yet, how I shall reach them.”
One of the writer's personal experiences is, perhaps, to the point in
this connection. One day, practically out of the blue sky, he asked a man,
who was discussing the problems of his son, “Have you and your son
ever shared a woman?” Completely taken aback, the man conceded that
his son had once been seduced by his stepmother. Since the writer is not
in the habit of making such conversational “shots in the dark,” and has
never in his life asked anyone such a question, it is clear, and was clear to
him even then, that his “third ear” had simply caught in the man's dis­
course certain nuances, which could be meaningful only if father and son
had, indeed, shared the same woman. The question was, thus, not just a
wanton “stab into the unconscious,” but the product of an intuitive put­
ting together of subtle clues, which led to an inference of an explanatory
nature. Were we to stop here, however, we would ignore one of the most
important aspects of the problem: Why the writer was capable of mak­
ing this inference, and why he voiced it during his first or second meet­
ing with this man, especially since the conversation was half social and
half scientific, in that it had been motivated by his interlocutor's interest
in a certain research problem on which the writer was working at that
time. In other words: Why was the writer's third ear sensitive to precisely
that topic, and why did he express his inference in a socially almost in­
appropriate context? The answer is that this perceptivity and this near-
inappropriate loquaciousness (98) were both determined by certain as­
pects of the writer's psyche. In brief, the clues were indubitably present
—in the sense in which certain high-pitched sounds are present—and per­
mitted the drawing of a certain inference. But, just as it takes a dog, and
not a man, to perceive such sounds, so there had to be, in this instance, a
listener for whose unconscious these particular clues were both meaning­
ful and interesting, and whose unconscious had been sufficiently analyzed
to permit such an inference to enter consciousness whenever the proper
stimuli were perceived by him.
The stimuli in question were complex ones, only three phases thereof
being still sufficiently well remembered at this time to be reported here.
One was the man's fatherly, rather than grandfatherly, interest in the
fact that his son's regular mistress was pregnant at that time. The second
was this moralistic man's singularly and consciously overlenient attitude
toward the fact that the son—whom he habitually and moralistically
overprotected, and from whom he usually demanded a highly rational
and almost selfish practicality—had permitted a shiftless tramp to trap
him into illegitimate fatherhood, by causing him to behave toward her
in an almost incomprehensively naive and childish manner. The third
factor was the strikingly lenient and almost fearful attitude of the father
toward the worthless and scheming woman who, for selfish ends, had
caused his son to impregnate her by falsely professing to be sterile.
This “clairvoyance” would have passed as such, had the “percipient”
not been a psychologically fairly sophisticated person. In the present in­
stance, however, the “clairvoyance” appears simply as a natural inference
drawn by a person so constituted psychologically that he was capable of
drawing this inference unconsciously or preconsciously, and at the same
time, could also recognize the means whereby this inference was reached.
It is needless to add that, had the man's “secret” been something to which
the writer's “third ear” was not attuned, he would not have perceived its
content solely by means of these minimal clues. Furthermore, had this
secret been accessible to the writer's unconscious, but had it pertained to
matters which had not been cleared up by his own analysis, the inference
would have remained unconscious; it would not have been “acted upon,”
but would merely have led to an “acting out” of the inference, without
an understanding of its nature and meaning.
This approach to an apparent instance of “extrasensory perception”
“explains”—by means of certain hypotheses concerning the nature of
the unconscious—a puzzling occurrence in a manner which does not bring
ESP hypotheses into the picture.
It must be admitted that this approach still leaves a residuum of un­
explained “ESP” occurrences. Of these some may be explained as follows:
Every psychological fact is overdetermined, and therefore open to several
interpretations. If the interpreter so chooses, he can stress those inter­
pretations which make the psychological occurrence seem telepathic,
while ignoring other aspects of the latent content and overdetermination
which would make it appear in a different light. In principle, the latter
interpretations should, for the time being, be given preference as being
more psychoanalytic, at least until all psychoanalytic explanations are
exhausted.
A further group of incidents can be disposed of as being inadequately
reported, improperly analyzed statistically, etc. *
The true question is the following: After eliminating the various
“ESP” occurrences which can be explained otherwise, does there remain
a hard core of events—or even a single event—not understandable in
terms of the dialogue of the unconscious, overdetermination, lack of
proof, or improper study, etc.? It is the writer's considered opinion that a
convincing, unprejudiced proof of the nonexistence of such an irre­
ducible hard core of “occult” occurrences is manifestly impossible. It
suffices to remember in this context that an inadequately vouched-for ex­
perience may nonetheless be a genuine one. It is, furthermore, a well-
known fact of logic that negative evidence is always very uncertain.
Though the writer is, personally, hard-boiled in the extreme about “psi
phenomena,” he does not find it in the least difficult or even disagree­
able to concede that certain events seemingly involving ESP, which can­
not be challenged on the basis of any of the above considerations, may
very well exist, and may not be due to the long arm of coincidence. This
does not prove, however, that they do ipso facto involve ESP; in other
words, this does not prove that one day one may not discover certain
hitherto unknown, but obviously “naturalistic” properties of the uncon­
scious to which these phenomena may have to yield their aura of strange­
ness and supernaturalism. In brief, we concede without reluctance that
there may be at least one event—and if there is one, there may be many
such events—which at present can be “explained” only in terms of ESP.
What we do deny, however, is that this implies automatically that ESP
is the proper explanation thereof, and that further study may not lead
to a new, hitherto unsuspected, and more appropriate explanation, which
may be a psychoanalytic one.
This is, admittedly, a negative hypothesis, which is quite as unprov-
able as a negative fact. However, it has in its favor the lesson of the his­
tory of science. Increasing knowledge has pushed further and further
into the background both supernaturalistic explanations, and hasty semi-
naturalistic ones. In brief, the ESP theory has, for the time being, the
same status as the phlogiston theory of heat, or as the theory of the ether,
both of which were preliminary syntheses and explanatory devices, pro­
ductive in the sense that they were ultimately self-suppressing. In other
words, whereas one may be inclined to deny any shred of ultimate valid­
ity or viability to ESP theories, one cannot challenge the thesis that they
may be necessary in the present state of our ignorance, if only because
they lead to constant experimentation and may, therefore, ultimately
abolish themselves. The paranaturalism implicit in ESP theory and work
should therefore serve as an invitation to hard-boiled “naturalists” to
devote time and effort to this significant inquiry into one of the last re*
maining areas of near-complete scientific ignorance, so that, by bringing
certain peculiar-seeming occurrences within the scope of natural science,
man's knowledge of himself should increase, making it possible for man's
self-esteem to be built not upon an imaginary kinship with the angels,
or upon esoteric “capacities,” but, more meritoriously, upon the skill and
determination which enable him to grow lilies on manure, to turn rusty
nails into watchsprings, and to sublimate sadism into brotherly love. In
this sense man is greater than “the angels born perfect,” because he per­
fects himself. His greatness lies in his original puniness, his courage pre­
supposes mortality, his wisdom folly, his maturity infantilism, his saint­
liness sadism. “By their fruits ye shall know them”—and never does the
fruit seem so glorious as when one has first rummaged among the soiled
roots of the tree of knowledge, which is also the tree of life.
IV. Psi P h en o m en a a n d P sycho analytic E pistem ology
Perhaps the simplest and most constructive way of beginning our dis­
cussion of the methodological problems involved in the psychoanalytic
study of “psi phenomena” would be to ask: Precisely what is the psycho­
logical significance and consequence of the hypothesis that a “psi
phenomenon” has taken place? What difference does it make to the psy­
chologist or psychoanalyst, who seeks to interpret the occurrence?
If we do not view two events, whose contents seem identical, as con­
nected with each other by means of extrasensory communication, each
of the two psychic events will be analyzed in terms of the past, and with­
out reference to any external occurrences other than those involving fa­
miliar forms of communication. In other words, each of these events
would be analyzed on its own merits, and would, at first, be viewed as a
“closed system,” even if one of the persons involved had the intention to
communicate with the other, and the latter had the intention of receiv­
ing a communication.9
In a somewhat similar manner, the temporal coincidence of two
events may sometimes be related to facts which occurred in the past and
determined two sequences of unilinear evolution culminating in the same
end results. The near-simultaneity of Leibnitz's and Newton's invention
of calculus, of B61yai's and Lobatchevsky's devising of negatively curved
geometrical spaces, and of Boyle's and Mariotte's discovery of the Boyle-
Mariotte law exemplify such overlapping occurrences, whose congruence
was determined by the structure of physical reality and by the state of
scientific development prevailing at that time.
To return to our example, had these two events not coincided in
time, John Doe's accident would ordinarily be analyzed in terms of his
self-destructiveness, while Mrs. Doe's vision of an accident befalling her
husband would ordinarily be interpreted as due to a death wish, which
assumed a hallucinatory form because of certain characteristics of Mrs.
Doe's psychological make-up. This classical approach would have yielded
9 In this sense, the fact that various potentates probably dined at the same time as
the clan chieftain MacNeil of Barra, is usually not held to be a consequence of the
fact that MacNeil of Barra's herald habitually ascended the castle tower and announced
to the rulers of the world that, MacNeil of Barra having dined, they too may dine
now. MacNeil of Barra's behavior is explainable in terms of his past development,
while the meal hours of the various potentates are held to have been determined by
their past histories, and by the distinctive practices of their respective courts.
the type of information and the type of therapeutic result usually sought
for by classical psychoanalysts.
Once the telepathy hypothesis is introduced into the study of these
two events, the discreteness of the two phenomena is abolished, or if, as
in the Doe case, the relationship has, up to then, been conceived of pri­
marily in analytic terms, it is now conceived of in different terms; i.e., in
terms of communication rather than in terms of converging unconscious
processes. The focus of the entire inquiry is, thus, displaced from internal
processes to “heteropsychic” (39), i.e., to external ones. In the case of
serious analysts this does not usually lead to a neglect of the internal
processes, although they will inevitably be considered as secondary. In
the same sense the scientifically minded parapsychologist's investigation
of the role of the communication factor in these two events will not pre­
clude a study of internal processes as well. Nonetheless, it is quite certain
that in both these instances the internal process will lose its erstwhile po­
sition of causa causans, and will be viewed primarily as a condition per­
mitting the occurrence of extrasensory communication, which is now de­
fined as the true effective cause of one of the events.
The validity of the assumption, that the adoption of the ESP hy­
pothesis has precisely such an effect upon one's mode of investigation, is
proven implicitly by the content of several of the papers reprinted in this
anthology, as well as by the fact that, thus far, the unconscious subjective
significance of the postulated nature of such “communications” has never
been analyzed. Needless to say, the mere fact that the telepathy hypothe­
sis does influence the direction of inquiry and analysis in this manner is
entirely independent of the problem of whether this hypothesis is a
legitimate one or not. Indeed, even if telepathic communication were as
real as a telephone communication, even if, in Ehrenwald's words (39),
“heteropsychic” material were actually and routinely incorporated into
the receiver's mind, this “communication”—regardless of whether we
consider the theory thereof, the process itself, or the material so “com­
municated”—would have certain unconscious repercussions, which are
worthy of a detailed analysis. A concrete application of this view will be
found in the chapter which describes the technique of analyzing “psi
phenomena” occurring during analysis (XXXI).
V. L o g ic a l P r o per t ies of the P o stu la ted N exus
We are now prepared to undertake the final step in our method­
ological investigation of “psi phenomena.” We have suggested above that
a satisfactory epistemological approach to the problem of “psi phe­
nomena” must include an outlining of the logical characteristics or prop­
erties which any satisfactory—ESP or other—explanation of the "nexus"
must possess, if it is to account fully for the phenomena in question, and
also if it is to be scientifically productive.
We therefore propose to examine what may well be the three prin­
cipal features which any kind of predicated nexus—be it familiar, un­
familiar or paranormal—must possess, in order to account adequately
for "psi phenomena."
(1) There are two kinds of connections: "A and B resemble each
other because both are C (or are produced by C)," and: "A and B resem­
ble each other because A caused B to come into being."
The first connection is similar to the process whereby two eggs pro­
duced by two hens, or by the same hen, resemble each other. A conse­
quence of the adoption of this hypothesis is the systematic utilization
of the principle of psychic determinism.
The second connection is of a different kind. The science of physics
and of chemistry knows of few or no processes by means of which A
causes B to resemble it. A vaguely similar process may be the following:
Occasionally a supersaturated solution, though allowed to cool, refuses to
crystallize. The process of crystallization can sometimes be initiated by
"inoculating" the solution with a minute crystal of the same substance, or
of a similar substance. True parallels can be found only in the realm
of psychology, i.e., when A, by means of a communication through
ordinary channels, causes the psychic content of B to resemble his
own psychic content. However, this parallel fits neither instances of
precognition, nor instances of clairvoyance, nor—if we accept Servadio's
elaboration (170, XXI) of Weiss's views (197-199) — hallucinations of the
presence or of the image of a dying person.10
Actually, if we take as our model normal communication between A
and B, clairvoyance would impute to a material object a "psychic con­
tent" which is equivalent to, but independent of, that of the percipient
and would, therefore, lend indirect support to the highly questionable
theory of Platonic prototypes. The only alternative hypothesis to this is
extra-sensory perception similar to the sense perception of the normal
organs.
Precognition, in turn, requires the postulation either of an empathy
with the mind of an omniscient Being who knows what the future holds
in store, or else of an extrasensory perception of some remote current
situation, not accessible to the ordinary senses, the perception being then
10 it may be postulated, of course, that the Servadio-Weiss hypothesis should be
supplemented by the assumption that the sick, hurt or dying person highly cathects
his damaged body.
supplemented by an almost divine combinatory feat capable of inferring
the future state of the paranormally perceived system.
Be that as it may, the basic characteristic of an ESP explanation of
the nature of a “telepathic/' “clairvoyant" or “precognitive" nexus must
be of the type: “A resembles B because A causes B to resemble it." Such
a concept of the process is, as stated above, patterned upon communica­
tion between two individuals. Event A is thus temporally antecedent to
B, and is, at the same time, the structural model for the result of the
change which it induces in B.
The writer does not affirm that this is, indeed, what happens. He
merely described one of the properties which logic demands that an ESP
explanation of the nature of the nexus between A and B should possess,
in order to satisfy certain minimum criteria of plausibility.
Some other criteria are the following:
(2) If the nexus predicated between A and B is assumed to be of the
ESP type, it must be explained why this same mechanism is specifically
and uniquely a characteristic of certain unusual processes, and does not
play a role also in more commonplace occurrences.
(3) If the nexus predicated between A and B is assumed to be a
latently familiar one, the method whereby the nonspecificity, i.e., the
non sui generis quality of the process is determined must be explained
in detail and in accordance with the usual canons of scientific inquiry.
There exist, no doubt, also other criteria which any statement regard­
ing the nature of the nexus must satisfy. It is, however, believed that
the three preceding criteria are the most crucial ones. We must admit
at once that none of the papers included in this anthology truly satisfy
all of these criteria, perhaps because the problem of the criteria which
such explanations must satisfy has, so far as we know, never been pre­
viously made explicit.
C onclusion
As the variety of viewpoints represented in this anthology indicates,
there is no “official" psychoanalytic attitude toward “psi phenomena."
Analysts differ in their conceptions of the proper range of analytic theory,
and in their views regarding the boundaries of the subject matter of
psychoanalysis. These differences in opinion are legitimate since, as we
stressed elsewhere (23), the logically somewhat similar nature-nurture
controversy is a fallacious one, in that there exists a certain transitional
range of facts, which one person will find easier to interpret in terms of
nature, and the other in terms of nurture. In the same way some analysts
find it easier to account for certain co-occurrences in psychoanalytic
terms, while others find it more convenient to explain the same phenom­
ena in parapsychological terms.
Even if time and the accumulation of further knowledge should
definitely tip the balance against the parapsychological point of view,
there can be no doubt that the patient quest for psychoanalytic truth,
which characterizes the work of psychoanalytic investigators of "psi
phenomena,” will have immeasurably enriched psychoanalysis, both by
certain positive findings and by the fact that it stimulated others to
re-analyze the same type of facts in a different manner. Regardless of
what the final outcome of the controversy may be, it can only lead to an
important extension of the scope, and to a significant deepening of the
insights, of psychoanalytic theory.
It is also incumbent upon us to repeat once more—because it cannot
be repeated often enough—that logically it is legitimate to assume that
there may exist at least one "psi phenomenon,” and if one exists, then
any number of other "psi phenomena” may also exist. However, even if
such phenomena do exist and can be explained by means of the ESP
hypothesis, the investigation of these phenomena by psychoanalytic
means will still continue to be entirely legitimate.
In brief, the anthology does not "point with pride” at the achieve­
ments of psychoanalysis or of parapsychology. It simply invites psycho­
analysts to work hard and to think soberly and to let the chips fall where
they may. No scientist can promise to obtain results, nor can he vouch
in advance for the nature of his ultimate findings. He can only resolve
to do his best with the tools and capacities at his disposal, ready to
submit at all times to reality and to be content with whatever results—
if any—his efforts may yield (VIII) . This, rather than the adoption of any
specific method of inquiry or reasoning, is the distinctive characteristic of
scientific work.
 Part II
Freud’s Studies
 Chapter 3
A PREMONITORY DREAM FULFILLED*
By SIGMUND FREUD

Frau B., an estimable woman who moreover possesses a critical sense,

told me in another connection and without the slightest arriere pensee
that once some years ago she dreamed she had met Dr. K., a friend and
former family doctor of hers, in the Karntnerstrasse1 in front of Hies’s
shop. The next morning, while she was walking along the same street,
she in fact met the person in question at the very spot she had dreamed.
So much for my theme. I will only add that no subsequent event proved
the importance of this miraculous coincidence, which cannot therefore
be accounted for by what lay in the future.
Analysis of the dream was helped by questioning, which established
the fact that there was no evidence of her having had any recollection at
all of the dream on the morning after she dreamed it, until after her
walk—evidence such as her having written the dream down or told it to
someone before it was fulfilled. On the contrary, she was obliged to accept
the following account of what happened, which seems to me more
plausible, without raising any objection to it. She was walking along the
Karntnerstrasse one morning and met her old family doctor in front of
Hies’s shop. On seeing him she felt convinced that she had dreamed the
night before of having this very meeting at that precise spot. According
to the rules that apply to the interpretation of neurotic symptoms, her
conviction must have been justified; its content may, however, require
to be reinterpreted.
The following is an episode with which Dr. K. is connected from
Frau B.’s earlier life. When she was young she was married, without her
wholehearted consent, to an elderly but wealthy man. A few years later
he lost his money, fell ill of tuberculosis and died. For many years the
young woman supported herself and her sick husband by giving music
lessons. Among her friends in misfortune was her family doctor, Dr. K.,
who devoted himself to looking after her husband and helped her in
* Written on November 10, 1899. Originally published in “Schriften aus dem
Nachlass,” Gesammelte Werke, 17:19-23, London, Imago, 1941. Translated from the
German by James Strachey, published in Collected Papers, 5:70-73, London, Hogarth
Press, 1950. Published here by permission of Hogarth Press, London.
l The principal street in Vienna.
finding her first pupils. Another friend was a barrister, also a Dr. K., who
put the chaotic affairs of the ruined merchant in order, while at the same
time he made love to the young woman and—for the first and last time—
set her passion aflame. This love affair brought her no real happiness, for
the scruples created by her upbringing and her cast of mind interfered
with her complete surrender while she was married and later when she
was a widow. In the same connection in which she told me the dream,
she also told me of a real occurrence dating from this unhappy period of
her life, an occurrence which in her opinion was a remarkable coinci­
dence. She was in her room, kneeling on the floor with her head buried
in a chair and sobbing in passionate longing for her friend and helper
the barrister, when at that very moment the door opened and he came
in to visit her. We shall find nothing at all remarkable in this coincidence
when we consider how often she thought of him and how often he
probably visited her. Moreover, accidents which seem preconcerted like
this are to be found in every love story. Nevertheless this coincidence
was probably the true content of her dream and the sole basis of her
conviction that it had come true.
Between the scene in which her wish had been fulfilled and the time
of the dream more than twenty-five years elapsed. In the meantime Frau
B. had become the widow of a second husband who left her with a child
and a fortune. The old lady's affection was still centered on Dr. K., who
was now her adviser and the administrator of her estate and whom she
saw frequently. Let us suppose that during the few days before the dream
she had been expecting a visit from him, but that this had not taken
place—he was no longer so pressing as he used to be. She may then have
quite well had a nostalgic dream one night which took her back to the
old days. Her dream was probably of a rendezvous at the time of her love
affair, and the chain of her dream thoughts carried her back to the occa­
sion when, without any prearrangement, he had come in at the very
moment at which she had been longing for him. She probably had dreams
of this kind quite often now; they were a part of the belated punishment
with which a woman pays for her youthful cruelty. But such dreams—
derivatives of a suppressed current of thought, filled with memories of
rendezvous of which, since her second marriage, she no longer liked to
think—such dreams were put aside on waking. And that was what hap­
pened to our ostensibly prophetic dream. She then went out, and in the
Karntnerstrasse, at a spot which was in itself indifferent, she met her old
family doctor, Dr. K. It was a very long time since she had seen him.
He was intimately associated with the excitements of that happy-unhappy
time. He too had been a helper, and we may suppose that he had been
used in her thoughts, and perhaps in her dreams as well, as a screen
figure behind which she concealed the better-loved figure of the other
Dr. K. This meeting now revived her recollection of the dream. She must
have thought: “Yes, I had a dream last night of my rendezvous with Dr.
K.” But this recollection had to undergo the distortion which the dream
escaped only because it had been completely forgotten. She inserted the
indifferent K. (who had reminded her of the dream) in place of the
beloved K. The content of the dream—the rendezvous—was transferred
to a belief that she had dreamed of that particular spot, for a rendezvous
consists in two people coming to the same spot at the same time. And if
she then had an impression that a dream had been fulfilled, she was only
giving effect in that way to her memory of the scene in which she had
longed in her misery for him to come and her longing had at once been
fulfilled.
Thus the creation of a dream after the event, which alone makes pro­
phetic dreams possible, is nothing other than a form of censoring, which
enables the dream to make its way through into consciousness.
 Chapter 4
PREMONITIONS AND CHANCE*
(AN EXCERPT)
By SIGMUND FREUD

Whoever has had the opportunity of studying the concealed- feelings

of persons by means of psychoanalysis can also tell something new con­
cerning the quality of unconscious motives, which express themselves in
superstition. Nervous persons afflicted with compulsive thinking and
compulsive states, who are often very intelligent, show very plainly
that superstition originates from repressed hostile and cruel impulses.
The greater part of superstition signifies fear of impending evil, and he
who has frequently wished evil to others, but because of a good bringing-
up has repressed the same into the unconscious, will be particularly apt
to expect punishment for such unconscious evil in the form of a mis­
fortune threatening him from without.
If we concede that we have by no means exhausted the psychology of
superstition in these remarks, we must, on the other hand, at least touch
upon the question whether real roots of superstition should be alto­
gether denied, whether there are really no omens, prophetic dreams,
telepathic experiences, manifestations of supernatural forces and the like.
I am now far from willing to repudiate without anything further all these
phenomena, concerning which we possess so many minute observations
even from men of intellectual prominence, and which should certainly
form a basis for further investigation. We may even hope that some of
these observations will be explained by our present knowledge of the
unconscious psychic processes without necessitating radical changes in
our present aspect. If still other phenomena, as, for example, those
maintained by the spiritualists, should be proven, we should then con­
sider the modification of our “laws” as demanded by the new experience,
* From Chapter 12 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904). Translated
from the German by Dr. A. A. Brill. Copyright 1925 by The Macmillan Co., and used
with the Macmillan Company’s permission.
without becoming confused in regard to the relation of things of this
world.
In the sphere of these analyses, I can only answer the questions here
proposed subjectively—that is, in accordance with my personal expe­
rience. I am sorry to confess that I belong to that class of unworthy
individuals before whom the spirits cease their activities and the super­
natural disappears, so that I have never been in a position to experience
anything personally that would stimulate belief in the miraculous. Like
everybody else, I have had forebodings and experienced misfortunes; but
the two evaded each other, so that nothing followed the foreboding, and
the misfortune struck me unannounced. When as a young man, I lived
alone in a strange city, I frequently heard my name suddenly pronounced
by an unmistakable, dear voice, and I then made a note of the exact
moment of the hallucination in order to inquire carefully of those at
home what had occurred at that time. There was nothing to it. On the
other hand, I later worked among my patients calmly and without fore­
boding while my child almost bled to death. Nor have I ever been able
to recognize as unreal phenomena any of the forebodings reported to me
by my patients.
The belief in prophetic dreams numbers many adherents, because it
can be supported by the fact that some things really so happen in the
future as they were previously foretold by the wish of the dream (VI).
But in this, there is little to be wondered at, as many far-reaching devia­
tions may be regularly demonstrated between a dream and the fulfillment
which the credulity of the dreamer prefers to neglect.
A nice example, which may be justly called prophetic, was once
brought to me for exhaustive analysis by an intelligent and truth-loving
patient. She related that she once dreamed that she had met a former
friend and family physician in front of a certain store in a certain street,
and next morning when she went downtown, she actually met him at the
place named in the dream. I may observe that the significance of this
wonderful coincidence was not proven to be due to any subsequent
event—that is, it could not be justified through future occurrences.
Careful examination definitely established the fact that there was no
proof that the woman recalled the dream in the morning following the
night of the dream—that is, before the walk and before the meeting.
She could offer no objection when this state of affairs was presented in a
manner that robbed this episode of everything miraculous, leaving only
an interesting psychologic problem. One morning, she had walked
through this very street, had met her old family physician before that
certain store, and on seeing him, received the conviction that during the
preceding night, she had dreamed of this meeting at this place. The
analysis then showed with great probability how she came to this convic­
tion, to which, in accordance with the general rule, we cannot deny a
certain right to credence. A meeting at a definite place following a pre­
vious expectation really describes the fact of a rendezvous. The old
family physician awakened her memory of old times, when meetings with
a third person, also a friend of the physician, were of marked significance
to her. Since that time, she had continued her relations with this gentle­
man, and the day before the mentioned dream, she had waited for him
in vain. If I could report in greater detail the circumstances here before
us, I could easily show that the illusion of the prophetic dream at the
sight of the friend of former times is perchance equivalent to the follow­
ing speech: “Ah, doctor, you now remind me of bygone times, when I
never had to wait in vain for N. when we had arranged a meeting.”
I have observed in myself a simple and easily explained example,
which is probably a good model for similar occurrences of those familiar
“remarkable coincidences” wherein we meet a person of whom we were
just thinking. During a walk through the inner city a few days after the
title of “Professor” was bestowed upon me, which carried with it a great
deal of prestige even in monarchical cities, my thoughts suddenly turned
to a childish revenge fantasy against a certain married couple. Some
months previous, this couple had called me to see their little daughter,
who suffered from an interesting compulsive manifestation following
the appearance of a dream. I took a great interest in the case, the genesis
of which I believed I could surmise, but the parents were unfavorable to
my treatment and gave me to understand that they thought of applying
to a foreign authority who treated by hypnotism. I now fancied to myself
that after the failure of this treatment, the parents begged me to take
the patient under my care, saying that they now had full confidence in
me, etc. But I answered: “Now that I have become a professor, you have
confidence in me. The title has made no change in my ability; if you
could not use me when I was instructor, you can get along without me
now that I am a professor.” At this point, my fantasy was interrupted by
a loud “Good evening, Professor I” and as I looked up, there was the
same couple on whom I had just taken this imaginary vengeance.
The next reflection destroyed all semblance of the miraculous. I was
walking toward this couple on a straight, almost deserted street; glancing
up hastily at a distance of perhaps twenty steps from me, I had seen and
realized their stately personalities; but this perception, following the
model of a negative hallucination, was set aside by certain emotionally
accentuated motives and then asserted itself spontaneously as an emerging
fantasy.
A similar experience is related by Brill, which also throws some light
on the nature of telepathy.
“While engrossed in conversation during our customary Sunday
evening dinner at one of the large New York restaurants, I suddenly
stopped and irrelevantly remarked to my wife, ‘I wonder how Dr. R. is
doing in Pittsburgh.' She looked at me much astonished and said: ‘Why,
that is exactly what I have been thinking for the last few seconds! Either
you have transferred this thought to me or I have transferred it to you.
How can you otherwise explain this strange phenomenon?' I had to
admit that I could offer no solution. Our conversation throughout the
dinner showed not the remotest association to Dr. R., nor, so far as our
memories went, had we heard or spoken of him for some time. Being a
skeptic, I refused to admit that there was anything mysterious about it,
although inwardly I felt quite uncertain. To be frank, I was somewhat
mystified.
“But we did not remain very long in this state of mind, for on looking
toward the cloak room, we were surprised to see Dr. R. Closer inspection,
however, showed our mistake, but we were struck by the remarkable
resemblance of this stranger to Dr. R. From the position of the cloak
room, we were forced to conclude that this stranger had passed our
table. Absorbed in our conversation, we had not noticed him consciously,
but the visual image had stirred up the association of his double, Dr. R.
That we should both have experienced the same thought is also quite
natural. The last that we had heard from Dr. R. was that he had taken
up private practice in Pittsburgh, and, being aware of the vicissitudes
that beset the beginner in private practice, it was quite natural that we
should wonder how he was getting along.
“What promised to be a supernatural manifestation was thus easily
explained on a normal basis; but had we not noticed the stranger before
he left the restaurant, it would have been impossible to exclude the mys­
terious. I venture to say that such simple mechanisms are at the basis of
the most complicated telepathic manifestations; at least, that has been
my experience in all those cases that were accessible to investigation."
 Chapter 5

By SIGMUND FREUD**

I n tro d u cto ry R em a r k s
We do not seem destined to work in peace on the development of our
science. Barely did we victoriously repel two attacks—one of which
sought to deny once more that which had been brought to light and to
replace all of its content with the motif of denial, while the other
attempted to beguile us into believing that we had misunderstood the
nature of this content, inviting us to replace it lightly with another—
barely did we begin to feel safe from these foes, when a new danger arose;
this time in the form of something tremendous and fundamental, which
threatens not only us, but even more perhaps our opponents.
It no longer seems possible to brush aside the study of so-called occult
facts; of things which seem to vouchsafe the real existence of psychic
forces other than the known forces of the human and animal psyche, or
which reveal mental faculties in which, until now, we did not believe.
The appeal of this kind of inquiry seems irresistible. In the course of a
brief vacation I had occasion to reject three requests for contributions
emanating from newly founded periodicals devoted to this type of in­
quiry. We believe that we know the source from which this trend derives
its strength. It is but one manifestation of the devaluation which, ever
* Originally published in “Schriften aus dem Nachlass,” Gesammelte Werke,
17:25-44, London, Imago Publishing Co., Ltd., 1941. Authorized translation from the
German by Dr. George Devereux. Published here by permission of Messrs. Sigmund
Freud Copyrights Ltd. Copyright by Messrs. Sigmund Freud Copyrights Ltd., London.
** Note of the Editors of the Gesammelte Werke.—This manuscript has no title and
is dated August 2, 1921. It was written for the Conference of the Central Committee of
the International Psychoanalytical Association, which met in the Harz early in Sep­
tember 1921. A large portion of this material was also used in the New Introductory
Lectures to Psychoanalysis (Lecture XXX: Dreams and the Occult). The “third case”
mentioned in the introductory part of this work is separated from the rest of the
manuscript and forms an appendix thereto. It was reproduced in the New Introduc­
tory Lectures and was therefore not reprinted here.
since the world catastrophy of the great war, has affected everything
established; it is part of the attempt to probe the great upheaval toward
which we are drifting, and whose scope we are unable to fathom as yet.
It is surely also an attempt at compensation, which seeks to regain by
other—supernatural—means the lost appeal of life on this earth. Indeed,
certain trends in the exact sciences may also have favored this develop­
ment. The discovery of radium has complicated the possibility of explain­
ing the physical world quite as much as it has broadened it, and the
newly won insight into the so-called theory of relativity caused some of
its uncomprehending admirers to lose a certain amount of confidence in
the objective plausibility of science. You will recall that Einstein himself
recently found it necessary to protest against such a misunderstanding.
It is by no means self-evident that the strengthening of the interest in
occultism represents a danger for psychoanalysis. On the contrary, one
might expect a mutual sympathy between the two. Both have been sub­
jected by official science to the same unfair and arrogant treatment.
Psychoanalysis is still suspected of mysticism, and the Unconscious is
deemed to belong to those things between Heaven and Earth of which
hidebound philosophy does not wish to dream. The many invitations to
collaborate which we receive from occultists show that they consider us
as belonging, in part at least, to their group, and that they count upon
our support against the pressure of the authority of exact science. Con­
versely, psychoanalysis, which is opposed to all that which is hidebound,
established and generally accepted, has no interest in defending these
authorities in a self-sacrificing manner; it would not be the first time that
psychoanalysis would champion the obscure but indestructible intuitions
of the common people against the arrogant assumed knowledge of the
intellectuals. Thus, an alliance of, and collaboration between, psycho­
analysts and occultists would seem to be both plausible and promising.
However, on closer examination, certain difficulties arise. The over­
whelming majority of occultists is not motivated by a thirst for knowl­
edge, nor by a sense of shame that science should have failed for so long
a time to take cognizance of undeniable problems, nor by the wish to
master this new set of phenomena. On the contrary, they are believers
who want to find new proofs, who seek a justification which would enable
them to confess their creed openly. However, this creed which they seek
first to prove, and then to foist upon others, is an old religious belief,
which, in the course of human evolution, has been pushed into the back­
ground by science, or else it represents still another faith, which is even
closer to the obsolete convictions of primitives. By contrast psychoanalysts
can deny neither their scientific ancestry, nor their kinship with the repre­
sentatives of science. Being extremely distrustful of the power of the
human wish, and of the temptations of the pleasure principle, they are
ready to sacrifice everything—the dazzling radiance of a fully elaborated
theory, the uplifting awareness of the possession of a well-rounded
Weltanschauung, the psychic security derived from a broad motivation
for reality-adequate and ethical action—in order to discover a little bit
of objective certainty. They are content with fragmentary crumbs of
insight and with initial hypotheses which are somewhat indefinite and
subject to change without notice. Instead of waiting for the right moment
in which to escape from the forceful grip of known physical and chemical
laws, they hope for the appearance of more comprehensive and deep-
going natural laws, to which they are ready to give allegiance. Psychoan­
alysts are fundamentally unreconstructed mechanists and materialists,
even though they refuse to strip the mind and the soul of their as yet
undetected qualities. They study occult material only because they hope
that this would enable them to eliminate once and for all the creations
of the human wish from the realm of material reality.
In view of this difference in attitude, collaboration between analysts
and occultists has little prospect of being profitable. The analyst has his
own sphere of activity—the unconscious portion of psychic life—from
which he may not deviate. If, in the course of his work, he is on the
lookout for occult phenomena, he runs the risk of overlooking everything
which is closer at hand. He would lose that unbiased, impartial and un-
anticipative attitude which, up to now, was an essential part of his ana­
lytic armor and equipment. If occult phenomena obtrude themselves in
the same manner as other phenomena do, he will avoid them as little
as he avoids other things. This seems to be the only decision compatible
with analytic activity.
The analyst's self-discipline can protect him against the subjective
risk of having his interest absorbed by occult phenomena. Things are
different, however, as regards the objective danger. It is probable that
the study of occult phenomena will result in the admission that some of
these phenomena are real; but it is also likely that a great deal of time
will elapse before one will be able to formulate an acceptable theory
accounting for these new facts. Eagerly expectant people will not wait
that long, however. The moment a first assent is forthcoming, the oc­
cultists will declare that their cause has triumphed. Belief in one alleged
fact will be held to constitute belief in all others. The scope of belief in
the phenomena themselves will be broadened to include also belief in
those explanations of these phenomena which they favor most, and
which are dearest to them. They mean to use the methods of scientific
investigation only as ladders which are to enable them to rise above
science. It will be a calamity if they ever rise that high! The skepticism
of spectators and of listeners will not induce them to reconsider the
matter, nor will the objections of the multitude impede them. They will
be welcomed as liberators from the irksome obligation of thinking
rationally. They will be jubilantly acclaimed by that predisposition to
credulousness which goes back to the childhood of humanity and of the
individual. Should this come about, we may anticipate a dreadful collapse
of critical thought and of mechanistic science. Will technology be able
to stem this tide by its inflexible concern with the magnitude of force,
with mass and with the quality of matter?
It is a vain hope that analytic work would escape this collapse of
values simply because its object is the mysterious unconscious. If the
spirits, with whom man is familiar, provide the final explanation, then
there will be no interest in the laborious approach of analysis to un­
known psychic forces. Even analytic technique will be forsaken when the
hope beckons that occult measures will enable one to enter into direct
communication with the spirits who determine everything, just as one
forsakes patient detail work, when there is hope of winning riches at a
single stroke, through speculations. During the war we heard of persons
who stood between two enemy nations, belonging to one of them by
birth, and to the other through choice and residence. It was their fate to
be treated as enemies first by one of these nations, and then, when they
were lucky enough to escape, also by the other. The fate of psychoanalysis
may be similar.
However, one must endure one's fate, regardless of what it may be.
Psychoanalysis too will have to adjust to its destiny. Let us return to the
present, and to our proximate task. In the course of the last years I have
made certain observations which I do not wish to withhold from those
at least who are close to us. The disinclination to become involved in the
prevailing trends, the fear of diverting interest from analysis and the
total lack of disguise of my case material explain why I do not wish to
give a wider publicity to my report. It is felt that my material possesses
two unusual advantages. In the first place, it does not give rise to the
type of misgivings and doubts which most of the data of the occultists
elicit. In the second place, the compelling nature of the material becomes
apparent only after it is subjected to analytic study. Admittedly, my ma­
terial consists only of two cases of the same kind. A third case, which is
of another type, and is susceptible of a different interpretation, is merely
added as an appendix. The two cases which I now propose to present in
detail concern events of the same kind: They are prophecies of profes­
sional fortunetellers which did not come true. Nonetheless, they made
an extraordinary impression upon the persons to which they were im­
parted. Hence, their essence cannot be their bearing upon the future.
Every contribution to their explanation, and every objection to their
convincingness will be most welcome to me. My personal attitude toward
such material remains one of reluctance and ambivalence.
I
A few years before the war a young man came to me for analysis from
Germany. He complained that he could not work, had forgotten every­
thing about his life, and had lost interest in everything. He was a Ph.D.
candidate in philosophy, who studied in Munich and was about to take
an examination. He was a highly educated and devious person, the infan­
tile and unruly son of a financier, who, as was subsequently shown, had
been able to cope successfully with a tremendous anal eroticism. When
asked whether nothing at all had been left over from his life and inter­
ests, he admitted that he had outlined a novel, whose historical locale was
Egypt under Amenhotep IV, and in which a ring played a very important
role. Taking this novel as our starting point, we found that the ring was
the symbol of marriage. With this much to go on, we managed to revive
all of his memories and interests. It was disclosed that his breakdown
was the result of a great internal renunciation. He had an only sister,
some years his junior, whom he loved with unconcealed intensity. The
two had often wondered why they could not marry each other. None­
theless, at no time did this tenderness exceed the limits of what is proper
between siblings.
A young engineer fell in love with the sister. She reciprocated his love,
but the suitor found no grace in the eyes of the strict parents. In their
distress the lovers turned to the brother for help. He became the cham­
pion of their cause, relayed their letters and, when home on a vacation,
made it possible for the lovers to meet. Finally he persuaded the parents
to authorize the engagement and the marriage of the lovers. During the
engagement period something extremely suspicious occurred. The brother
and his future brother-in-law decided to climb the Zugspitze, the brother
acting as a guide. The two lost their way, were in danger of falling to
their death, and saved themselves only with considerable effort. The pa­
tient offered no strenuous objections when I interpreted this adventure
as an attempted murder and suicide. A few months after the marriage
of his sister the young man started an analysis.
After six or nine months he regained his working capacity and left
analysis in order to take his examination and write his Ph.D. thesis.
A year later, having obtained his Ph.D., he returned to me for further
analysis, because, as he put it, for a student of philosophy psychoanalysis
possessed an interest which transcended therapeutic success. I know that
he resumed his analysis in October. A few weeks later he mentioned in
some connection the following experience.
There lived in Munich a female fortuneteller, who enjoyed a great
reputation. The Princes of Bavaria consulted her whenever they planned
some undertaking. She asked only that she be given a date. (I forgot to
inquire whether the date had to include also the year.) This date had to
be the birthday of a person, although the fortuneteller did not ask for
the name of the person in question. After obtaining this date, she con­
sulted her astrological books, made long computations and finally made
a prophecy about that person. Last March my patient had allowed him­
self to be persuaded to visit this fortuneteller. He gave her the birth date
of his brother-in-law, without, however, giving her the brother-in-law's
name, and without revealing to her that he had him in mind. The oracle
stated that next July or August this person would die of crab or oyster
poisoning. After reporting this to me, the patient added: “It was mag­
nificent I”
I did not understand what he meant, and contradicted him vigor­
ously: “What is so magnificent about that? You have been with me for
several weeks now. Had your brother-in-law really died, you would have
told me so long ago; therefore he is still alive. The prophecy was made
in March and was to take effect this summer. It is already November.
Hence, the prophecy did not come true. What is it, then, that you admire
about it?"
He replied: “I admit that it did not come true. What is remarkable
about it is this: My brother-in-law is passionately fond of crabs, oysters
and the like, and the preceding August he did, in fact, have crab poison­
ing and almost died of it." We did not discuss the matter any further.
Let us now examine this case.
I have faith in the veracity of the narrator. He has to be taken seri­
ously, and is at present a teacher of philosophy in K. I know of no motive
which could have induced him to mystify me. His narrative was inci­
dental and not at all tendencious. Nothing else was linked with it, and
no conclusions were drawn from it. He did not seek to persuade me of
the existence of occult psychic phenomena; in fact, I had the impression
that the meaning of this experience was not at all clear to him. This
narrative startled me so much, and made so disagreeable an impression
upon me, that I preferred not to subject it to an analytic interpretation.
The communication seems equally unassailable in still another sense.
It is certain that the fortuneteller did not know the client. Ask yourself
what degree of intimacy a knowledge of the date of birth of the brother-
in-law of an acquaintance presupposes. On the other hand, all of you
will join me in doubting stubbornly that, by means of some formulae and
with the help of some tables, one may discover so specific an aspect of
destiny as illness due to crab poisoning. Let us not forget how many
people are born on the same day. Is it conceivable that the community of
fate which may be determined by the date of birth would include such
details? I therefore feel that the astrological computations may be entirely
disregarded in this discussion. It is my belief that the fortuneteller might
just as well have done something else, without changing thereby the
results of the interview. Thus, the source of the deception cannot possibly
have been the fortuneteller, whom we might just as well call “the
medium."
If you concede the reality and genuineness of this observation, then
we are already provided with an explanation thereof. As is the case with
most of these phenomena, we find that their explanation in terms of the
occult hypothesis is unusually adequate, and accounts for everything that
requires an explanation. Unfortunately, this explanation is inherently a
very unsatisfactory one. The fortuneteller could not possibly have known
that the person bom on the date given to her had had a crab poisoning,
and she could not have found this information in her tables and com­
putations. On the other hand, her client did possess this information.
The occurrence can be fully explained if we are willing to assume that
this knowledge was transmitted from the client to the alleged prophetess
by unknown paths, and by means other than the known forms of com­
munication. This, in turn, seems to call for the conclusion that thought
transmission exists. In that case the purpose of the fortuneteller's as­
trological work was to divert her own intra-psychic forces, and to occupy
them innocuously. This made it possible for her to become receptive and
permeable to the impact of the thought of others, and enabled her to be­
come a genuine “medium.” The study of wit has acquainted us with sim­
ilar devices for facilitating the automatic unfolding of psychic processes.
The import and significance of this case can be further increased by
seeking to understand it analytically. Analysis reveals that that which was
inductively transmitted from one person to another was not just any odd
scrap of casual information. On the contrary, it was an extremely strong
wish, which stood in a special relationship to the conscious, and which
found a conscious, though slightly disguised* expression through another
person. Similarly, when the invisible end of the spectrum impinges upon
a photographic plate, it reveals itself, in a form accessible to the senses,
as the colored continuation of the spectrum. It seems possible to recon­
struct the reasoning of this young man after the illness and recovery of
his brother-in-law, who was also his hated rival: “Well, he managed to
pull through this time I This does not mean, however, that he will now
give up this dangerous predilection. Let us hope that he will die of it the
next time.” As a counterpart to this, I could quote to you the dream of
another person, in which a prophecy was part of the manifest content.
Dream analysis revealed that the content of the prophecy was congruent
with a wish fulfillment.
I cannot simplify my interpretation by saying that my patient’s death
wish toward his brother-in-law was unconscious and repressed. During
the previous year this wish had become conscious to him in the course
of his analysis, and the results of its repression had disappeared. Yet the
wish continued to exist, and, without being pathogenic, was still quite
intense. One might call this wish a “suppressed” one.
II
In the town of F. there lived a girl, who was the oldest of five siblings,
all of them girls. The youngest was ten years her junior. One day she let
the baby fall from her arms, and later on she called it “her child.” Her
own birth was followed after the shortest possible interval by the birth
of another sister, both births occurring in the same year. The mother
was older than the father and not amiable at all. Not only was the father
some years her junior, but he also devoted much time to his little girls
and impressed them with his various tricks. Unfortunately he was not at
all impressive otherwise. As a businessman he was unable to support his
family without the help of relatives. His oldest daughter soon became the
confidante of his worries, which were due to his inadequate earning
capacity.
After overcoming her rigid and passionate childhood character, the
girl grew up as a veritable model of all virtues. Her high moral pathos
was coupled with a narrowly limited intelligence. She became a grade-
school teacher, and was highly respected. The timid homage of a relative,
who was a music teacher, did not move her. No man had, as yet, awak­
ened her interest.
One day one of her mother's relatives appeared on the scene. Though
much older than the girl, he was still a fairly young man, since at that
time the girl was only nineteen years of age. He was a foreigner, who
lived in Russia, and was the head of a large commercial enterprise. He
had become so rich that it took nothing less than a world war and the
collapse of the greatest despotism to impoverish him. He fell in love
with his young and austere cousin, and wished to marry her. The parents
did not urge her to accept him, but she knew what they wanted her to
do. Behind all her moral ideals there beckoned the hope of fulfilling the
fantasy wish of helping her father, and of saving him from his difficul­
ties. She expected her future husband to help her father with money, as
long as the latter remained in business, and to pension him off when he
finally gave up his business; and also to provide her sisters with dowries
and trousseaux, in order to enable them to get married. She then fell in
love with him, married him soon thereafter, and followed him to Russia.
With the exception of a few, not easily understandable occurrences,
which acquire a meaning only in retrospect, everything went very well
indeed with this marriage. She became a tenderly loving and sensually
satisfied woman, who was the providence of her family. Only one thing
was lacking: She had remained childless. Finally, at the age of twenty-
seven, while she was living in Germany, she overcame various misgivings
and consulted a German gynecologist. With the usual thoughtlessness of
specialists, this physician assured her of success provided that she con­
sented to subject herself to a minor operation. She was ready to do so,
and in the evening spoke to her husband about this matter. Since it was
getting dark at that time, she wished to turn on the lights. However, her
husband asked her not to do it, since he had something to tell her which
he preferred to say in the dark. He told her to cancel her operation, since
he himself was responsible for their childlessness. Two years earlier, he
had heard at a medical congress that certain maladies deprived the man
of the capacity to procreate children, and an examination had disclosed
that he too was in that situation. After this revelation the operation was
canceled. She then suffered an internal breakdown, which she sought in
vain to conceal. She could love her husband only as a father substitute,
and now she had learned that he could never become a father. She was
confronted with three alternatives, all of which were equally impossible
for her: infidelity, renunciation of the child, and separation from her
husband. The latter was impossible for her, for the best of practical rea­
sons. The penultimate alternative was impossible because of certain very
strong unconscious motives which you will readily guess. Her entire
childhood had been dominated by the thrice deceived hope of getting a
child from her father. Her only way out was the one which happens to
arouse our interest in her: She became severely neurotic. For a while she
protected herself against various temptations by means of an anxiety
hysteria, which later on turned into compulsive rituals. She was placed
in mental institutions, and, finally, after ten years of illness, she came to
me. Her most striking symptom was that in bed she fastened (ansteckte)
her bed linen to the blankets by means of safety pins. In this manner she
betrayed her husband's infection (Ansteckung) which had deprived her
of children.
This patient, who at that time was about forty years old, once told
me of an event which took place during the early stages of her moodiness,
but before the appearance of the compulsion neurosis. In order to divert
her, her husband took her along on a business trip to Paris. The couple
was sitting in the hotel lobby with one of the husband's business ac­
quaintances, when a certain unrest and commotion became apparent in
the room. She asked a hotel employee what was going on, and learned
that Monsieur le Professeur had arrived, and was giving consultations in
his cubicle near the hotel entrance. M. le Professeur was a great fortune­
teller, who asked no questions; instead he made his visitor press his palm
into a bowl of sand, and revealed the future by a study of the handprint.
She said that she too wanted to visit the fortuneteller, in order to have
her future revealed to her, but her husband advised against it, saying that
it was nonsense. However, when her husband departed with his business
acquaintance, she removed the wedding ring from her finger and sneaked
into the cabinet of the fortuneteller. He studied her handprint for a
long time, and then said: “You will have great struggles in the near fu­
ture, but everything will end well. You will marry and will have two
children by the time you are thirty-two years old/' She told this story ad­
miringly, and apparently quite without insight. My comment: “It is re­
grettable that the fulfillment of the prophecy is eight years overdue,”
made no impression on her. I might have imagined that she admired the
confident temerity of this prophecy, the “rabbi's eagle eye."
Unfortunately, my usually reliable memory is not certain whether the
first part of the prophecy was that all would end well, and that she would
marry, or simply that she would be happy. My attention was entirely
focused upon the clearly remembered final sentence and its striking de­
tails. Indeed, the first sentences, about struggles which will have a happy
ending, correspond to the vague remarks which occur in all prophecies,
including those which one can buy ready made. The definiteness of the
two numbers occurring in the last sentence is therefore doubly impres­
sive. Yet, it would certainly not be without interest to know whether the
Professor had really spoken of a marriage. Although she had removed
her wedding band, and at twenty-seven looked young enough to be taken
for a single girl, it would not have required much subtlety to recognize
the mark of the wedding band on her finger. Let us limit ourselves there­
fore to the problem presented by the last sentence, which promised her
two children by the time she was thirty-two years old.
Indeed, these details seem entirely arbitrary and inexplicable. Even
the most credulous would hardly presume to derive them from the inter­
pretation of the lines of the hand. These details would have been un­
questionably justified, had fate confirmed them. This, however, fate had
failed to do, since she was now forty years old, and still childless. What,
then, was the origin of these numbers? The patient herself had no ideas
whatsoever regarding this matter. The simplest thing would be to disre­
gard this problem entirely, and to cast this apparently worthless event
into the limbo of many other meaningless data of an allegedly occult
nature.
This would be very convenient indeed; it would be both the simplest
solution and the most desirable relief for us. However, I am forced to
say that, unfortunately for us, it is precisely analysis which is in a position
to provide an explanation of these two numbers, and, at that, an explana­
tion of a kind which is entirely satisfying and, given the nature of the
situation, almost self-evident. Indeed, the two numbers are in perfect con­
cordance with the life history of our patient's mother. The latter married
after her thirtieth birthday and her thirty-second year was precisely the
one in which—deviating from the usual fate of women, and almost as
though seeking to make up for lost time—she gave birth to two children.
The prophecy is therefore easy to interpret: “Don't grieve over your
present childlessness; it means nothing. You can still have the same fate
as your mother, who at your age was not even married, and yet had two
children at the age of thirty-two." The prophecy, coming from the mouth
of a fortuneteller who was ignorant of all these personal details, and was
occupied with a handprint in the sand, promised her the gratification of
that mother identification which was the secret of her childhood. We are
free to assume that this completely unconscious wish fulfillment presup­
posed the following: “You will be rid of your useless husband through
death, or else you will find the strength to leave him." The nature of the
compulsion neurosis is more compatible with the first alternative, while
the victorious struggles mentioned in the prophecy seem to suggest the
latter alternative.
You will recognize that, in this case, analytic interpretation plays an
even greater role than in the preceding one; one might even say that it
actually brought the occult factor into being. Consequently, in this in­
stance too one seems obliged to concede the compelling convincingness
of the possibility that an unconscious wish, and the thoughts and factual
material connected therewith, have been transferred from one person to
another. I see only one way of escaping the compellingness of this case,
and certainly do not propose to conceal it from you. In the course of the
twelve or thirteen years which had elapsed between the prophecy and the
reporting thereof in therapy, the patient may possibly have evolved a
falsification of memory. Indeed, the Professor may only have uttered
some comforting, and not at all amazing, banalities, into which she grad­
ually inserted the significant numbers derived from her unconscious. If
this is so, then the facts, which seek to force so momentous a conclusion
upon us, become rather flimsy. We would gladly share the views of the
skeptic who is willing to discuss such material only if it is reported im­
mediately after the event, and perhaps even then only with certain mis­
givings. I recall that, on being appointed to a professorship, I had an
audience with the Minister, in order to thank him. While leaving the au­
dience, I caught myself in the act of trying to falsify the conversation
which had taken place between him and myself, and it was never again
possible for me to remember correctly the conversation which had actu­
ally taken place. I must leave it to you to decide whether or not this ex­
planation is a legitimate one. I can neither refute nor confirm it. For
this reason this second observation, though inherently more impressive
than the first one, is also more open to doubt.
The two cases which I submitted to you concern prophecies which did
not come true. I believe that such observations provide the best material
for the study of the problem of thought transference, and I would like
to induce you to collect similar cases. I also prepared for you a sample
of another kind of material. This case is that of a patient of a special
kind, who discussed in his analytic hour matters which were related in a
striking manner to an experience of my own immediately before his
hour. But you are about to receive a tangible proof of the fact that it is
only with the greatest reluctance that I concern myself with these occult
questions. While in Gastein, I took out the notes which I had selected
and taken along for the purpose of preparing this report, and found that
the sheet of paper on which I had jotted down these latter observations
was not there. Instead, there was another sheet, which contained certain
other, irrelevant notes of another kind, which I had mistakenly brought
along with me. Nothing is to be done in the face of so obvious a resist­
ance. I cannot give you a report of this case, because I am unable to
reconstruct it from memory. Instead, I will add a few remarks about a
person well known in Vienna, the graphologist Rafael Scherman, who is
reputed to have performed the most amazing feats. He is said to be able
not only to infer the character of a person from a sample of his hand­
writing, but also to give a description of that person, and to make predic­
tions which are eventually confirmed by fate. Many of these remarkable
feats are admittedly reported by Scherman himself. Without telling me
of his plan beforehand, a friend of mine once tried to make Scherman
fantasy about a sample of my own handwriting. He was able to disclose
only that it was the writing of an old gentleman—which was easy to
guess—with whom it is difficult to live, because he is an insupportable
domestic tyrant. Members of my household would hardly confirm this.
But, as is well known, in the field of the occult there prevails the com­
fortable basic principle that a negative case does not prove anything.
 I made no direct observations on Scherman, but have, through the
intermediary of a patient, entered with him into a relationship of which
he is not cognizant. 1 want to tell you something about this matter. Sev­
eral years ago a young man came to me for analysis. He made so very
agreeable an impression upon me, that I gave him preference over many
others. It was found that he was involved in an affair with one of the best
known demimondaines. He wished to extricate himself from it, but,
lacking all power of self-determination, was unable to do so. I was able
to free him from his bondage, and, in the course of this process, one ob­
tained also full insight into his compulsion. Several months ago he con­
tracted a normal marriage, compatible with middle-class standards. In
the course of the analysis it soon became apparent that the compulsion
against which he fought did not bind him to this demimondaine, but to
a woman of his own social class, with whom he had had an affair ever
since his youth. The demimondaine had been accepted only as a “whip­
ping boy,” who enabled him to gratify through her all the vengefulness
and jealousy whose true object was his beloved mistress. In accordance
with a familiar pattern, he escaped the inhibitions of ambivalence by
means of a displacement to a new object.
He was in the habit of torturing this demimondaine, who had fallen
in love with him in the most unselfish manner, with the most refined
cruelty. When she was no longer able to conceal her suffering, he de­
flected to her also the tenderness he felt for the love of his youth. He
gave her presents and conciliated her, only to start the cycle all over
again. When, under the influence of the therapy, he finally broke with
her, it became apparent what his behavior toward this substitute for his
beloved one had sought to accomplish: He sought to obtain a compensa­
tion for his youthful attempt to kill himself when his beloved refused to
yield to him. After this suicidal attempt he finally managed to conquer
his beloved, who was older than himself. During this phase of his treat­
ment he was in the habit of visiting Scherman, with whom he was ac­
quainted. Scherman repeatedly found in the handwriting samples of the
demimondaine indications that she was at the end of her strength, on
the verge of suicide, and certain to kill herself. This she failed to do,
however. Instead, she shook off her human foibles, recalled the principles
of her profession, and her duties toward her official lover. It was clear
to me that the wizard had revealed to my patient only the latter's own
secret wish.
After ridding himself of this screen personage, my patient engaged
seriously in the task of freeing himself also from his real bondage. I in­
ferred from his dreams that he was just then evolving a plan to break
off the affair with the love of his youth, without deeply wounding or
materially damaging her. She had a daughter, who behaved very affec­
tionately toward her mother's lover, and was supposedly unaware of the
secret role of the latter. He wished to marry this girl. Soon thereafter the
plan became conscious, and the man undertook the first steps leading to
its realization. I encouraged this intention, which offered an irregular,
but nonetheless possible way out of a difficult situation. However, he
soon had a dream which was very hostile toward the girl. He once more
consulted Scherman, who declared that the girl was childish, neurotic and
not suitable for marriage. This time this great expert on the human
heart was right, because the behavior of the girl, who was practically en­
gaged to this young man, gradually became so inconsistent that it was
decided to get her into analysis. The analysis resulted in the cancellation
of the marriage plans. The girl had had a detailed unconscious knowl­
edge of the relationship between her mother and her fiance, and was at­
tached to the latter only because of her oedipus complex.
The analysis was terminated at this point. The patient was free and
capable of making his own way in the future. He married a respectable
girl, who did not belong to his family circle, and about whom Scherman
expressed a favorable opinion. May he be right again this time!
You have already understood in what way I wish to interpret my ex­
periences with Scherman. You note that all of my material pertains solely
to the problem of thought induction. I have nothing to say about the
rest of the wonders of occultism. I have already publicly admitted that
from the occult viewpoint my own life was a singularly barren one. Per­
haps the problem of thought transference will seem rather trifling to you
in comparison with the great world of occult miracles. Yet consider that
even this hypothesis already represents a great and momentous step be­
yond our present viewpoint. The remark which the custodian of St.
Denis usually appended to his narrative of the martyrdom of that saint
also applies to this problem. After being decapitated, St. Denis is said to
have picked up his head and, holding it in his arms, to have walked
quite a distance with it. At this point the custodian made the comment:
“Dans des cas pareils, ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute.”1 The rest
comes easy.

i In such instances only the first step is hard.

 Chapter 6
DREAMS AND TELEPATHY*
By SIGMUND FREUD

At the present time, when such great interest is felt in what are called
“occult” phenomena, very definite anticipations will doubtless be aroused
by the announcement of a paper with this title. I will therefore hasten to
explain that there is no ground for any such anticipations. You will
learn nothing from this paper of mine about the enigma of telepathy;
indeed, you will not even gather whether I believe in the existence of
“telepathy” or not. On this occasion I have set myself the very modest
task of examining the relation of telepathic occurrences, whatever their
origin may be, to dreams, more exactly, to our theory of dreams. You
will know that the connection between dreams and telepathy is com­
monly held to be a very intimate one; I shall propound the view that
the two have little to do with each other, and that if the existence of
telepathic dreams were established there would be no need to alter our
conception of dreams in any way.
The material on which the present communication is based is very
slight. In the first place, I must express my regret that I could make no
use of my own dreams, as I did when I wrote the Traumdeutung (66).
But I have never had a “telepathic” dream. Not that I have been with­
out dreams that conveyed an impression of a certain definite occurrence
taking place at some distant place, leaving it to the dreamer to decide
whether the occurrence is taking place at that moment or will do so at
some later time. In waking life, too, I have often become aware of pre­
sentiments of distant events. But these hints, foretellings and forebod­
ings have none of them “come true,” as we say; there proved to be no ex­
ternal reality corresponding to them, and they had therefore to be re­
garded as purely subjective anticipations.
* Paper read before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Originally published in
Imago, 8:1 “22, 1922. Translated from the German by C. J. M. Hubback, published in
Collected Papers, 4:408-435, London, Hogarth Press, 1925. Published here by permis­
sion of Hogarth Press, London,
 For example, I once dreamed during the war that one of my sons then
serving at the front had fallen. This was not directly stated in the dream,
but was expressed in an unmistakable manner, by means of the well-
known death symbolism of which an account was first given by W.
Stekel (181,182). (Let us not omit here to fulfill the duty, often felt to be
inconvenient, of making literary acknowledgments!) I saw the young
soldier standing on a landing stage, between land and water, as it were;
he looked to me very pale; I spoke to him but he did not answer. There
were other unmistakable indications. He was not wearing military uni­
form, but a skiing costume that he had worn when a serious skiing acci­
dent had happened to him several years before the war. He stood on
something like a footstool with a chest in front of him; a situation always
closely associated in my mind with the idea of “falling," through a mem­
ory of my own childhood. As a child of little more than two years old I
had myself climbed on such a footstool to get something off the top of a
chest—probably something good to eat—whereupon I fell and gave my­
self an injury, of which I can even now show the scar. My son, however,
whom the dream pronounced to be dead, came home from the war un­
scathed.
Only a short time ago, I had another dream announcing misfortune;
it was, I think, just before I decided to put together these few remarks.
This time there was not much attempt at disguise: I saw my two nieces
who live in England; they were dressed in black and said to me “We
buried her on Thursday." I knew the reference was to the death of their
mother, now eighty-seven years of age, the widow of my eldest brother.
A time of disagreeable anticipation followed; there would of course
be nothing surprising in so aged a woman suddenly passing away, yet it
would be very unpleasant for the dream to coincide exactly with the oc­
currence. The next letter from England, however, dissipated this fear.
For the benefit of those who are concerned for the wish-fulfillment the­
ory of dreams I may interpolate a reassurance by saying that there was no
difficulty in detecting by analysis the unconscious motives that might be
presumed to exist in these death dreams just as in others.
Do not now urge the objection that what I have just related is value­
less because negative experiences prove as little here as they do in less
occult matters. I am well aware of that and have not adduced these in­
stances with any intention whatever of proving anything or of surrep­
titiously influencing you in any particular way. My sole purpose was to
explain the paucity of my material.
Another fact certainly seems to me of more significance, namely, that
during my twenty-seven years of work as an analyst I have never been in
a position to observe a truly telepathic dream in any of my patients. The
people among whom my practice lay certainly formed a good collection
of very neurotic and “highly sensitive" temperaments; many of them
have related to me most remarkable incidents in their previous life on
which they based a belief in mysterious occult influences. Events such as
accidents or illnesses of near relatives, in particular the death of one of
the parents, have often enough happened during the treatment and in­
terrupted it; but not on one single occasion did these occurrences,
eminently suitable as they were, afford me the opportunity of registering
a single telepathic dream, although treatment extended over several
months or even years. Anyone may explain this fact as he likes; in any
event it again limits the material at my disposal. You will see that any
such explanation would not affect the subject of this paper.
Nor does it embarrass me to be asked why I have made no use of the
abundant supply of telepathic dreams that have been published. I should
not have had far to seek, since the publications of the English as well as
of the American Society for Psychical Research are accessible to me as a
member of both societies. In all these communications no attempt is
ever made to subject such dreams to analytic investigation, which would
be our first interest in such cases.1 Moreover, you will soon perceive that
for the purposes of this paper one single dream will serve well enough.
My material thus consists simply and solely of two communications
which have reached me from correspondents in Germany. They are not
personally known to me, but they give their names and addresses: I have
not the least ground for presuming any intention to mislead on the part
of the writers.
I
With the first I had already been in correspondence; he had been
good enough to send me, as many of my readers do, observations of ev­
eryday occurrences and the like. He is obviously an educated and highly
intelligent man; this time he expressly placed his material at my disposal
if I care to turn it “to literary account.”
His letter runs as follows:
“I consider the following dream of sufficient interest to give you some
material for your researches.
“I must first state the following facts. My daughter, who is married
and lives in Berlin, was expecting her first confinement in the middle of
December of this year. I intended to go to Berlin about that time with
my (second) wife, my daughter’s stepmother. During the night of No­
vember 16-17 I dreamed, with a vividness and clearness I have never be­
fore experienced, that my wife had given birth to twins. I saw quite
plainly the two healthy infants with their chubby faces lying in their cot
side by side; I was not sure of their sex: one with fair hair had distinctly
my features and something of my wife's, the other with chestnut-brown
i In two publications by W. Stekel (mentioned above) (181, 182) there are at least
attempts to apply the analytic technique to alleged telepathic dreams. The author ex­
presses his belief in the reality of telepathy.
hair clearly resembled her with a look of me. I said to my wife, who has
red-gold hair, ‘Probably “your” child's chestnut hair will also go red
later on.’ My wife gave them the breast. In the dream she had also made
some jam in a wash basin and the two children crept about on all fours
in the basin and licked up the contents.
“So much for the dream. Four or five times I had half awaked from it,
asked myself if it were true that we had twins, but did not come to the
conclusion with any certainty that it was only a dream. The dream lasted
till I woke, and after that it was some little time before I felt quite clear
about the true state of affairs. At breakfast I told my wife the dream,
which much amused her. She said, ‘Surely Use (my daughter) won't have
twins?’ I answered, 41 should hardly think so, as there have never been
twins either in my family or in G.Y (her husband). On November 18, at
ten o’clock in the morning, I received a telegram from my son-in-law
handed in the afternoon before, telling me of the birth of twins, boy and
girl. The birth thus took place at the time when I was dreaming that my
wife had twins. The confinement occurred four weeks earlier than had
been expected by my daughter and her husband.
“But there is a further circumstance: the next night I dreamed that
my dead wife, my daughter’s own mother, had undertaken the care of
forty-eight newborn infants. When the first dozen were being brought in,
I protested. At that point the dream ended.
“My dead wife was very fond of children. She often talked about it,
saying she would like a whole troop round her, the more the better, and
that she would do very well if she had charge of a Kindergarten and
would be quite happy so. The noise children make was music to her. On
one occasion she invited a whole troop of children from the streets and
regaled them with chocolates and cakes in the courtyard of our villa. My
daughter must have thought at once of her mother after her confinement,
especially because of the surprise of its coming on prematurely, the ar­
rival of twins, and their difference in sex. She knew her mother would
have greeted the event with the liveliest joy and sympathy. ‘Only think
what mother would say, if she were by me nowl' This thought must un­
doubtedly have gone through her mind. And then I dream of my dead
wife, of whom I very seldom dream, and had neither spoken of nor
thought of since the first dream.
“Do you think the coincidence between dream and event in both
cases accidental? My daughter is much attached to me and was most cer­
tainly thinking of me during the labor, particularly because we had often
exchanged letters during the pregnancy and I had constantly given her
advice.”
It is easy to guess what my answer to this letter was. I was sorry to
find that my correspondent’s interest in analysis had been so completely
killed by that in telepathy; I therefore avoided his direct question, and,
remarking that the dream contained a good deal besides its connection
with the birth of the twins, I asked him to let me know what information
or incidents could give me a clue to the meaning of the dream.
 Thereupon I received the following second letter which certainly did
not give me what I wanted:
“I have not been able to answer your kind letter of the 24th until to­
day. I shall be only too pleased to tell you ‘without omission or reserve'
all the associations that occur to me. Unfortunately there is not much,
more would come out in talking.
“Well then—my wife and I do not wish for any more children. We
very rarely have sexual intercourse; at any rate at the time of the dream
there was certainly no 'danger/ My daughter's confinement, which was
expected about the middle of December, was naturally a frequent sub­
ject of conversation between us. My daughter had been examined and
skiagraphed in the summer, and the doctor making the examination had
made sure that the child would be a boy. My wife said at the time, *1
should laugh if after all it were a girl.' At the time she also thought to
herself it would be better if it were an H. rather than a G. (my son-in-
law's family name); my daughter is handsomer and has a better figure
than my son-in-law, although he has been a naval officer. I have made
some study of the question of heredity and am in the habit of looking
at small children to see whom they resemble. One more thing! We have
a small dog which sits with us at table in the evening to have his food
and licks the plates and dishes. All this material appears in the dream.
“I am fond of small children and have often said that I should like
to have the bringing up of a child once more, now that I should have so
much more understanding, interest and time to devote to it, but with my
wife I should not wish it, as she does not possess the necessary qualities
for rearing a child judiciously. The dream makes me a present of two
children—I am not sure of the sex. I see them even at this moment lying
in the bed and I recognize the features, the one more like myself, the
other like my wife, but each with minor traits from the other side. My
wife has auburn hair, one of the children chestnut (red) brown. I say,
‘Yes, it will later on be red too.' Both the children crawl round a large
wash basin in which my wife has been stirring jam and lick it all over
(dream). The origin of this detail is easily explicable, just as is the dream
as a whole; it would not be difficult to understand or interpret it, if it
had not coincided with the unexpectedly early arrival of my grandchil­
dren (three weeks too soon), a coincidence of time almost to the hour (I
cannot exactly say when the dream began; my grandchildren were bom at
nine P.M. and a quarter past; I went to bed at about eleven and dreamed
during the night). Our knowledge too that the child would be a boy adds
to the difficulty, though possibly the doubt whether this had been fully
established might account for the appearance of twins in the dream.
Still, all the same, there is the coincidence of the dream with the unex­
pected and premature appearance of my daughter's twins.
“It is not the first time that distant events have become known to me
before I received the actual news. To give one instance among many. In
October I had a visit from my three brothers. We had not all seen one
another together for thirty years (naturally one had seen another oftener),
once only at my father’s funeral and once at my mother’s. Both deaths
were expected, and I had had no ‘presentiments' in either case. But, when
about twenty-five years ago my youngest brother died quite suddenly and
unexpectedly at the age of nine, as the postman handed me the postcard
with the news of his death, before I even glanced at it, the thought came
to me at once, ‘That is to say that your brother is dead.' He was the only
one left at home, a strong healthy lad, while we four elder brothers were
already fully fledged and had left the parents' house. At the time of their
visit to me the talk by chance came round to this experience of mine, and,
as if on the word of command, all three brothers came out with the dec­
laration that exactly the same thing had happened to them. Whether ex­
actly in the same way I cannot say; at all events each one said that he had
felt perfectly certain of the death in advance before the quite unexpected
news had been communicated, following closely as it did on the presenti­
ment. We are all from the mother's side of a sensitive disposition, though
tall, strong men, but not one of us is in the least inclined toward spirit­
ism or occultism; on the contrary, we disclaim adherence to either. My
brothers are all three University men, two are schoolmasters, one a sur­
veyor, all rather pedants than visionaries. That is all I can tell you in re­
gard to the dream. If you can turn it to account in any of your writings,
I am delighted to place it at your disposal."
I am afraid that you will behave like the writer of these letters. You,
too, will be primarily interested in the question whether this dream can
really be regarded as a telepathic notification of the unexpected birth of
the twin children, and you will not be disposed to submit this dream like
any other to analysis. I foresee that it will always be so when psycho­
analysis and occultism encounter each other. The former has, so to speak,
all our instinctive prepossessions against it; the latter is met half-way by
powerful and mysterious sympathies. I am not, however, going to take up
the position that I am nothing but a psychoanalyst, that the problems of
occultism do not concern me: you would rightly judge that to be only
an evasion of the problem. On the contrary, I maintain that it would be
a great satisfaction to me if I could convince myself and others on unim­
peachable evidence of the existence of telepathic processes, but I also
consider that the data about this dream are altogether inadequate to
justify any such pronouncement. You will observe that it does not once
occur to this intelligent man, deeply interested as he is in the problem of
his dream, to tell us when he had last seen his daughter or what news he
had lately had from her; he writes in the first letter that the birth was a
month too soon, in the second, however, the month has become three
weeks only, and in neither do we gain the information whether the birth
was really premature, or whether, as so often happens, those concerned
were out in their reckoning. But we should have to consider these and
other details o£ the occurrence if we are to weigh the probability of the
dreamer making unconscious estimates and guesses. I felt too that it
would be of no use even if I succeeded in getting answers to such ques­
tions. In the course of arriving at the information new doubts would
constantly arise, which could only be set at rest if one had the man in
front of one and could revive all the relevant memories which he had
perhaps dismissed as unessential. He is certainly right in what he says at
the beginning of his second letter: more would come out if he were able
to talk to me.
Consider another and similar case, in which the disturbing interest of
occultism has no part. You must often have been in the position to com­
pare the anamnesis and the information about the illness given during
the first sitting by any neurotic with what you have gained from him after
some months of psychoanalysis. Apart from the inevitable abbreviations
of the first communication, how many essentials were left out or sup­
pressed, how many displacements made in the relation the various facts
bear to one another—in fact, how much that was incorrect or untrue
was related to you that first timel You will not call me hypercritical if I
refuse in the circumstances to make any pronouncement whether the
dream in question is a telepathic fact or a particularly subtle achieve­
ment on the part of the dreamer’s unconscious or whether it is simply
to be taken as a striking coincidence. Our curiosity must be allayed with
the hope of some later opportunity for detailed oral examination of the
dreamer. But you cannot say that this outcome of our investigation has
disappointed you, for I prepared you for it; I said you would hear noth­
ing which would throw any light on the problem of telepathy.
If we now pass on to the analytic treatment of this dream, we are
obliged again to admit that we are not satisfied. The material that the
dreamer associates with the manifest content of the dream is insufficient
to make any analysis possible. The dream, for example, goes into great
detail over the likeness of the children to the parents, discusses the color
of their hair and the probable change of color at a later age, and as an
explanation of this much spun-out detail we only have the dry piece of
information from the dreamer that he has always been interested in
questions of likeness and heredity; we are certainly accustomed to push
the matter rather further! But at one point the dream does admit of an
analytic interpretation, and just at this point analysis, otherwise having
no connection with occultism, comes to the aid of telepathy in a remark­
able way. It is only on account of this single point that I am asking for
your attention to this dream at all.
Rightly viewed, this dream has no right whatever to be called “tele­
pathic/’ It does not inform the dreamer of anything that is taking place
elsewhere—apart from what is otherwise known to him. What, on the
other hand, the dream does relate is something quite different from the
event reported in the telegram the second day after the night of the
dream. Dream and actual occurrence diverge at a particularly important
point, and only agree, apart from the coincidence of time, in another
very interesting element. In the dream the dreamer’s wife has twins. The
occurrence, however, is that his daughter has given birth to twins in her
distant home. The dreamer does not overlook this difference, he does not
seem to know any way of getting over it and, as according to his own ac­
count he has no leaning toward the occult, he only asks quite tentatively
whether the coincidence between dream and occurrence on the point of
the twin birth can be more than an accident. The psychoanalytic inter­
pretation of dreams, however, does away with this difference between
the dream and the event, and gives to both the same content. If we con­
sult the association material to this dream, it proves to us, in spite of its
sparseness, that an inner bond of feeling exists between this father and
daughter, a bond of feeling which is so usual and so natural that we
ought to cease to be ashamed of it, one that in daily life merely finds ex­
pression as a tender interest and only in dreams is pushed to its logical
conclusion. The father knows that his daughter clings to him, he is con­
vinced that she often thought of him during the labor, in his heart I
think he grudges her to the son-in-law, about whom in one letter he
makes a few disparaging remarks. On the occasion of her confinement
(whether expected or communicated by telepathy) the unconscious
though repressed wish becomes active: “she ought rather to be my (sec­
ond) wife”; it is this wish that has distorted the dream thoughts and is
the cause of the difference between the manifest dream content and the
event. We are entitled to replace the second wife in the dream by the
daughter. If we possessed more associations with the dream, we could un­
doubtedly verify and deepen this interpretation.
And now I have reached the point I wish to put before you. We have
endeavored to maintain the strictest impartiality and have allowed two
conceptions of the dream to rank as equally probable and equally un­
proved. According to the first the dream is a reaction to the telepathic
message: “your daughter has just brought twins into the world.” Ac­
cording to the second an unconscious chain of thought underlies the
dream, which may be reproduced somewhat as follows: “Today is un­
doubtedly the day the confinement will take place if the young people
in Berlin are out in their reckoning by a month, as I strongly suspect.
And if my (first) wife were still alive, she certainly would not be content
with one grandchild! To please her there would have to be at least
twins.” If this second view is right, no new problems arise. It is simply a
dream like any other. The (preconscious) dream thoughts as outlined
above are reinforced by the (unconscious) wish that no other than the
daughter should be the second wife of the dreamer, and thus the mani­
fest dream as described to us arises.
If you prefer to assume that a telepathic message about the daughter's
confinement reached the sleeper, further questions arise of the relation of
such a message to the dream and of its influence on the formation of the
dream. The answer is not far to seek and is not at all ambiguous. The
telepathic message has been treated as a portion of the material that
goes to the formation of a dream, like any other external or internal
stimulus, like a disturbing noise in the street or an insistent organic sen­
sation in the sleeper's own body. In our example it is evident how the
message, with the help of a lurking repressed wish, becomes remodeled
into a wish fulfillment; it is unfortunately less easy to show that it blends
with other material that becomes active at the same time so as to make a
dream. The telepathic message—if we are justified in recognizing its ex­
istence—can thus make no alteration in the structure of the dream;
telepathy has nothing to do with the essential nature of dreams. And
that I may avoid the impression that I am trying to conceal a vague no­
tion behind an abstract and fine-sounding word, I am willing to repeat:
the essential nature of dreams consists in the peculiar process of the
“dream work” whereby the preconscious thoughts (residue from the pre­
vious day) are worked over into the manifest dream content by means of
an unconscious wish. The problem of telepathy concerns dreams as little
as the problem of anxiety.
I am hoping that you will grant this, but that you will raise the ob­
jection that there are, nevertheless, other telepathic dreams in which
there is no difference between the event and the dream, and in which
there is nothing else to be found but the undisguised reproduction of
the event. I have no knowledge of such dreams from my own experience,
but I know they have often been reported. If we now assume that we
have such an undisguised and unadulterated telepathic dream to deal
with, another question arises. Ought we to call such a telepathic experi­
ence a “dream” at all? You will certainly do so as long as you keep to
popular usage, in which everything that takes place in mental life during
sleep is called a dream. You, too, perhaps say, “I tossed about in my
dream,” and you are not conscious of anything incorrect when you say,
“I shed tears in my dream” or “I felt apprehensive in my dream.” But
notice that in all these cases you are using “dream” and “sleep” and
“state of being asleep” interchangeably, as if there were no distinction
between them. I think it would be in the interest of scientific accuracy to
keep “dream” and “state of sleep” more distinctly separate. Why should
we provide a counterpart to the confusion evoked by Maeder who, by
refusing to distinguish between the dream work and the latent dream
thoughts, has discovered a new function for dreams? Supposing, then,
that we are brought face to face with a pure telepathic “dream,” let us
call it instead a telepathic experience in a state of sleep. A dream with­
out condensation, distortion, dramatization, above all, without wish ful­
fillment, surely hardly deserves the name. You will remind me that, if so,
there are other mental products in sleep to which the right to be called
“dreams” would have to be refused. Actual experiences of the day are
known to be simply repeated in sleep; reproductions of traumatic scenes
in “dreams” have led us only lately to revise the theory of dreams. There
are dreams which by certain special qualities are to be distinguished
from the usual type, which are, properly speaking, nothing but night
fantasies, not having undergone additions or alterations of any kind and
in all other ways similar to the well-known daydreams. It would be awk­
ward, certainly, to exclude these imaginings from the realm of “dreams.”
But still they all come from within, are products of our mental life,
whereas the very conception of the purely “telepathic dream” lies in its
being a perception of something external, in relation to which the mind
remains passive and receptive.
II
The second case I intend to bring before your notice belongs to quite
another type. This is not a telepathic dream, but a dream that has re­
curred from childhood onwards, in a person who has had many telepathic
experiences. Her letter, which I reproduce here, contains much that is
remarkable about which we cannot form any judgment. Some part of it
is of interest in connection with the problem of the relation of telepathy
to dreams.
1. My doctor, Herr Dr. N., advises me to give you an account
of a dream that has haunted me for about thirty or thirty-two years. I
am following his advice, and perhaps the dream may possess interest for
you in some scientific respect. Since, in your opinion, such dreams are to
be traced to an experience of a sexual nature in the first years of child­
hood, I relate some reminiscences of childhood, that is, experiences which
even now make an impression on me and were of so marked a character
as to have determined my religion for me.
“May I beg of you to send me word in what way you explain this
dream and whether it is not possible to banish it from my life, for it
haunts me like a ghost and the circumstances that always accompany it
—I always fall out of bed, and have inflicted on myself not inconsider­
able injuries—make it particularly disagreeable and distressing.
2. “I am thirty-seven years old, very strong and in good physical
health, but in childhood I had, besides measles and scarlet fever, an
attack of inflammation of the kidneys. In my fifth year I had a very severe
inflammation of the eyes, which left double vision. One image slants
toward the other and the edges of the image are blurred, as the scars from
the ulcers affect the clearness. In the specialist’s opinion there is nothing
more to be done to the eyes and no chance of improvement. The left side
of my face was somewhat awry, from having screwed up my left eye to
see better. By dint of practice and determination I can do the finest
needlework, and similarly, when a six-year-old child, I broke myself of
squinting sideways by practicing in front of a looking glass, so that now
there is no external sign of the defect in vision.
“In my earliest years I was always lonely, kept apart from other chil­
dren and had visions (clairvoyance and clairaudience); I was not able to
distinguish these from reality, and was often in consequence in embar­
rassing positions, with the result that I am a very reserved and shy person.
Since as a quite small child I already knew far more than I could have
learned, I simply did not understand children of my own age. I am my­
self the eldest of a family of twelve.
“From six to ten years old I attended the parish school and up to six­
teen the high school of the Ursuline Nuns in B. At ten years old I had
taken in as much French in four weeks, in eight lessons, as other children
learn in two years. I had only to repeat it and it was just as if I had
already learned it and only forgotten it. I have never had any need to
learn French, in contradistinction to English, which certainly gave me
no trouble but was not known to me beforehand. The same thing hap­
pened to me with Latin as with French and I have never properly learned
it, only knowing it from ecclesiastical Latin, which is, however, quite
familiar to me. If I read a French book today, then I immediately begin
thinking in French, whereas this never happens to me with English, al­
though I have more command of English. My parents are peasant people
who for generations have never spoken any languages except German
and Polish.
“Visions. Sometimes reality vanishes for some moments and I see
something quite different. In my house, for example, I often see an old
couple and a child; and the house is then differently furnished. In a
sanatorium a friend once came into my room at about four in the morn­
ing; I was awake, had the lamp burning, and was sitting at my table
reading, as I suffer much from sleeplessness. This apparition of her always
means a trying time for me—as also on this occasion.
“In 1914 my brother was on active service; I was not with my parents
in B., but in C. It was ten in the morning on August 22 when I heard
my brother's voice calling, ‘Mother! Mother!' It came again ten minutes
later, but I saw nothing. On August 24 I came home, found my mother
greatly depressed, and in answer to my questions she said that the boy
had appeared on August 22. She had been in the garden in the morning,
when she had heard him call, ‘Mother! Mother!' I tried to comfort her
and said nothing about myself. Three weeks after there came a card from
my brother, written on August 22 between nine and ten in the morning;
shortly after that he died.
“On September 27, 1921, while in the sanatorium, I received a message
of some kind. There were violent knockings two or three times repeated
on the bed of the patient who shared my room. We were both awake;
I asked if she had knocked; she had not heard anything at all. Eight
weeks later I heard that one of my friends had died in the night of
September 26-27.
“Now something which is regarded as a hallucination, a matter of
opinion! I have a friend who married a widower with five children; I got
to know the husband only through my friend. Nearly every time that
I have been to see her, I have seen a lady going in and out of the house.
It was natural to suppose that this was the husband's first wife. I asked at
some convenient opportunity for a portrait of her, but could not identify
the apparition with the photograph. Seven years later I saw a picture
with the features of the lady, belonging to one of the children. It was
after all the first wife. In the first picture she looked in much better
health; she had just been through a feeding-up treatment and that alters
the appearance of a consumptive patient.—These are only a few examples
out of many.
"The dream. I see a tongue of land surrounded by water. The waves
 are driven to and fro by the surf. On this piece of land stands a palm
tree, bent somewhat toward the water. A woman has her arm wound
round the stem of the palm and is bending low toward the water, where
a man is trying to reach the shore. At last she lies down on the ground,
holds tightly to the palm tree with her left hand and stretches out her
right hand as far as she can toward the man in the water, but without
reaching him. At that point I fall out of bed and wake. I was about
fifteen or sixteen years old when I realized that this woman was myself,
and from that time I not only went through all the woman’s apprehen­
sions for the man but I stood there many a time as a third who was not
taking part and only looked on. I dreamed this dream too in separate
scenes. As the interest in men awoke in me (eighteen to twenty years
old), I tried to see the man’s face; it was never possible. The foam hid
everything but the neck and the back of the head. I have twice been
engaged to be married, but the head and build were not those of either
of the two men.—Once, when I was lying in the sanatorium under the
influence of paraldehyde, I saw the man’s face, which I now always see
in this dream. It was that of the doctor under whose care I was. I liked
him as a doctor, but there was nothing more between us.
"Memories. Six to nine months old. I was in a perambulator. Quite
close to me were two horses; one, a chestnut, is looking at me very hard
and in a way full of meaning. This is the most vivid experience; I had
the feeling that it was a human being.
"One year old. Father and I in the town park, where a park keeper is
putting a little bird into my hand. Its eyes look into mine. I feel ‘That
is a live creature like yourself.’
“Animals being slaughtered. When I heard the pigs screaming I
always called for help and cried out, ‘You are killing a person’ (four
years old). I have always avoided eating meat. Pork always makes me
sick. I came to eat meat during the war, but only against my will; now
I have given it up again.
“Five years old. My mother was confined and I heard her cry out.
I had the feeling, ‘There is a human being or an animal in the greatest
distress,’ just as I had over the pig killing.
“I was quite indifferent as a child to sexual matters; at ten years old
I had as yet no conception of offenses against chastity. Menstruation
came on at the age of twelve. The woman first awakened in me at six-and-
twenty, after I had given birth to a child; up to that time (six months)
I constantly had violent vomiting after intercourse. This also came on
whenever I was at all oppressed in mood.
“I have extraordinarily keen powers of observation, and quite excep­
tionally sharp hearing, also a very keen sense of smell. I can pick out
by smell people I know from among a crowd with my eyes bandaged.
“I do not regard my abnormal powers of sight and hearing as patho­
logical, but ascribe them to finer perceptions and greater quickness of
thought; but I have only spoken of it to my pastor and doctor—very un­
willingly to the latter, as I was afraid he would tell me what I regarded
as plus qualities were minus qualities, and also because from being mis­
understood in childhood I am very reserved and shy.”
 The dream which the writer of the letter asks us to interpret is not
hard to understand. It is a dream of saving from water, a typical birth
dream. The language of symbolism, as you are aware, knows no grammar;
it is an extreme case of a language of infinitives, and even the active and
passive are represented by one and the same image. If in a dream a
woman pulls (or wishes to pull) a man out of the water, that may mean
she wishes to be his mother (takes him for her son as Pharaoh’s daughter
did with Moses), or equally she wishes him to make her into a mother,
to have a son by him, a son who shall be as like him as a copy. The tree
trunk to which the woman clings is easily recognized as a phallic symbol,
even though it is not standing straight up, but inclined toward the surface
of the water—in the dream the word is “bent.” The onrush and recoil
of the surf brought to the mind of another dreamer who was relating a
similar dream the comparison with the intermittent pains of labor, and
when, knowing that she had not yet borne a child, I asked her how she
knew of this characteristic of labor, she said that one imagined labor as
a kind of colic, a quite unimpeachable description physiologically. She
gave the association “Waves of the Sea and Waves of Passion.”2 How our
dreamer at so early an age can have arrived at the finer details of the sym­
bolism: tongue of land, palm tree, I am naturally unable to say. We
must not, however, overlook the fact that, when people maintain that
they have for years been haunted by the same dream, it often turns out
that the manifest content is not throughout quite the same. Only the
kernel of the dream has recurred each time; the details of the content are
changed or additions are made to them.
At the end of this dream, which is evidently charged with anxiety, the
dreamer falls out of bed. This is a fresh representation of childbirth;
analytic investigation of the fear of heights, of the dread of an impulse
to throw oneself out of the window, has doubtless led you all to the same
conclusion.
Who then is the man, by whom the dreamer wishes to have a child, or
of whose very image she would like to be the mother? She has often tried
to see his face, but the dream never allows of it; the man has to remain
a mystery. We know from countless analyses what this veiling means, and
the conclusion we should base on analogy is verified by another state­
ment of the dreamer’s. Under the influence of paraldehyde she once
recognized the face of the man in the dream as that of the hospital
physician who was treating her, and who meant nothing more to her
conscious emotional life. The original thus never divulged its identity,
but this impression of it in “transference” establishes the conclusion that
earlier it must have always been the father. Ferenczi is undoubtedly per­
fectly right in pointing out that these “dreams of the unsuspecting” (53)
are valuable sources of information confirming the conjectures of analysis.
Our dreamer was the eldest of twelve children; how often must she have
gone through the pangs of jealousy and disappointment when not she,
but her mother, obtained from her father the longed-for childl
2 Editor's note.—“Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen/* the title of a play by Grill-
parzer.
 Our dreamer has quite correctly supposed that her first memories of
childhood would be of value in the interpretation of her early and re­
current dream. In the first scene, in the first year of her life, as she sits
in her perambulator she sees two horses close to her, one looking hard at
her in a significant way. This she describes as her most vivid experience;
she had the feeling that it was a human being. This is a feeling which we
can understand only if we assume that the two horses represent, in this
case as so often, man and wife, father and mother. It is, as it were, a flash
of infantile totemism. If we could, we should ask the writer whether the
brown horse who looks at her in so human a way could not be recognized
by its coloring as her father. The second recollection is associatively con­
nected with the first through the same “understanding" gaze. “Taking
the little bird in her hand" reminds the analyst, who, by the way, has
prejudices of his own at times, of a feature in the dream in which the
woman's hand is again in contact with another phallic symbol.
The next two memories belong together; they make still slighter de­
mands on the interpreter. The mother crying out during her confinement
reminded the daughter directly of the pigs screaming when they were
killed and put her into the same frenzy of pity. We may also conjecture,
however, that this is a violent reaction against a death wish directed at
the mother.
With these indications of tenderness for the father, of contact with
his genitals, and of the death wish against the mother, the outline of the
female oedipus complex is sketched. The ignorance of sexual matters
retained so long and the frigidity at a later period bear out these suppo­
sitions. The writer of the letter has been virtually—and for a time no
doubt actually—a hysterical neurotic. The life force has, for her own
happiness, carried her along with it, has awakened in her the sexual
feelings of a woman and brought her the joys of motherhood, and the
capacity to work, but a portion of her libido still clings to its point of
fixation in childhood; she still dreams that dream that flings her out of
bed and punishes her for her incestuous object choice by “not incon­
siderable injuries."
And now a strange doctor's explanation, given in a letter, is to effect
something that all the most important experiences of later life have failed
to do. Probably a regular analysis continued for a considerable time
might have some success. As things were, I was obliged to content myself
with writing to her that I was convinced she was suffering from after­
effects of a strong emotional tie binding her to her father and from a
corresponding identification with her mother, but that I did not myself
expect that this explanation would help her at all. Spontaneous cures of
neurosis usually leave scars behind, and these smart from time to time.
We are very proud of our art if we achieve a cure through psychoanalysis,
yet even so we cannot always prevent the formation of a painful scar in
the process.
The little series of reminiscences must engage our attention for a
while longer. I have on one occasion stated that such scenes of childhood
are “screen memories" selected at a later period, put together, and
thereby not infrequently falsified. This subsequent elaboration serves a
purpose that is sometimes easy to guess. In our case one can practically
hear the ego of the writer glorifying or soothing itself throughout the
whole series of recollections. “I was from a tiny thing a particularly large-
hearted and compassionate child. I learned quite early that the animals
have souls as we have, and could not endure cruelty to animals. The sins
of the flesh were far from me and I preserved my chastity till late.” With
declarations such as these she loudly contradicts the inferences that we
have to make about her early childhood on the basis of our analytical
experience, namely, that she had an abundance of premature sexual
emotions and violent feelings of hatred for her mother and her younger
brothers and sisters. (Beside the genital significance assigned to it, the
little bird may also have that of a child symbol, like all small animals;
her memory also accentuates in a very insistent way that this tiny creature
had the same right to exist as she herself.) The short series of recollections
in fact furnishes a very nice example of a mental structure with a twofold
aspect. Viewed superficially, we may find in it the expression of an
abstract idea, here, as usually, with an ethical reference. In H. Silberer's
nomenclature the structure has an anagogic content; on deeper investiga­
tion it reveals itself as a chain of phenomena belonging to the region of
the repressed life of the instincts—it displays its psychoanalytic content.
As you know, Silberer, who was among the first to issue a warning to us
on no account to lose sight of the nobler side of the human soul, has put
forward the view that all or nearly all dreams permit such a twofold
interpretation, a purer, anagogic one beside the ordinary, psychoanalytic
one. This is, however, unfortunately not so; on the contrary, a further
interpretation of this kind is rarely possible; there has been no valuable
example of such a dream analysis with a double meaning published up
to the present time within my knowledge. But something of the kind can
often be observed within the series of associations that our patients pro­
duce during analytic treatment. The successive ideas are linked on the
one hand by an obvious and coherent association, while on the other
hand you become aware of an underlying theme which is kept secret and
at the same time plays a part in all these ideas. The contrast between the
two themes that dominate the same series of ideas is not always one
between the lofty anagogic and the common psychoanalytic, but is rather
that between shocking and decent or neutral ideas—a fact that easily
explains how such a chain of associations with a twofold determination
arises. In our present example it is of course not accidental that the ana­
gogic and the psychoanalytic interpretations stand in such a sharp con­
trast to each other; both relate to the same material, and the later
tendency is the same as that seen in the reaction-formations erected
against the disowned instinctual forces.
Now why did we make such a special search for the psychoanalytic
interpretation instead of contenting ourselves with the more accessible
anagogic one? The answer to this is linked up with many other prob­
lems—with the existence of neurosis itself and the explanations it inevi­
tably demands—with the fact that virtue does not reward a man with
the joy and strength in life that is expected from it, as though it brought
with it too much from its original source (this dreamer, too, had not been
well rewarded for her virtue), and with many other things which I need
not discuss before this audience.
So far, however, in this case we have completely neglected the ques­
tion of telepathy, the other point of interest in it for us; it is time to
return to it. In a sense we have here an easier task than in the case of
Herr G.3 With a person who so easily and so early in life succumbed
before reality and replaced it by the world of fantasy, the temptation is
irresistible to connect her telepathic experiences and “visions” with her
neurosis and to derive them from it, although here too we should not
allow ourselves to be deceived as to the cogency of our own arguments.
We shall merely replace what is unknown and unintelligible by possi­
bilities that are at least comprehensible.
On August 22, 1914, at ten o’clock in the morning, our correspondent
experienced a telepathic impression that her brother, who was at the time
on active service, was calling, “Mother! Mother!”; the phenomenon was
purely acoustic, it was repeated shortly after, but nothing was seen. Two
days later she sees her mother and finds her much depressed because the
boy had announced himself to her by repeatedly calling, “Mother!
Motherl” She immediately recalls the same telepathic message, which she
had experienced at the same time, and as a matter of fact some weeks
later it was established that the young soldier had died on that day at
the hour stated.
It cannot be proved, but also cannot be disproved, that instead of this
what happened was the following: the mother told her one day that the
son had sent this telepathic message; whereupon the conviction at once
arose in her mind that she had had the same experience at the same time.
Such delusory memories arise in the mind with the force of an obsession,
a force derived from real sources—they have, however, substituted ma­
terial for psychical reality. The strength of the delusory memory lies in
its being an excellent way of expressing the sister’s tendency to identify
herself with the mother. “You are anxious about the boy, but I am really
his mother, and his cry was meant for me; I had this telepathic message.”
The sister would naturally firmly decline to consider our attempt at
explanation and would hold to her belief in the authenticity of the expe­
rience. She simply cannot do otherwise; as long as the reality of the un­
conscious basis of it in her own mind is concealed from her she is obliged
to believe in the reality of her pathological logic. Every such delusion
derives its strength and its unassailable character from its source in un­
conscious psychical reality. I note in passing that it is not incumbent on
us here to explain the mother's experience or to investigate its authen­
ticity.
The dead brother is, however, not only the imaginary child of our
correspondent; he represents also a rival regarded with hatred even at the
time of his birth. By far the greater number of all telepathic presenti­
ments relate to death or the possibility of death: when patients under
analysis keep telling us of the frequency and infallibility of their gloomy
3 Editor's note.—Obviously Herr H., the father, is meant. This slip of the pen,
which substitutes the son-in-law’s initial to that of the father, indirectly confirms the
validity of Freud's interpretations.
forebodings, we can with equal regularity show them that they are foster­
ing particularly strong death wishes in their unconscious against their
nearest relations and have therefore long suppressed them. The patient
whose history I related in 1909 (70) was an example to the point; he was
even called a “bird of ill omen” by his relations. But when the kindly
and highly intelligent man—who has since himself perished in the war—
began to make progress toward recovery, he himself gave me considerable
assistance in clearing up his own psychological conjuring tricks. In the
same way, the account given in our first correspondent’s letter, of how
he and his three brothers had received the news of their youngest
brother's death as a thing they had long been inwardly aware of, appears
to need no other explanation. The elder brothers would all have been
equally convinced of the superfluousness of the youngest arrival.
Another of our dreamer’s “visions” will probably become more intel­
ligible in the light of analytical knowledge! Women friends have obvi­
ously a considerable significance in her emotional life. News of the death
of one of them is conveyed to her shortly after the event by knocking
at night on the bed of a roommate in the sanatorium. Another friend had
many years before married a widower with several (five) children. On the
occasion of her visits to their house she regularly saw the apparition of a
lady, whom she felt constrained to suppose to be the dead first wife;
this did not at first permit of confirmation, and only became a matter of
certainty with her seven years later, on the discovery of a fresh photo­
graph of the dead woman. This achievement in the way of a vision has
the same inner dependence on the family complex already recognized in
our correspondent as her presentiment of the brother’s death. By identi­
fying herself with her friend she could in her person achieve her own
wish fulfillment; for all eldest daughters of a numerous family build up
in their unconscious the fantasy of becoming the father’s second wife by
the death of the mother. If the mother is ill or dies, the eldest daughter
takes her place as a matter of course in relation to the younger brothers
and sisters, and may even in respect to the father take over some part of
the functions of the wife. The unconscious wish fills in the other part.
I am now almost at the end of what I wish to say. I might, however,
add the observation that the cases of telepathic messages or occurrences
which have been discussed here are clearly connected with emotions
belonging to the sphere of the oedipus complex. This may sound start­
ling;! do not intend to give it out as a great discovery, however. I would
rather revert to the result we arrived at through investigating the dream
I considered first. Telepathy has no relation to the essential nature of
dreams; it cannot deepen in any way what we already understand of them
by analysis. On the other hand, psychoanalysis may do something to
advance the study of telepathy, in so far as, by the help of its interpreta­
tions, many of the puzzling characteristics of telepathic phenomena may
be rendered more intelligible to us; or other, still doubtful phenomena
be for the first time definitely ascertained to be of a telepathic nature.
 There remains one element of the apparently intimate connection
between telepathy and dreams which is not affected by any of these con­
siderations: namely, the incontestable fact that sleep creates favorable
conditions for telepathy. Sleep is not, it is true, indispensable to the
accomplishment of the process—whether it originates in messages or in
an unconscious activity of some kind. If you are not already aware of
this, you will learn it from the instance given by our second correspond­
ent, of the message coming from the boy between nine and ten in the
morning. We must add, however, that no one has a right to take excep­
tion to telepathic occurrences on the ground that the event and the pre­
sentiment (or message) do not exactly coincide in astronomical time. It
is perfectly conceivable that a telepathic message might arrive contem­
poraneously with the event and yet only penetrate to consciousness the
following night during sleep (or even in waking life only after a while,
during some pause in the activity of the mind). We are, as you know, of
opinion that dream formation itself does not necessarily wait for the
onset of sleep to begin. Often the latent dream thoughts may have been
lying ready during the whole day, till at night they find the contact with
the unconscious wish that shapes them into a dream. But if the phenom­
enon of telepathy is only an activity of the unconscious mind, then no
fresh problem lies before us. The laws of unconscious mental life may
then be taken for granted as applying to telepathy.
Have I given you the impression that I am secretly inclined to support
the reality of telepathy in the occult sense? If so, I should very much
regret that it is so difficult to avoid giving such an impression. In reality,
however, I was anxious to be strictly impartial. I have every reason to be
so, for I have no opinion; I know nothing about it.
 Chapter 7
THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE OF DREAMS*
By SIGMUND FREUD

There seems to be no end to the problems of dream life. But this

can only be surprising if we forget that all the problems of mental life
are repeated in dreams with the addition of a few new ones arising from
the special nature of dreams. But many of the things that we study in
dreams, because we meet with them there, have little or nothing to do
with the psychological peculiarity of dreams. Thus, for instance, sym­
bolism is not a dream problem, but a topic connected with our archaic
thinking—our “root language,” as it was aptly called by the paranoiac
Schreber (71). It dominates myths and religious ritual no less than
dreams, and dream symbolism can scarcely even claim as a peculiarity the
fact of its concealing more particularly what is important sexually.
Again, it is not to be expected that the explanation of anxiety dreams
will be found in the theory of dreams. Anxiety is a problem rather of
neurosis, and all that remains to be discussed is how it comes about that
anxiety can arise under dream conditions.
The position is just the same, I think, in the matter of the occult
world. But, since dreams themselves have always been mysterious things,
they have been brought into intimate connection with the other un­
known mysteries. No doubt, too, they have a historic claim to that
position, since in primeval ages, when our mythology was being formed,
dream pictures may have played a part in the origin of ideas about
spirits.
There would seem to be two categories of dreams with a claim to
being reckoned as occult phenomena: prophetic dreams and telepathic
ones. A countless multitude of witnesses speak in favor of both of them,
while against both of them there is the obstinate aversion, or maybe
prejudice, of science.
* Originally published in Imago, 9:234-238, 1925. Translated from the German by
James Strachey, and published in Collected Papers, 5:158-162, London, Hogarth Press,
1950. Published here by permission of Hogarth Press, London.
 There can, indeed, be no doubt that there are such things as prophetic
dreams, in the sense that their content gives some sort of picture of the
future; the only question is whether these predictions coincide to any
noticeable extent with what really happens subsequently. I must confess
that upon this point my resolution in favor of impartiality deserts me.
The notion that there is any mental power, apart from acute calculation,
which can foresee future events in detail is on the one hand too much in
contradiction to all the expectations and presumptions of science and
on the other hand corresponds too closely to certain ancient and familiar
human desires which criticism must reject as unjustifiable pretensions.
I am therefore of opinion that after one has taken into account the
untrustworthiness, credulity and unconvincingness of most of these re­
ports, together with the possibility of falsifications of memory facilitated
by emotional causes (HI) and the inevitability of a few lucky shots, it may
be anticipated that the specter of prophetic dreams will disappear into
nothing. Personally, I have never experienced anything or learned of
anything that could encourage a more favorable presumption.
It is otherwise with telepathic dreams. But at this point it must be
made quite clear that no one has yet maintained that telepathic phenom­
ena—the reception of a mental process by one person from another by
means other than sensory perception—are exclusively related to dreams.
Thus once again telepathy is not a dream problem: our judgment upon
whether it exists or not need not be based on a study of telepathic dreams.
If reports of telepathic occurrences (or, to speak less exactly, of
thought transference) are submitted to the same criticism as stories of
other occult events, there remains a considerable amount of material
which cannot be so easily neglected. Further, it is much more possible to
collect observations and experiences of one's own in this field which
justify a favorable attitude to the problem of telepathy, even though they
may not be enough to carry an assured conviction. One arrives at a pro­
visional opinion that it may well be that telepathy really exists and that
it provides the kernel of truth in many other hypotheses that would
otherwise be incredible.
It is certainly right in what concerns telepathy, too, to adhere ob­
stinately to a skeptical position and only to yield grudgingly to the force
of evidence. I believe I have found a class of material which is exempt
from the doubts which are otherwise justified—namely, unfulfilled
prophecies of professional fortunetellers. Unluckily, I have but few such
observations at my disposal; but two among these have made a powerful
impression on me. I am not in a position to describe them in such detail
as would produce a similar effect upon other people, and I must restrict
myself to bringing out a few essential points.
 A prediction was made, then, to the people in question (at a strange
place and by a strange fortuneteller, who at the same time went through
some, presumably irrelevant, performances) that something would hap­
pen to them at a particular time, which in fact did not happen. The date
at which the prophecy should have come true was long past. It was
striking that those concerned told of their experience not with derision
or disappointment but with obvious satisfaction. Included among what
had been told them there were certain quite definite details which seemed
capricious and unintelligible and would only have been justified if they
had hit the mark. Thus, for instance, the palmist told a woman who was
twenty-seven (though she looked much younger) and who had taken off
her wedding ring, that she would be married and have two children
before she was thirty-two. The woman was forty-three when, now seri­
ously ill, she told me the story in her analysis; she had remained childless.
If one knew her private history (of which the “Professor” in the lounge
of the Paris Hotel was certainly ignorant) one could understand the two
numbers included in the prophecy. The girl had married after an unusu­
ally intense attachment to her father and had then had a passionate
longing for children, so as to be able to put her husband in the place of
her father. After years of disappointment, when she was on the brink of
a neurosis, she obtained the prophecy, which promised her—the fate of
her mother. For it was a fact that the latter had had two children by the
time she was thirty-two. Thus it was only by the help of psychoanalysis
that it was possible to give a significant interpretation of the peculiarities
of this pretended message from without. But there was then no better
explanation of the whole, unequivocally determined chain of events than
to suppose that a strong wish on the part of the questioner—the strongest
unconscious wish, in fact, of her whole emotional life and the motive
force of her impending neurosis—had made itself manifest by being
directly transferred to the fortuneteller, whose attention was distracted
at the time by the performances he was going through.
I have often had an impression, in the course of experiments in my
private circle, that strongly emotionally colored recollections can be suc­
cessfully transferred without much difficulty. If one has the courage to
submit to an analytical examination the associations of the person to
whom the thoughts are supposed to be transferred, correspondences often
come to light which would otherwise have remained undiscovered. On
the basis of much experience I am inclined to draw the conclusion that
thought transference of this kind comes about particularly easily at the
moment at which an idea emerges from the unconscious, or, in theoretical
terms, as it passes over from the “primary process” to the “secondary
process.”
In spite of the caution which is prescribed by the importance, novelty
and obscurity of the subject, I feel that I should not be justified in hold­
ing back any longer these considerations upon the problem of telepathy.
All of this has only this much to do with dreams: if there are such things
as telepathic messages, the possibility cannot be dismissed of their reach­
ing someone during sleep and coming to his knowledge in a dream.
Indeed, on the analogy of other perceptual and intellectual material, the
further possibility arises that telepathic messages received in the course
of the day may only be dealt with during a dream of the following night.
There would then be nothing contradictory in the material that had been
telepathically communicated being modified and transformed in the
dream like any other material. It would be satisfactory if with the help
of psychoanalysis we could obtain further and better authenticated knowl­
edge of telepathy.
 Chapter 8
DREAMS AND THE OCCULT*
By SIGMUND FREUD

L adies and G e n t l e m e n —Today we are to travel along a narrow path,

but it may lead us to a wide prospect.
When you hear that I am going to talk about the connection between
dreams and the occult, you need hardly feel surprised. Dreams are indeed
often regarded as the portal to the world of mysticism, and even today
seem to many to be in themselves an occult phenomenon. Even we, who
have made them an object of scientific study, cannot deny that several
strands link them up with those obscure regions. Mysticism—Occultism—
what is meant by these terms? Do not imagine that I shall attempt to
provide you with a clear definition of such hazy concepts. In a general
and vague way we all know what we mean by the terms. They refer to a
kind of “other world” which lies beyond the clear world, with its inexor­
able laws, which science has built up for us.
Occultism assumes that there are in fact more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Well, we need not be tied
down by the narrow-mindedness of the Schools; we are ready to believe
whatever is made plausible to us.
We intend to treat these things in just the same way as we treat any
other material for scientific investigation. First, we have to establish
whether these processes really occur, and then, but only then, when there
is no doubt as to their actuality, we can set about their explanation. But
we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that even the first step will be
made difficult for us by intellectual, psychological and historical factors.
It is by no means the same as when we start on any other investigation.
Let us consider the intellectual difficulties first. Allow me to give you
* Originally published in Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einfiihrung in die
Psychoanalyse. Vienna, Intemationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1933. Translated
from the German by W. J. H. Sprott, published in New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, London, Hogarth Press, 1934. Published here by permission of Hogarth
Press, London.
a crude, obvious explanation of what I mean. Supposing we are dealing
with the constitution of the interior of the earth. Admittedly we know
nothing certain about it. We suppose that it consists of heavy metals in
a molten condition. Now let us imagine that some one asserts that the
interior of the earth is made of water impregnated with carbonic acid;
that is to say, a kind of soda water. We shall certainly say that it is very
improbable, that it runs counter to all our expectations, and that it does
not take into consideration the scientific data which have led us to put
forward the mental hypothesis. But for all that it is not unthinkable. If
any one shows us the way to prove the soda-water hypothesis, we shall
follow it without any resistance. But now another person comes along
who seriously asserts that the center of the earth is made of jam. We
shall behave quite differently toward his theory. We shall say to ourselves
that jam is not a product of Nature but of human cookery; moreover, the
existence of that material presupposes the presence of fruit trees and their
fruit, and we cannot see our way to placing vegetation and human
cookery in the center of the earth. The result of this intellectual objection
will be a diversion of our interests; instead of their being directed on to
the investigation itself, as to whether the interior of the earth is really
made of jam or not, we shall wonder what kind of man it must be who
can get such an idea into his head, or at the most we shall ask him where
he got the idea from. The unfortunate inventor of the jam hypothesis
will be very much offended, and will complain that we are refusing to
consider an objective evaluation of this theory out of what he calls scien­
tific prejudice. But his complaints will be in vain. Prejudices, we feel, are
not always to be deplored, but are sometimes justified; and they are use­
ful in saving us unnecessary trouble. They are, indeed, nothing more
than conclusions drawn by analogy from other well-founded judgments.
A whole number of occult theories make the same impression on us
as the jam theory, so that we feel justified in putting them aside at the
outset without testing them. But it is not quite such a simple matter. An
analogy such as I have suggested—like all analogies—proves nothing.
In any case it is doubtful whether it is a fair analogy, and it is obvious
that it was our attitude of scornful rejection which in the first instance
determined our choice of it. Prejudices are very often useful and justified,
but sometimes they are erroneous and harmful, and one never knows
when they will be the one or the other. The history of science is full of
examples which should warn us against too hasty a condemnation. For a
long time it was thought to be an absurd thesis that the stones which we
now call meteorites should have reached the earth from outer space, or
that mountains, the rocks of which contain remains of shells, should once
have formed the bed of the sea. And, after all, not so very different a fate
befell our psychoanalysis itself, when it brought forward the discovery
of the unconscious. We analysts, therefore, have special reason to be
cautious in making use of intellectual arguments in the rejection of new
theories, and we must recognize that such arguments will not put us
beyond the reach of feelings of aversion, doubt and uncertainty.
I called the second factor psychological. By that I meant the general
human inclination toward credulity and belief in the marvelous. From
the very beginning, when life imposes its stern discipline upon us, there
grows up in us a resistance against the restlessness and monotony of the
laws of thought, and against the need for putting things to the test of
reality. Reason becomes an enemy that keeps us from so many possibil­
ities of pleasure. One discovers what a joy it is to escape from it at least
for a moment, and give oneself up to the fascination of irrationality. The
schoolboy amuses himself by making up ridiculous plays on words, the
specialist makes fun of his own work after a scientific congress, and even
the serious-minded man enjoys an occasional joke. More serious antag­
onism against “Wisdom and Science, man's most prized powers," awaits
its opportunity; it is eager to prefer the miracle man or the natural
healer to the “trained" doctor, it makes us warm toward the theories
of the occult, so long as its reputed facts can be taken as breaches of law
and rule. It puts our critical faculty to sleep, falsifies our perception, and
forces us to confirm and agree without real justification. Any one who
takes these human weaknesses into consideration has every reason to dis­
count the value of much of the information contained in occult literature.
In referring to the third obstacle as the historical one I had in mind
the fact that nothing new is to be found in the world of the occult. On
the contrary, we meet again in it with all the signs, wonders, prophecies
and apparitions which have been handed down to us from remote ages
and in old books, and which we long ago thought we had done with as
being the offspring of unbridled imagination or tendentious fraud, the
product of a time when the ignorance of mankind was at its height and
when the scientific spirit was still in its infancy. If we accept as true what
we are told by the occultists of our own day, then we must be prepared
to believe the accounts which have come down to us from the past. And
then we remember that the traditions and sacred books of all races are
packed with such marvels, and that religions base their claim to credi­
bility precisely on such extraordinary and wondrous happenings, and
find in them the proof of the operation of superhuman forces. At this
point it is hard for us to avoid the suspicion that occult interests are
really religious ones, and that it is one of the secret motives of the occul­
tist movements to come to the aid of religious belief, threatened as it is
by the progress of scientific thought. The discovery of a motive of this
kind cannot fail to increase our mistrust and our disinclination to embark
upon an investigation of these so-called occult phenomena.
But this disinclination must be overcome. The whole thing is really
a question of fact: is what the occultists tell us true or not? It must be
possible to decide this by observation. Au fond we ought to be grateful
to the occultists. The tales of wonderful happenings which have come
down to us from ancient days are beyond our powers of testing. If we say
that they cannot be proved, we must at least admit that, strictly speaking,
they cannot be disproved. But about what happens in the present, about
things which we can actually witness, we ought to be able to reach a
definite conclusion. If we are convinced that such wonders do not occur
nowadays, we need not fear the objection that they might have occurred
in days gone by. Other explanations will then be far more plausible. We
have, then, put aside our scruples and are ready to take part in the
observation of occult phenomena.
Unfortunately we come up against considerations which are highly
unfavorable to our laudable intentions. The observations on which our
judgments must depend have to be made under conditions which render
our powers of perception insecure, and which blunt our faculty of atten­
tion; the phenomena take place in the dark or in the faint glimmer of a
red light after long periods of fruitless waiting. We are told that even
our skeptical—that is to say, our critical—attitude may very well prevent
the hoped-for phenomena from manifesting themselves. The situation
which thus arises is simply a caricature of the conditions under which
we are used to carrying out scientific investigations. The observations are
made on so-called mediums, persons to whom are ascribed special “sensi­
tive” gifts, who, however, do not display outstanding qualities of intelli­
gence or character, and who are not moved, as the old wonderworkers
were, by some great idea or by some serious purpose. On the contrary,
they are regarded as particularly untrustworthy even by the people who
believe in their mysterious powers; most of them have already been
unmasked as frauds, and we are tempted to expect that the same will
happen with the rest as well. Their performances remind us of the mis­
chievous pranks of a child or of a conjuror's tricks. Nothing of any value
has so far ever come out of these seances with mediums; no new source of
energy has become accessible to us. And, to be sure, one does not expect
any advances in our knowledge of pigeon breeding from the tricks of a
conjuror who produces pigeons out of an empty top hat. I can easily put
myself into the position of a man who wishes to fulfill the demands of
objectivity and therefore takes part in these occult stances, but tires of
them after a while, and, put off by what is required of him, gives up the
whole business and returns to his prejudices no wiser than before. To
such a man one might object that his behavior is not right, and that if
one is going to investigate phenomena one cannot decide beforehand of
what nature they shall be and under what conditions they shall manifest
themselves. It is, on the contrary, his business to persevere and form
some estimate of the precautionary measures of control which are used
nowadays as a protection against the untrustworthiness of mediums. Un­
fortunately the modern control technique puts an end to the easy accessi­
bility of occult observations. The study of the occult has become a spe­
cialized and difficult pursuit, a form of activity which one cannot carry
on side by side with one's other interests. And until the investigators who
have given their minds to it have come to some conclusion, one is neces­
sarily given over to doubts and to one's own conjectures.
Among these conjectures the most probable is, I think, that in
occultism there is a core of facts which have hitherto not been recognized,
and round which fraud and fantasy have woven a veil which it is hard
to penetrate. But how can we even approach this core? At what point can
we grasp the problem? It is here, it seems to me, that the dream comes
to our aid by suggesting to us that we should pick out the theme of tele­
pathy from all the confused material that surrounds it.
You know that by telepathy we mean the alleged fact that an event
which occurs at a specific time comes more or less simultaneously into
the consciousness of a person who is spatially distant, without any of the
known methods of communication coming into play. The tacit assump­
tion is that this event occurs to a person, in whom the receiver of the
message has some strong emotional interest. Thus, for example, a person
A has an accident, or dies, and a person B, some one closely connected
with A, his mother or daughter or loved one, learns of it at about the
time of its occurrence through a visual or auditory perception; in the
latter case it is as though they were in telephonic communication, which,
however, they are not; in fact, it is a kind of psychic parallel to wireless
telegraphy. I need not emphasize to you the improbability of such proc­
esses, and anyway there are good grounds for rejecting the majority of
such reports. Some of them are left over which cannot be rejected so
easily. I must now ask you to allow me to leave out the precautionary
word “alleged” for the purposes of what I have to tell you, and to let me
continue as though I believed in the objective reality of telepathic phe­
nomena. But you must remember all the time that this is not the case,
that I have not committed myself to any conclusion on the subject.
As a matter of fact I have but little to tell you—only one modest fact.
And I will further diminish your expectations by informing you that
fundamentally the dream has but little to do with telepathy. Telepathy
throws no new light on the nature of the dream, nor does the dream bear
witness for the reality of telepathy. Telepathic phenomena are also by
no manner of means confined to dreams; they can also manifest them­
selves during waking life. The only ground for mentioning the connec­
tion between dreams and telepathy is that the condition of sleep seems
to be especially suitable for the reception of telepathic communications.
If then one comes across a so-called telepathic dream, one can convince
oneself by its analysis that the telepathic message has played the same
role as any other residue of waking life, and as such has been altered
by the dream work and made to serve its purpose.
Now in the course of the analysis of a telepathic dream of this kind
something occurred which seems to me of sufficient importance, in spite
of its slightness, to serve as the starting point of this lecture. When in
the year 1922 (VI) I brought up this subject for the first time, I had only
one observation at my disposal. Since then I have made several other
observations; but I shall keep to the first example, because it is the easiest
one to describe, and I shall proceed at once to the heart of the matter.
An obviously intelligent man, and one who, according to his own
estimation, was in no way “tainted with occultism” wrote to me about
a dream which seemed to him to be remarkable. He prefaced his story
with the information that his married daughter, who lived some distance
from him, was expecting her first confinement in the middle of Decem­
ber. He was very much devoted to this daughter, and he knew that she
was very much attached, to him. Now he dreamed in the night between
the 16th and 17th of November that his wife had had twins. There fol­
lowed several details which I can pass over here, not all of which have
found a satisfactory explanation. The woman who, in the dream, had
become the mother of the twins, was his second wife, the daughter's step­
mother: He did not wish to have children by this woman, whom he did
not consider fitted for bringing up children in an understanding way,
and at the time of the dream he had for a long time given up sexual inter­
course with her. What induced him to write to me was not a doubt about
the validity of the theory of dreams, though the manifest dream would
have justified him if that had been the case; for why does the dream, in
flat contradiction to his wishes, depict this woman as bearing children?
And according to his story he had no grounds for fearing that this
unwished-for occurrence might take place. What determined him to tell
me about his dream was the fact that early in the morning of November
18th he received a telegram to say that his daughter had given birth to
twins. The telegram had been handed in the day before, and the birth
had taken place during the night between the 16th and 17th, at about
the same time that he had dreamed that his wife had had twins. The
dreamer asked me whether I thought that the simultaneity of the dream
and the event was a mere coincidence. He did not go so far as to call the
dream a telepathic one, because the difference between the content of the
dream and the event itself concerned precisely what he considered to be
the most important point, the person who had the children. But from
 one of his remarks it looked as though he would not have been surprised
if he had had a real telepathic dream. His daughter, he felt certain, had
“thought especially about him” during labor.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sure that you can already explain the
dream, and that you understand why I have told it to you. Here is a man,
dissatisfied with his second wife, who would prefer to have a wife like
his daughter by his first marriage. In the unconscious this “like” is
naturally omitted. Now during the night he receives the telepathic com­
munication that his daughter has had twins. The dream work seizes on
this information, allows his unconscious wish that his daughter should
replace his second wife to act upon it, and thus emerges the singular
manifest dream in which the wish itself is veiled and the message dis­
torted. We must admit that only dream interpretation has shown us that
this is a telepathic dream; psychoanalysis has discovered a telepathic
event which we should not otherwise have recognized as such.
But do not let yourselves be led astray. In spite of all this, dream
interpretation has said nothing about the objective truth of telepathic
phenomena. It may be only an appearance which can be explained in
some other way. It is possible that the man's latent dream thoughts ran
like this: “Today is the day on which the confinement must take place,
if my daughter, as I incidentally believe is the case, has been a month out
in her calculations. And her appearance when I saw her last time was
such that it looked as though she was going to have twins. And my dead
wife was so fond of children: how delighted she would have been by
twins!” (The last point is derived from associations of the dreamer which
I have not yet mentioned.) In that case the stimulus for the dream would
have been well-founded suspicions on the part of the dreamer and not
a telepathic message; the result would have been the same in both cases.
You notice that even this interpretation has told us nothing about the
question of whether one should assign objective reality to telepathy. One
could only come to a conclusion about that after making detailed in­
quiries into all the circumstances of the case, which unfortunately was
impossible with this example, as it was with all the others in my expe­
rience. We may grant that the assumption of telepathy gives us by far
the simplest explanation; but that does not carry us very far. The sim­
plest explanation is not always the right one, truth is very often not
simple, and one must act with the greatest caution before committing
oneself to such a far-reaching assumption.
We can now leave the subject of dreams and telepathy; I have nothing
more to say about it. But I want you to notice that it was not dreams that
seemed to teach us something about telepathy, but the interpretation of
the dreams, the psychoanalytic treatment of them. We can therefore leave
dreams on one side in what follows, and we will examine further our
suspicion that the application of psychoanalysis may throw a light on
other so-called occult facts. There is, for example, the phenomenon of
thought transference, which is closely allied to telepathy and, indeed, can
be identified with it without much difficulty. It is held that psychological
processes, ideas, states of excitement, volitions, which occur in the mind
of one person, can be transferred through space to another, without the
usual means of communication (words or signs) being employed. Inci­
dentally it is remarkable that it is actually these phenomena which find
the least mention in the old accounts of the miraculous.
During the psychoanalytic treatment of patients I have had the im­
pression that the activities of professional fortunetellers provide an ad­
mirable opportunity for making really satisfactory observations of
thought transference. It is usually mediocre and even inferior people who
carry on practices of this sort, deal out cards, study writing and the lines
upon the hand, or make astrological reckonings, and foretell the future
of their visitors, after having shown some knowledge of their past or
present history. Their clients usually express themselves as satisfied by
their performances, and bear them no ill will, if their prophecies do not
come true in the end. I have come across a great many such cases and
have been able to study them analytically. I will tell you the most re­
markable instance of the kind. Unfortunately the evidential value of this
information is reduced on account of the numerous omissions which are
necessitated by the rules of professional secrecy. I have, however, carefully
avoided any distortions. This is the story of one of my female patients,
who had an experience of the kind we are discussing with a fortuneteller.
She was the eldest of a family of brothers and sisters, grew up with
an extraordinarily strong attachment to her father, had married young,
and had found entire satisfaction in her married life. There was only one
thing wanting to make her happiness complete; she was childless, and
thus the husband whom she loved could not wholly fill the place of her
father. When after many years she decided to have a gynecological oper­
ation, her husband disclosed to her the fact that the fault lay in him,
that through an illness which had occurred before marriage he had been
rendered incapable of procreating children. She took this disappointment
very badly, became neurotic, and suffered unmistakably from dread of
the husband's attempts. In order to cheer her up, her husband took her
with him on a business visit to Paris. While they were there, they were
sitting one day in the hall of the hotel when she noticed a stir among the
hotel servants. She asked what was happening, and learned that Monsieur
le Professeur had arrived and was giving consultations in a certain room.
She expressed her wish to see what the thing was like herself. Her hus­
band tried to dissuade her, but when he was not looking she slipped into
the room where the fortuneteller was giving his consultations. She was
twenty-seven years old, but looked much younger, and she had taken off
her wedding ring. Monsieur le Professeur told her to rest her hand on
a bowl filled with ashes, carefully studied the imprint, and, after telling
her all sorts of things about severe troubles which lay before her, con­
cluded with the comforting assurance that she would get married all the
same and have two children by the time she was thirty-two years of age.
When she told me this story she was forty-three, very ill, and with no
expectation of ever having a child at all. The prophecy therefore had not
come true, and yet she spoke of it with no bitterness whatever, but with
an unmistakable expression of satisfaction, as though she were looking
back with pleasure upon a happy experience. It was easy to assure oneself
that she had not the slightest idea what the two numbers in the prophecy
might mean, or whether they meant anything at all.
You will say that this is a stupid and incomprehensible story, and ask
why I have related it to you. Now I should feel exactly as you do, but for
the fact—and this is the important point—that the analysis enabled us
to obtain an interpretation of the prophecy, which was actually most
significant when it came to the details. For the two numbers have a place
in the life of the mother of my patient. She had married late, when she
was more than thirty, and her family had often remarked how successful
she had been in making up for lost time. Her two first children—and our
patient was the elder of these—had been born within a single calendar
year with the smallest possible interval between them; and it was really
true of her that by the time she was thirty-two she had two children.
What Monsieur le Professeur told my patient meant this: “Cheer up, for
you are still young! You will have the same experience as your mother,
who also had to wait a long time for children, and you will have two
children by the time you are thirty-two.” But to have the same experience
as her mother, to be in her position, to take her place with her father,
was the strongest wish of her childhood, the wish whose nonfulfillment
was beginning to make her ill. The prophecy promised her that it would
be fulfilled, how could she feel otherwise than friendly toward the
prophet? But do you think that Monsieur le Professeur could really have
been familiar with the dates of the intimate family history of a chance
client? It is impossible; whence, then, came the knowledge that enabled
him to express in his prophecy the strongest and most secret wish of my
patient by bringing in these two numbers? I can see only two possi­
bilities. Either the story, as she told it to me, was not true and the events
were different, or we must accept thought transference as a real phenom­
enon. It could, no doubt, be argued that my patient, after the lapse of
sixteen years, had carried over the two numbers we are discussing from
her unconscious into her recollection. I have no evidence for this sugges­
tion, but I cannot rule it out, and I imagine that you would prefer to
believe in such an explanation rather than in the reality of thought
transference. If, however, you should accept the latter view, do not
forget that it was only analysis that brought to light the occult element,
which had been distorted out of all recognition.
If we had to deal with only one case like that of my patient, we should
turn away from it with a shrug of the shoulders. It would not occur to
any one to base a belief which has such far-reaching implications on an
isolated observation. But I can assure you that this is not the only case
in my experience. I have collected a whole set of such prophecies, and I
have the impression that in every instance the fortuneteller has only
given expression to the thoughts, and particularly to the secret wishes, of
his clients; so that we are justified in analyzing such prophecies as if they
were the subjective productions, fantasies or dreams of the people con­
cerned. Naturally not all cases have equal evidential value, nor in all
cases is it equally possible to rule out more rational explanations; but
taking all the evidence together there remains a heavy weight of prob­
ability in favor of the reality of thought transference. The importance
of the matter would justify my putting all my cases before you; but I
cannot do that because the material would be of inordinate length and
would inevitably involve a breach of professional secrecy. I will try to
salve my conscience as far as possible by giving you one or two more ex­
amples.
One day a very intelligent young man came to see me. He was a stu­
dent, preparing for his final medical examination; but he was not in a
condition to take it, because, as he complained, he had lost all his inter­
ests, all power of concentration, and even the faculty of a well-ordered
memory. The history of this paralyzing condition was soon unraveled:
he had fallen ill after carrying through a line of conduct which had ne­
cessitated great self-discipline. He had a sister toward whom he felt, just
as she did toward him, an intense but always restrained affection. They
had often enough said to each other: “What a shame it is that we cannot
marry!” An unobjectionable man had fallen in love with the sister, and
she had returned his feeling, but her parents would not give their consent
to the union. The couple had turned to my patient for help, and he had
not refused it. He had enabled them to correspond with each other, and
it had been due to his influence that the parents had eventually been
persuaded to give their consent. While they were engaged, a chance oc­
currence had taken place, whose significance it is easy to guess. He and
his future brother-in-law undertook a difficult climb without a guide;
they lost their way, and were in danger of never returning alive. Shortly
after the marriage of his sister he had fallen into his present state of
mental exhaustion.
When he had become able to work as a result of psychoanalysis, he
left me to take his examination; but after he had got through it he came
back to me in the autumn of the same year for a short period. He then
told me of a remarkable experience which he had had before the sum­
mer. In his university town there lived a fortuneteller, who carried on a
very successful practice there. Even the princes of the reigning house
used to consult her regularly before undertaking any important step.
The way in which she worked was very simple. She asked for the facts
concerning the birth of the person involved, but wanted to know nothing
else about him, not even his name. She then consulted her astrological
books, made long calculations and in the end made a prophecy about
him. My patient decided to make use of her secret arts in connection
with his brother-in-law. He visited her and gave her the requisite data
about him. After she had made her calculations she pronounced the fol­
lowing prophecy: “This person will die in July or August of this year of
poison from eating crabs or oysters.” My patient finished his story by ex­
plaining: “And that really was marvelous!”
From the very beginning, I had listened to his story without enthu­
siasm; and after this exclamation I permitted myself to ask: “What is it
that makes you find this prophecy so marvelous? We have already reached
the late autumn, and your brother-in-law is not dead yet, or you would
have told me long ago. The prophecy therefore has not come true.” “The
prophecy—no,” he said, “but the remarkable thing is this. My brother-
in-law is passionately fond of crabs and oysters, and last summer, that is
to say before my visit to the fortuneteller, he was poisoned by eating
oysters, and nearly died of it.” What could I say about it? I could only
feel distressed that such an intelligent man, and moreover one who had a
satisfactory analysis behind him, should not have seen through the whole
thing more clearly. For my part, before I believe that one can calculate
the onset of shellfish poisoning by consulting astrological tables, I would
rather suppose that my patient had not yet overcome his hatred toward
his rival, the repression of which had caused his own illness, and that the
lady astrologer simply gave voice to his own hope: “People never give up
such tastes, and one day they will really be the end of him.” I admit that
I can find no other explanation for this case, except perhaps that my pa­
tient was making a joke at my expense. But neither then nor later did he
give me any grounds for such a suspicion, and he seemed to mean quite
seriously what he said.
Here is another case. A young man of good position had a mistress,
and showed a remarkable obsession in his relations with her. From time
to time he was impelled to wound her feelings with insulting remarks till
she was reduced to despair. When he had got her into this condition he
felt relieved, made it up with her and gave her presents. But now he
wanted to free himself from her, for the obsession was becoming a worry
to him: he noticed that his professional life was suffering from the rela­
tionship, and wanted to have a wife and family of his own. Since, how­
ever, he could not get away from his mistress by his own efforts, he came
to analysis for help. After one of these scenes, which occurred during the
analysis, he got her to write him a few words on a piece of paper and
showed it to a graphologist. The information he received from him was
to the effect that this was the handwriting of a person in the depths of
despair, who would certainly commit suicide in the course of the next
few days. That event did not indeed come about, for the lady remained
alive, but the analytical treatment enabled him to free himself from his
fetters; he left the lady, and turned his attentions to a young girl who he
thought would make him a good wife. Soon afterward he had a dream
which could only be explained as due to an incipient doubt about the
young girl's worth. He obtained a specimen of her handwriting as well,
which he placed before the same authority, and received a judgment on
it which confirmed his anxieties. He therefore gave up his intention of
making her his wife.
To estimate the reports of the handwriting expert, and particularly
the first one, at their proper value, one must know something of the pri­
vate history of our subject. In his early adolescent years he was madly in
love with a young woman, some years older than himself, in the passion­
ate way that was characteristic of him. She rejected him and he thereupon
attempted suicide; nor can we doubt the seriousness of his intention. It
was only by miracle that he escaped death, and it was only after careful
nursing that he recovered. But his reckless act made a deep impression
upon the woman he was in love with; she responded to his attentions,
and became his mistress. From that time onward he had a deep attach­
ment to her, and served her in a truly devoted manner. After more than
two decades, when they had both lost something of their youth, the
woman naturally more than he, he felt the need of detaching himself
from her; he wanted to be free, to lead his own life, and to have a house
and family of his own. And at the same time that he felt this dissatisfac­
tion, there sprang up in him the long-suppressed need for revenge upon
her. Just as at first he had tried to commit suicide himself, because she
rejected him, so now he wanted to have the satisfaction of seeing her seek
destruction because he was leaving her. But his love was still too strong
for this wish to become conscious; nor was he able to behave badly
enough to her to drive her to commit suicide. In this frame of mind he
took on the mistress whom I first mentioned as a kind of whipping boy,
in order to satisfy his thirst for revenge in corpore vili, and inflicted on
her all the injuries calculated to produce in her the effect he desired to
produce in the woman he loved. The fact that the revenge was actually
directed toward the latter was only betrayed by the circumstances that
he made her a confederate and advisor in his love affair, instead of hid­
ing his lapse from her. The unfortunate woman, who had sunk from the
position of giving favors to that of receiving them, probably suffered
from his confidences more than the new mistress did from his brutality.
The obsession of which he complained in reference to the latter, and
which brought him under analytic treatment, had naturally been trans­
ferred from his first mistress to her; it was from his first mistress that he
wanted to free himself and could not. I am no handwriting expert, and I
do not think much of the art of guessing character from handwriting;
still less do I believe in the possibility of foretelling the future of the
writer in that way. You see, however, that, whatever one may think of
the value of graphology, it is undeniable that the expert, when he prom­
ised that the writer of the specimen which had been brought to him
would commit suicide during the next few days, had once more only
brought to light a very strong secret wish on the part of the person who
was asking his opinion. Something similar happened in the case of the
second report, only that here we are not concerned with an unconscious
wish; here it was the incipient doubts and anxieties of the inquirer that
found overt expression through the mouth of the handwriting specialist.
I may add that my patient was able with the help of the analysis to make
a love choice outside the magic circle within which he had been spell­
bound.
Ladies and Gentlemen—You have now heard what dream interpreta­
tion and psychoanalysis in general can do for occultism. You have seen
by means of examples that, through the application of psychoanalytic
theory, occult phenomena have been revealed which would otherwise
have remained unrecognized. The question which doubtless interests you
most, whether we ought to believe in the objective reality of the phe­
nomena, is one which psychoanalysis cannot answer directly; but at least
the material which it has helped to bring to light is favorable to an af­
firmative reply. But your interest will not stop there. You will want to
know to what conclusion that far richer vein of material, with which
psychoanalysis has nothing whatever to do, leads us. There, however, I
cannot follow you; it is no longer my province. The only thing I can do,
is to tell you of some observations, which at any rate have something to
do with psychoanalysis in the sense that they were made during analytical
treatment, and were perhaps rendered possible by means of it. I will
give you one example, the one which left the strongest impression with
me; it will be long-winded, and you will have to keep a number of details
in your minds, and even so a great deal will have to be omitted which
increased the evidential value of the observation. It is an instance in
which the phenomena in which we are interested came to light quite ob­
viously and did not have to be brought out by analysis. In discussing it,
however, we shall not be able to do without analysis. But I ought to warn
you beforehand that even this example of apparent thought transference
in the analytic situation is not proof against all objections, and does not
warrant unconditional acceptance of the reality of occult phenomena.
The story is this. One autumn day in the year 1919, at about 10:45
A.M., Dr. David Forsyth, who had just arrived from London, sent in his
card while I was working with a patient. (My respected colleague from
the University of London will, I feel sure, not think I am being indiscreet
if I tell you that he came to me for some months to be initiated into the
mysteries of psychoanalytical technique.) I had only time to say “How
do you do?” and arrange an appointment for later on. Dr. Forsyth had a
special claim upon my interest; for he was the first foreigner who came
to me after the isolation of the war years, and seemed to be a harbinger
of better times. Soon after this, at eleven o'clock, my next patient arrived,
a Mr. P., an intelligent and charming man of between forty and fifty,
who had come to me because he experienced difficulties in sexual inter­
course with women. In his case there was no prospect of bringing about
a cure, and I had long ago suggested that he should break off the treat­
ment; but he had preferred to continue it, obviously because he felt com­
fortable in a well-tempered father transference upon myself. Money
played no part at this time, because there was too little of it about. The
hours I spent with him were stimulating for me as well, and a relaxation,
and so, setting aside the strict rules of medical etiquette, we were going
on with the analytic treatment for a specified length of time.
On this particular day P. reverted to his attempts at sexual inter­
course with women, and mentioned once more the pretty, piquante girl,
in poor circumstances, with whom he might have been successful if only
the fact of her virginity had not frightened him off from taking any seri­
ous steps. He had often spoken of her, but that day he told me for the
first time that she, though naturally she had not the slightest idea of the
real grounds of his difficulty, used to call him Mr. Foresight (Vorsicht). I
was much struck by this piece of information; Dr. Forsyth’s card was be­
side me, and I showed it to him.
These are the facts. I dare say they will seem to you to be rather thin;
but if you will have patience you will find that there is more to come.
P. had spent some years of his youth in England, and had retained a
lasting interest in English literature. He possessed a well-stocked library
of English books, which he used to lend me, and it is to him that I owe
my acquaintance with authors such as Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy,
of whose works I had so far read but little. One day he lent me a novel
by Galsworthy called The Man of Property, the subject of which is an
imaginary family named Forsyte. Galsworthy’s imagination was obvi­
ously captured by this creation of his, because in the later stories he re­
peatedly went back to members of this family, and eventually collected
all the stories which had to do with them under the heading of The
Forsyte Saga. Only a few days before the event I am telling you about,
P. had brought me a new volume out of this series. The name Forsyte
and all that it typified for the author, had played a part in my conversa­
tions with P.; it had become a part of the private language which so
easily grows up between two people who see each other regularly. Now
the name Forsyte out of the novels is not very different from that of my
visitor Forsyth (as pronounced by a German, indeed, they are hardly dis­
tinguishable), and the expressive English word “foresight,” which means
“Voraussicht” or “Vorsicht ” would be pronounced in the same way. P.
had, therefore, produced from his own personal experiences a name that
was in my mind at the same time on account of a circumstance quite un­
known to him.
As you see, we are making some progress. But I think we shall be
even more strongly impressed by this remarkable occurrence and get
some sort of insight into the conditions of its origin, if we turn the light
of analysis onto two other associations which P. brought up during the
same hour.
First: One day in the preceding week I was expecting Mr. P. at 11
o’clock, but he had not appeared, and I went out to pay a call on Dr.
Anton v. Freund at his pension. I was surprised to find that Mr. P. lived
on another floor of the same house in which the pension was. Referring
to this later, I told P. that I had in a sense paid him a visit at his house;
but I am absolutely certain that I did not mention the name of the per­
son whom I had visited in the pension, and now, soon after the mention
of Mr. Foresight, he asked me the following question: “Is the lady called
Freud-Ottorego who gives the English course at the Volksuniversitat your
daughter by any chance?” And for the first time in our long acquaintance
he let slip the distorted form of my name, to which officials, clerks, and
printers have accustomed me; instead of Freud, he said Freund.
Secondly: At the end of the hour he told me a dream, out of which he
had woken with a feeling of anxiety, a regular “Alptraum” (“nightmare”)
he called it. He added that he had recently forgotten the English word
for it, and had told someone who had asked him, that the English for
“Alptraum” was “a mare’s nest.” That is of course, absurd, because “a
mare's nest” means nothing of the sort, and the correct translation of
“Alptraum” is “nightmare.” This association seemed to have nothing
more in common with the others than the element of “English”; but he
reminded me of a trivial occurrence which had happened about a month
before. P. was sitting in my room with me, when there appeared quite
unexpectedly another welcome guest from London, Dr. Ernest Jones,
whom I had not seen for a long time. I nodded to him to go into my
other room until I had finished with P. The latter recognized him at
once, however, from a photograph of him which hung in the waiting
room, and even asked to be introduced to him. Now Jones is the author
of a monograph on the nightmare (109). I did not know whether P. was
acquainted with the book; he avoided reading analytical literature.
At this point I should like to consider what analytical understanding
we can obtain of P/s associations and their motivations. P. had the same
attitude toward the name Forsyte as I had; it meant the same to him as it
did to me, and in fact it was to him that I owed my knowledge of the
name. The remarkable thing was that he brought this name into the
analysis immediately after it had acquired another meaning for me
through a recent experience, namely the arrival of the physician from
London. But perhaps not less interesting is the way in which the name
came up in his analytical hour. He did not say: “Now the name Forsyte,
out of the novels you have read, comes into my mind,” but, without any
conscious reference to this source, he managed to weave it into his own
personal experiences and brought it to the surface in that way—a thing
which might have happened long before, but which had not as a matter
of fact occurred until now. At this juncture, however, he said: “I am a
Forsyte, too, for that is what the girl called me.” One cannot mistake the
mixture of exacting jealousy and plaintive self-depreciation which finds
expression in this utterance. We shall not go far wrong if we complete
it thus: “I am hurt that your thoughts should be so much wrapped up in
this newcomer. Come back to me; after all, I am a Forsyth too—or rather
only a Mr. Foresight, as the girl called me.” And now, starting from the
idea of “English,” his train of thought worked back to two earlier situa­
tions, which might very well have aroused the same jealousy in him. “A
few days ago you paid a visit at my house, but, alas, it was not to me, it
was to a Herr v. Freund.” This idea made him distort the name Freud
into Freund. The name Freud-Ottorego from the lecture list came in, be­
cause as the name of a teacher of English it paved the way for the mani­
fest association. And now the memory of another visitor of a few weeks
back presented itself, a visitor toward whom he certainly felt just as
jealous, this visitor (Dr. Jones) was at the same time in a superior posi­
tion to him, because he could write a book about nightmares, while the
best he could do was to have nightmares himself. The allusion to his mis­
take about the meaning of a “mare's nest” belonged to the same connec­
tion; it must mean: “I am not a proper Englishman after all, any more
than I am a proper Forsyth.”
Now it could not be said that his jealous feelings were either inap­
propriate or incomprehensible. He had already been made aware that his
analysis, and with it our relations, would come to an end as soon as for­
eign pupils and patients began to return to Vienna; and this is actually
what happened shortly afterward. But what we have just been doing has
been a piece of analytical work: the explanation of three ideas which
were brought up in the same hour and were determined by the same
motivation. This has not much to do with the question whether these
ideas could have been produced without thought transference or not.
The latter question applies to each of the three ideas, and can thus be
divided into three separate questions. Could P. have known that Dr.
Forsyth had just paid his first visit to me? Could he have known the
name of the person whom I visited in his house? Did he know that Dr.
Jones had written a book about nightmares? Or was it only my knowledge
of these things which was displayed in the ideas that came into his head?
Whether this observation of mine leads to a conclusion in favor of
thought transference depends on the answer which is given to these sep­
arate questions. Let us leave the first question aside for the moment, as
the two others are easier to deal with. The case of the visit to the pension
strikes one at first sight as being very convincing. I am quite sure that
in my short humorous mention of my visit to his house I did not mention
any name; I think it is most improbable that P. made inquiries in the
pension to discover the name of the person I had called on; in fact, I be­
lieve that he never knew of his existence. But the evidential value of this
case is undermined by a chance factor. The man whom I had been to
see in the pension was not only called Freund, but was indeed a true
friend to us all. It was he whose generosity had made possible the found­
ing of our publishing house. His early death, and that of Karl Abraham
a few years later, were the most serious misfortunes which have befallen
the development of psychoanalysis. It is possible, therefore, that I said to
Mr. P.: “I have been visiting a friend at your house,” and with this pos­
sibility the occult interest of the second association evaporates.
The impression made by the third association, too, soon fades. Could
P. have known that Jones had published a monograph on the nightmare,
seeing that he never read analytical literature? Yes, he could. He pos­
sessed books issued by our publishing house, and he might certainly have
seen the titles of new publications printed on the covers. It cannot be
proved, but it cannot be disproved. Along this road, then, we can come
to no decision. This example of mine, I regret to say, is open to the same
objections as so many others. It was written down too late, and came up
for discussion at a time when I was not seeing Mr. P. any more, and
could not ask him any further questions.
Let us return to the first association, which even by itself would sup­
port the alleged occurrence of thought transference. Could P. have known
that Dr. Forsyth had been with me a quarter of an hour before him?
Could he even have known of his existence or of his presence in Vienna?
We must not give way to the temptation to answer both questions straight
off in the negative. I might very well have told Mr. P. I was expecting a
physician from England for training in analysis, the first dove after the
deluge. This might have happened in the summer of 1919; Dr. Forsyth
had made arrangements with me by letter, months before his arrival. I
may even have mentioned his name, though that is most improbable. In
view of the other association which the name had for us both, the men­
tion of it would inevitably have led to a conversation of which some trace
at least would have been preserved in my memory. Nevertheless such a
conversation may have taken place and I may have totally forgotten it,
so that it became possible for the mention of Mr. Foresight in the
analytical hour to strike me as miraculous. If one regards oneself as a
skeptic, it is as well from time to time to be skeptical about one’s skep­
ticism. Perhaps I too have that secret leaning toward the miraculous
which meets the production of occult phenomena halfway.
Even if one part of this miraculous occurrence is thus explained
away, we still have another part on our hands, and that the most difficult
part of all. Granted that Mr. P. knew that there was such a person as Dr.
Forsyth and that he was expected in Vienna in the autumn, how was it
that my patient became sensitive to him on the very day of his arrival
and immediately after his first visit? We might say that it was chance,
that is, we might leave it unexplained; but I have mentioned the two
other ideas which occurred to Mr. P. precisely in order to exclude chance,
in order to show you that he really was occupied with jealous thoughts
directed against people who visited me, and whom I visited. Or, if we
are anxious not to overlook anything even remotely possible, we might
suppose that P. noticed that I was in a state of unusual excitement, a
state of which I was certainly not aware, and that he drew his inference
from that. Or that Mr. P., who after all had arrived only a quarter of an
hour after the Englishman, had met him in the immediate neighborhood
of my house, that he had recognized him from his typically English ap­
pearance, and with his jealous feelings on the alert, had immediately
thought: “Ah, there is Dr. Forsyth, whose arrival means the end of my
analysis; and probably he has just left the Professor.” I cannot go any
further into these rationalistic hypotheses. We are left once more with a
non liquet, but I must confess that here too I feel that the balance is in
favor of thought transference. For the matter of that, I am certainly not
the only person who has met with “occult” phenomena in the analytic
situation. Helene Deutsch in 1926 (XII) reported some observations of
the same kind, and studied the way in which they were conditioned by
the relation of transference between the patient and the analyst.
I am sure that you will not be satisfied with my position with regard
to this problem—not completely convinced and yet ready to be con­
vinced. Perhaps you will say to yourselves: “Here is another example of a
person who has all his life been a steady-going man of science, and is
now in his old age becoming weak-minded, religious and credulous.” I
know that some great names belong in that category, but you must not
reckon mine among them. At least I have not grown religious, and I
hope I have not become credulous. If one has humbled oneself all one's
life long in order to avoid painful conflict with facts, one tends to keep
one’s back bowed in one’s old age before any new facts which may ap­
pear. No doubt you would far prefer that I should hold fast to a mod­
erate theism, and turn relentlessly against anything occult. But I am not
concerned to seek anyone’s favor, and I must suggest to you that you
should think more kindly of the objective possibility of thought trans­
ference and therefore also of telepathy.
You must not forget that I have only dealt with the problem here in
so far as one can approach it from the direction of psychoanalysis. When
I turned my thoughts toward it more than ten years ago, I too felt afraid
lest our scientific outlook might be endangered and have to give way to
spiritualism or mysticism if occult phenomena were proved to be true. I
think otherwise now; it seems to me that one is displaying no great trust
in science if one cannot rely on it to accept and deal with any occult
hypothesis that may turn out to be correct. And as regards thought trans­
ference in particular, it would seem actually to favor the extension of
the scientific (or, as opponents would say, mechanistic) way of thinking
onto the elusive world of the mind. For the telepathic process is sup­
posed to consist in a mental act of one person giving rise to the same
mental act in another. What lies between the two mental acts may very
well be a physical process, into which the mental process transforms
itself at one end and which is transformed back into the same mental
process at the other. The analogy with other transformations, such as
speaking and hearing across the telephone, is an obvious one. And think
what it would mean if one could get hold of this physical equivalent of
the mental act! I should like to point out that by inserting the uncon­
scious between the physical and what has hitherto been regarded as the
mental, psychoanalysis has prepared the way for the acceptance of such
processes as telepathy. If one gets used to the idea of telepathy one can
account for a great deal by means of it, so far, of course, only in imagina­
tion. It is a familiar fact that we have no notion of how the communal
will of the great insect states comes about. Possibly it works by means of
mental transference of this direct kind. One is led to conjecture that this
may be the original archaic method by which individuals understood one
another, and which has been pushed into the background in the course
of phylogenetic development by the better method of communication by
means of signs apprehended by the sense organs. But such older methods
may have persisted in the background, and may still manifest themselves
under certain conditions: for example, in crowds roused to a state of pas­
sionate excitement. All of this is highly speculative and full of unsolved
problems, but there is no need to be alarmed by it.
If telepathy is a real process, one may, in spite of the difficulty of
proof, suppose that it is quite a common phenomenon. It would fit in
with our expectations if we could show that it occurs particularly in the
mental life of children. One is reminded of the frequent fear felt by
children that their parents know all their thoughts without having been
told them—a fear which is a complete parallel to, and perhaps the origin
of, the belief of adults in the omniscience of God. A short time ago a
trustworthy observer, Dorothy Burlingham, published some findings in a
paper called “Child Analysis and the Mother” (18), which, if they are
confirmed, must put an end to any remaining doubts of the reality of
thought transference. She took as her starting point a number of those
cases (now no longer rare) in which a mother and child are being
analyzed at the same time, and reported such remarkable phenomena as
the following. One day in her analytic hour the mother was talking about
a gold coin which had figured in one of her childhood experiences. Im­
mediately afterward, when she had returned home, her little ten-year-
old boy came into her room and brought her a gold coin to keep for
him. She was astonished and asked him where he had got it from. He
had been given it on his birthday, but that was several months ago, and
there was no reason why the child should have remembered the gold
coin just then. The mother told the analyst about the coincidence, and
asked her to try to find out from the child why he had behaved in this
way. But the analysis of the child elicited nothing; the action had made
its way into the child's life that day like a foreign body. A few weeks
later the mother was sitting at her writing table, in order to make a note
of the occurrence, as she had been asked to do. At that moment the boy
came in and asked for the gold coin back, saying that he wanted to take
it to show his analyst. Once more the child's analysis disclosed nothing
that led up to the wish.
And with that we return to our starting point—the study of psycho­
analysis.
 Part III
Studies by Psychoanalytic
Pioneers
 Chapter 9
A CRITIQUE OF CLAIRVOYANCE*
By EDWARD HITSCHMANN, M.D.

In recent years several authors, including especially foreign ones, have

published books which, while not asserting the existence of supernatural
relationships, nonetheless point out that the numerous cases of clairvoy­
ance, prophetic dreams, telepathic phenomena, crystal gazing, seeing
ghosts and the like, reported from every country under the sun, make it
advisable not to reje*ct prematurely such matters as being due either to
deliberate fraud or else to self-deception caused by defective recall, but
to seek for deeper connections and for a scientific explanation of these
phenomena. Most occultists and spiritualists who take an interest in
such matters suspect that these occurrences suggest the existence of some
unknown underlying physical force, such as “the Od,” or a sixth sense.
They show no inclination, however, to undertake a psychological clarifi­
cation of these phenomena.
Since the examples cited usually come from beyond the ocean, or else
from some remote village, our knowledge of the actual details of these
occurrences is, of necessity, a limited one, thus making it impossible for
us to establish the necessary controls. There can be no doubt that in this
instance, as in many other phases of psychological investigation, a gener­
alized approach becomes possible only after a detailed psychoanalytic in­
vestigation of numerous individual cases. For example, one asks in vain
whether the clairvoyant was a hysteric, whether the prophetess was a
skilled medium, or suffered from hallucinations, or was bigoted, or dis­
played a tendency to fantasy. Be that as it may, the very fact that reports
of such occurrences did reach the writers, who then published them, sug­
gests that we are dealing with adherents of occultism and of occult phe­
nomena.
* Originally published in German in the Wiener Klinische Rundschau, 24:94-95,
1910. Translated by George Devereux and published here by permission of Dr. Ed­
ward Hitschmann.
 It may be interesting, therefore, to examine carefully a case of clair­
voyance in a sober and healthy psychologist, and the psychological, rather
than the physical, explanation of this event.
Ever since the ascent of Renner's dirigible balloon at Graz, I devel­
oped a great deal of interest in dirigibles, and read carefully all the news
about balloons published in the newspapers. However, side by side with
enthusiastic remarks about the ascent of the first Austrian dirigible, I
also read the skeptical utterances of a certain specialist, who stressed that
the balloon had no valve, which meant that, in case of accident, the bal­
loon could not be made to land at will. He also pointed out the possibil­
ity that solar radiations might cause the balloon to rise to such heights
that it would eventually explode. When the balloon was finally brought
to Vienna, and, on a certain Saturday, made its first successful ascent in
the presence of the Emperor, I read the news of this ascent with great in­
terest. At the same time I also felt a certain amount of disappointment
that a technically so imperfect aeronautical device should be granted so
much recognition. Next Sunday I repeatedly felt the impulse to attend
the next ascent of the balloon, but permitted other plans to inhibit this
recurrent impulse. At about the time of the scheduled ascent I happened
to be sitting at the table, when, after glancing at the clock, I exclaimed:
“It is 3:30. One of the two Renner boys just fell out of the balloon, and
the balloon is flying away!” At the same time I also had a clear vision of
these happenings. Three hours later I heard in the streets that this is ex­
actly what had happened. The balloon, with the surviving aviator aboard,
had been carried away by air currents, and did not land until quite some
time later, in the vicinity of Vienna.
I was greatly pleased with my prophetic performance. One thing,
however, disappointed me a little: The accident occurred when the bal­
loon collided with the hangar. This meant that the aviator had not fallen
from the balloon, but had been thrown out of it and of that part
of the events I had had no premonition.
If one takes into consideration the unusual nature of a sudden
prophetic remark about events which take place at an hour's distance,
then it is possible to consider it as a new proof of the possibility of
clairvoyant occurrences. One can do so even if certain minor details are
not quite accurate, and if a more careful inquiry reveals that the actual
incident occurred only half an hour later, i.e., at 4 P.M. If, however, I
try to view the incident in an unprejudiced manner, and in conformity
with my skeptical attitude toward everything metaphysical and occult,
then the incident can be explained in the following manner:
That Sunday morning I had been reading Hyslop’s book Enigmas of
Psychical Research (100) and, after examining several of his examples,
had put down this book, whose case material impressed me as superficial
and worthless. At that time I also had the pleasant fantasy that some day
I would discuss this problem before a group made up of our psycholog­
ically-minded friends, and would declare that all of these incidents could
be interpreted, were one but able to investigate every detail of each in­
dividual case. The ascent of the balloon itself I had viewed with great
interest, but also with some slight disfavor, because my indecision had
kept me away from it. On glancing at the clock at 3:30, I must have
finally decided that it had become totally impossible for me to be present
at the ascent. In addition, the structural deficiencies of the balloon had
caused me to doubt that its ascent would be completely successful. This,
in turn, probably gave additional support to the recurrent fantasy, which
had haunted me for several days past, that the ascent would not suc­
ceed.1 At the particular time when, in a slightly bantering tone, I told
my brother about my vision, I had, in reality, done nothing more than
make a final choice between several alternative fantasies regarding the
manner in which the ascent would fail. One of these, which involved the
possibility that excessive solar heat might cause an explosion, I rejected
inwardly, by taking into consideration the slight intensity of the sun's
radiations in autumn. The slight malice implicit in the belief that the
ascent—at which I had failed to be present—would come to no good end,
may also have been motivated in part by the fact that my original plan
of spending this Sunday in the company of a lady had miscarried. The
visual form assumed by my fantasy I can perhaps explain by the fact
that, when reading about clairvoyant occurrences earlier in the day, I
may have unconsciously hoped to be able to dispose completely of such
an occurrence by means of a psychological explanation of all details
thereof. In addition, the summary form of the vision also reminds one
of the form of a joke. Thus, had the vision not been followed by cor­
responding events, my remarks about the crash of the aviator would have
been nothing more than a “bad joke," i.e., the kind of uncalled-for de­
light in the mishaps of others which betrays the presence of the kind of
basic mood which is so clearly reflected by the typically Viennese remark:
“Things will certainly go wrong!" In this context I will also confess that
jokes often come to my mind, and that these jokes are frequently ag­
gressive ones. Freud has provided us with a cogent explanation of the
relationship between aggressive jokes and the unconscious of the joker
(68). The hallucinatory representation: “Now he is falling," also re­
minds one of the dream which—as Freud has shown in The Interpretation
of Dreams (66)—is closely related to unconscious repressed wishes,
and tends to transform thoughts into imagery. Thus, the death of rela­
tives may play the same role both in clairvoyance and in dreams.
Although I have tried to be as frank as possible in the interpretation
of this occurrence, I must report how I fared in the course of the next
few days, whenever I tried to narrate this instance of clairvoyance. Even
though I am completely skeptical about the whole matter, I repeatedly
caught myself trying to embellish my account, by adding further details
to my clairvoyant performance. For example, even though I always told
this story with a smile, vanity may be responsible for the fact that I never
rounded out my narrative with a discussion of my skeptical interpretation
of the real nature of this occurrence. Hence, one cannot help wondering
how much more intensely the wish to boast about one’s suprasensory
abilities, and to receive praise for them, influences those who are ignorant
i When, later on, the Frenchman Bleriot flew over Vienna in his technically unob­
jectionable airplane, I had no such Cassandra fantasies. Nemo propheta in patria!
of the psychological objections which can be raised regarding the pos­
sibility of the occurrence of occult phenomena! A large proportion of
occult experiences must be rooted in precisely this human foible. In ad­
dition, because of their psychic development, many persons have an ir­
resistible urge toward the occult. This urge, which is a problem in itself,
also requires an explanation.
The above considerations led me to formulate the following criteria,
which will have to be applied to every case of clairvoyance, as soon as it
is reported in detail, in order to enable one to establish, once and for all,
either the existence of an unobjectionable case of clairvoyance, or else
the impossibility of there being such cases.
1. A very exact determination of the time and details of the vision itself,
as well as of the actual incident, special care being taken to exclude
all possibility of a deception of the senses.
2. A study of the clairvoyant's psychic state:
(a) The psychic state at the time of the occurrence: Is there a recent
complex present, either consciously or unconsciously, i.e., is there
a more than average interest in a given object, incident, person,
etc.? Did this interest elicit fantasies, hallucinations and dreams?
Did there occur additional phenomena of a different content,
which did not materialize? Is some wish or anxiety connected
with that matter or person? (Psychoanalysis.)
(b) The relations of the clairvoyant with occultism and its repre­
sentatives.
(c) What benefits or disadvantages may the clairvoyant expect to de­
rive from this report about his experience?
It is my conviction that this approach will lead to the final repudia­
tion of the clairvoyance theory. Remote objects, scenes or occurrences
are never perceived except by means of the corresponding sense impres­
sions. In reality, in most cases of clairvoyance we are dealing with noth­
ing more than fantasies, dreams, hallucinations, or daydreams, which are
stimulated by an overwhelmingly strong current interest (thought com­
plex), and whose weirdness is due to the hidden or repressed emotions of
the unconscious. In the remainder of the cases one will find nothing more
at the root of these “supersensory phenomena" than self-deception, or
else deliberate fraud.
 By EDWARD HITSCHMANN, M.D.i

I. C la ir v o y a n t P e r c e pt io n of a D ista n t B a llo o n A c cid en t

In the year 1910 a great sensation was made in the principal town of
one of the Austrian provinces by two young men who had constructed a
dirigible balloon. Local patriotism gave enthusiastic expression to its
pride in the first Austrian balloon of the dirigible type; there was also,
however, a note of skepticism in the newspapers. The balloon had no
valve and therefore could not be made to descend in case of an accident;
in the heat of strong sunshine it might fly to an enormous height and
possibly burst. It was later brought to Vienna and one Saturday made a
successful ascent, the Emperor being a spectator; the present writer then
read an account of this with rising interest and looked at its photograph
in an illustrated paper, at the same time, however, feeling some disap­
pointment that so much recognition should be accorded to a type of
aircraft by no means high in technical efficiency. On the following Sun­
day I thought more than once of going to see the second ascent, but
allowed various things to prevent me. At about the time when the balloon
was to go up I was sitting at the table, when suddenly, looking at the
clock, I called out, “It is half-past three—one of the brothers is falling
out of the balloon which is being carried away!” I had a vision of this
happening as I spoke.
Three hours later I heard in the street that this had actually hap­
pened, and that the balloon with one of its pilots had been carried high
into the air, landing later on without further mishap not far from
Vienna. I had a feeling of satisfaction and of amazement at my capacity
for foreseeing future events; the only disturbing element was the fact
that the balloon had collided against the hangar, so that the aviator had
not fallen but had been flung out, which I had never thought of.
* Originally published in Imago, 9:368*382, 1923. The English translation was first
published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 5:423-438, 1924, and is pub­
lished here by permission of Dr. Edward Hitschmann and of the editor of the Inter­
national Journal of Psycho-Analysis.
i Amplification of a lecture delivered in the Volksbildungshaus “Urania” at Vienna
in 1921. The subject has been limited to so-called spontaneous clairvoyance and does
not include experiments (Kotik, Tischner, Wasielewski, etc.).
 In view of the improbability of anyone suddenly describing in a pro­
phetic way an event taking place an hour's journey distant and seeing it
before his very eyes, we may regard this case as a fresh proof of the
possibility of clairvoyance.
II. T e l e p a t h ic I n t im a t io n o f a F a t h e r ' s D e a t h
The poet Max Dauthendey, in his autobiographical work Der Geist
meines Vaters, gives an account of the telepathic intimations that he
received of his father's death. He writes as follows:
“For some time the son had been interested in occult phenomena, the
symbolism of numbers, and so on. One day he was playing with a so-
called ‘star card,' i.e., two concentric circular cards of different sizes, on
the smaller of which is a chart of the constellations and the Milky Way,
while on the margin of the larger card are marked the three hundred
and sixty-five days of the year. By placing any given day on the meridian
of the ‘star card' the position of the constellations on that day can be
seen. He now ‘in imagination' placed it on the date of his father's birth­
day and then on that of his own, saw with amazement -that the tracks of
the Milky Way intersected at these two dates, and wondered to himself
whether this signified the contrast between his own nature and his
father's. At that moment for no external reason he suddenly experienced
a very distinct hallucination, which persisted for some time, of a smell
of tobacco which he remembered from the days of his youth as charac­
teristic of his father. At the moment he was just going to wash his hands;
and feeling that the smell proceeded from them, he washed them several
times over. It proved, however, to be a hallucination, for his wife de­
clared emphatically that there was no such smell perceptible. Several
hours later the poet received at his address in Paris a telegram stating
that his father had died at home in Wurzburg at the very hour when the
hallucination of tobacco had occurred in Paris. This event, which took
place in September, produced in the son a feeling of solemnity rather
than grief; it followed upon a dream which he had had three months
before containing an intimation of his father's death. In the month of
June the younger Dauthendey had suddenly started up from his sleep
(he was lying stretched out like a corpse with his hands folded on his
breast) and heard a voice saying, ‘In September your father will die!' On
that occasion too he had not felt any grief, only a sensation of shuddering
awe at the impressive tidings of death. The poet made a note of this
dream in his diary, and as the month of September approached he and
his wife recalled the prophecy; the death foretold actually occurred on
the fifth of September. Would anyone be prepared to deny that in this
instance the accumulated operation of strange influences from afar points
to the assumption of mystical forces at work?"
I II . C la ir v o y a n c e and T elepathy in P o pu l a r O p in io n
We have here two cases of clairvoyance and telepathy, one of which
was observed by the writer of these pages, being himself the percipient;
while the other is described in detail by a well-known poet in an auto­
biographical work. The one is a case of the perception and knowledge
of a flying accident which took place many miles away, while the other is
an experience of a son's receiving while in Paris strange intimations of
the death of his father living in Wurzburg. Reports of similar observa­
tions are no longer rare; in the press and in the various collected works
of Flammarion (57, 58), Hyslop (100) and others, there are many in­
stances of clairvoyance, telepathy, intimations of death and prophecies,
though it is true these examples are always given in quite a brief form.
Hence the majority of my readers are not at all likely to refuse to accept
such cases of telesthesia as facts. It is easy enough at the present day to
fall back on the banal explanation, “Well, there is such a thing as wire­
less telegraphy!” Might not the minds of father and son be so attuned
to one another that the son could be aware of emanations from his
father’s mind, especially in the supreme hour of death? It is possible that
a minority of my readers may be more skeptical and deny such happen­
ings; it is not pleasant to see the facts of physics and physiology go by
the board. Superstition confronts us on every side. Mediums have often
enough been shown up as frauds at spiritualistic seances; a poet may well
be regarded as an untrustworthy witness—it is his very profession to put
his fantasies on record. Finally, there are cautious men of science who
shake their heads when they hear of such marvels, and go back to their
work of exact investigations, saying: “Of course it is possible that there
are forces of which as yet we know nothing, but I shall wait till I have
better evidence. Your accounts are superficial; you must make more exact
inquiries; take note of time and place; above all, observe the mental
condition of the person who had had the telepathic experience.”
This method of exact examination of the details is the one we shall
pursue here.
IV. A nalysis o f th e M ental C o n d itio n o f t h e P e r c ip ie n t in t h e
C ase o f t h e B a llo o n A c cid en t
It is obvious that such cases of telesthesia must be examined immedi­
ately; the traces they leave are only too easily obliterated by time. I sub­
jected my clairvoyant knowledge of the flying accident to a thorough
analysis then and there, and now give the result as follows:
The actual event took place half an hour later than the vision; and
one of the pilots had been flung out, owing to the balloon's colliding with
the hangar, instead of falling out, according to the hallucination. Some­
one with an especially mystical turn of mind might indeed go so far as
to suggest that the occurrence was the consequence of this wicked
thought! But against this we must remember how many people cherished
the hope that everything would go well.
 Let us analyze in greater detail my state of mind on that particular
day. My attitude toward the ascent of the balloon was that of great
interest; at the same time, since I had stayed away owing to my own inde­
cision, I had a certain grudge against it. When I looked at the clock at
half-past three I must have suddenly realized that it was now out of the
question for me to witness the ascent. A feeling of skepticism due to the
imperfections of this form of aircraft confirmed me in the fantasy that
the ascent would be a failure—a fantasy that had haunted me for the
last day or two. At the moment when I saw the vision, which I recounted
half in jest to my brother, I selected one of my various fantasies on the
subject of the failure of the ascent. One of these fantasies, namely, that
excessive exposure to the sun might lead to a catastrophe, I rejected in
my own mind because the autumn sunshine was not very strong. The
malicious wish that the sight I had missed should end in disaster may also
have been conditioned by the fact that my original intention to spend
Sunday in feminine company had not been fulfilled. The circumstance
that my fantasy took the form of a vision may perhaps be explained by my
having been reading that morning about clairvoyant experiences of this
sort, and by having perhaps unconsciously hoped to meet with some such
experience myself. Further, the momentary character of the vision re­
minds us of the form of a witticism. We have only to imagine that the
actual occurrence did not follow the vision and we see that my remark
about one of the pilots having fallen out, etc., would simply have been
a “bad joke/’ a piece of gratuitous malice, which would certainly have
betrayed some personal feeling. It was rather like the way in which the
Viennese often grumble: “It will turn out badly right enough!” I may
add that jokes do occur to me quite often and that very frequently they
are of an aggressive nature. As it is well known, Freud has elucidated
the relations of aggressive wit to the unconscious mental life of the
person making the joke. A joke affords an opportunity for giving
vent to repressed complexes. In wit the aggressive instinct which is at
other times inhibited finds partial gratification. The hallucinatory form
of the words “now . . he is falling . . . also reminds us of dreams,
which, as Freud again has demonstrated in his famous work Die Traum-
deutung (66) stand in the most intimate relation to unconscious wishes
and regularly transformed thoughts into sensory images.
A more profound self-analysis enables me to add the following re­
marks. I was thirty-nine years old at the time, and a bachelor; I and a
brother two years my junior were living with our mother. The three of
us were on the best possible terms; but, at the same time, a certain
jealousy existed between us brothers (based on former rivalry), the points
at issue being, on the one hand, our affectionate care for our mother and,
on the other, our right to be free from claims in the home on Sundays;
especially in the afternoons, to spend the time as we chose according to
the dictates of friendship or love (55). On Sunday afternoons we both
harbored conflicting desires to be free and to do our duty by keeping
our mother company. Supposing I had stayed at home, it rather annoyed
me if my brother were there too. An impatient feeling—“You or I”—
was in the air—“One in and the other out.” The analogy to the subject
of the vision is very obvious.2
From what I have said it is now quite clear that we have here an
instance of a “curse” of some kind finding expression. We have, however,
to explain how anyone accustomed to scientific thinking could at that
moment imagine that his exclamation could bring about a distant event
and have a disastrous influence on the ascent of the balloon. We are
reminded of the magic spells of superstitious primitive peoples, to which
they ascribe power to influence the outside world. Narcissism is the term
applied by Freud to the savage's overestimation of himself, which leads
him to attribute to himself “omnipotence of thought.” He believes that
his thoughts are able to kill a foe and to bring about fortune or mis­
fortune.
In concluding these remarks on the clairvoyant premonition of the
balloon accident, I will ask my readers the following question: Which
seems the more probable, that I was endowed at that particular moment
with the extraordinary capacity of perceiving by telepathy a quite unim­
portant event which took place many miles away half an hour later in
time? Or that the following psychological explanation is the right one:
that I was full of feelings of skepticism, hostility and self-reproach;
dissatisfied with myself and irritated by the company of my family, which
I found dull and irksome on a Sunday afternoon; annoyed at the pres­
ence of my brother who was only too much like myself; and disappointed
both at having failed to go and see the ascent of the balloon and having
my hopes in love frustrated; and that in consequence I rid myself of
these oppressive and conflcting unconscious feelings by means of a spite­
ful and revengeful vision? In this way I succeeded in spoiling for the
other two their enjoyment of their Sunday afternoon, in justifying my
not having gone to see the balloon, in giving vent to my jealousy of my
brother and in gaining relief from the accumulated inner tension. There
were so many motives and they were so strong that they gave rise not
merely to a thought but to a hallucination, which my vanity took the
risk of recounting to my companions. I seem to have attributed to myself
for one moment omnipotence of thought, the capacity of clairvoyance,
and the power of exercising a magical influence at a distance.
2 To this interpretation I subjoin the following additional remarks, hardly suitable
for the general public. It is improbable that any other occasion than that of a flying
exhibition would have given rise to this pseudo-clairvoyant experience. As the psycho­
analytic interpretation of dreams has shown, an air balloon, particularly in the form
in which it appeared to the percipient in this instance, is a symbol for the male organ.
Bound up with the male’s jealousy of other males, there are intimate associations of
the ideas of comparison of one’s own penis with that of others, destruction of an­
other’s penis and, so to speak, of placing another under the curse of impotence. The
percipient in this case can recall a dream from his earlier days, which was occasioned
by moving into another house on account of which (the new country house being
smaller than their old home) he had to sleep with his brother, as they had done in
childhood, instead of having a separate room. On the first night in the new home he
dreamed of striking at a serpent. The gondola in which the pilots of an airship sit is,
in the language of the unconscious, symbolic of the mother’s womb.
 V . A n alysis o f t h e M e n t a l A t t it u d e in t h e S o n W h o R ec eiv ed
a n I n t im a t io n o f H is F a t h e r ' s D e a t h
Dauthendey’s works provide ample material for the psychological
interpretation of his premonitions of his father's death.
The relations between the father Dauthendey and his two sons were
similar and yet different. The elder brother could not at all get on with
his father, who was capable of inflicting the most cruel punishments upon
his sons. From the very beginning this brother's attitude toward his
father was one of masculine defiance; and there came a day when the son
suddenly took his departure, saying that he could not work near his
father. Subsequently he went to Holland and America, and two years
later shot himself, being afflicted with delusions of persecution.
With the other son, who was eight years younger and gifted with
poetic talents, things were different. His was a gentler nature and his
father felt more tenderly toward him, seeing in him the image of his wife
who had died young. The two often went for walks, when the father
would engage in intimate talk with him. To all appearance this boy was
the favorite child, but there was one point on which father and son
differed profoundly: from childhood the latter was a dreamer, while the
former manifested the utmost antagonism and intolerance toward the
habit of dreaming, with which he constantly reproached his son and
which he tried to drive out of him by means of cold baths and gymnastic
exercises.3 Of a softer and more submissive disposition than his brother,
the younger son, in spite of the strongest feelings of resistance against
his father and in spite of plans to escape (he wanted against his father's
will to be an artist, or later on a poet), remained in bondage at home
and succeeded his father as head of his tedious business as a photog­
rapher. Not until he was in the twenties did he one day confront him
and declare that he must leave the house, that for years he had been
living a wasted life. For the past three months he had hardly spoken to
his father, except to answer Yes and No. “For," as we read in his book,
“the pressure his spirit exerted upon mine wearied me to death."
It is quite easy to recognize here the ambivalence of the son's atti­
tude: on the one hand, in his need for love, the motherless boy depended
on his father, while on the other he felt himself oppressed by him. Full of
3 The poet speaks of these daydreams of his in an entirely characteristic manner:
“When my father insisted that I should give up dreaming I felt as if my heart were
being torn out of my body. . But just as nobody could order me to sleep without
dreaming, so, as I soon sorrowfully realized, though I could certainly force myself to
work, dreams rose up in my brain in the daytime, when I was awake, no less uncon­
sciously than at night when I was asleep and in the midst of my work, in the
midst of writing my school tasks, or listening to what was being said . . . . I could not
help my mind being suddenly far away from the classroom, my ears hearing voices
speaking, my eyes looking on landscapes, my feet wandering on woodland paths,
while I listened to the ringing of bells and in my mind lived with people out of the
stories I had read; and then, suddenly back in the classroom, I found that I had lost
the thread” (69, 93, 96).
the longing for freedom and of his plans for poetic activity, at last he
painfully extricated himself from the home and went out into the world.
Years afterward he came back as a distinguished poet to his native town
where his mother was buried. Then his father, who in the meantime had
given him only the most meager and grudging help, made some sort of
apology. He had, he said, undervalued his son's dreams and verses.
Yet when the latter shortly afterward married, at a place some dis­
tance away, the father was angry with him and seems to have refused to
recognize the wife, and though the young man was notoriously badly off
he refused to give him any more money. The marriage had taken place in
May: in June occurred the dream which foretold the father's death, and
in September he died.
In the book which years afterward the son dedicated to his father's
memory, the prophetic dream and the hallucination of the cigarette smell
are represented as mystical phenomena. His feeling is that of awe rather
than distress; there is at first no word of remorse. The prosaic analyst is
impelled to seek a rationalistic explanation of those dreams, by no means
rare, which announce the death of near relatives; and in accordance with
his experience he looks for the unconscious death wish of the dreamer
(66). m ^
As the son wandered about from place to place devoting himself to
the art of poetry, he had at last freed himself from the passive-feminine
attitude to his father, and having become able to love, he married the
woman of his choice. He dared not, however, introduce her to his father,
and could not go back to his native town where his beloved mother was
buried. Indeed, it was just at this time that his father showed himself
relentless and refused to give a single penny to the young couple, who
had no resources whatever, with the result that they were in the direst
need. By the process of regression the son found in his infantile hatred
of the man who forbade his dreams and disturbed his love's reinforcement
for his unconscious death wishes, for only on his father's death could he
inherit means of livelihood and be free to visit his beloved home.
That in spite of, and side by side with, all his love for his father there
was even in quite early days a strong feeling of opposition to him is
clear from the poet's words: As a boy “I found life difficult when I had to
be my father's companion. My mother never used to speak of rules; my
father on the other hand seemed to me the embodiment of his continual
commands.” And in another passage: “Once more I felt in my heart that
there was a wide gulf between us, and I was silent, marveling that there
should be no bridge between father and son, between spirit and spirit.”
When we sum up this analysis of the poet's mind it suggests to us
that the telepathic news which the son received of his dying father is not
to be explained by the theory of mental “emanations” but that its origin
is to be sought only in the son’s unconscious mind. Even as a boy his
feelings toward his harsh father were ambivalent, i.e., oscillating between
love and hate. Thus, when he had just received news of his aged father's
illness, at a time when through his father's fault he was in a condition
of dire poverty, and more, had brought a young and dearly loved wife
to share that poverty, the death wishes could be revived in his uncon­
scious mind.
 So in this second instance of clairvoyance too we find the influence of
evil unconscious impulses, whose existence the son would at the time, if
he had been questioned, no doubt have denied in horror. All that he was
conscious of was that for some time past he had fallen a victim to the
fascination of occultism, and that in dreams and at other times the
thought of his father constantly occurred to him, once in the unusual
form of a hallucination of the smell of his father's tobacco.
Apart from external influences, the helplessness and hopelessness of
the poet would seem to be the precipitating cause of his regression to
mysticism, to ideas of supernatural prevision and similar powers and of
the omnipotence of thought characteristic of occultism. It reminds us
of the way in which people say: “Nothing but a miracle can help me
now.”
That in dreams evil unconscious wishes, and especially death wishes,
come to the surface is to the psychoanalyst a commonplace. The remem­
brance of a smell characteristic of some particular person, occurring with
the vividness of a hallucination, is, however, something unusual and
still demands explanation. Probably the only explanation necessary lies
in the intensity of the affect investing the whole subject in the son's
mind, in combination with his tendency to visual daydreams, to clear
memories, and to poetic fantasies. We must remember too that his
brother died a victim to delusions of persecution, a form of insanity
which, as is well known, is also characterized by hallucinations.
Those versed in psychoanalysis will moreover recognize that the atti­
tude of the son who was receiving his father's influence from a distance
in this way was, as it were, a passive, or, if you will, a feminine one toward
his father. An insane patient in a similar relation of dependence would
have a hallucination of being impregnated by the father, as we know
from many cases of paranoia. This “clairvoyant” period in the poet's life
might be construed as a partial regression to his attitude to his father in
childhood and at the same time as a regression to narcissism and inherited
sadism.
The assumption that intimations of the death of others have their
origin in death wishes is sufficiently well borne out by the son's feelings
of guilt after the event took place, which appear as the autobiography
proceeds. In this work, Gedankengut aus meinen Wanderjahren, the poet
betrays profound remorse in connection with his father's death, because
when the news reached him he heaved a “sigh of relief” which, however,
at the moment he “was not willing to admit consciously to himself.”
“For,” he goes on, “it struck me as ugly and ignoble that the death of my
old father, whom I loved so tenderly, should in my distressed circum­
stances make me heave a sigh of relief.” It was only when he came into
his father's money that he was delivered from actual hunger and enabled
to go on living. “In the frantic mockery to which I then gave way at the
thought of such a tragic situation, inheritance seemed to me synonymous
with cannibalism.” A skeptic might still ask how we are to account for
the fact that, in the intimation of death, September was named correctly
as the date of its occurrence, and that the tobacco hallucination synchro­
nized “exactly” with the actual death. Here I would reply that we have
no exact proof of the coincidence in time, that details are lacking; and
 further I assume that if the father had not died on that particular day
of that particular month both hallucination and dream would have
been forgotten, instead of proudly registered by the narcissism of the
poet At such times of mental agitation, moreover, errors and unconscious
falsifications of memory are by no means uncommon.
The unscientific, unpsychological reader with a predilection for the
mystical, who moves in circles where occultism and theosophy are prac­
ticed and has his own part to play in them, as a “member” or even “on
the committee”—this type of reader, especially if he is not restrained by
any sort of scientific training, will of course reject the explanation just
given. He will prefer lightheartedly to assume “some sort of wireless
telegraphy,” instruments keyed to the same pitch, and will quote from
the special literature of the subject, etc. Why should it not be possible
for telepathic influence of this sort to radiate from Wurzburg to Paris?
True, in other cases the chief stress is laid on the harmony existing
between the two minds; it is supposed to be love which so intensifies the
operation of obscure forces. Whereas in this case the father was angry
with the son and wished him not to have any newsl
Now whose voice are we to suppose it was which audibly foretold the
death: “In September your father will die”? One thing the poet himself
has told us—that since the break with his father, characteristically
enough, he had ceased to believe in a personal God (95)A From whom
did the smell of tobacco emanate? Are we to imagine that the father was
smoking, mortally ill as he was? Such credulity and foolishness as this
can be tolerated only where a poet's fantasy is concerned.
This intimation of the death is indeed the conscious motive of the
whole expectation of its happening. Dauthendey started out of his sleep
and heard the voice. Obviously it was an inner voice breaking in upon
his sleep and accompanied by so strong an affect that the dream work
could not be carried through. According to Freud, dreams are “the aboli­
tion of sleep-destroying (mental) stimuli by means of hallucinatory grati­
fication.” In this case the mental stimulus was too great and sleep was
destroyed; the dream turned into an audible intimation. Mental expe­
riences of this sort which cannot be reduced to the form of dreams are
also seen giving rise to many profound and lasting changes in personality;
they lie at the root of religious conversions (94, 95, 103) and mental
disorder.
Freud throws a considerable degree of light also on the genesis of
hallucinations. At the moment of waking the faculty of testing reality is
obviously not always functioning with sufficient accuracy to enable us to
distinguish whether a psychic excitation proceeds from within (from
memory) or from without (from perception). Thus the son mistook the
inner voice, which predicted his father's death (of such urgent necessity
to himself) as about to take place a few months later, and took it to be
an outer, mystical voice, absolving him completely from his feelings of
4 By an oversight no reference was made to this work in the Report on the ad­
vances in psychoanalysis between 1914 and 1919, published in the Internationale
Zeitschrift fiir Psychoanalyse, or in the similar Reports on "Religionswissenschaft” and
“Mystik und Okkultismus” (178) .
guilt. We can readily understand that in consequence his feeling was one
of awe only and was without any sort of distress.
The tendency of artists toward mysticism deserves to be examined
separately; the most obvious explanation is to be found in the peculiar
urgency of the play of forces belonging to the repressed material in the
unconscious, pressing in the direction of production. To quote a preg­
nant remark made by our poet, “That which I wished for in the pro-
foundest depths of my subconsciousness always came to pass of its own
accord in my life.” This amounts to an indirect admission of the death
wish and confirms our interpretation of the telepathic intimations he
received: in his unconscious mind he had put his father to death.
VI. C la ir v o y a n c e and T e l e p a t h y in t h e C ases C o nsidered A re B ased
N o t on M y stic a l o r U n k n o w n P h y sic a l F o rces , B u t
o n t h e P sy c h o lo g y o f t h e U n co nscio us

Spontaneous clairvoyance is often (or invariably?) a purely mental

subjective phenomenon. It occurs as an acute psychic phenomenon as a
result of a congenital disposition in the subject, reinforced by childhood
experiences, or sometimes merely through the stress of a particular situa­
tion. Forbidden wishes which have undergone repression force their way
into consciousness, but reach it only in a disguised form—by which all
responsibility on the part of the subject is repudiated—namely, in that
of a “mystical experience" projected outward. Contributing factors are
intellectual narcissism, i.e., the craving to possess omnipotence of thought
or to regard oneself as singled out for peculiar distinction by forces from
the “other side.” To these transitory general conditions we must add
defective capacity for testing reality, while the tendency to regard oneself
as specially chosen for clairvoyance and the like inhibits subsequent
examination of the fact in order to establish the exact actual data. Re­
gression to the infantile development of personality and to the level of
narcissism, which is associated with the magical power of thought, causes
the mind of the clairvoyant to approximate to that of primitive peoples;
a weakness of intellect, affectively conditioned and with a particular bias,
makes him cling to the mystical interpretation of the “experience.”
Such phenomena are allied with those of dreams, tendencious wit,
prophecy, conversion, etc.
Like every form of superstition clairvoyance is largely made up of an
expectation of evil and, again like all superstition, has its origin in
suppressed hostile and cruel impulses. In both instances it is especially
plain that the telepathic perception represents, so to speak, a psychic
prothesis, a stretched-out arm, which reaches out mystically toward that
which is far off and cannot be approached in actuality by physical means.
Because the clairvoyant knows nothing of the motivation of his own
experience in clairvoyance, and because the fact of this motivation presses
for recognition in him, he is obliged by a process of displacement to
locate it in the outside world and to postulate supernatural forces. The
assumption of the existence of mystical forces is simply psychology pro­
jected into the outer world. The endopsychic perception, the obscure
apprehension of the unconscious, is reflected in the creation of trans­
cendental forces and realities which science has to reconvert into the
psychology of the unconscious (67).
Thus, on the basis of psychoanalytical knowledge, we can explain the
phenomena of clairvoyance and telepathy without finding ourselves
forced to make any radical alterations in the present-day position in psy­
chology and the natural sciences. I would repeat here my challenge of
1910 (IX), that in cases of analogous telesthesia the percipient should be
subjected to a psychoanalysis. This method should be used in investigat­
ing the results of automatic writing, the observations of naive participa­
tors in spiritistic stances, and so-called veridical dreams. Freud has ap­
plied his method with reference to apparently telepathic dreams (VI)
without deciding either for or against the reality of telepathy in the
occult sense. Only by “taking a leaf out of his book” shall we solve the
riddle.
 Chapter 11

By EDWARD HITSCHMANN, M.D.

As I undertake to publish this incident, which occurred during an

analysis, I am aware of my reluctance to reveal myself in a state of anx­
iousness, and as a fallible person. It is, however, necessary to do sol
The day before this incident took place, an employee of the hospital
telephoned me around noon, informing me that a special delivery letter
had been handed in for me at the hospital. I told him to keep the letter
for me; I would send someone for it the same afternoon. I forgot all
about it, however, until early next morning, when I remembered this
urgent letter with a great deal of self-reproach.
I then decided to have the letter picked up by the servant, who usually
left the house around 9 A.M. to do our shopping. However, I kept on
thinking about this letter. It occurred to me that it would be much sim­
pler and much more expedient to call the hospital reception clerk,
and ask him to read the letter to me over the telephone, since it seemed
unlikely that this letter would contain any secrets.
However, the arrival of a patient for an 8 A.M. analytic hour made
it necessary to postpone this matter. Toward the end of this hour I began
to get worried. I wanted to be sure to catch the servant before she left
the house, so that, in case I succeeded in having the letter read to me over
the telephone, she would not go unnecessarily to the hospital. If the
letter could be read to me over the telephone, I could pick it up myself
the same evening, while attending a meeting at the hospital.
At this point the analysand surprised me by asking an unusual ques­
tion: "Have you, just now, mentioned a letter
Immediately I was seized by feelings of guilt, because I had just been
thinking with so great an intensity about this special delivery letter
that my attention was diverted from the patient's dream, which we had
been analyzing at that particular moment. I therefore felt tempted to
assume that this remark was due to a telepathic impact of my intense pre-
* Originally published anonymously, in German, in Psychoanalytische Bewegung,
5:77-81, 1933. Translated by George Devereux and published here by permission of
Dr. Edward Hitschmann, given both in his capacity as author and as last editor of
Psychoanalytische Bewegung.
occupation with the letter in question upon the open soul of this young,
passive-feminine male patient, who, at that time, was in a state of
ambivalent, though predominantly positive, transference.
A careful questioning of the analysand revealed the following facts:
The previous evening the patient had, for once, dined alone with his
father. During the dinner he had been mostly silent, and soon afterward
he had reached for an interesting novel, so as not to be obliged to engage
in a conversation with his father, with whom he was not on good terms.
This English novel, which described a newly rich family, appealed a
great deal to the patient, who lived in reduced circumstances. It is,
furthermore, possible that it was fairly easy for the patient to link the
irritable father figure described in that novel with his own father, who
was avaricious, and rightly dissatisfied with his sons whom he often
scolded. Then it occurred to the patient that I, his analyst, could not be
easily irritated, and was unlikely to react in an ill-tempered manner,
because, being an analyst, I was outside and above the situation. In other
words, his thoughts about me seemed to be friendly ones (?).
Immediately afterward the patient attempted, in a rather dreamy
manner, to recall his thoughts about his analyst, and discovered that
he had completely forgotten his earlier thoughts. He only saw a flat white
surface—apparently a visual representation of his mental blank—which
soon transformed itself into a greyish cardboard slipcase, into which a
hand inserted a letter by its narrow edge.
Next morning the patient was greatly surprised when, in the course
of the analysis of his dream, which dealt at first with other matters, the
image of a slipcase, into which a letter was being inserted, intruded into
his train of thoughts.
At first he felt so guilty about the intrusion of so irrelevant an idea
into the analysis that, in violation of the basic rule, he did not mention
this thought to me. Toward the end of the hour he did, however, attempt
to justify this apparently unmotivated idea, about a slipcase and a letter,
by means of an assumption which found expression in the surprising
question: “Have you, just now, mentioned a letter?” Thus, apparently,
the telepathic incident had not occurred toward the end of the hour,
when I was thinking of the letter in the most intensive, most conscious
and most worried manner; rather had it happened somewhat earlier,
perhaps because the matter of a letter had preoccupied me during the
entire analytic hour. However, the patient asked the question toward
the end of the hour.
This latter finding is not necessarily an important one, since the
letter motif had, in a way, pervaded the atmosphere of the entire hour.
At first the patient was completely unable to associate to the image of
the letter in the slipcase. Furthermore, the demonstration that a telepathic
incident had, indeed, taken place does not seem sufficiently convincing
in this instance. Yet, the analyst is seldom as intensely preoccupied as
I had been on this occasion. I positively yearned to wind up this letter
business. I felt obliged to do something which I had failed to do. I was
impatient because time had been lost. I also had some guilt feelings
because I had done an injustice to the patient, who had a right to the
analyst's undivided attention. In addition to feeling guilty, I also har­
bored the hope that the patient would not notice my lack of attention.
Hence, when the patient suddenly asked a question about the matter
which preoccupied the analyst—i.e., about a letter—the analyst had the
feeling that, somehow or other, he had been “found out,” or “caught in
the act.” Under these circumstances, the interesting escape possibility
implicit in the telepathy hypothesis was experienced by the analyst as a
kind of relief. He therefore felt quite disposed to devote some time to a
more careful scrutiny of this matter, although previously he had felt no
inclination to do so. It must be admitted, however, that not more than
five minutes were devoted to this matter, since the hour was almost over.
Two unusual phases of this episode seem to suggest that a telepathic
occurrence had taken place:
(1) The truly extraordinary intensity with which the analyst thought
of the letter which had to be picked up. It is possible that the image of
a letter may even have appeared in a visual form in this connection.
(2) The great amazement of the patient, which was caused by the
apparently unmotivated appearance of the picture of a letter already
partially inserted into a slipcase. The unexpected emergence of this image
induced him to do something which he had never done before in his
entire analysis: He asked the analyst whether the latter had just men­
tioned a letter, without, however, making any reference to a slipcase.
Soon thereafter the patient recalled that this apparently unmotivated
vision was but a repetition of an image which had already appeared to
him the previous evening.
One has to admit that neither of these facts provides us with com­
pellingly conclusive evidence. What is more, the fact that the analyst’s
interest in a letter—or, specifically, in his letter—was motivated by a
strong sense of duty, and by distress over a task left undone, while the
patient’s interest in a letter was simply rooted in a kind of visual game,
which had started the previous evening, deprives us forever of the possi­
bility of reaching a final decision regarding the nature of this particular
incident.
The patient's dream also concerned the problem of “seeing.” “I am
at a variety theater with a woman friend. Then I lose her, and go outside
to search for her. There I observe her in the act of trying on a (new?)
furcoat. The furcoat she usually wears has already been placed in a box
or parcel. In order to see herself better, she is standing on a chair in front
of a mirror. Then she turns to me and says: ‘You too are watching this?'
I, however, feel that my eyes had been closed, and am wondering whether
she had noticed it.”
As regards the interpretation of this dream, it is sufficient to state
that, in this context, the act of looking represented something prohibited.
These considerations lead me to believe that one’s willingness or
unwillingness to envisage the possibility that this incident—which, ad­
mittedly, has many arresting features—may have been a telepathic one,
will be determined solely by one’s subjective attitudes, i.e., by one’s
mystical or antimystical tendencies.
Not wishing to forget any part of this occurrence, I recorded it in
writing the very same day on which it took place. In addition, since lack
of time had prevented me from investigating it in detail at the end of
the previous hour, I decided to question the patient further about this
incident which had caused me to envisage the possibility that it may have
been a telepathic occurrence. This supplementary inquiry had to be
scheduled for the very next hour, which was to be the patient's last
session with me, since, because of his father's opposition to analysis, his
treatment had to be discontinued.
It must be admitted that on this occasion the patient supplied certain
additional data which appreciably modified the whole picture. To begin
with, he stated that on the previous evening he had harbored very hostile
thoughts toward the analyst. He viewed the termination of his analysis
as an injustice, and as a sign of the analyst's lack of affection for him.
He felt that, despite paternal objections, his analysis would not have had
to be discontinued, had the analyst been willing to treat him further
free of charge. The patient had also toyed with the idea that, during his
last hour, he would get even with the analyst, and would be rude to him.
Then he told himself that, since the analyst stood above the situation, he
would not be offended thereby, and that the quarrel would therefore be
entirely devoid of meaning. The fact that the patient suddenly “forgot"
his earlier thoughts about the analyst was, thus, nothing but a reflection
of this train of thought which, in turn, was rooted in his ambivalence.
This increase in the patient's frankness then led to a further clarification
of the problem of the letter and of the slipcase. The patient had planned
to ask me at the end of his last hour to lend him a certain volume of
Freud's writings which, still encased in its slipcase, stood in plain sight
on one of my bookshelves.
As to the letter, it occurred to the patient that, on this occasion, as on
several previous ones, he would be handed a bill, encased in an envelope,
with the request to transmit it to his father. At this point the patient was
in a quandary: If he rebelled against me, he would not be in a position
to ask me to lend him this book.
Thus, one's general impression is the following: The additional infor­
mation provided by the patient did not increase the plausibility of the
assumption that a telepathic occurrence had taken place. Indeed, in a
certain sense, the patient had already brought with him into the hour the
idea—or, if one prefers, the image—of a letter. His timidity had inhibited
the expression of the wish to borrow a book, together with its individual
slipcase.
The analyst's own thoughts about his letter had also been brought
into the hour. Thus, the analyst and the analysand had only one expe­
rience in common, and even this experience had arisen in a spontaneous
and independent manner in each of them. This common experience was
a feeling of guilt over the fact that each of them had been secretly think­
ing of his own letter problem.
At this point the person with an antimystical complex will joyfully
exclaim that one can never be skeptical enough in considering the possi­
bility of thought transmission. On the other hand, the man who has a
mystical complex, and is therefore always prepared to defend occult
phenomena, will take a different view of this matter. He will feel entitled
to continue to view as conclusive the fact that the patient asked the
analyst whether the latter had mentioned a letter at a time when the
analyst was, in fact, thinking intensely of his letter.
The patient explained this extremely unusual question in a manner
which will not satisfy everyone: He stated that he felt surprised when
the image of the letter and of the slipcase, which had first appeared to
him the previous evening, reappeared in the analytic situation entirely
out of context with the rest of his thoughts, even though this image did,
in fact, reflect certain ideas, such as the settling of accounts and the plan
to borrow a book, which had already been present during the previous
analytic hour. Perhaps the patient had hoped that this question would
both excuse his own inattentiveness, and explain the intrusion of the
letter motif into his train of thoughts.
Only a large number of such happenings will make it possible to settle
the problem of telepathic incidents during analysis, which seems to
provide an especially favorable setting for the occurrence of such in­
cidents.
 Chapter 12
OCCULT PROCESSES OCCURRING DURING
PSYCHOANALYSIS*
By HELENE DEUTSCH, M.D.

But if the phenomenon of telepathy is only an activity of the unconscious

mind, then no fresh problem lies before us. The laws of unconscious
mental life may then be taken for granted as applying to telepathy.
— F r e u d (VI)

Modern science does not challenge a priori the existence of so-called

“occult” phenomena. It does, however, view them with justifiable skep­
ticism, and demands proofs and explanations.
The inclination toward the occult is one of the manifestations of
man's eternal desire to break down the barrier between the self and the
world, and to fuse his emotional experiences and the external world into
a whole. This is achieved in two ways: On the one hand he projects these
psychic forces outward, in order to make them appear in the external
world as “supernatural” forces, while on the other hand the mastery of
these supernatural forces seems to suggest to him that human capacities
include also certain mystical and divine powers.
In this manner, the basic forces of man—all that which is beyond his
trivial knowledge and ordinary powers—are negated, and are viewed as
something supernaturally divine. By recognizing these supernatural
forces in himself, mortal man becomes, in a roundabout way, the very
Divinity which he had fashioned in his own likeness.
Psychoanalysis, which discovered the great power of the unconscious
in psychological events, also explores the ways and means whereby man
seeks to escape all that which emerges from his inner darkness. For
example, psychoanalysis has found that when the push of the warded-off
forces becomes too strong, man seeks to unburden himself by means of
projections. In the course of these defensive activities, man evolves a
* Originally published in German, in Imago 12:418-433, 1926. Translated by George
Devereux and published here by permission of Dr. Helene Deutsch and of Drs. Ernst
Kris and Robert Waelder, the last editors of Imago.
belief in spirits, and assumes an animistic attitude, which he then keeps
alive in the guise of “spiritistic insights” or of “occult phenomena.”
By contrast, psychoanalysis refers these puzzling human experiences
back to their intrapsychic birthplace in the unconscious—back to that
“mystical** place from which they have sprung. It investigates individual
experiences which cannot be explained by means of conscious volition,
until it locates their place of origin and, thus, discovers the explanation
of the “mysterious” in internal happenings.
The psychoanalyst understands and interprets a psychological event
by dissecting it with the help of the subtly accurate technique of psycho­
analysis. For this reason only a small part of “occult phenomena” is
accessible to direct analytic observation. “Telepathic phenomena,” which
Freud defined as “the reception of a mental process by one person from
another by means other than sensory perception” (VII), are especially
suitable for such inquiries. During psychoanalysis the psychic contact
between analyst and analysand is so intimate, and the psychic processes
which unfold themselves in that situation are so manifold, that the
analytic situation may very well include all conditions which especially
facilitate the occurrence of such phenomena. Thus, very careful obser­
vations should enable one to recognize that a given psychic process,
which unfolds itself before our very eyes, is “telepathic,” and should also
help one to reveal its true nature by means of the methodology charac­
teristic of psychoanalytic technique. The value of insights obtained in
this manner is due principally to the fact that one is not dealing here
with discrete happenings, but with psychic events which are part of a
continuous process, and which can be fully understood only within the
framework of that process. The same events, when torn from the con­
textual whole of the analytic process, would impress the outsider as
typically “occult,” and, because of the impossibility of interpreting them,
would retain their typically “occult” character. One has the impression
that only by fitting such “occult” incidents into a continuum can one
deprive them of their mystical features.
Such analytic experiences also enable one to conclude that, by the use
of similar devices, occult phenomena could be “unmasked” even outside
the analytic situation; that mysteriously incomprehensible events could
be reduced to simple and intelligible ones, by linking them with a chain
of events which had been interrupted somewhere, or by filling in the
gaps which came into being in the course of certain psychic processes.
In the previously cited brief study, “The Occult Significance of
Dreams,” Freud states: “I have often had the impression, in the course
of experiments in my private circle, that strongly emotionally colored
recollections can be successfully transferred without much difficulty. If
one has the courage to submit to an analytic examination the associa­
tions of the person to whom the thoughts are supposed to be transferred,
correspondences often come to light which would otherwise have re­
mained undiscovered. On the basis of much experience I am inclined to
draw the conclusion that thought transference of this kind comes about
particularly easily at the moment at which an idea emerges from the
unconscious, or, in theoretical terms, as it passes over from the 'primary
process' to the ‘secondary process' " (VII).
The systematic utilization of the technique of free association explains
why the psychoanalytic situation seems to be, par excellence, the setting
in which “emotionally colored recollections" are constantly in statu-
nascendi, i. e., in the state in which they “pass over from the ‘primary
process' to the ‘secondary process.' " Freud does not discuss in detail the
conditions under which the person to whom thoughts are being trans­
ferred receives this emotionally charged complex of ideas, which emerges
from the unconscious. The above considerations lead one to suspect that
this process represents a reaction of the unconscious, which manifests
itself only through free associations. In addition, the content of this
reaction, and its concordance with the thoughts of the person who orig­
inated the stimulus, can be revealed only by means of analytic investi­
gations. Under certain conditions which are not altogether clear, but
which are probably connected with transference (in the analytic sense),
the transmission of ideas to a given person elicits in that individual a
reactive process, which is then transformed into perceptual thought
content. Since sense impressions, which usually precede such a process,
are lacking, the occurrence acquires the characteristics of the “occult."
One may therefore suspect that the condition for this transfer of “emo­
tionally colored recollections" consists in a certain unconscious readiness
to receive them. Only if this condition is fulfilled can the recipient func­
tion as a “receiving station." These emotionally cathected ideas must
mobilize in the unconscious of the second person analogous ideas of
similar content, which then manifest themselves in the conscious as
“internal experiences." Later on, when the identity of the two sets of
thoughts is perceived, the internal apperception acquires the character­
istics of an external one.
A close scrutiny of processes occurring during analysis enable one to
recognize that they satisfy rather fully the conditions necessary for the
occurrence of occult phenomena. The following reflections will seek to
determine the exact point at which, in analytic work, the occurrence of
occult phenomena is impeded.
We know that the analyst's task is twofold: Probably his most impor­
tant duty is to receive passively the material which the patient offers to
him in the course of his obscure self-betrayals and transference expe­
riences. His second task is the evolving of a wholly conscious insight
into the nature of the material so received, and the intellectual processing
of this material.
In his technical “Recommendations” Freud says: “All conscious exer­
tion is to be withheld from the capacity for attention, and one’s ‘uncon­
scious memory’ is to be given full play.” [The analyst] “must bend his
own unconscious like a receptive organ toward the emerging unconscious
of the patient; be as the receiver of the telephone to the disc. As the
receiver transmutes the electric vibrations induced by the sound-waves
back again into sound-waves, so is the physician's unconscious mind able
to reconstruct the patient's unconscious, which has directed his associa­
tions, from the communications derived from it” (74).
This internal experience of the analyst, which we propose to discuss
in detail further below, establishes between him and the analysand a
contact which is outside the conscious apparatus, even though this proc­
ess itself is stimulated by a mo tor-verbal discharge on the one hand, and
by a reception of the latter through the organ of hearing on the other
hand. However, that which takes place between the first stimulation of
the senses, and the subsequent intellectual processing of this stimulus
is a process which is “occult,” and lies outside the conscious. Thus, we
may speak of the analyst's “unconscious perception.” His ability to un­
ravel and to utilize this perception seems to overlap rather completely
with the concept of “analytic intuition.” The analyst's “intuitive em­
pathy” is a capacity which transcends his own consciousness, and springs
from unconscious sources. Only subsequently does conscious knowledge
tame these unconscious forces by directing them at a goal, and by fitting
them into harmoniously connected thought sequences. In brief, the
“inspirational” element is mastered by soberly transforming it into
matter-of-fact insight. The concept of “unconscious—respectively ana­
lytic—perception” is, as we shall see, assigned here the same psychological
meaning as “internal perception.” The affective psychic content of the
patient, which emerges from his unconscious, becomes transmuted into
an inner experience of the analyst, and is recognized as belonging to the
patient (i.e., to the external world) only in the course of subsequent
intellectual work. The possibility of establishing an analogy between this
experience and telepathic phenomena is, therefore, probably derived
from the transformation of a message, emanating from an external object,
into an internal experience, and from the reprojecting of this experience
upon its place of origin, from which the stimulus had emanated in the
first place. In analytic work this “reprojection'' is a product of a sub­
sequent conscious intellectual activity, which fills all the gaps of the
experience. In occult phenomena this reprojection takes place uncon­
sciously, in the course of obscure emotional processes.
It is not a specific, distinctive and characteristic aspect of the analyst's
“free-floating attention" that that which has been unconsciously per­
ceived in the patient and has then become the analyst's “own" experience,
is subsequently communicated to the conscious as an inner experience.
On the contrary, this seems to be the essence of all intuition in general.
Indeed, intuitive empathy is precisely the gift of being able to expe­
rience the object by means of an identification taking place within one­
self, and, specifically, in that part of one's own self in which the process
of identification has taken place. This intuitive attitude, i.e., the ana­
lyst's own process of identification, is made possible by the fact that the
psychic structure of the analyst is a product of developmental processes
similar to those which the patient himself had also experienced. Indeed,
the unconscious of both the analyst and the analysand contains the very
same infantile wishes and impulses. In a sense the intuitive reception
of these wishes therefore represents a reviving of those memory traces
which these already outgrown tendencies had left behind. The process
whereby one re-experiences the memory traces present in one's own
psychic material is identical with the process by means of which the
analyst's experience of the patient is transformed into an inner percep­
tion. In this sense, the psychic process of the analyst's preparatory intui­
tive work resembles that of the analysand. This process revives similar
infantile urges in both of them: In the case of the analysand, by means of
transference, and in the case of the analyst by means of identification.
This aspect of the analyst's unconscious relationship with the patient is
known as “countertransference." However, countertransference is not
limited to an identification with certain portions of the patient's ego,
which happen to be cathected in an infantile manner. It also entails
the presence of certain other unconscious attitudes, which I would like
to designate by the term “complementary attitude." We know that the
patient tends to direct his ungratified infantile-libidinous wishes at his
analyst, who, thus, becomes identified with the original objects of these
wishes. This implies that the analyst is under the obligation of renounc­
ing his real personality even in his own unconscious attitudes, so as to
be able to identify himself with these imagines in a manner compatible
with the transference fantasies of his patient. I call this process “the
complementary attitude," in order to distinguish it from mere identifica­
tion with the infantile ego of the patient. Only a combination of both
of these identifications constitutes the essence of unconscious “counter­
transference." The utilization and goal-directed mastery of this counter­
transference are some of the most important duties of the analyst. This
unconscious countertransference is not to be confused, however, with the
analyst's gross, affective, conscious relationship to the patient.
The difference between the analyst and the analysand consists prin­
cipally in the genuine freedom of movement' of those of the analyst's
own drives which, due to repression, are in a state of resistance in the
patient. Thus, whereas the patient, who is in a state of transference,
expresses his unconscious tendencies in the form of acting out, in the
analyst the sublimating, intellectual working through of his wishes is
interposed between wish and action. As a rule, the patient tries to trans­
form analytic treatment into a situation which will gratify his uncon­
scious wishes. By contrast, the analyst renounces, in a goal-directed man­
ner, all attempts to obtain from the patient any gratification other than
the one implicit in sublimating insight. Whenever one of the analyst's
unconscious impulses is repressed, his intuitive performance (which, as
stated above, includes also his identification), is thereby impaired with
regard to those of the patient’s problems which are connected with this
particular repressed drive. Similarly, the analyst is also short-circuited
when his own unconscious impulses prevent him from giving up an
already established identification. Disturbing influences of this kind often
emanate from an analyst who has failed to master his complementary
attitude. In some cases the analyst is reluctant to abandon a painfully
acquired identification, and is therefore unable to assume a new role
which is more compatible with the current transference situation. In
other instances the analyst's existing identification with one of the pa­
tient's infantile objects gratifies his unconscious needs so fully that he
is unwilling to abandon his established role. In both of these instances
the analyst's inadequate mastery of the “complementary attitude" dis­
turbs the free movement of the waves of the transference.1 We know, for
example, that the progress of the analysis is greatly impeded whenever
the analyst's current affective experiences put him under additional strain.
It is to be assumed, therefore, that the unconscious inhibition of the free
movement of the analyst's libido will exert an even more disturbing
influence.
This brief examination of the psychoanalytic situation seeks to justify
the assumption that the analytic situation reveals the presence of certain
“occult” happenings. Every analyzed person will recall instants when he
1 These matters became especially clear to me in the course of control hours with
candidates of the Vienna Training Institute. For example, female candidates often
assert that the patient is unable to abandon an established father transference. Equally
common are certain tenacious mother transferences experienced by male candidates. In
both types of cases one usually finds that the incompletely mastered masculinity com­
plex of the woman analyst, or the male analyst's own passive-feminine wishes, are
responsible for the occurrence of such difficulties.
felt that his analyst was a “mindreader.” As to the analyst himself, he
knows that his conscious capacities provide no adequate substitute for
his unconscious receptiveness.
The above considerations seem to indicate the existence of an essen­
tial relationship between analytic intuition and the telepathic process.
It seems permissible, therefore, to assume also that this intuitiveness can,
on occasion, exceed in intensity the intuitiveness needed for analytic
work. When such a feat of intuition is not subjected to the same working
through of the intellect to which it is subjected in analysis, i.e., when
such intuitively perceived material erupts from the deeper layers of the
psyche and intrudes into the sphere of consciousness, it tends to acquire
the appearance of an “occult phenomenon/’ In such instances the occult
medium experiences in a clairvoyant manner that which the analyst
gradually deprives of all occult significance, by means of slow and cau­
tious interpretations.
Up to this point we have discussed the reactions of the analyst's
unconscious to the unconscious processes of the patient. The reverse of
this process, i.e., the influence of the analyst upon the patient, was found
to manifest itself in the form of certain disturbing influences which also
seem to affect not so much the patient as the analyst himself, whose
intuitive performance they tend to inhibit and even to paralyze alto­
gether. Other types of influences which the analyst's unconscious may
exert upon the patient cannot be directly observed by the analyst himself.
Let us assume, however, that it could be shown that the patient's associa­
tions sometimes express the conscious thoughts of the analyst, i.e.,
thoughts which the analyst is able to control. Could such processes be
demonstrated, they would prove the existence of telepathy, provided only
that one had carefully excluded the possibility that any part of the
analyst's thought may have been conveyed to the patient by means of
sense perceptions.
Let us suppose, for instance, that the analyst's interest in a certain
problem suddenly resulted in the appearance of the looked-for material
in the patient’s productions, or that the analyst's internal, and supposedly
well-concealed, impatience—which is due perhaps to the fact that other
demands are being made upon him—suddenly brought the analyses of
all of his patients to a standstill. The first of these phenomena could be
reduced to the analyst's anticipatory ideas, while the latter would be due
to an increase in the acuteness of the patient's capacity for observation.
A wealth of other examples, all of which are reducible to a special state
of the perceptual apparatus, could also be mentioned in this context.
In the course of two analyses I found it possible to observe the estab­
lishment of a contact between my own conscious psychic material and
the unconscious of the patient which circumvented the sensorium. The
analytic investigation of these peculiar psychological phenomena yielded
results so highly characteristic that they strike me as being worthy of
publication.
The first case is that of a male patient, who had been in analysis for
several months. One day, while recounting the events of the preceding
day, he informed me that one of his feminine acquaintances, who lived
abroad, had just become engaged. This event, which was a matter of in­
difference to the patient, elicited a strong affective reaction in me, be­
cause the groom-to-be had played an important role in the fate of a per­
son who was quite close to me. Consequently—and contrary to analytic
rules—the focus of my attention began to shift from the patient to the
news which he had given me. Naturally, I did not tell him that I had a
personal interest in these tidings. In fact, I feel confident that 1 have not
permitted any impression of my interest to reach the patient's conscious.
Yet, as if to satisfy my personal interest in this matter, the patient him­
self soon made this engagement the pivot of his analysis. Day after day I
waited breathlessly for further news about this event, and, day after day,
the patient brought me just what I wanted. I wish to stress once more
that neither before nor after these events had my patient's female ac­
quaintance played any role whatsoever in my life. In addition, the groom
himself was totally unknown to the patient. Yet, as if complying with my
“invitation," the patient contrived to initiate an intensive exchange of
letters with the bride-to-be, and thus managed to become her confidant.
This enabled him to obtain information about every detail of this love
relationship. The outcome of this was that the analysis seemed to go on
the rocks. I could save the analysis only by suppressing my own curiosity.
This enabled me to find a way around the obstacle which I myself had
placed in the path of further progress. Analysis eventually disclosed the
following facts: The lady in question, who, until then, had not interested
the patient in the least, had suddenly become the object of his erotic fan­
tasies. At the same time the lady's fiance became the patient's bitterly
hated rival. The patient's interest in this matter was rooted in the un­
conscious wish to assume the role of the “injured third party." Needless
to say, the weird manner in which this “love" came into being was closely
related to the transference situation, as is often the case when analysands
“fall in love” during analysis. In addition, the lady was also identified
with me, which meant that her fianc£ was brought into an erotic rela­
tionship with the analyst. Soon thereafter the patient brought into the
analysis memories pertaining to the infantile prototype of this situation.
As a child, the patient hated bitterly all men who seemed to interest his
mother, because he was convinced that these men were his mother’s lov­
ers. Hence, in the transference situation, the patient fantasied that my
interest in this matter was an erotic one. He therefore attempted—just as
he had done in the case of his mother—to win for himself my equivalent,
i.e., the lady in question.
The original impetus behind this repetitive acting out of infantile
material was completely unknown to the patient. It was clear to me,
however, that my own intensive interest had communicated itself to his
unconscious, which had been listening all along for just this kind of ma­
terial. This discovery was then subjected to a secondary elaboration in
the patient's unconscious. The material was, first of all, linked with in­
fantile material, and was then provided with an outlet in the form of the
“acting out" described above. This complicated endopsychic performance
was then interpolated between the starting point of the “telepathic
process," as represented by my wish to obtain certain information, and
the terminal point of the process, which consisted in the gratification of
my wish by the patient. The underlying motivation of this phenomenon,
as reflected by this endopsychic process, could only be unraveled by analy­
sis. As to the patient's motivation, it was, in turn, rooted on the one hand
in the analytic transference, and on the other hand in the affinity be­
tween my conscious wish and certain memory traces present in the pa­
tient's psyche.
The second incident came about in the following manner: On the
eve of my eighth wedding anniversary I was intensively preoccupied with
thoughts concerning this occasion, and felt that this day should be cele­
brated in some way. I noted, however, that due to my day-long profes­
sional obligations, thoughts about my own personal affairs could come to
the fore only during the last hour of my workday. After the hour I felt
that my preoccupation with my own problems had greatly impaired my
attentiveness during the last hour. I therefore prepared myself for ad­
mittedly deserved reproaches, which this woman patient, who was very
sensitive to slights of this kind, was sure to heap upon me the next day.
Before I go any further, I wish to stress that there was nothing in the ap­
pearance or atmosphere of my house to suggest that an anniversary was
in the offing, and that no one outside my immediate family knew of this
event. Last, but not least, the patient, who happened to be a foreigner,
knew no one acquainted with me. The next day the patient began her
hour by telling me her dream of the previous night, which went as fol­
lows: A family is celebrating its eighth wedding anniversary. The couple
is sitting at a round table. “She” is very sad, and the husband is angry
and irritated. Already in her dream, the patient knows that the sadness
of the woman is due to her childlessness. Though married for years, the
woman is still childless, and now she knows that she must forever aban­
don this hope. Analysis disclosed that the physical setting of the dream
was the result of a condensation of my office with the living room of the
patient's parents. Associations revealed that the woman who, in the
dream, was celebrating her wedding anniversary, was the product of a
series of identifications between the patient, the patient's mother and my­
self. Because of recurrent miscarriages, the patient, who had been mar­
ried for three years, felt that her strong desire for a child was doomed to
be frustrated. She had had a miscarriage even during her analysis, and
we already knew that her psychologically determined childlessness was in­
timately linked with the fate of her oedipus complex. She was the oldest
of six siblings born at regular intervals. In the eighth year of her mar­
riage, and already surrounded by a large brood, the patient's mother ter­
minated her reproductive activities. The patient's own childlessness was
the result of a neurotic reaction to the pregnancies and deliveries of her
mother. The dream identification between herself and her mother was
determined by the wish that the father, instead of giving further chil­
dren to the mother, should give them to the patient herself, so that she
could take the place of her mother. The structure of the transference sit­
uation was responsible for the fact that I too was fitted into this situation.
In fact, the dream was organically connected with the transference. Is it,
however, sheer coincidence that the patient had this dream precisely on
my eighth wedding anniversary, and that my thoughts during the pre­
ceding analytic hour were mirrored in the manifest content of the dream?
It is my impression that, in this instance too, conditions of transference
and identification, similar to those obtaining in the first case, established
a relationship between my conscious thoughts and the unconscious of the
patient. Here too the unconscious behaved like a sensitive resonator,
ready to respond to that portion of the psychic material of another per­
son which is closely related to certain strong unconscious urges of the re­
ceiving person. In this instance too this readiness, which is determined
by some definite factor, enabled the patient's psychic apparatus to re­
ceive certain impressions by means other than those of conscious per­
ception.
These directly observed occurrences seem to indicate that there are
excitations which, although they do not stimulate sense impressions,
nonetheless produce in the psychic sphere reactions similar to those they
would have produced had they stimulated the organism by material
means. Thus, in the instances just mentioned, analysts will readily see
that consciously perceived impressions would have affected the uncon­
scious in the same way in which the unconscious was affected in the ab­
sence of all such impressions. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that the
transference induces the patient to accept eagerly each of the analyst's
acts, and that, as in the preceding instances, these acts are then subjected
to a characteristic elaboration, and reappear eventually in fantasies and
in dreams. In both of our cases the situation had certain very distinctive
aspects. Things happened as though the system Conscious had suddenly
become transparent, and as if an occurrence in the perceptual apparatus
had communicated itself directly to the lower layers. In both cases it was
possible to demonstrate the presence of infantile-affective factors in the
psychic reaction, which mobilized “something" actual, though inacces­
sible to the conscious, which was then elaborated in a very specific man­
ner. In the first case we are dealing with a reawakening of infantile jeal­
ousy in the transference, and, in the second case, with the renouncing of
an infantile wish. These processes were stimulated by external factors,
which could find an outlet only in the deeper layers of psychic life. Only
after the unconsciously perceived material had acquired an adequate de­
gree of intensity, by becoming linked with unconscious wish impulses,
could it intrude into the conscious. At the same time, the connection be­
tween this material and external influences was lost, because this material
had not been received in the usual form of sense impressions.
Potzl has shown that genuine sense impression, which had not be­
come true conscious percepts, later on return in fantasies and in dreams,
and thus prove the reality of their impact (149), It is also known that,
under the sway of emotions, we can either strengthen, or else lose alto*
gether, certain conscious capacities. Thus, our emotions sometimes make
us negate altogether something which is fully accessible to our percept
tions. (Negative hallucinations.) However, this does not prevent our un­
conscious or preconscious from incorporating these perceptions, which,
later on, they utilize, whenever it seems expedient to do so, by circum­
venting the conscious. However, in such cases we always deal with im­
pressions which have the inherent capacity of being perceived con­
sciously. By contrast, in our two cases the thoughts transferred from me to
the patient did not possess the capacity of affecting the sense organs. If
we assume that my conscious thought had transformed itself into some
motor excitation—and this assumption seems a legitimate one—the in­
tensity of this excitation was certainly so minimal that it could not have
stimulated the human sense organs. It is also quite true that a psychic
process had acquired within me the value of an action, but the nature
of this action was such that it had to remain inaccessible to sense per­
ception.
Only if this kind of message, which emanates from the external world,
meets in the deeper layers of the psychic apparatus impulses to which it
is related either through its capacity to fulfill a wish, or through some
other emotional motive, does an associative linking and strengthening of
both of these influences take place. Then, as in dreams or certain other
well-known processes, these messages manifest themselves as conscious
thoughts. In such cases the analytic technique of free associations often
succeeds in finding the connecting link between stimulus and reaction.
Our cases suggest that this connecting link is usually a complicated en­
dopsychic process, which involves the assimilation of perceptions with
one's own psychic material. The capacity of this material of being per­
ceived entails, in turn, the possibility of an “unconscious perception," in
that something, which does not seem accessible to the sensorium, is none­
theless fitted into the psychic structure. In other words, although exter­
nal perception does not occur, the external influence can, under certain
conditions, turn into an “inner perception." In that form it can be com­
municated to the perceiving ego. The transformation of such messages
emanating from the external world into inner perception is made pos­
sible by die identity of the psychic content of both the subject and the
object. In the analytic situation, the identity of the analyst's unconscious
with that of the analysand finds expression in “analytic intuition." It
must be admitted that in these two cases, which I myself have observed,
there occurred an identification of my conscious with the patient's un­
conscious. However, here too this transformation of the “inner percep­
tion” must have corresponded to an intuitive process.
In both instances the conscious content, which was communicated to
me by the patients, had already been subjected to a secondary elabora­
tion. Hence, its original derivation from the external world could no
longer be recognized by the patients themselves. The “telepathic” nature
of the process could only reveal itself to me.
We may also suppose that, under certain conditions, the establish­
ment of this identity—the transformation of the external message into
an “inner” perception, respectively—can also take place without an ex­
tensive modification of the content thereof, so that, even though the con­
scious receives the message from the deeper layers of the psyche, its
content is nonetheless completely identical with that portion of the ex­
ternal world from which the stimulus emanated in the first place.
If this identity is recognized by the sensorium, the process acquires
the appearance of an “occult phenomenon,” because the perception
emanating from within is immediately reprojected into the external
world. This process differs from the process underlying projection in
hallucinations only in so far that its content is actually identical with
the real content of the field upon which the idea is projected. The re­
ceiving medium knows nothing of the complicated internal processes
which preceded this event. The medium believes in the reality value of
his projections just as the psychotic believes in that of his hallucinations.
The difference between the two lies in the fact that the environment rec­
ognizes the reality value of the medium's projections, because objective
reality and the content of the projection which had been structured by
reality happen to be congruent.
This last hypothesis has to be further verified by analytic experience.
However, analytic experience already indicates that “occult phenomena”
are a manifestation of a greatly strengthened intuition, which is rooted
in the unconscious affective process of identification.
The two cases discussed above have shown us how such a “phe­
nomenon” can come into being. By contrast, another case observed by
me had a more impressively “occult” character.
In the course of analysis the liberation of libidinal forces caused a
hitherto strongly inhibited female patient to fall violently in love with
an obviously unsuitable love object. Constant renunciations, necessitated
by the love object’s incapacity to love, made this strong and passionate
relationship regress to a process of identification. The patient gradually
renounced most of her emotional and intellectual personality in favor of
this identification. One might even go so far as to say that she thought
the thoughts of her love object, felt his emotions, and, thus, partly com­
pensated herself for the inadequate reciprocation of her feelings. When
the love object suddenly broke off the relationship, the process of iden­
tification became extraordinarily intensified. She now mobilized all her
psychic forces in an attempt to retain this object within herself—if not
in reality, then at least through identification. This enabled her to
achieve a kind of continued togetherness with the lost love object. The
patient further supplemented this process of introjection by building
also a real bridge between herself and the man she loved. In other words,
by means of a discreet but incessant watchfulness, she managed to keep
herself fully informed of all aspects of this man's life. Thus, without
seeming to intrude, she followed his every step. She developed a truly
superb capacity for combining the various details which she discovered
into a fully developed and continuous whole. Thus, I had the impres­
sion that she knew even before the man himself had become aware of it,
that his previously platonic relationship with another woman had now
acquired an erotic tinge. This insight seems to have been made possible
by the fact that she re-experienced internally each of the man's actions
with an intensity which greatly transcended the man's own emotional
capacities.
One evening she sat at home in a state of utter despair, secluded
from the world, and totally dominated by a single emotion. The last
scraps of news which had reached her seemed to indicate that the man
in question was planning a tryst with his girl friend. Her imagination
followed the man's actions step by step. She fantasied that, under a cer­
tain pretext, he had managed to induce his girl friend's mother to leave
the house. She then depicted to herself the courtship which would pre­
cede the man's sexual advances. At a certain hour, which the patient was
able to name, she experienced with hallucinatory clarity the love scene
between these two persons. The gradual building up of the situation to
its climax was performed in a state of semiconsciousness, and became
wholly conscious only during her next analytic hour.
Fascinated by the patient's statements, I attempted to investigate this
matter. My acquaintance with my patient's rival enabled me to obtain
proof that the real events and the internal experiences of my patient were
in perfect concordance. The entire preconscious combinatory chain of
thoughts was shown to have been correct. The hallucinated events had,
indeed, taken place at the time mentioned by the patient, and in pre­
cisely the manner in which she had described them to me. The patient
herself was fully aware of the fact that the hallucination corresponded
to her own inner knowledge, which was projected into the external
world. However, unlike other hallucinations, this “knowledge" was not
an unconscious process, but a superb combinatory feat, which transcended
the limits of the “normal" and was fed by libidinal energies. The patient
derived her “suprasensory gift" from the process of identification, which
also dominated her conscious thinking.
The sequelae of this “telepathic" experience are also of interest in
connection with the problem under consideration. From this day onward
the patient abandoned her pursuit of Mr. X, because, having discovered
her internal telepathic nexus with him, she believed herself to be closely
connected with her love object. At this juncture she brought into the
analysis a whole series of telepathic dreams, which “revealed" to her
various events of Mr. X’s life. My further inquiries showed, however,
that at this point her telepathic “knowledge" had failed her completely.
Analysis did disclose, however, that the dream events, which purportedly
referred to her love object, actually reflected every detail of her infantile
experiences with her brother. Thus, the things she professed to have
“telepathically" perceived in dream did, indeed, correspond to a reality,
but this reality was one which had been preserved in the form of uncon­
scious memory traces, and which had been recently reactivated. Her re­
cent disappointments in love had set into motion a regressive process,
and caused her to re-experience, in connection with her recent love ob­
ject, that which had taken place originally in connection with an infan­
tile love object. This temporal displacement, from the past to the present,
and from the old love object to the new one, caused her dreams to ac­
quire an allegedly telepathic character.
If we believe in the continuity and causality of psychic life, and if we
do not deny the very real powers of the repetition compulsion, then we
must also accept psychic “predestination" and must recognize in the con­
structive forces thereof one of the sources of prophetic inspiration. I be­
lieve that, by making a certain kind of object choice, this patient actu­
ally contrived to be disappointed in love, and, thus, unconsciously uti­
lized in her “occult knowledge" that which she had previously experi­
enced in connection with her brother.
Be that as it may, analytic experiences confirm that “occult" powers
are to be sought in ;the depth of psychic life, and that psychoanalysis is
destined to clarify this problem in the same manner in which it has pre­
viously clarified other “mysterious" happenings in the human psyche.
 Chapter 13
TELEPATHY IN A DREAM*
By G£ZA ROHEIM, Ph.D.

The patient, whose case leads to certain hypothetical views regarding

the unconscious meaning of telepathy and magic, is a girl aged twenty-
six suffering from anxiety hysteria and from a generally arrested devel­
opment of her personality. She came into analysis because of an unfor­
tunate love affair and because of a state of general depression from which
she had not been free since her friend abandoned her. She could not talk
to people, was afraid of everybody, began to cry when in society, and
feared she would become a prostitute.
At the beginning of the love affair, the young man was in the posi­
tion of a hopeless and romantic adorer. She was ashamed of being seen
in his company because he was shabbily dressed and did not know how
to behave in society. But she admired him as a scientist of reputation and
pitied him because he was a consumptive. Finally she yielded to his en­
treaties and went with him to a room. She explains that she did not know
what she was doing, and that she thought it was her duty to do every­
thing he desired because he was sick and she could cure him. The liaison
lasted several years. Its chief features were the perversions imposed by
her lover which he compelled her to endure and her crying spells when­
ever their rendezvous ended. Her behavior was extremely passive and
timorous from the beginning, and must have provoked bullying from
anybody who was sadistically inclined. He used to beat her whenever he
failed to get an erection, or when she cried after their assignations or if
she followed him in the street. To produce an erection he would mas­
turbate or tell her smutty stories in which homosexuality and other
perversions figured conspicuously. Another important incident in their
liaison was when he made her confess the whole story with all its humili­
ating details to a married woman with whom he was seriously in love,
while he continued to have intercourse with her in a sadistic manner. It
was, furthermore, his custom to call her a prostitute and to assure her
during cohabitation that he did not love her. When she came into analy­
sis the state of affairs was that he would have nothing more to do with
* Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1:227-291, 1932. Published
here by permission of Dr. G£za R6heim and of the editors of The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly.
her, and she considered herself a social outcast because of this affair. She
could not possibly love anybody else because by rights she belonged to
X, her first lover, and consequently she was, as she put it, “beyond the
pale/' that is, excluded from any kind of pleasure.
Her lover, who had been analyzed during the love affair, had told
her that there was something wrong with his potency and gave this as the
reason why he could not dispense with perversions. The reaction of the
patient was an unconscious identification with the beloved object. This
identification became especially marked when the love affair was broken
off. We are familiar with this mechanism in melancholia where the lost
love object is introjected into the ego. Indeed her condition when she
came into analysis might be described as depressive and hysterical at the
same time. She was excluded from pleasure by a double mechanism: (a)
because she was a male and not a girl, (b) because she was an impotent
male, that is, her lover. In her fantasies she played the role of Parsifal and
other knights of the Grail—the role of a chaste male—and explained
this by saying that she had remained pure through all the perversions
which she had permitted only in order to cure her lover of his impotence.
There was, however, something exaggeratedly feminine and passive in
her whole character. She obeyed everybody, was incapable of making any
objections and had a retreating, cringing way of shaking hands. She at­
tributed this timidity to her humiliation during the love affair. Indeed
she managed matters as unskillfully as possible, involved her family in
the affair, complained about it to her friends and to the lady with whom
her lover was really in love, and made a thorough mess of things.
She had had much suffering in her life. Especially prominent in this
connection was her brother who had the same Christian name as her
lover and who had beaten her terribly when they were children. Even at
the time of her analysis, he would box her ears at the slightest provoca­
tion. Her father had the same habit. If she bathed at home without lock­
ing the door her brother was wont to come in and stay in spite of her
screams. These episodes were always related in the analysis with horror,
contortions and protests.
This leads to the central delusion of her neurosis, viz., that everybody
at home masturbated. When her father read the newspaper—why did he
put his hands under the table? He must be masturbatingl She would hear
her mother moving about in the next room and would hide her head
under the cushion, because she was afraid of hearing her mother having
intercourse with her brother. Her parents would have intercourse in the
next room. It was unbearable that she must hear it. The analyst prob­
ably masturbated, too, when she related these things. She shouted and
gesticulated protestingly as if she were trying to rid herself of something
filthy. .
After about six months of analysis, she had the following dream:
"I dreamed that I did not dream anything. The telephone rang but I
did not go. My father was undressing beside his bed but he too refused
to go, saying: 'This is not the time for business, I have something else to
do: "
 The telephone call referred to her lover. She was always imagining
that he had been calling her but that her family did not tell her, or
something of the kind. She feels much better; now she would not go if he
did call. In fact her idea in the dream that she did not dream anything
means that she does not need analysis. But the emphatic negation only
serves to cover up the all-too-manifest contents—that her father is un­
dressing and is going to have intercourse with her, he has no time for
business. In real life, the situation was of course just the opposite—her
father had no time for her, only for business. Then she talked about a
friend of hers who refused to be remarried and stayed with her father.
After this she had, to her great horror, a fantasy of coitus with her father
and concluded by declaring that she must go to a factory as a common
working girl. This led to her fantasy of becoming a prostitute, and the
analysis of a poem she had written on this subject showed that becoming
a prostitute meant intercourse with a stranger, and that the stranger
represented the father. Notwithstanding the fact that she had actually
gone through the fantasy of intercourse with her father and had done so
with a considerable show of emotion, this idea continued to form the
nearly manifest subject of her dreams and always came to her as a sur­
prise and a shock. The next dream:
"There is a stigma, or sign, on my forehead. My father tries to rub it
off with his saliva but I will not let him do i t ”
Another verse which she wrote in childhood came to her mind: the
stigma on her forehead means that she will never be happy. An exclama­
tion of alarm. So it is her father who is trying to make her happy 1 Hindu
women have the sign on their forehead; it means that they are married.
She showed great alarm because this meant marriage with her father
and was followed by a memory of having urinated into her swaddles.
There was a “prostitution" then—no, she means a demonstration—and
she thinks her forehead must have been wiped when the swaddles were
opened.
The next dream was about a corridor in which she was divided by
a glass partition from a laborer and a dancing girl. The question as to
what the glass partition reminded her of produced a very violent reac­
tion: She dreamed that she heard her mother's voice and her father's
voice panting, she asked what the matter was, and after that they put
her little bed out of the parents' bedroom. This she regards as a great
injustice and a deprivation of pleasure. In another dream she saw a
window and light that shone beyond the window. The window was some­
thing that protects or isolates her. Then she had the following vision:
a triangle covered by a quadrangle. Then the vision changed
and she drew it as follows: i ~i ^x> She looked at the drawing and
then said that it represented a couple in the act of cohabitation, the
woman being covered by the man. No, it was her father in his nightshirt
and he was masturbating. Her lover used to masturbate before they had
intercourse and when they had intercourse she felt pleasure but then
she “closed the window" and did not let the feeling of pleasure pene­
trate any more deeply into the vagina. She showed what she meant by
another drawing in which the triangle stands for her
genital and the circle represents the “closing” of the passage. Then she
spoke of the analyst's wife as the only woman who had seen the Austra­
lian initiation ceremonies. (She has read my book.) Again a vision: seven
flutes (Pan) in a row. Many men or one? A penis in erection—darkness—
faces emerging from the dark—a negro—‘‘he is going to eat me—my
father is coming to kiss mel”—another period of darkness—a Chinese
with a big hat—then, with the greatest horror, shuddering, “Father said
yesterday, ‘I have not f----- d you for a long time/ ” (The word used for
cohabitation means in popular slang “a licking” and it is in this sense
that the father was using it.) After having had a casual love affair with a
married man, as a substitute for the analyst, she related that a horrible
grinning face disturbed her pleasure in coitus. She saw birds cohabiting
in the garden when she came today, a sight which she professed never to
have seen before. The grinning face reminded her of a picture postcard.
Yes, it was something horrible. They must have been about six or seven
years old, when she and her brother found a postcard in her father’s
drawer. She could not say what it was. It began in the beautiful legs of a
girl and as they went upward where the vagina might have been, there
was the grinning face of a big fat man. She recognized this as the vision
she had seen during cohabitation but became terribly excited about the
postcard, which she regarded as the father himself performing cun-
nilingus. She experienced enormous relief when the analyst suggested
that the picture must have been a hoax. The person who looked at it
would be expecting something piquant; he would pull some trigger
contrivance, and all he would see would be a fat man laughing at him.
The above material has been related in order to demonstrate the
paramount importance of the primal scene in her symptoms, in her
character formation and sexual life. Her frequent visions of objects that
are separated and reunited correspond to a symptom of which she com­
plained in the first three months; she felt as if there were a cleavage in
her, as if she were cut into halves. Obviously she has introjected the par­
ents in the act of coitus, and the complaint that the two halves cannot
meet is really the expression of a desire that the coitus between father
and mother should not take place. This identification with the primary
objects is very strong in her, but it is hidden under the guise of an ex­
tremely fleeting identification, or a series of hysterical identifications with
men (fathers) and women (mothers). Everybody has become the repre­
sentative of the parental imagines; and therefore she was afraid that she
must do what any man (father) or any woman (mother) tells her to do.
Hence her prostitution fantasies and occasional homosexual episodes.
The extremely developed “nonresistance” in her character was, on the
one hand, a permanent cry for her brother (father) to come and beat
(rape) her, and on the other hand, was due to the repression of her rage
against her mother. Having had to bear a great deprivation at a very
early age, she was now incapable of bearing the slightest strain. The in­
sults she suffered from her lover or his refusals to meet her produced an
unbearable anxiety, and she was compelled to telephone to one of her
acquaintances and arrange a meeting as quickly as possible although she
had no real desire for these meetings. “To be left alone/' to be separated
from the parents and love was an unbearable catastrophe. She had been
re-enacting her part of the primal scene in analysis in nearly every hour,
for she went through a coitus fantasy and also enacted a coitus scene in
which the analyst was having intercourse with her but at the same time
was masturbating, which is of course what she did at this juncture. She
frequently had trance-like states, in which she actually believed in the re­
ality of her “visions." In these states her whole manner and voice
changed and became completely infantile. Once she declared “The sun
is coming into me. Now Bessy [her name] is the sun and the sun is
Bessy." Then she felt a pressure on her head, something heavy bearing
down upon her. It was an “iron hat" (vaskalap), a figurative expression
used in Hungarian for conservatism. Sometimes instead of “iron hat"
(vaskalap) she said “iron sheet" (vaslap), and it might feel like either.
This “pressure" was really repression and it usually appeared when she
could not bear the sight of one of the visions. After the solar vision men­
tioned above, the iron sheet again appeared and the patient asked, “What
is a grownup?" The sheet reminded her of the coffin of Attila, the King
of the Huns. According to the Hungarian chronicles, Attila was buried
in a threefold coffin, or rather in three coffins: one of gold, one of silver,
and one made of iron. A river was diverted from its stream and the coffin
was buried in the river bed. Then the river was turned back into its
former course, and the slaves who performed the ceremony were all
slaughtered, so that no one would know the place where the great king
of the Huns was buried. Attila wedded a young German princess and
bled to death through the nose 'on the night of his wedding. When it was
pointed out what all this meant—that the great secret is that Attila, the
father, buries himself in her on his wedding night—she remarked that
there were certain things that she forbade herself to think about when
she was a little girl. One of these was something she had read in the
newspaper about a musician who had raped an immature girl. The other
was to think about God when she was in the toilet, and the third to think
about the worms that were once found in her excrements—that is, she is
raped by the father and is delivered of an excremental child. Then she
began to ask many nonsensical questions, and said that at the age of six
her brother had told her that children were made whenever a girl and a
boy put their “water-makers" together. She suggested to her brother that
they might try this, but he refused because this was done only by lovers.
Then she arose from the couch with frightened protests, and when asked
what was the matter, replied that she thought her father was here and
was just going to try it with her. In connection with a dream about hav­
ing intercourse with her brother, she began to scream “I cannot look.
The iron sheet is coming down! The electric lightl Father in his night­
shirt lying on top of mother—darkness."
During the first few months of the analysis she gradually gave up
one of her very characteristic habits. She used to form her handkerchief
in a way that varied between the shape of a nipple and of the penis and
put it into her mouth. The analysis of this led to a real event which, ac­
cording to what her mother told her afterward, must have happened
when she was about four months old. Her mother did not have enough
milk and the patient was taken off the breast when she was still very
hungry. She remembers distinctly that she did not cry although she felt
terribly like doing so. Her mother confirms this memory; she remembers
it very well, for everyone was astonished that the baby did not cry. This
was the beginning of her theory that pleasure is a substance (milk) of
which there are only limited supplies in the world, and that she can get
only very little or must suffer for whatever amount she consumes. She
was hungry for love, and when she went home after the analytic hour
she was hungry and had some white coffee (i.e., coffee with milk).
We see therefore that her depression is rooted in two events of her
infancy: in the deprivation she suffered through her mother and in the
deprivation she suffered through her father. The two traumata are super­
imposed on each other with a continual identification of nipple and
penis. The case confirms both the earlier views on the oral conditioning
of melancholia and those advanced by Lewin who found that a hypo-
mania or euphoric state was really a repetition of the excitement felt in
connection with the primal scene (122). In the course of the analysis the
two traumata reoccur in their ontogenetic order, but the parental coitus
trauma seems to have had the greater dynamic importance.
All this serves merely as a preliminary to what I regard as the real
subject matter of this paper. In this case, tne significance of some familiar
fantasies of mankind was so clear, and the coincidence of this significance
with conclusions I had arrived at on the basis of anthropological data was
so great that I decided to publish the case. A certain decoration on a
chest in the analytic room—a semicircle—was evolved by the patient into
a “goddess.” Whenever she progressed a step in the transference situation
she would become frightened and project her anxiety to an outward
cause. It was the “goddess” who was hypnotizing her, the goddess who
opened a gigantic mouth to devour her. In the second month of analysis
she brought the following dream:
“Bessy X., a friend of mine, tells me ‘I do not love my father, I love
the doctor.* And I see the empty—or not empty—skin of a fish ”
The empty skin of the fish stood for the empty nipple, Bessy X for
herself, and the sentence in the dream was an avowal of transference.
This was followed by great alarm at the “goddess,” who was approaching
to bite her. She recognized the identity of the goddess with the analyst's
wife. Then she said with reference to the goddess, "sunt anima rerum”
objects have a soul. The goddess, she said, was not a person but the
purity that is inherent in the person, the power, or the protecting genius.
Gods and goddesses do not cohabit, and she always thought that her
school teachers were supernatural beings far removed from everything
that was dirty. She has dreamed that the cook was performing cun-
nilingus with her. The cook had been visiting her mother's grave. When
she smiled, because the teacher praised her, the goddess was angry; when
she was sad, the goddess was happy. She hoped there was nothing the
matter with the analyst's wife. “No, the wishes don't come true in this
case.” Then she had a vision: flames burst forth from the mouth of the
 goddess. She was grinding her teeth—was she preparing to bite or to kiss
or to lick the patient?
Nothing could be clearer than her ambivalent attitude to the parental
imagines, in this case to the mother. That all the grinning demoniac
faces, negroes and Chinese, satyrs and other bogeys of her fantasy world
stood for the parents in the primal scene, or series of “primal scenes," is
now quite evident. But what about gods and goddesses, that is, what
about her position with regard to the analyst and his wife? She drew a
distinct line between teachers and parents. The “horrors," that is, those
who have intercourse, were the parents, and the gods or teachers repre­
sent “purity." However, her attention was called to the fact that some­
thing was wrong with her Latin. Sunt animae rerum is the correct form,
anima is a lapsus. Anima reminded her of “animalni,” a Hungarianized
form of the Latin root, meaning the activity of a prostitute in a brothel
whose job is to “animate," that is, to stimulate the sexual desire, of the
guests. But it also reminded her of animals, of the animal element in
man, that is, of coitus. Thus the purity of noncohabitation of the “gods"
was revealed as the opposite of what it seems to be, and the difference
between the gods and the demons is that the latter represent the anxiety-
distorted image of the primal scene, while the gods stand for the same
thing in a sublimated form.
After some months of analysis she declared that she could perform
magic. Whenever she was in love with a man and desired him to think
of her, all she had to do was to think hard of the man in question and
to turn her upper lip inwards in a manner strongly suggestive of suck­
ing. In connection with a dream of dolls dancing behind a partition on
a stage, whom she tries to approach, but without being able to—she ex­
plained what magic is. She said that magic is the power to overstep
boundaries and to identify oneself psychically with a person who is some­
where else. The latent content of the dream in question was again the
primal scene, and thus “magic" would mean the excitement experienced
by the child and her desire to “overstep the boundaries" which divided
her from the parents. This “magic" was evidently the autoerotic repeti­
tion of an oral form of gratification and consisted of thumbsucking, with
the thumb as a substitute both for the mother's nipple and for the father's
penis. Three dreams forming a series or rather the third dream of this
series now brings us to the subject of telepathy.
/. “Your wife tells me now it is Bessy*s time, or turn; she is going to
perform. I have got something in my hand which is like a hambone, but
it gets larger and smaller again as if it were Indian rubber ”
The “performance" is the same thing as the dolls dancing on the
stage, and the rubber-like quality of the hambone refers to the marvel of
erection. Gnawing hambones was one of her favorite pastimes in child­
hood, and her mouth was full of saliva when she talked about this dream.
Next night, a dream continues the same theme:
II. “/ am sitting on the bank of the Danube with you and X ., the
photographer. We are all in bathing costumes. I take hold of your penis
and feel that you have an erection. I am ashamed, and in order to hide
my confusion, I also hold the penis of X. I am happy because his penis is
not as big as yours ”
She stated that she once saw her father in underwear; he was wearing
only pants, and she could see spots on his body. They must have been
traces of her mother's lips. Then she went through the motions of coitus
and declared that she is cohabiting and that the analyst was masturbat­
ing, obviously a reversal of the latent content—the little girl masturbated
when she observed parental coitus and perhaps had the fantasy of grab­
bing the father's penis and taking it away from the mother. Her series
formations—many men, in reality and in her fantasies—are due to a
flight from the father's big penis. Mr. X. is a photographer; she has
brought a collection of his photos which she wants me to see—that is,
she is showing me the picture which determined her whole life (primal
scene).
In the middle of June 1932, Dr. Hollos gave a lecture on telepathy in
the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society (98). The lecture was based
mostly on occurrences during analysis, that is, on a telepathy between
the patient and the analyst. The next day the patient reported the fol­
lowing dream:
HI. “I am still at home and I see that it is a quarter to eleven or a
quarter to one. I ought to have started at half past in order to come to
analysis. It is too late and I go on playing the piano. I feel as if playing
the piano were an irresistible compulsion. Twenty-three hours have passed
and I am in time for next day's analysis. I have had a dream which I
am going to tell the analyst. The dream was this: A white dove alights on
a pink cloud. I see this and the sky is blue. I come into analysis, enter the
room, but the couch stands crosswise. You begin to talk instead of letting
me talk and you say: 7 dreamed that a white dove alights on a pink
cloud. The sky was blue! I am so happy that I scream with pleasure.
Your wife comes into the room and says, ‘Well, Bessy, what is the mat­
ter?’ She is very friendly ”
The patient dreamed this the same night that I was thinking about
the problem of telepathy, a subject I had never been interested in be­
fore the lecture given by Dr. Holl6s. It is obvious that she dreamed of
having dreamed the same thing that I had, that is, we have before us a
telepathic dream on the subject of telepathy. In analyzing this dream we
may therefore expect to obtain some information regarding the uncon­
scious processes underlying telepathy.
It is a quarter to eleven or a quarter to one: The day before she nearly
made a mistake. She thought that eleven o'clock was the right time for
her to come to analysis. The hour beginning at eleven is the hour of an
acquaintance of hers, Mrs. N. She thought Mrs. N. was my favorite pa­
tient. If she came at one o'clock she would be disturbing me, for that is
the time when I have lunch with my wife. Therefore the meaning of the
first sentence is: the analyst is with another woman and the patient wants
to disturb them to take the other woman's place. She added another de­
tail: her governess was talking to her and said that her young man was
also in love with one of the patient's cousins. The governess was a bad
lot, she would go with any man who asked her. This is what she feared
was true of herself; if she were to put a little rouge on her face, she
would be compelled to become a prostitute. (The compulsion of playing
the piano.) The young man in question was also in love with her, and
she had homosexual relations with the cousin in question.
Twenty-three hours afterward she went away from analysis in low
spirits because I went into my wife's room after the hour while she was
still in the corridor. She felt quite giddy, so she went home and fell
asleep in the afternoon. It was as if she had had an abortion. But the
central figure in the dream is the white dove. It reminded her of a pic­
ture of the trinity, the dove being the Holy Ghost, the immaculate con­
ception. Blue and pink are the colors of a dress in which she looked very
pretty when she was quite a little girl. Then she began to talk about a
subject that kept tormenting her in her school days. She had been told
in school that God, who was invisible, had created the world from noth­
ing. She tried hard to picture this, but whenever she tried she saw God
like an old man, like her father, and the world was something that was
green and sprouting. But if this were so, then God was not invisible and
the world had not been created out of nothing. For how can something
be visible and invisible at the same time? Then with a sudden outburst
of rage: “Damn them for having covered my little bed when I slept in
the bedroom. The air was very bad. They even used a chamber pot. I
tore the cover off in my rage." (Her bed stood crosswise to the bed of the
parents.) Here the analyst suggested that she must have observed the
coitus of her parents and shrieked, and that then her mother (my wife in
the dream) probably comforted her. Yes, she stated, she could remember
her mother coming to her little bed and caressing her when she screamed
at night.
In the situation of the primal scene, the little girl had her first “tele­
pathic" experience. The parents were speaking a language that every
living being understands, the language of sexual excitement. The child
responds by “magic," i.e., it is capable of finding libidinal gratifications
that transcend the limits of space. In the cases reported by Holl6s, the
characteristic feature was that telepathy occurred when the thoughts of
the analyst would wander to other subjects, i.e., that the child would call
to the father to love him and not the mother. In the case I have described
the day stimulus of the telepathic dream was that I left her alone and
went into my wife's room, and the latent infantile material was the psy­
chic content. We should have to assume that the identification with the
analyst involves an interaction between the preconscious systems, or that
the identification takes place in a given moment when the cathexis of the
unconscious content with the preconscious element takes place. We
should also have to assume another element of transition, viz., the transi­
tion between identification and object cathexis. I explained the telepathic
nature of the dream to the patient, and she was as pleased with this in
her waking life as she had been in the dream. She continued to talk
about it and dreamed that she was Christopher Columbus who aided by
God has discovered the realm of the soul. God reminded her of a picture
of an old man with a beard floating in the air; Columbus: an expedition,
“the realm of the soul," a psychoanalytic expedition (the analyst) and
her telepathy. If the analyst is Columbus, she is America. In her child­
hood she had had a conscious fantasy that she was the Bahama Islands,
the place first discovered by Columbus and that the islands were a sort
of huge human (or divine) being with Columbus anchoring at the head
of this being. This led us to the situation of the child making its first
expeditions of discovery on the parent's body. She said that she could not
give up this idea of telepathy, that she was brooding on it like a hen on
an egg. Perhaps we have to regard this complete identification as the
latent survival of primitive phases in the development of the ego, of the
mother-child identification. In situations which are analogous to or
which bring up the unconscious content of the primal scene, a recru­
descence of this prenatal nonlimited form of existence might take place,
and this might help to explain the shock-like feeling connected with
these phenomena.
However, all this is only workable when the two persons concerned
are in some sort of contact, for instance, in the same room. It is possible
that even the slightest movement suffices for the unconscious, but we do
not know how these interactions can take place at a distance. An ex­
planation of the dream can scarcely be regarded as an explanation of
telepathy in the ordinary sense of the word. We must of course take into
consideration the peculiarly susceptible character of the patient, her at­
titude of yielding to all outward influence and the decisive role played
by the primal scene in her whole mental make-up. Nevertheless, the
problem remains unsolved. As somebody (Bernfeld?) once remarked, an
aeroplane is a symbol of erection, and the fact that one can also use it
for going from Paris to Berlin is merely incidental. It is therefore inter­
esting to observe that telepathy or magic corresponds to or is based on
the situation of the child in the primal scene, but that does not explain
why the projections formed on this basis happen to correspond to facts.
The anthropological bearings of the data in question are perhaps of
greater significance, or, at any rate, of a more unambiguous character.
For one thing, we have a striking confirmation of my theory of the origin
of hostile supernatural beings—ogres, demons, etc., as representatives of
the father (the parents) in the primal scene. I have also contended that
the gods (totemic ancestors) were later offshoots of the same stem, with
this difference, that in the ogre type we have anxiety—repression—pro­
jection, whereas in the case of the gods the original libidinal identifica­
tion (superego formation), which is contained in the repressed, returns
from repression and leads to a sublimation of the primal scene content.
The mechanism in this case might be described as anxiety—repression—
projection—annulment or semiannulment of this projection by a fictive
identification.
 Finally, the meaning of magic in its relation to demon-lore (primal
scene) is borne out by the patient's magical actions and theories. Magic
is the substitute gratification (onanism) of the child in the primal scene
situation (162, 163).
 ON THE ROLE OF TRANSFERENCE AND
COUNTERTRANSFERENCE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS*
By FANNY HANN-KENDE, M.D.

From magic to psychoanalysis, the course of transference was always

the most important determinant of psychotherapeutic success. Before
Freud physicians working with hypnotism or with suggestion used only
a part of the dynamic force of transference—the positive one—as a means
of therapy, and then only in an intuitive manner. Later on Freud (73)
and especially Ferenczi (52) interpreted the ontogenetic, descriptive and
dynamic properties of transference and, thus, made available to us a psy­
chological mechanism, whose presence is a conditio sine qua non of
analytic therapy, and which must be taken into consideration at all times
in analytic work. Transference—i.e., the individual's unconscious libid-
inal or other attachment to the object—does not develop only within the
framework of analytic therapy. In fact, the psychoanalytic situation
merely facilitates the complete unfolding of the dynamic strength of the
transference.
Freud describes the genesis of transference as follows: “Let us bear
clearly in mind that every human being has acquired, by the combined
operation of inherent disposition and of external influences in childhood,
a special individuality in the exercise of the capacity to love—that is, in
the conditions which he sets up for loving, in the impulses he gratifies by
it, and in the aims he sets out to achieve in it. This forms a cliche or
stereotype to him, so to speak (or even several), which perpetually repeats
and reproduces itself as life goes on, in so far as external circumstances
and the nature of the accessible love-objects permit, and is indeed itself
* This article was especially revised for the present anthology by the author, on the
basis of a translation from the Hungarian original by George Devereux. An earlier,
and now superseded, version of this paper was published in Magyarorszdgi Pszicho-
analitikai Egyesulet Tagjai: Lelekelemzesi Tanulmanyok (Ferenczi Memorial Volume),
Budapest, B61a Soml6 , 1933 and in Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, 22:478­
486, 1936. Copyright 1952 by International Universities Press.
to some extent modifiable by later impressions. Now our experience has
shown that of these feelings which determine the capacity to love only a
part has undergone full psychical development; this part is directed to­
wards reality, and can be made use of by the conscious personality, of
which it forms a part. The other part of these libidinal impulses has been
held up in development, withheld from the conscious personality and
from reality, and may either expend itself only in fantasy, or may re­
main completely buried in the unconscious so that the conscious person­
ality is unaware of its existence. Expectant libidinal impulses will in­
evitably be roused, in anyone whose need for love is not being satisfac­
torily gratified in reality, by each new person coming upon the scene,
and it is more than probable that both parts of the libido, the conscious
and the unconscious, will participate in this attitude" (73).
Naturally, healthy emotional ties also contain unconscious transfer­
ence elements, parts of which are archaic elements inherited in the course
of psychic continuity, while other parts are the products of early child­
hood experiences. However, the healthy individual’s object attachments
are overwhelmingly under the control and direction of the conscious ego,
and are adapted to reality; i.e., they are elastic. By contrast, the neurotic
is not the master of his actions and feelings; he hates or loves desper­
ately, often without being able to rationalize these feelings, as in
the case of “love at first sight." In most instances the patient is animated
by an amalgam of contrary emotions, in which love is blended with hate,
confidence with distrust, and desire with revulsion. Regardless of whether
or not both members of these paired emotions are conscious, this type of
ambivalence can actually paralyze the individual in every respect. These
are the patients who usually complain of an inability to feel anything
whatsoever.
In psychoanalytic therapy, transference—this specific tie, which is a
characteristic of every patient—is present already in the first hours, al­
though, despite the fact that we have informed him of the basic rule of
psychoanalysis, the patient may confess his first thoughts and feelings
only at a later date. I now propose to cite a few examples which reveal
the mechanism of the transference, and which show that the patient
brings his transferences already into his first hour, in the form of a fully
developed complex whose source is hidden in the patient's unconscious,
and is independent of the analyst's personality.
A thirty-year-old male patient, who began treatment because of im-
potency, started his first analytic hour with the following remark: “How
fortunate that you are so old and ugly. It means that I do not have to
fear that I might fall in love with you"—thus revealing his castration
anxiety, which formed the nucleus of his impotency.
 A twenty-six-year-old, strikingly pretty woman patient began her first
hour with the following statement: “I am pleasantly disappointed in
you. . . . You are very beautiful. . . . I believed that every woman doctor
is ugly. . . . I do not like ugly women. . . ." The patient then admitted,
albeit reluctantly, that she dislikes also women more beautiful than her­
self. Her sisters too are beautiful, but she is the most beautiful of them
all. Thus, fortunately for the analysis, I was incorporated into the group
of competing sisters already in the course of the very first hour.
A woman patient, who is some ten years my senior, stops horrified in
the door of my office, and makes the following opening remark: “Nol I
told the professor [who sent this patient to me] that I would not go to a
woman, and especially not to so young a woman 1 Why, you could be my
daughter! How could you help me, when you yourself are but a very
young girl?" I soon learned that the patient’s agony had lasted several
decades, and led to the oedipus complex which had not been overcome
in a normal manner. Her daughter’s recent marriage further exacerbated
this conflict, the patient’s torment becoming unendurable when her
daughter became pregnant.
From the viewpoint of technique and of the intrapsychic constella­
tion, and with special reference to transference, the patient’s recovery is
divided into three phases. In the first phase—which Ferenczi calls the
analytic “honeymoon"—we do not interpret the transference. At the same
time we observe its unfolding in silence, but with the same attentiveness
with which we follow all of the patient’s words and deeds. During this
phase of the analysis the patient usually experiences a tremendous relief,
and often believes himself cured. This is understandable: The patient
gets rid of some of the secrets which had oppressed him for a long time,
and had induced him to withdraw into himself. Indeed, even the patient
who seemingly had not become isolated, often felt that the uncompre­
hending manner in which his family and friends listened to his com­
plaints indicated that these complaints bored them, and that they were
unable to help him. Thus, when he complained of his inability to work,
they urged him to try to work. When he took refuge in obsessive-com­
pulsive overwork, they suggested that he take a rest. When he felt in­
capable of having a sexual life, they told him to have an affair, because
it would enable him to have a sex life. When he ran from one object to
another, without ever obtaining real gratification, he was told to give up
the chase and to become monogamous like other decent people. They
viewed his compulsive rituals as exaggerations and his fears as childish
stupidity. When, as so often happens, such a situation goes on for sev­
eral years, even the patient himself finally begins to imagine that he is
perhaps not really ill, but merely lazy, worthless and shiftless, and there­
fore inclined to fuss interminably with his thoughts. In other instances
 he too begins to think that masturbation has destroyed his potency, or
that his fears are too unreal to be worth discussing, etc. As a rule, he
comes to us only in the last resort, and here, for the first time in his life,
he is permitted to be sick, without having to feel either guilt or shame.
This freedom which we are the first to grant the patient—this appar­
ently passive attitude—is, in its essence, a very active gesture indeed.
Hence, the patient's “feeling of liberation" is quite appropriate. Indeed,
as is well known, neurosis is usually one of the manifestations of an un­
conscious intrapsychic conflict between an inflexibly severe superego and
the instinct representatives of the id, which unfolds itself within a rela­
tively weak ego, which is too feeble or immature to establish a normal
internal balance between these forces. In other words, we strengthen the
ego when we induce the patient to discard all shame and reserve, and to
associate freely and without seeking to adapt his thoughts to some intel­
lectual pattern. In this manner we reinforce the strivings of the patient's
unconscious, in order to permit the intrusion of at least part of his re­
pressed wishes and fantasies into the conscious ego. At this stage the
transference does not cause resistances. The patient is grateful to us, be­
cause we permit him to complain, and understand him. He works with
us, and, in the course of this work, obtains a new psychic perspective.
The more narcissistic the patient is, the more he is afraid of “losing him­
self." This, in turn, delays the onset of the second phase of analysis, dur­
ing which resistances begin to develop. In general, the first change oc­
curs in the rate at which material is being produced. The patient usually
says: “I have already told you everything," and then remains silent. In
other instances he brings us superficial associations. No new memories
emerge; instead, the patient repeats things by acting them out. The ex­
haustion of material is, in itself, quite painful to the patient, who expects
us to punish him for it in the most diverse ways. Fortunately Freud told
us that the patient's tenacious silence usually conceals emotions and fan­
tasies which pertain to the person of the analyst, and that, if we mention
this to him, we usually manage to put an end to his silence.
During this period we do indeed come to occupy the center of the pa­
tient's intellectual and emotional attitudes. We find that we are always
present in the patient's dreams and fantasies, in which we appear either
identified with various imagines, or else concealed by symbols. In other
instances it is actually our own office which is the stage upon which the
dream unfolds itself, even though the patient states that the setting of
the dream is his own home. He also wishes to consult us before making
any decision whatsoever and seeks to make every one of his actions de­
pend on us. It is painful for him that he can come only at a certain hour
of the day, that he cannot live with us, that we have a family of our own,
or that we also have other patients beside himself, etc. He wants to find
in our office a complete re-enactment of his family situation. He con­
stantly expects, and even provokes, the analyst to mete out punishment,
to abandon him, to throw him out or to reward him. In other words,
transference is now entirely in the service of the repetition compulsion;
it becomes a symptom and must be understood as such. The patient in­
vests us with the qualities of his superego, and expects from us the very
same prohibitions and orders which his superego represents. What bene­
fit does the patient derive from this phase of the analysis, when he feels
subjectively much worse, when he is much more irritable, and sensitive,
and, above all, when dependence on the analyst is especially painful,
particularly to the narcissistic patients? The patient will derive two bene­
fits from this phase of his analysis. First of all, as a result of the transfer­
ence we represent those persons who were the most influential agents of
the patient's early childhood, i.e., those who served as prototypes for his
superego. By projecting them upon us, the patient is enabled to transfer
these components of his superego, or at least some parts thereof, from
their intrapsychic position to an extrapsychic position and to turn them
once more into external objects. In addition, the patient's ego, now freed
to some extent from the pressure of the superego, can liberate a quantity
of repressions which had been forced upon it by the superego. As a re­
sult, quantities of unconscious material now become communicable.
The third phase of therapeutic work is usually reached by impercep­
tible steps. Ordinarily we seldom obtain newly emerging memory mate­
rial. In addition to the working through of material produced up to this
point, our most important task is the resolving of the transference. The
transference would once more like to indulge in repetition: The patient
identifies himself with us and wishes to put us, in the guise of ego ideals,
in the place of the now abandoned superego. Through constant interpre­
tative work we manage to strengthen the ego sufficiently to enable it to
renounce also this undertaking. In other words, the cured patient be­
comes the type of personality which he would have become, had various
traumatic experiences not impaired the development of his ego.
Let us now consider the analyst's countertransference to the patient,
which consists of libidinal processes seldom discussed in analytic litera­
ture. Yet, it is precisely the recognition of the countertransference which
prepared the way for the second basic rule: that only a person who has
had a didactic, i.e., a complete character analysis, can analyze others.
Freud did not define the essence of countertransference. He did stress,
however, that the analyst has to control his feelings toward the patient,
and that he must not confuse the manifestations of the patient's positive
transference sentiment with real love directed at his person. Helene
Deutsch made an attempt to define counter transference (XII). She viewed
it as a mechanism developed in the course of analysis, and consisting of
two components, both of which are rooted in the unconscious. One of
these is the identification of the analyst's unconscious with that of the
patient—an identification made possible by the fact that wishes and ten­
dencies similar to those of the patient are also stirring in the analyst's un­
conscious. The second component of countertransference, labeled “the
complementary attitude," is the process whereby the analyst uncon­
sciously identifies himself with the libidinal imagines which play a role
in the patient's unconscious fantasies. It seems rather unfortunate that
Deutsch should view the “complementary attitude" as one of the de­
terminants of the countertransference. Indeed, it is precisely one of the
purposes of the didactic analysis to interpret and render ineffective all
those tendencies of the future analyst which would cause him to become
identified with these archaic imagines, not merely in the patient's uncon­
scious, but also in his own.
Ferenczi's papers dealing with the technical problems of psycho­
analytic practice discuss in great detail the harm countertransference
may cause. Like Freud himself, he too believes that one of the analyst's
principal tasks is the absolute control of the countertransference.
Ferenczi states his viewpoint as follows: “The psycho-analyst, however,
may no longer be gentle and sympathetic or downright and hard accord­
ing to inclination and wait till the patient's soul moulds itself to the doc­
tor's character; he must understand how to graduate his sympathy. In­
deed he may not even yield inwardly to his own affects; to be influenced
by affects, not to mention passions, creates an atmosphere unfavorable
for the taking up and proper handling of analytic data. As the doctor,
however, is always a human being and as such liable to moods, sympathies
and antipathies, as well as impulses—without such susceptibilities he
would of course have no understanding for the patient's psychic con­
flicts—he has constantly to perform a double task during the analysis:
on the one hand, he must observe the patient, scrutinize what he relates,
and construct his unconscious from his information and behavior; on the
other hand, he must at the same time consistently control his own atti­
tude towards the patient, and when necessary correct it; this is the
mastery of the counter transference (Freud).
“The pre-condition for this is of course the analysis of the doctor him­
self; but even the analysed individual is not so independent of peculiari­
ties of character and actual variations of mood as to render the supervi­
sion of countertransference superfluous" (54).
One of the most difficult tasks of analytic work is precisely the con­
stant self-interpretation and direction of the dynamic force of counter­
transference. Indeed, the patient's transference reactions to the analyst,
and the analyst's countertransference reactions to the patient come into
being as soon as the two meet for the first time. The patient's general ap­
pearance, mode of speaking, distinctive movements, voice and remarks
elicit not only an understanding of relationships and a conscious com­
passion or a feeling of sympathy-antipathy, but also revive some of the
analyst's preconscious memory traces. Regardless of how hard we try to
approach each new case without preconceptions, and to view it objec­
tively and solely on the basis of well-directed conscious observations, our
preconscious and even our unconscious always automatically participate
in this work. In fact, in psychoanalytic therapy, the prompt correspond­
ence between the analyst's and the patient's unconscious—or, perhaps
more precisely, between their respective preconscious spheres—is an in­
dispensable prerequisite of successful co-operation. Indeed, just as con­
scious and unconscious positive and negative feelings toward the patient
may prevent the analyst from understanding the latter, so he would be
incapable of curing the patient if he had no desexualized libidinal rela­
tionship with him. Patients react with great sensitiveness to the analyst's
libidinal attitude. The writings of Freud (VIII) and of Deutsch (XII)
contain striking proofs for this statement. A paper by Holl6s, read before
the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society, also lends support to these ob­
servations (98).
My own observations regarding this matter belong to a period of my
life during which a concatenation of circumstances made my regular
analytic work rather irksome for me. I had too many patients; I could
not formulate in a satisfactory manner a psychoanalytic problem which
had crystallized within me; and, above all, I was constantly preoccupied
by the sudden, unexpected, and severe illness of a dear friend, whom we
shall call X. On the fifth day of X.'s illness—having been unable to ob­
tain a positive diagnosis, and receiving only evasive answers from his
physician—I felt that my tenseness was going to make the day's analytic
work rather difficult for me. “If only I could go away for two weeks—to
some place near the seal" I thought, but could devote no further time to
this fantasy, because my first analytic patient had just arrived, and began
his hour with the following remark: “While I was sitting in the recep­
tion room, I was wondering what would happen if you were to leave for
two weeks. You tell me in vain that we are equal partners in the analysisl
The plain fact is that you can leave me any time." The patient's further
associations then gradually drifted to other instances of rejection, which
had occurred in his childhood. After the hour I decided that it was actu­
ally impossible for me to go away. Instead, I began to consider the pos­
sibility of canceling one or two hours, and thought in this connection
of my next patient, whose analysis was nearing its end, and who, for quite
some time now, had been feeling well. This patient began his hour with
remarks whose tenor had been revealed to me already by his facial ex­
pression: “I am like an orphan. You are the only one I have, etc.MThen
he proceeded to recite a series of childhood disappointments. The man­
ner in which this patient reacted to my unexpressed impulses caused me
to give up these wishes altogether.
The next patient to arrive had been suffering from a neurosis which
had completely inhibited him in every respect. For reasons of discretion
I cannot describe his illness in detail, and need mention only one of his
symptoms—a depression. The patient connected this severe depression,
which only occurred from time to time, with a certain bodily defect of
his. This obviously quite insignificant and commonplace anatomical de­
fect caused him a great deal of constant distress, and also enabled him to
rationalize the deficiencies of his sex life, his lack of manly self-confidence,
daring and initiative, and, above all, his belief that no one could pos­
sibly fall in love with him. When this patient came to me for treatment,
his principal presenting symptom was this depression, which caused him
to become seriously preoccupied with plans of suicide. On this occasion
too he began his hour with thoughts about suicide, and then proceeded
to discuss his anatomical defect. At this moment it suddenly occurred to
me that X. also had the same physical “defect," and began to wonder
whether he, too, had felt uncomfortable about this defect. As soon as
this thought occurred to me, the patient made the following remark:
“You know, for the past five days I have had a funny feeling. When I
look at myself in the mirror, I notice that I begin to resemble X. more
and more. This reassures me, since X. has the same defect I have. Please
don’t laugh at me . . . . but I feel that you find him attractive. In fact, I
now feel that you also find me attractive, etc." This patient knew X. only
casually, and X. had hitherto played no role whatsoever in his rather
long analysis. In fact, he did not even know that X. was ill. Yet, his un­
conscious apparently sensed that some of my libido had been diverted
from him to X. Since this patient’s transference had made me into a
mother imago, his depression returned whenever he tried to establish a
sexual relationship. Even though such a relationship may have seemed
desirable to him on the level of reality, his unconscious castration anxiety
actually forbade him to have an affair. The castration anxiety itself was
connected with a fear of rivalry with the father. In this instance too, the
sense of rivalry elicited a depression, and caused him to regress from the
real object to the infantile mother imago which I represented for him.
He replaced the dreaded father with X., but, for the first time in his life,
also found the courage to identify himself with the latter. The patient’s
depression ended forever in the course of this hour.
In the case of the first patient one might envisage the possibility that
the patient had indulged in fantasies about my trip because he had
gained the impression that I looked tired. However, this hypothetical im­
pression had no basis in objective reality. In addition, the patient had
envisaged the possibility that I might take a two-weeks’ trip already in
my waiting room, precisely when I, myself, was thinking of a two-weeks'
trip. The second and the third patients' intuitive empathy is, no doubt,
also a mechanism of the unconscious. We are as yet ignorant of the real
nature of this mechanism, and can only define some of its characteristics:
1. The patient produces such “insights” when he unconsciously
senses a decrease in the analyst's libido.
2. The patient's “telepathic" feat is contingent upon the presence
of a positive transference.
3. The patient uses this mechanism to regain the libido which had
been withdrawn from him.
I cite these instances solely for the purpose of lending support to the
following statement made by Ferenczi: “Gradually, then, I came to the
conclusion that the patients have an exceedingly refined sensitivity for
the wishes, tendencies, whims, sympathies and antipathies of their
analyst, even if the analyst is completely unaware of this sensitivity" (56).
The patient's intuitive sensitiveness, which is connected with the
mechanism of transference, makes it necessary for the analyst to be com­
pletely sincere, quite apart from any interpretation which he may make.
It also means that the analyst may not consider the therapeutic process
as a means to a selfish end. In other words, he should not treat the patient
for the purpose of substantiating a certain analytic thesis, nor in order to
find proof for some new, and theoretically apparently sound thesis. The
sole purpose of psychoanalytic therapy is the cure of the patient. How­
ever, since psychoanalysis is, par excellence, a science based upon em­
piricism, its therapeutic application to each new patient will not only
enable one to attain the specific therapeutic goal, but will also yield new
insights.
The essence of psychoanalytic therapy is the overcoming of resistances
and the interpretation of repressed material. In this work the analyst is
guided by three factors: Theoretical and experiential knowledge, de-
sexualized ego libido, and the counter transference. The countertransfer­
ence is a consequence of the analyst's and the patient's own personal
transferences. The analyst's transference impulses—i.e., his unconscious
instinct representatives, and libidinal and destructive tendencies—have,
for the greatest part, become conscious in the course of his own analysis,
and have been subjected to the process of sublimation. A part of them
has, however, been stored away in his preconscious in the form of mem­
ory traces, which unconsciously correspond to the patient's transference,
and which, from the ontogenetic point of view, dispose of dynamic forces
identical with those which actuate the patient's transference. It is indis­
pensable for the success of the analysis that the analyst should consciously
control and neutralize these memory traces, since only in this manner
can he create an atmosphere which is affect-free, and which may be called
“the basic mood" (Grundstimmung) (91). The development of this atti­
tude is inhibited only by those memory traces which had not become
conscious either in the course of the analyst's own analysis, or in the
course of his supervised analyses. Furthermore, since to a certain extent
each analytic treatment involves also a supplementary self-analysis of the
analyst, in the course of which more and more additional memory traces
enter his consciousness, the further the analyst's continuous self-analysis
progresses, the more the countertransference is deprived of significance,
intensity and dynamic effectiveness. The analyst's countertransference is,
obviously, as unavoidable as the patient's transference. However, if the
countertransference is brought into a suitable equilibrium with the trans­
ference, and if the “basic atmosphere" is assigned the leading role,
countertransference not only does not inhibit, but, on the contrary, actu­
ally facilitates analytic work.
 Chapter 15
PROPHETIC DREAMS*
By HANS ZULLIGER

Three friends were sitting waiting for a fourth, upon whom, in his
absence, the conversation turned. Quite recently, the girl whom he was
going to marry had suddenly been taken ill with inflammation of the
caecum and had died. Her fianc£ appeared to be brokenhearted. It was
difficult to interest him in anything, he had no longer any heart for his
work and nothing gave him any pleasure. As they waited, his friends were
discussing how they could rouse him from this state of apathy. Two of
the three were planning to climb the Bliimlisalp (one of the Bernese
Alps, the highest peak of which is called the “Weisse Frau," 12,000 feet)
the following week end and they intended to ask the fourth to join them.
He and his dead fiancee used to be enthusiastic Alpine climbers, and his
friends knew that he was especially fond of the Bliimlisalp district. It
was true that he was now refusing to take part in any amusements, but
they hoped to persuade him to join in such a “serious" undertaking and
believed that his delight in the mountains and in the beauty of nature
would divert his mind from its sad thoughts.
When he appeared, they suggested the expedition, overcame his hesi­
tation and objections and finally secured his promise to join them.
Two days later he took it back. He put down his change of mind to a
dream: He had set out to climb the Jungfrau and had fallen from the
Rottalsattel.1 He was not in general superstitious. This dream, however,
* Originally published in the Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, 18:201­
218, 1932. The English translation was first published in the International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 15:191-208, 1934, and is published here by permission of Mr. Hans
Zulliger and of the editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. The editor
replaced the unofficial English translations of quotations from Freud's works with the
authorized translations of the same passages.
l Editor’s note.—The problem of the dreamer's choice of precisely these place-
names was discussed in a correspondence between the author and the editor. The in­
terpretations resulting from that correspondence are appended to this article by per­
mission of Mr. Hans Zulliger. The “Weisse Frau" (white woman) probably symbolizes
the mother in her nightgown, and perhaps also the bride in her white wedding dress.
Thus, the choice of this symbol seems to have been determined by the oedipus com­
plex. The “Rottalsattel" (red valley saddle) probably symbolizes menstruation and
defloration, the two being frequently equated with one another. Two colloquial Amer­
had made a singularly strong impression on him and he felt that he must
not undertake the climb of the Blumlisalp.
His friends succeeded in persuading him to make another expedition
instead, to the safe Gantrisch peak (about 8000 feet). This is one of the
foothills of the Alps and is very often climbed, in fact even children can
manage it. There is no difficulty of any sort and the expedition is worth
making because of the beautiful view.
As the party was coming down, the dreamer slipped, fell over a preci­
pice and was killed.
Anyone knowing of the prior dream can hardly help feeling that it was
prophetic. His horrified friends certainly thought so. It seemed too as if
the victim of the accident had taken his dream to be a bad omen and a
warning, and he evidently gave up the idea of climbing the “Weisse
Frau” in order to prevent the prophecy of disaster from coming true.
“He had a premonition of his death,” his friends supposed, “just as, in
the war, many soldiers felt convinced beforehand that on a certain day
or at a certain hour they would be hit by a bullet 1”
The dream and the subsequent accident lend color to the belief that
there are such things as prophetic dreams. This view is still held at the
present day by a large number of the common people, who consult the
well-known "Egyptian” dream books when they have had a dream. The
belief has persisted from the earliest times and is not easily eradicated
from the minds even of educated people. There only has to be one case
of a dream “coming true,” such as I have just narrated, to revive the be­
lief or superstition (and the latter after all is simply a belief) that there
is an inexplicable and mystical connection between dreams and future
events.
Men have always had the desire to know beforehand something of
their own future or that of their friends, or the fate of a country or a
people, and throughout the history of mankind attempts have been made
to interpret dreams as foretelling what is to come. The interpretations of
dreams in the Old Testament are not the only classical examples of this
(127). There has come down to us a dream interpretation by Artemidoros,
which the sage gave to his royal master, Alexander of Macedon. The lat­
ter had laid siege to the city of Tyre for a long time without success.
Having half made up his mind to withdraw without achieving his pur­
pose, he had a dream in which he saw a satyr dancing on his shield. He
himself thought that this dream picture betokened some sort of mockery,
ican references to menstruation: “riding the white saddle” and “riding the cotton bi­
cycle” also support this interpretation. A further confirmation of this view is the Swiss
practice of jokingly referring to coitus as “Jungfrau Besteigung” (“climbing the Jung­
frau mountain”) . The symbolic equation mountain—the maternal body, which prob­
ably belongs to the oedipal period, is fairly transparently represented in Charles
Baudelaire’s poem “La G£ante.”
but Artemidoros explained to him that Satyros (Greek) meant “Sa Tyros”
(“Tyre is thine"). The king launched a fresh assault and took the town
( 66).
In those days the belief in the prophetic nature of dreams was gen­
eral and people held that all dreams referred in some way to the future.
After the ancient art of dream interpretation was lost, modern science
pronounced dreams to be only froth.2 It was reserved for psychoanalysis
to recognize their meaning. But Freud himself in his writings rejects as
not proven the notion that dreams can have a prophetic significance. In
his Traumdeutung he shows that they are concerned not with the dream­
er's future but with his past. It is true that in certain quarters associated
with psychoanalysis attempts have been made to prove that dreams have
a “prospective" tendency. But Freud abides by his view: “There can, in­
deed, be no doubt that there are such things as prophetic dreams, in the
sense that their content gives some sort of picture of the future; the only
question is whether these predictions coincide to any noticeable extent
with what really happens subsequently. I must confess that upon this
point my resolution in favor of impartiality deserts me. The notion that
there is any mental power, apart from acute calculation, which can fore­
see future events in detail is on the one hand too much in contradiction
to all the expectations and presumptions of science and on the other
hand corresponds too closely to certain ancient and familiar human de­
sires which criticism must reject as unjustifiable pretensions. I am there­
fore of opinion that after one has taken into account the untrustworthi­
ness, credulity and unconvincingness of most of these reports, together
with the possibility of falsifications of memory facilitated by emotional
causes and the inevitability of a few lucky shots, it may be anticipated
that the spectre of prophetic dreams will disappear into nothing. Per­
sonally, I have never experienced anything or learned of anything that
could encourage a more favorable presumption" (VII).
From Freud s many writings we know how cautious he, our leading
authority, is in his statements. We have learned that he is reluctant to
make assertions even in the case of problems whose solution has thrust
itself upon him in hundreds of empirical observations and that he really
expresses his view only when anything has finally become self-evident for
him. We are particularly struck by the caution which governs his state­
ments in the passage that I have just quoted about prophetic dreams. He
says that his predilection for impartiality leaves him in the lurch here
and he finally declares his opinion as a rather unfavorable prejudgment.
We may conjecture that in what he says there is an underlying sug-
2 German proverb: “Traume sind Sch 'dume”—“Dreams are froth.”
 gestion to his pupils to test the question of prophetic dreams further and
to compare his view with any fresh material that comes to light.
This impression is strengthened when, in studying Freud’s note re­
ferred to above, we find three paragraphs after the passage I have quoted
on “prophetic” dreams the following sentence: “It is certainly right in
what concerns telepathy, too, to adhere obstinately to a sceptical position
and only to yield grudgingly to the force of evidence.”
Let us then apply this spirit to Freud’s “rather unfavorable prejudg­
ment” concerning the prophetic significance of certain dreams. We will
examine material which is fully known and vouched for, and see what we
can make of it.
Apparently very few “prophetic” dreams occur in psychoanalyses. The
literature tells us almost nothing about them. Freud (VI) merely shows
that none of the dreams that his patients related to him as being
prophetic or telepathic could, when more closely examined, substantiate
the claim. He has paid special attention to “telepathic” dreams, and says
that we cannot attribute to telepathic dream material any other role than
belongs, for example, to recent memories or those of childhood. He de­
fines telepathy as “the reception of a mental process by one person from
another by means other than sensory perception” (VII). Hitschmann (X)
has studied the problem of telepathy and comes to the conclusion that
the cases which he examined were really instances of projection. “The
assumption of the existence of mystical forces is simply psychology
projected into the outer world,” he says. Telepathy, he considers, is often
to be regarded as the work of suppressed hostile and cruel impulses,
manifesting themselves in the form of clairvoyant expectations of dis­
aster.
Applying this conception in a parallel way to dreams which “come
true” we may conjecture that such impulses are the cause of those
“prophetic” dreams in which the death of loved relations or of acquain­
tances occurs.
We are proposing to confine our investigation to “prophetic” dreams
and we must distinguish them from those which are “telepathic.” In tele­
pathy knowledge of something removed from us in space is acquired by
some means other than that of sense perception, whereas in prophecy
there is as well the foretelling of something removed in time. We can
say that the temporal element is the specific factor in prophecy.
The reason why psychoanalysts have not much more often tried to
collect and to test material relating to “prophetic” dreams (XII, 115, 4)z
is no doubt that the problem is of quite secondary importance in therapy.
3 In investigating premonitions Allendy (4) also came upon the process of projec­
tion.
For the therapeutic analyst the dreams narrated by his patient are con­
nected with the many other phenomena of the analysis and can scarcely
be isolated from these. Many of the dreams recounted in the psycho­
analytic sessions are not fully understood until months later, sometimes
not until the analysis is ended. The best example in the literature is the
dream of the Wolf-man in Freud's “History of an Infantile Neuro­
sis" (80).
The popular interpretation of dreams is different: people regard them
as complete in themselves, just as Artemidoros did. They believe that
dreams have a prophetic significance which they imagine to be somehow
expressed in symbols; they guess the meaning of these or think they can
ascertain it with the help of a “key," and on this they base their anticipa­
tions of the future. If something actually does happen which occurred
previously in a dream, they see in this an indubitable proof of the fact
that their dreams are derived from an indefinable sense of the future
which academic science has not as yet understood.
The prophetic dreams which I am going to cite here are taken from
my own direct observation, as was my first example about the mountain
accident. My material is not extensive, but it has this advantage—that I
can vouch for it and I know the accompanying circumstances. The same
cannot always be maintained with any certainty in the case of material
acquired at third and fourth hand; one never knows how much error has
crept into the reports without the narrator's intention. When we see, for
example, how unreliable are the utterances of witnesses in courts of law
we feel impelled to be cautious.
I will first give a “true" dream which, like that of the mountain acci­
dent, could not be analyzed. It has further this peculiarity: that neither
the dreamer, a girl of twenty-four, nor any of those to whom she told it,
except myself, saw in it any connection with what happened after. A
little party of us was walking home from a meeting. This girl told us that
she had half made up her mind not to go to the meeting, for she had had
a slight temperature the night before. She went on to say that that night
she had had a strange dream. She was about to go for a country walk
with her fiance. Suddenly she saw a high wall and a heavy black gate
opened. She went through in front of her future husband and heard the
gate slam in his face in a violent draught. Thereupon she fell into an
abyss.
Somebody remarked that dreams of falling occur when we have thrown
off the bedclothes in our sleep and feel the cold air. The dreamer, he
said, had probably uncovered herself, being slightly feverish, and this was
the cause of her dream.
Personally, however, I thought of what Freud says in his Psycho­
pathology of Everyday Life (67) about symptomatic and chance actions.
He tells how the great actress, Eleonora Duse, in a family drama, after an
argument with her husband and before the tempter comes on the scene,
plays with the wedding ring on her finger, taking it off, putting it on
again and finally taking it off once more. Freud gives this example to
show how truly Duse's acting came from the depths of the unconscious.
He quotes other examples of similar symptomatic actions (reported by
Maeder and Reik). A bride forgets to try on her wedding dress—she gets
a divorce from her husband almost as soon as she is married. A young
man loses a ring given him by a girl whom he wants to marry. At the
same time he is seized with an overwhelming longing for another girl.
I asked myself whether the dream of falling, in which the dreamer
was separated from her fiance, had not a similar meaning. It seemed to
me to contain a bad prognosis for the coming marriage. I felt as though
the dream confirmed certain thoughts which had already arisen in my
mind when the girl became engaged. All her life she had clung to her
father passionately and had plainly been in love with him. Till shortly be­
fore her engagement one often heard her say things like: “The only man
I will marry must be just like Father, he must be Father over again," or
“The man I should like best to marry is father." These remarks seemed
childish and perhaps absurd, but the girl, who was by no means lacking
in intelligence, meant them seriously. It was the father who finally urged
his daughter to get married. He found her the young man, with whom
he had made friends, and, when the engaged couple were seen together
later, they did not strike people as being in love: the girl's manner was
cool and she was always far more affectionate with her father. It was whis­
pered that she was marrying the young man only because it was her
father's wish. As an obedient daughter she accepted without demur the
man whom he had selected, rather as if he had given her a present.
I betrayed nothing of my suspicions in connection with the dream.
The marriage was to take place in four days' time. The morning after the
girl told us her dream I learned that she was ill. Next we heard that the
physician had found inflammation of the lungs. On the day when she
was to have been married she died.
These facts, taken in connection with what we know of the girl's at­
titude to her father and her fianc£, cannot but strike us as suspicious. We
may suppose that she preferred death to marriage. Perhaps the feverish
attack on the night of the dream was the beginning of the inflammation
of the lungs. And, looking at the dream, we ask ourselves whether it was
not the utterance of an unconscious suicidal tendency. Probably it has
the value of a symptomatic action; indeed, as a direct derivative of the
unconscious we must regard it as such.
But even then we could not assert that it revealed anything of the fu­
ture. For it indicated something that already existed, but had not been
able to break through into consciousness yet. Thus, once again, this
would not really be a veridical dream—one that tells the truth.
Our skepticism goes even further. Dreams of falling, we say to our­
selves [remembering Freud’s Traumdeutung (66)\, generally have an­
other meaning. It is true that in this dream the essential point is perhaps
not the falling but the abrupt separation from the dreamer’s fianc£. We
know nothing for certain. If anyone says to us “It was a coincidence," we
cannot prove the contraryl We could only say in reply that the dream,
dreamed in connection with the dreamer's illness and four days before
her marriage, was likely after all to have something to do with what was
most occupying her mind. But all that we say is guesswork, mere conjec­
ture, for the dream could not be analyzed. And everything that we have
cited in support of the view that this may still have been something like
a veridical dream is just as little adapted to the demands of an exact sci­
entific investigation as was the dream of the climbing accident.
Let me explain further why the two dreams seem to me to resemble
one another. If I assume that they are to be regarded as symptomatic ac­
tions, then both betray an unconscious purpose; a suicidal tendency. I
believe that the young man of the first dream could not get over the loss
of his fiancee; he wanted to die in order to be with her. The girl who
dreamed the second dream chose rather to die than to marry a man
whom she did not love. It might be said to be an extraordinary piece of
imprudence on her part, after she had been feverish during the night of
the dream, to go to the meeting instead of taking care of herself, and in
this behavior again we should see a suicidal tendency breaking through.
So far, however, we have not proved anything definitely. We are still
groping in the dark and are glad to be able to turn to such prophetic
dreams as have occurred during psychoanalytic treatment. I can give ex­
amples of four such dreams from my own practice.
A young man whose analysis was just beginning told me that he had
gone to see his fiancee, whom he found in the kitchen. By a careless
movement he knocked down a glass bowl, which was smashed to atoms.
He thereupon recollected a dream which he had had the night before.
He had to open a glass jam pot, but the cover stuck and would not
move. He then said that they would have to break the glass, there was
no other way of doing it. Looking back, he regarded this dream as
prophetic.
We might be tempted to see in this a mere coincidence. But analysis
showed that the dream and the incident which followed—the faulty act
—were connected with one another and meant the same thing. Both phe­
nomena represented a denial of the unconscious dread of the act of de­
floration (79). He performed symbolically what he was afraid to do in
fact. The dream shows the breaking through of a tendency which re­
vealed itself more plainly in the faulty act, then appeared quite openly
in the subsequent analytic sessions and subsequently occupied us for a
long time. The young man equated defloration with castration; he feared
a reprisal and tried to escape from his anxiety by conceiving the wish to
marry a woman whom another man had already deflowered. Lest he
should pass from Scylla to Charybdis (as we shall see later), he did not
want this wish to come true either, and so in the dream he ventured to
do what in reality he shunned.
So far as the problem of prophetic dreams is concerned, the interest­
ing point about this example is that in it we can see clearly how the un­
conscious breaks through by a succession of stages. First comes the hint
given by the “veridical” dream, then the symbolic action, finally the
emergence into consciousness of the unconscious tendency.
 This type of behavior occurs not infrequently in criminals. I recollect
an example. A murderer took a girl on his motorcycle to a deserted spot,
without as yet being conscious of his murderous intention. When they
reached the place he showed her a Browning pistol. It went off acciden­
tally and the shot just grazed the girl. According to his own account this
so confused the man that he turned the pistol on her and shot her dead.4
Professor Herbertz (Bern), the criminologist, has coined a term for crimes
preceded by faulty actions which foreshadow the criminal act. He calls
them “follow-up crimes" [Anschlussverbrechen]. We must examine the
connection which this term indicates between crime and faulty act from
the psychoanalytical standpoint. We then find that such incidents which
precede and foreshadow the real criminal act represent the breaking
through of unconscious tendencies (204).
The dream of the broken glass shows that an unconscious tendency
can announce itself in a dream, and we know from criminology that
faulty acts, representing the breaking through of the unconscious, fre­
quently precede “follow-up crimes." We begin to wonder whether there
is a criminal tendency also lurking behind the dream of the broken
glass. In order to find out, we must penetrate a little further into the com­
plexities of the psychic state of the dreamer. We have learned that he
wanted a wife who had already been deflowered, in order to avoid castra­
tion. Subsequently this figure in his mind revealed herself to be his
mother. Unconsciously, then, the dreamer desired to commit the crime
of Oedipus—that of incest—the punishment for which is, once more, cas­
tration. Now we realize more clearly why both in the dream and the
faulty act he was symbolically carrying through the act of defloration:
he wanted to escape the threat of castration at the hands of his father by
renouncing his desire for incest. But, do what he would, he was menaced
with castration in either case; nevertheless castration as a reprisal for de­
floration seemed to him, so to speak, the less dangerous. In the dream he
decided for the lesser evil.
For the purpose of our present problem, however, we are less inter­
ested in this fact than in the perception that here again, in a “true"
dream which we now know to represent the breaking through of uncon­
scious material, we are concerned with criminal fantasies.
We have seen that “dreams which come true" do not really refer to
the future. They announce something which already exists in the uncon­
scious and goes far back into the early experiences of the dreamer. For
the oedipus fantasies go back to early childhood where they could find
no normal satisfaction, so that they were reactivated when, in the case
before us, the boy, now grown to a young man, was confronted with a
real marriage situation.
Now let us look at a second example. A married woman, still young,
whose treatment was nearly finished, began one analytic hour with the
following remarks: “You will remember I once told you that when I had
4 1 followed the newspaper reports of the Waggital murder in 1930 ( 5).
conceived my son this was made known to me in a dream. I dreamed
that I had a baby at my breast. Afterward it proved that I had conceived.
Last night I had a similar dream. But this time I do not mind if I have
another child. In fact [she smiled] I am really very glad. I feel as if I
had been wanting a child again for a long time I”
The patient was deceived in her recollection: she had never told me
of a dream of this sort before. For a long time she firmly believed that
she had already had such a dream at the time when her son was con­
ceived and that she had told me about it. No less firm was her conviction
of the prophetic nature of the dream which she asserted that she had
dreamed once before and had now dreamed again. When the time came
for her period, it did not in fact occur. This gave her the utmost joy, not
only because it showed that a child was coming but also because it proved
to me that her interpretation of her dream was right, for she declared
that she could feel that I doubted the prophecy. Her period set in a week
later.
We proved later beyond any doubt that the desire to have a child at
her breast had arisen some months earlier during the treatment, when the
patient was producing the associations connected with oral erotism. She
had immediately repressed her wish, betrayed nothing of it and now re­
produced it in an altered form: she turned it into a “prophetic” dream
which, as she believed, she had had at the time when she conceived her
son. Now, when she really did have the dream, she recollected her former
suppressed association in the form of a “deja vu ” i.e., of a “true” dream
dreamed on a previous occasion.
In association to this dream there occurred to her recollections from
the time when she played with dolls. She had been nursed by her mother
for rather a long period. In order to escape the trauma of weaning or to
work it over and master it, she identified herself with her mother and put
her baby dolls to her breast. In doing this she imitated the action of an
aunt, whom she had seen nursing her baby.
The reason why the fantasy of having a child at her breast had im­
mediately been suppressed in her analysis when it first emerged and had
undergone a fresh repression was that the child of her fantasy was the
analyst. She had wanted in this way to possess herself of him and so to
break through the “frustration” involved in the treatment. The dream
filled up again the gap in the analysis, caused by her silence on the former
occasion. At the same time it indicated her wish for a genital child, which
she desired to receive from the analyst. This wish was probably respon­
sible for the fantasy of pregnancy and very likely also for the retardation
of her period.
Here then we have a supposedly “true” dream whose prophecy was
not fulfilled, and we can learn more from it than if it had chanced that
the patient had actually conceived. It did not announce what was going
to happen: it betrayed what had once existed and what the dreamer
wished to happen. As the source of the dream we recognize the repetition
compulsion, for we had reached the final phase of the analysis, i.e., the
weaning from the treatment. The patient, as a child, had succeeded in
escaping from the trauma of weaning only by receiving a child (a doll)
from her love object and treating it as she wished to have been treated
herself. She was now repeating this behavior in the transference.
Now let us suppose that, at the time of her ostensibly “prophetic"
dream, the woman had really conceived a child. Probably the analytic
material that I have put before you would still have been forthcoming.
But there would, besides, have been the doubt whether the dream did
not contain as well some truly prophetic element. Possibly, one might
have said, the child was begotten through a so-called “carelessness" on
the part of the husband, which the woman certainly noticed but did not
consciously take in—and now the dream was betraying to her what for
some reason or other she did not wish to know or at least not to know
for certain. Or it may have been a case of autoscopy,5 but, even so, there
would really be nothing “prophetic" about the dream.
In any case we see that the fact that the prophecy did not come true
is an advantage to us for the purpose of a thorough investigation of the
problem of “veridical" dreams.
In connection with this young woman's dream the analysis threw
some light on the psychology of those who have “veridical" dreams. It is
worth our while to consider the points in question.
The patient was deeply gratified by the fact that she had learned
from her dream something of which her analyst was ignorant and which,
as she detected, he doubted. She attributed to herself some sort of “medi-
umistic" powers, not possessed by all and sundry. That she had them
flattered her vanity enormously. It raised her above the ruck of man­
kind. She hoped that she would foresee other pieces of good fortune—
not necessarily the birth of a child. She thought it possible that she might
also get premonitions of dangers and be able to avoid or prevent them
if she had the warning. She then bethought herself in sudden violent
terror that she might know beforehand if her husband, herself or her
analyst were in peril. All at once she felt almost a horror of her power,
for it might mean her actually knowing beforehand of the death of those
for whom she cared. She comforted herself, however, with the thought
that her prophetic gift would surely not extend to this.
The desire to foresee the future contributed to her error of memory
when she thought that she had already had the coming of her first child
announced to her by means of a “true" dream. It seems obvious that
anyone who foresees birth can also foresee death. This was pointed out
to her and, during the same session, when I turned on the electric light,
it occurred to her what enormous delight she felt as a child when she
realized the connection between the electric switch over her cot and the
power of turning the light on and off. The game with the switch pleased
her more than any other: she felt she was like God who could command
day and night.
Thus we may see in the wish to possess “mediumistic" powers the re­
mains of that phase of childhood in which the young human being, in
his narcissism, feels himself to be “omnipotent ”
5 Cf. Allendy (4) : “It has been shown with certainty by the work of Fer£, Lemaitre,
Comar, Bacri and Sellier that by some direct channel which is still unexplained we can
obtain cognizance of our organic state.”
 The third dream was that of a schoolboy and was as follows: “I was
at school and the master told me to come forward and sit on the first
form. I had the feeling that this was something grand.”
The following day the boy had to do a test paper in Greek. The mas­
ter told the few boys who took this subject to sit in the front row instead
of the back. The dreamer was by no means pleased at this order, for,
when directly under the master's eye, it was not so easy to help one an­
other. Nevertheless he had a strong sense of satisfaction because his dream
had come true.
During the next few analytic sessions he discoursed at length on the
subject of prophecy in dreams in general and his own “power” in par­
ticular. Only after several hours of analysis did he choose to produce as­
sociations to his dream (resistance).
This boy was a foreigner and came of one of the most aristocratic
families in his native land. His relatives lived in a kind of patriarchal
society, the head of which was the aged grandfather, who managed the
family property. The direct heir—according to the practice of his coun­
try in the matter of inheritance—had been this boy's father, but he had
died and the boy had stepped into his shoes. The patient said that one
of his uncles held the highest office in the land, being responsible to his
sovereign alone. “He comes first of all with the king.” This uncle, whom
the boy took as his model, was the brother of his mother, who was still
quite young. From his earliest years she had thoroughly spoiled the boy
because, as she said, she was haunted by the thought that a premature
death might take him away from her as it had taken her husband.
The patient was undecided as to whether, later on, he would take
over the management of his grandfather's factories and estates or whether
he would go into office like his uncle. He said that in any case he would
inherit the property and he could easily find someone to administer it
for him. On the other hand, if he was to obtain the official post, he would
have to depend on its falling vacant.
He had a fear that his sovereign might be assassinated by anarchists,
but he reassured himself with the thought that his uncle would protect
the king. By virtue of his office his uncle was really above the king, be­
cause he acted as his protector. The king was in his hands.
This short account has already given us some idea of the unconscious
motives contained in the dream: it was a case of oedipus fantasies, hav­
ing reference to the different father imagos. The school had nothing to
do with the dream, except in so far as it supplied the pictures for the
manifest content. An additional point was that the patient had noticed
that another analysand, who used to come for treatment just before he
did, was no longer coming. Thus in his analysis also the boy had got rid
of a rival and had as it were moved into the “first place.”
The fact that this Greek master told him (and, incidentally, the rest
of his division with him) to come and sit in the front row had nothing
to do with the dream but belonged to quite a different order of things.
It was a matter of chance that the incident at school agreed to some ex­
tent with the manifest content of the dream of the previous night.
The content of the last ostensibly prophetic dream which I can cite
here is quite commonplace. It probably occurs in almost every analysis
on one or more occasions, but it is not often regarded by patients as a
“true” dream.
This analysand, an elderly maiden lady, did take it to be prophetic,
and subsequently she duly made it come true. The dream was as follows:
I was standing in a square. The tram went off under my nose. I thought:
“I shall be too late.” What I was going to be too late for I did not know.
What was I to do? I had nothing with me to read. Suddenly Frl. X. was
at my side; I cheered up and thought: “Now we can wait together and be
too late together.”
The following day the patient missed a tram which she had to catch
to come to analysis. “I really could quite well have jumped on still,” she
said, “but I did not want to risk having my leg taken off.” It appeared,
besides, that she had seen the tram coming from a short distance. If she
had hurried she would have caught it.
The meaning of the dream was as follows: She had “missed her con­
nection” for a husband. The man whom she loved had been taken away
from under her nose and married by another woman. She was too late.
She did not care to console herself with self-gratification (“reading”). The
fact that her friend, Frl. X., remained unmarried like herself reconciled
her to the situation. She found consolation in her homosexual attach­
ment.
Both the friends were being analyzed, and in each case the analysts
were married men. Both patients were too late with their demands. Ob­
viously, the dream signified something quite different from a prediction
of the future. But it acted as a suggestion. Its symbolic content with ref­
erence to the analyst was translated into action. In the transference the
analyst stood for the patient's brother. Upon her brother—an incestuous
object—she might not make libidinal claims; here again was a wish the
punishment for which was castration. This was represented in the pa­
tient's anticipation of having her leg taken off if she persisted in trying
to catch the tram.
The missing of the tram on the following day was suggested by the
interpretation of the dream exactly as the conquest of Tyre by Alexander
the Great was suggested by the interpretation of Artemidoros. In both
cases something which had been dreamed was afterward made to come
true; on each occasion it could have been left undone and, in the one
case as in the other, it was done because it corresponded to the wishes of
the dreamer. Alexander wished to take the city of Tyre and our analysand
wished to miss the tram. She had to wish it in order to escape from the
prospect of having her leg taken off. That is to say: she had to “miss her
connection” with the analyst (brother) if she did not wish to suffer cas­
tration (the punishment for incest).
Now if we take a survey of the material that I have put before you,
we see from the examples which we have been able to examine in detail
one prominent characteristic of “dreams which come true”: they are all
wish fulfillments.
All these prophetic dreams point not to the future but to the past.
Behind the manifest dream pictures there have emerged in every case
dream thoughts which represent the elaboration of wishes and fantasies
belonging to the history of the dreamer's childhood.
It cannot be disputed that there are dreams (probably occurring much
more frequently than is generally supposed) which in retrospect are held
to be “true" dreams because some subsequent incident accidentally re­
sembles or even coincides with the manifest dream content. Possibly the
dream of the fall from the Rottalsattel comes under this category. Cer­
tainly the schoolboy's dream of changing his place belongs here.
Other “veridical" dreams are obviously errors of memory (150). We
may take as an example of this the dream of the child at the breast, a
fantasy converted into a dream. Here we discover several such errors. Not
only had the fantasy been converted into an alleged dream, but also, in
its new guise, its date had been shifted to suit the unconscious wish. The
dreamer firmly believed that she had had this “dream" at the time when
she conceived her son—long before the analysis. And she was no less
firmly convinced that she had already told the dream to the analyst.
Incidentally this young woman's dream is an illustration of the rea­
son why “prophetic" dreams are dreamed. The dreamer's narcissism is at
work. If we explore what lies behind man's tendency to wish for the ex­
traordinary power of foreseeing the future, we come at bottom to the
wish to foreknow death (as Cassandra foreknew the fall of Troy) as well
as life. For such a power ensures for him once more something of that
omnipotence which is today still the attribute of a primitive despot and
the fantasy of little children and paranoiacs. Here “knowledge" is ver­
itably “power," and “power" signifies power of life and death.
In the case of this young woman the omnipotence of thought pre­
vented her period from setting in at the right time.
We were able to see clearly that the dream which actually did occur
in the final phase of her analysis was an expression of the repetition com­
pulsion. As an adult the patient was reacting to a given situation in ex­
actly the same way as she had once reacted as a child. In the transference
situation of her psychoanalytic treatment, when she reached the phase of
weaning, she behaved just as she had done in the corresponding phase of
her childhood, and what she projected into the future was her own per­
sonal history.
From the point of view of psychoanalytic technique this patient's
dream must be regarded as a sign of resistance to the treatment: the
“true" dream, whose meaning the dreamer professed to have seen long
before the analyst, was intended to forestall the analysis and render it
otiose. We have the same situation in the case of the schoolboy's dream.
The fatalistic view of life which underlies the belief in “veridical" dreams
makes analysis illusory and useless. In the previous example the dreamer
wished to deprive analysis of its value in order to avoid having to give
up the analyst. She was trying to evade the resolution of the transference
and the process of weaning from the treatment.
I conjecture that very many of the “true” dreams produced during
psychoanalytic treatment serve the purpose of resistance.
The example of the dream of the broken glass shows the breaking
through of an unconscious tendency behind which lurk criminal wishes.
We have seen how closely akin are dreams and faulty acts, and that, fig­
uratively speaking, the boundaries of the two realms touch or intersect,
and we have learned that, before the perpetration of criminal acts, faulty
acts very often occur as a break-through of unconscious impulses. A
question to be considered is whether dreams followed by a crime which
they have “predicted” should not be regarded as equivalent to symp­
tomatic faulty acts. We have not enough material to decide this point.
We can only conjecture that this is the case in the dream of the mountain
accident and that of the girl's separation from her fiance. We might sur­
mise that in both instances—behind the fall and the death from inflam­
mation of the lungs—there was present an unconscious suicidal intention
which the dreams betrayed. At any rate one cannot quite dismiss the sus­
picion in the case of the young girl who went to a meeting in spite of her
feverish symptoms, instead of taking care of herself. The criminal ten­
dency would appear in those suicidal intentions, and the dreams would
represent the breaking through of criminal unconscious impulses.
But we will not return to the uncertain ground of conjecture. Rather
let us turn to the example of the dream of missing the tram. It reveals
suggestion as the driving power in “prophetic” dreams. We have already
seen that this factor was at work in King Alexander’s “true” dream.
We have seen why it is that human beings wish to credit themselves
with the possession of a strange, mysterious power and a special sense
organ for the prediction of the future. In the so-called “true” dreams
we have found the following factors at work: chance, errors of memory,
the repetition compulsion, the breaking through of an unconscious ten­
dency and, finally, autosuggestion. When an ostensibly “true” dream is
produced, there is no doubt often an interplay of several of these mech­
anisms. In the examples of dreams which we have examined in detail we
have met with nothing that contradicts Freud’s findings as stated in his
Traumdeutung. We have not succeeded in discovering any “prospective
tendency” in dreams: they all faced backwards and preserved their char­
acter of a hallucinatory wish fulfillment. Even in the case of those pro­
phetic dreams which predict the death of persons closely associated with
the dreamer we may conjecture that unconscious death wishes are at their
root. We know that these wishes are the most deeply repressed of all.
In dreams which come true the procedure resembles that of the for­
tuneteller who reads her cards. She draws out her client without his no­
ticing it and afterwards startles him by telling him things which she has
been able to discover and which are “true." The dreamer of the “true"
dream is at one and the same time fortuneteller and client.
In order to investigate the content of ostensibly “true" dreams we
must have the dreamer's associations. We then find that there is as little
agreement between the manifest dream picture and the latent dream
thoughts as there is in ordinary dreams. In the examples I have given in
this paper I have not called special attention to the dream mechanisms:
displacement, condensation, secondary elaboration, etc. But as soon as we
examine them from these angles we perceive that herein also they do not
differ from ordinary dreams.
Hence we must acknowledge the justice of Freud’s prejudgment about
prophetic dreams; it is fully confirmed by our examples, and we ask
ourselves whether it is not something more than a “prejudgment."
 Chapter 16
A “PROPHETIC” DREAM*
By HANS ZULLIGER

An approximately sixty-year-old gentleman paid me a visit, in order

to submit to me a “prophetic" dream. The impetus for this visit was
provided by the fact that I had attended a small party, in the course of
which I had stated that I did not believe in dreams which purport to
predict the future, because that which we are unable to predict logically
in the waking state cannot come to us in dream, since dreams do not
provide us with new practical tricks.
This gentleman had been a merchant. He retired from business fairly
early, and now lives near one of our lakes, in the vicinity of the lake's
outlet. For many years past this man had been an enthusiastic fisherman,
and owned a boat.
He had had the following dream: “/ am rowing on the lake. At a very
definite spot, not far from the shore, I suddenly see a human figure, with
arms spread, lying half buried in sand. Before I became really scared, I
discovered that it was only a scarecrow, which someone must have thrown
in the water ”
The man then made the following remarks: “Nonetheless, the dream
made a certain impression on me. In the morning I related the dream to
my family, and for several days thereafter did not revisit that spot, al­
though I did not avoid it intentionally. Approximately a week later, after
I had already forgotten my dream, I once more rowed past that spot. On
the very spot which I had visited in dream, where the water is about one
and a half meters (5 feet) deep, I saw a drowned man, almost wholly
buried in mud, whose arms were extended upward. At that moment I
once more recalled my dream. The sight corresponded in full to my
dream, except that the object which was lying under water was not a
scarecrow, but a corpse. I promptly went to get help, and much cautious
effort had to be expended before the corpse could be recovered. Suddenly
the corpse—bloated with gases—rose to the surface. It was evident that
it must have been in the water for quite some time. The corpse could be
identified as that of a suicide, whose clothes and farewell letter had been
found, quite some time before, farther along the lake shore."
* Originally published in German in Psyche, 5:232-236, 1951. Translated by George
Devereux, and published here by permission of Mr. Hans Zulliger and of Privatdozent
Dr. Alexander Mitscherlich, editor of Psyche.
 “Thus, my dream had been a prophetic one!”
I told the gentleman that he had apparently visited me in order to
prove that I had been guilty of an error. He admitted that such, indeed,
had been his intention, and that he had preferred to do so privately,
rather than during the party. He was of the opinion that I, too, would
now be convinced of the fact that prophetic dreams do exist.
He was mistaken, however; I remained unconvinced. In order to
prove my suspicions, I engaged my guest in a conversation, in the course
of which he told me that he had once before helped to recover a corpse.
This corpse too had remained undiscovered for some time, and when he
had tried to grasp the corpse’s arm, he had almost torn it off. This had
greatly terrified him. When it was finally dragged ashore, the corpse stank
quite horribly. My visitor had been unable to get over this dreadful expe­
rience for quite some time, and, every time he went past that spot, shivers
had run along his spine.
While my guest was telling me this story, I made a small experiment.
I took out my pocket watch, detached it from its chain, played with it,
and then replaced it in my pocket. I took care to ascertain that his glance
had fallen on my hands—in other words, that he had seen what I had
been doing.
At the end of the conversation I asked my visitor whether he had
noticed what I had been doing during the conversation.
Somewhat surprised, he answered: “You gave me a cigar—and a
light.”
“Are you sure that I have not done also something else?”
“I can’t imagine what else you could have done. No I”
In other words, my visitor’s eyes had perceived something, although
he had not registered it. This gave support to my assumption that the
gentleman had seen the waterlogged corpse before he had ever dreamed
about it, although he had failed to register that he had actually per­
ceived it.
We must, therefore, assume that the real train of events was the
following:
One day this gentleman rows along the lake shore and sees a corpse.
However, for some unspecified reason, he does not register this sight.
In the course of the following night the dream gets hold of this expe­
rience, and repeats it in a manner similar to that in which—in accordance
with the repetition compulsion^the dreams of men who during the war
had been buried alive by the explosion of a shell again and again evoke
this previously experienced situation.
The purpose of these dreams is known. The unsolved “trauma” is
resubmitted to the dreamer, so as to enable him to work it through once
more, in order to master it.
Let us now return to the incident of the pocket watch. Why doesn’t
my guest recall that which, without doubt, he had actually seen? No
doubt because his animated conversation diverted his attention from it.
He had both seen and “not seen” it. How can we now explain that he
both saw and “didn't see” the corpse? What diverted his attention?
One must assume that this was due to an impulse rooted in the emo­
tions: The gentleman did not "wish” to see what he had seen. This, in
turn, must have been due to an (unconscious) recall of his earlier dread­
ful experience with the corpse found in the water. We are confronted
here with the simple process of ‘‘repression." The nonregistering seeks
to annul that which had been seen, so as to save this person from a sim­
ilar dreadful experience in order to spare him a new and similar fright.
However, since the corpse had been seen, the dream takes hold of
this theme. At the same time the dream also gives comfort to the dreamer:
Before he has time to be “really scared," he sees that it is nothing but a
scarecrow. In a sense, the dream seems to tell him: “You need not be
scared: this is not a corpse, it is only a straw puppet—go on sleeping
quietly!" After all, this is the real function of the dream: It aborts dis­
turbing stimuli, in order to safeguard the sleep. We do not dream when
we are in deep sleep. We dream when either an external organic, or else
an inner psychic stimulus has already almost awakened us. This is best
proven by awakening dreams and by dreams of danger: In so far as
possible, the dream seeks to render trivial any stimulus which might
disturb sleep. When this is impossible, the dreamer is awakened, so as to
enable him to dispose of the stimulus in reality. The dream of the person
in question managed to degrade the disturbing stimulus. It minimized
the dreadful experience of the previous day, which had not been abre-
acted by means of motility. Indeed, this dreadful experience was very
much present in his psyche, even though the gentleman was not con­
scious of this. The dream also minimized the unabreacted stirrings of his
conscience, which reminded him of the duty to recover the corpse which
he had discovered.
What did repression accomplish on the day the corpse was discovered?
We assume that it stood in the service of the psychic tendency to preserve
“equilibrium," and sought to prevent the occurrence of an experience
which would have elicited a maximum of unpleasure. Even his dream
sought to prevent such an occurrence, by changing the meaning of that
which had been seen. The dream assures the sleeper that only an old
scarecrow is lying in the water; therefore there is no need for him to get
excited about it.
Two circumstances prove, however, how greatly the gentleman was
actually upset: In the first place, at breakfast, he narrated this dream to
his family; in other words, he did not forget this dream almost immedi­
ately, the way one usually does; and the narrating of the dream itself
reflects the tendency to abreact tension. In the second place, he avoided
the spot, which he had seen with such naturalistic clarity in his dream,
for quite a while.
Why, then, did he again visit that spot a week later? Although we
are not certain of the answer, we can imagine the motives behind this
action. In the first place, this man's conscience had not been permanently
silenced; it demanded that he should convince himself that the corpse
was really no longer in that particular spot. In the second place, in the
meantime the corpse might either have drifted away, or else might have
been entirely covered by sand, so that one could no longer see it. Had
either of these alternatives occurred, the gentleman's wish not to see a
drowned man would have been gratified, as would have been also the
wish to possess a “good conscience," said wish having been evolved at
the demand of the superego. In this manner the conflict would have been
abolished also on the level of reality.
Thus, a week later the dreamer found enough courage to expose
himself to a very definite experience of terror, because he had uncon­
sciously “forced himself" to find the courage to do so.
Needless to say, I evolved these views long before I set them down in
writing. I did not communicate them, however, to my guest—nor did he
ask for my ideas on this subject, since he felt convinced that I too now
considered this dream as a prophetic one.
There was something else, however, that interested him. He aske^l me
why I had inquired whether he had noted what I had done during the
conversation. A sudden inspiration induced me to give him only half of
the true explanation of my question, and to withhold all information
about the kind of experiment to which I had subjected him. I declared
that I had merely been wondering whether he was an accurate observer,
and that I had wished to test the acuteness of his observation. This was
not a lie—even though I did not tell him the purpose of this experiment.
Fortunately he asked no further questions about this matter, perhaps
because I immediately diverted him from this topic by asking what his
family had said when he told them his dream that morning. He replied
that his wife had merely smiled, and had said, in a deprecating manner,
“Dreams are but foam."1 (In other words, his wife encouraged him to
“repress" this matter.)
I had no idea, at that time, that the little interlude of the pocket
watch would lead to a postlude, which would lend a great deal of plausi­
bility to my interpretation of this “prophetic dream."
Two days after this visit, this gentleman telephoned to tell me that,
as a result of my conversation, he had dreamed about me. The dream ran
as follows: He and I had been sitting together, and I had been looking
for something on the lower platform of the little round table which
stands in my room. He had assumed that I was searching for the box of
cigars, in order to offer him one. Instead, there appeared a pocket watch,
on a thin chain, which I then placed in my vest pocket.
I told him that this was precisely what had happened on the occasion
of his visit, and reminded him that I had asked him whether he had
noticed my actions during our conversation.
I also invited him to visit me again, in order to discuss once more his
“prophetic dream," adding that I wished to submit to him my ideas about
this dream. I also told him that, in my opinion, the second dream had
come into being in exactly the same manner as the first one.
Apparently the question of whether he had carefully observed every­
thing I had done during the conversation had irritated my visitor some­
what. That is why he wished to know my reasons for asking this question.
Since I had given him only half an answer, and had then diverted him
from this topic, his dream brought up this matter once more (149). Thus,
it was only in dream that he finally actually saw that which he had pre­
viously seen, but had failed to register.
l “Traume sind Schaume”—a popular poetic expression, which minimizes the sig­
nificance of dreams.
 Thus, the dream seems to utilize a sight which our eyes have per­
ceived, but have not registered. However, that which had not been regis­
tered had nonetheless been perceived, and had therefore been incorpor­
ate^ into the psyche. The dream utilizes this picture, which he did not
recall having actually seen. This fact tends to support my “interpretation"
of my visitor's “prophetic" dream.
I do not know whether or not I have been able to convince him of my
views. This, of course, is unimportant. The finding itself is, however,
important for the psychology of dreams: Under careful scrutiny a seem­
ingly “prophetic dream” reveals itself as a historical reminiscence, and
not as a dream which predicts the future.
The discoveries of Freud (66, VI, VII) and of others (4, XII, X, 115,
127, XV), about the apparent prophetic qualities of certain dreams, are
confirmed by the dream about the corpse in the water. Nonetheless, I
would not have published it, had the rather unusual and fortunate coin­
cidence of the second dream not provided us with a means of proving
that our subject does, indeed, see things, without registering them. We
readily concede that our little dream interpretation is marred by various
uncertainties, and by certain gaps in our method of adducing proof.
However, these defects will impress only those who know very little about
the language and the mechanisms of the unconscious. Those who have
insight into such matters will find my proof both credible and convincing,
precisely because of the subject's second dream. Indeed, it almost seems
as though, quite unintentionally or unconsciously, this man had tried to
prove to me that my interpretation of his dream was entirely correct.
 CHILD ANALYSIS AND THE MOTHER*
(AN EXCERPT)
By DOROTHY T. BURLIN GHAM

(E ditor 's N o te . "Child Analysis and the Mother” deals primarily

with the importance of maintaining the child's parents, and particularly
the mother, “in a favorable attitude toward the analysis,” because of the
especially intense and important relationship obtaining between the
child and the mother. The fragments reproduced below describe certain
striking parallelisms between the thought or behavior of the mother and
that of the child, which do not seem understandable in terms of familiar
forms of communication between mother and child.)
The power of unconscious forces is especially marked in the
interplay between parent and child. It is so subtle and uncanny that it
seems at times to approach the supernatural. The analyst knows this,
and knows that this quality is more marked in some people than in
others, and that if it is found in a child it must be taken into account as
an unknown quantity that will bring many uncertainties into the
analysis. . . .
(The author next discusses the earlier phases of a little girl's analysis.
Gerti is the neurotic five-year-old daughter of a very poor lower-class
couple. The mother is essentially moralistic, but has a lover, who finally
leaves her and goes to America. The father is brutal, shiftless and has a
mistress. The parents have had no sexual relations for some time past.
The complex family situation affects all the children, but especially Gerti.
After the lover's departure the father becomes more considerate and
makes sexual advances to his unwilling wife, who is worried over Gerti's
masturbation.)
In the meantime Gerti in her analysis was talking of babies, saying
that they come from the stomach, girls from the mother, boys from the
* Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 5:69-92, 1935. Published
here by permission of Dorothy T. Burlingham and the editors of The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly.
father. When boys are born they are immediately given to the mother to
nurse. She gives the babies milk from one breast, blood from the other.
(This was of interest because the mother had told me previously that
before her own marriage nothing had been explained to her and she had
imagined just what Gerti's analysis had brought out. Perhaps her mother
had told Gerti this, but it seemed scarcely possible.) During the same
period the mother told me that Gerti was lying; and Gerti herself told
me that she has so many sins, lying, stealing; and, I added, putting her
hands to her genitals. She talked more freely now of the children and
how they played with each other, and above all and with the greatest
pleasure of the boys' “tails." The next day the mother came to me in
great excitement. Gerti had talked of her hour at home; the children
were horrified and she is afraid that when Gerti begins to talk of such
things she will begin to do them. She is sure that I do not understand her
milieu and the temptations for the children. Through the windows of
the house across the way they can see all sorts of things going on. Her
husband, when he does not have enough money, urges her to go on the
street, to be a prostitute. I try to quiet her by telling her that the best
protection for the children lies not in ignorance but in knowing about
such things. . Throughout the whole next hour, Gerti asks how much
longer she can stay with me. Can she come tomorrow, the next day, this
spring, next year? I did not realize it would be her last hour; but the
next day a letter arrived from her mother saying that she would not send
Gerti any more since one could not have an analysis without being en­
lightened about masturbation and sex, and she did not wish that for her
children.
Between this part of Gerti's analysis and what was happening in the
mother's life there must have been a connection. The mother is having
difficulties, missing her sex life. Her husband suddenly behaves differ­
ently toward her and makes advances as if he instinctively felt her need.
What does Gerti do at this time? She dreams of intercourse. She talks
of babies and is interested above all in the penis. She feels that someone
is lying to her, not telling her the truth as it really is—surely her mother.
She is excited and shows signs of greater freedom at home. She is also on
the point of being very open in her analysis. How does the mother react?
With horror. Gerti should be given the freedom to do that which the
mother does not allow herself to do, to masturbate? Gerti should always
remind her mother of her own desires? She has always turned away with
disgust from such desires and such thoughts. We know how she kept the
children from masturbating. She has protected herself before from temp­
tation. She has to struggle against the desires caused through the loss of
her lover and those which her husband has stirred in her. But above all
she must protect herself from Gerti. She cannot stand Gerti's having
thoughts so like her own. If her daughter begins to have such thoughts,
even to speak openly of sex, how will she avoid the next step, actually
doing things? She must protect her as she has protected herself. She must
not for a moment forget the temptations of their lives, the difficulties due
to their milieu, and to her husband's urging her to go on the street.
Above all she must not forget the consequences of giving in to such temp­
tations, the dreadful illnesses. She must shut the door to these thoughts
completely. She knows of only one sure way, through ignorance and
through repression. . . .
I have given only a small part of Gerti's analysis, and have omitted
periods where only straight analytical material was to be seen. It was my
intention to describe only that part of the analysis in which the two
trends were to be seen side by side, i.e., the simple analytical situation
on the one hand, and on the other hand the more complicated situation,
which was the result of the mother's actual life with its conscious and
unconscious emotional reactions continually intruding into Gerti's
problem.
We must bear in mind that not all cases are like this one. There is
not always such a close contact between mother and child. There are
many such cases, however, and in all of them one is struck by the inter­
play of emotions between the two. One does not know the extent of this
influence on a child's life; but the following examples illustrate a phe­
nomenon which demands investigation.
(1) A mother had just had the idea of giving her child a bicycle for
Christmas. The child was in the room with her and called out, “I know
what you are going to give me for Christmas—a bicycle."
(2) The child guesses that her mother is pregnant before she is sure
of it herself, or that she is in love with someone before she is aware of
it herself. (Instances of this kind are not rare in analyses.)
(3) Here, however, is an example where the child is in no way emo­
tionally connected with the mother's thought and yet follows her thoughts
in his actions. A gold piece had played an important part in a scene in
the mother's childhood. This scene had just been brought out in her
analysis. After her hour she went home. She had been there only a few
minutes when her little boy brought her a gold piece to hold for him.
She asked him where he had gotten it, and he answered on his birthday
which had been several months ago. There seemed to be no reason why
he should have remembered it just then. A few weeks later, just as the
mother was writing down some notes about this scene of the gold piece,
the little boy came in to her and asked for his gold piece. He wanted to
show it to his analyst. Again there was no connection with this material
at this time in his own analysis.
(4) The most striking example that I know of a child being influenced
by his mother's thoughts is the following: The mother was in analysis
and in her hour she had a fantasy of throwing a jug of boiling water over
someone when in a rage. She had witnessed a similar scene in her child­
hood. An hour later she was sitting at the table with her children. The
younger child quarreled with his older sister. He suddenly left the table
and returned a few seconds later carrying a glass of steaming water. He
advanced on his sister crying: “You will see what I will do to you," and
he threatened her with the water. The action was entirely unusual and
unexpected from him. Where would such an occurrence fit in the child's
analysis? Had it really anything to do with the child? If not, what is this
strange form of communication?
(The article concludes with a series of cogent remarks about the man­
agement of the simultaneous transferences of both mother and child on
the analyst, and about the manner in which the co-operation of parents
may be obtained.)
 TELEPATHIC SENSITIVENESS AS A
NEUROTIC SYMPTOM*
By LEON J. SAUL, M.D.

An analysand interested in telepathy and laying claim to telepathic

powers, has recently given me an opportunity to observe the psychological
mechanisms upon which she bases her claim. These clinical observations
substantiate those of Helene Deutsch (XII), who has published three
instances of “telepathy" in her patients and has explained them on the
basis of unconscious perception heightened because of intensified iden­
tification. This identification may be partial, as the identity of strong
unconscious emotional trends in the observer, with the same trends, con­
scious or unconscious in the observed; or it may be more complete, as the
regressive identification of a girl with a lover who has rejected her. If the
identity of the inner and outer perception is not consciously realized, but
the inner perception is projected to the outer world, the experience
attains the character of the “occult" (XII). My analysand demonstrated
these mechanisms with such clarity as to warrant publication of the main
points of the material. Deutsch states that in her case she believes the
perception was truly extrasensory. It is my opinion, however, that whereas
an open mind must be kept about this possibility, the evidence for so
revolutionary an observation must be much more convincing and much
more widely checked than any so far presented.
Each individual uses his own sensory apparatus in his own special
way, and is more perceptive of some things and less of others, particularly
when the phenomena are subtle psychological ones. There is therefore a
risk of underestimating the acuity of perception of another person, espe­
cially when this acuity is sharpened by a neurotic or near-psychotic
tension. In such states persons can develop a heightened sensitivity in per­
* Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7:329-335, 1938. Published
here by permission of Dr. Leon J. Saul and of the editors of The Psychoanalytic Quar­
terly.
ceiving from the faintest clues, which one normally overlooks, emotional
states in others which correspond to urgent needs of their own. The
greatest caution must be exercised in reaching the negative conclusion
that this perception, which would be unusual for the average person, is
extrasensory. Some individuals in states of high emotional pitch become
so tuned to their objects, that even when the object is at a distance, they
can predict much about his or her psychological state, without benefit of
telepathy. It may be said at the outset that despite conscientious attention
I failed to be convinced of any true telepathic occurrences in the case
reported below. Holl6s (98), R6heim (XIII), and Burlingham (18) have
reported evidence in favor of telepathic perception. Schilder (XX) has
published a discussion of Holl6s’ paper. Freud’s (83, 84, VIII) attitude is
one of open-minded scientific interest.
The analysand was an attractive girl with a college education and a
well-to-do and cultured background which included practical people with
no turn for the occult. She came to analysis because of a series of depres­
sions, failure to make a sexual or marital adjustment, and feelings of
tension with fear of a mental breakdown connected with extrasensory
(she believed) hypersensitiveness to persons in her presence. Her mother
had died before the patient was two years old, leaving the patient with
intense longings for a mother which were in large part transferred to the
father whom the patient unconsciously reproached violently for neglect­
ing her. She had reacted to the childhood situation created by her
mother’s death with a high degree of narcissism and with excessive de­
mands on people, especially her father. Unconsciously she showed a strong
orally colored sexual attachment to the father, and chronic hostility
against him from jealousy. This hostility was near enough to the surface
to be set off by the slightest injury to her narcissism, thwarting of her
demands, or by jealousy. The ambivalence of this stormy relationship
with the father was partly conscious though mostly unconscious. Trans­
ferred to other men, it so disturbed her relationships to them that she
practically relinquished their society in favor of women, though under­
neath she longed for marriage. Thus the main mechanism was the one
described by Freud (82): She felt rejected by her father and reacted to
this unconsciously by hostility to him, identification with him, and turn­
ing from him, and from all men, to women. Her narcissism served as a
defense against feelings of inferiority and inadequacy which she felt to­
ward independent, effective, sexually adjusted people.
Her two chief methods of defense were projection and identification.
For example, failing to see her demands on the analyst, she dreamed of
him as a robber, and in reality she accused him of making demands upon
her. She denied her hostility to him but asserted that he and the analysis
were attacking her, making her life miserable. When the patient began
to develop a cold, she believed she detected signs of one in the analyst.
Outside of the analysis, this mechanism was equally clear. It was not so
much projection as hypersensitivity to that in others that she did not
wish to see in herself. A further simple example of how her mind worked
is afforded by a bit of the analysis. Once the analyst pointed out her
unwillingness to spend time away from the shelter of her home in a small
town in order to go to a metropolis. She denied her emotional motives
for clinging to her home and attributed her preference to superficial, ex­
ternal reasons but then immediately spoke most disparagingly of a boy
who was so pampered by his family, that he refused to leave his home in
a small town in order to attend a big university. The patient really had
an uncanny faculty for selecting persons appropriate to her needs as well
as just those weak spots in people which corresponded with her own,
which she could point out in others and not see in herself; moreover,
this overly keen intuition had a hostile coloring because of her uncon­
scious resentments, and did not fail to reach the weakest and tenderest
spots in those at whom she directed it. It served as an instrument of
aggression, although not all of Her telepathic experiences were of hostile
nature. In connection with repressed hostilities the well-known observa­
tion that most clairvoyant predictions of the future are of wars, floods,
earthquakes, and other dire and destructive events is of interest, and
certainly, as Freud has pointed out, such predictions tell a lot about the
unconscious wishes of the predictor.
Her other characteristic mechanism was identification. This appar­
ently had two major components. The one was the well-known mech­
anism of regressive identification with the love object, in this case
primarily the father. She expressed it very frankly by the formula, “If I
cannot have you, I want to be like you/’ One of her earliest transference
reactions was the wish to be an analyst. Her other mechanism of identi­
fication served as a defense against her masochism and dependence. She
fought off these tendencies and reacted by wishing to reverse the situa­
tion, to be in an independent position, to be a man, to be the analyst.
This is the mechanism of “identification with the aggressor" (65). For
example, the day after an interpretation made by the analyst she would
bring a dream in which she was the analyst and was treating a naughty
little boy. This strong tendency to identification further intensified the
hypersensitiveness from projection.
From this point on, the process was apparently a simple quantitative
one. From being sensitive to the emotional states of others, she became
hypersensitive. As her own emotional reactions to people became of neu­
rotic intensity, the hypersensitiveness increased to the point of disturbing
her social relationships. She could sense situations and psychological
states of others so unerringly that she began to believe that she possessed
telepathic powers. She was not overcritical of this conclusion since it
afforded her a great narcissistic satisfaction and since it was becoming a
major defense measure. As the need for it increased, she became more
and more convinced of the validity of telepathic phenomena although
she never gave the subject any systematic or objective study. She soon
extended this belief until she began to be convinced that she was truly
telepathic, that she was capable of extrasensory perceptions which took
place regardless of distance. She always denied that the mind reading,
even with the persons present, had any basis in sensory perception, that
is, that she got any clues whatever from the manner or appearance of the
persons concerned, but insisted upon its extrasensory nature. (The author
considers this an underestimation of the keenness of sensory perception
when it is heightened by emotional needs.)
She came to the analysis with the fear of a mental breakdown, con­
nected, she complained, with the strain of her compulsive hypersensitive
“extrasensory" perception of the thoughts of people she met. Thus, far
from enjoying her supposed powers, she wished to be cured of them since
she felt that they threatened her sanity, and that they were themselves
symptoms of her tense and anxious mental condition. She never relin­
quished her sense of reality, but admitted, although most reluctantly,
that the telepathic phenomena might possibly be explicable on other
grounds. As her emotional condition improved, her convictions regarding
both telepathy and her own telepathic sensitivity, waned markedly—a
fact of considerable significance. The relationship of this symptom to
similar symptoms in the psychoses is merely mentioned here.
Two simple examples will illustrate the type of telepathic experience
reported by this patient. She developed a very strong attachment to an
eligible man, and then learned of his engagement to another girl. She had
been quite unconscious of the intensity of her wishes for the man and
consciously denied more than superficial feelings of disappointment.
From the analysis, however, it was obvious that he had unwittingly
aroused intense expectations in her, and that she was repressing severe
disappointment and feelings of marked depression. At this point she met
some people socially. One of them was a man. The patient instantly
sensed that under this man's smooth exterior he was hiding a severe
depression from thwarted expectations in love. She denied that her
knowledge was due to a perception of anything in the man's expression
or manner but attributed it entirely to her telepathic sensitiveness. She
was thus hypersensitive to that in the other person which she repressed
in herself, or else she simply attributed it to him.
An example of telepathic perception at a distance is afforded by a
dream. The patient had had a slight difference with a friend, a girl, and
had written her a letter which she hoped would smooth out the relation­
ship. The night the letter was due to reach the girl, the patient dreamed
that the girl entered the patient's room and embraced her. The dream
clearly expressed the patient's wish for the affection of the friend, and
had a similar transference meaning. But the patient denied this, saying
that the dream was a telepathic perception of the affectionate response of
the friend to her letter. She thus used telepathy as a defense by claiming
that what she saw was something not in herself but in another person,
in her friend. The patient claimed that dreams of this type came to her
frequently, and when checked proved to correspond with the actual
reactions of the other person at the time. But she never demonstrated this
during the analysis.
D iscussion
The observations herein presented obviously relate only to the uncon­
scious psychological elements of the patient's hypersensitivity and of her
belief in her telepathic powers. At no time, was I able to observe any
convincing example of her powers. The possibility that such exist in
her is not precluded, only none of her material made possible an ade­
quate examination of the objective validity of such phenomena.
The prominence of this girl’s narcissism and of her marked ambiva­
lence to her father makes a striking parallel with the psychic life of
primitive man as described by Freud (75). It should not prejudice one
for or against the existence of telepathy but should make one cautious,
to note that these occult phenomena so closely related to narcissism and
omnipotence of thought, are most marked among the primitive and back­
ward races who discover in the outer world their own projections (XII);
moreover our own unconscious wishes to believe them must make us
doubly cautious in evaluating claims. On the other hand, one possibility
among others is that perceptions once operative, have been lost or over­
laid due to domestication and the development of the intellect (3) along
with other animal powers such as the sense of smell (VIII).
S u m m ar y
The telepathic powers claimed by an analysand were seen in analysis
to be based upon an extension, in the interests of narcissism and ego
defense, of a hypersensitiveness to the emotional states of others. This
hypersensitiveness was due to a tendency to projection and identification,
and was complained of by the patient as a neurotic symptom. The exist­
ence of true telepathic powers was not convincingly demonstrated by the
material.
 Part IV
The Hollos-Schilder-Servadio
Controversy
•a
 A SUMMARY OF ISTVAN HOLLOS’ THEORIES*
By GEORGE DEVEREUX, Ph.D.

S u bjective D ifficulties in R esearch

The study of the problem of telepathy automatically stimulates and
gratifies archaic wishes rooted in infantile omnipotence fantasies. Careless
investigators simply yield to these wishes and fantasies. Others seek to
protect themselves against such impulses by means of elaborate precau­
tions, borrowed from the armamentarium of experimental science, which
are useless, since the wish slips past such precautions unobserved.1 Still
others profess to have no interest whatsoever in such problems, because
they are afraid of being overwhelmed by their incompletely sublimated
infantile and archaic wishes. They cling to their skepticism because they
have no real faith in science and in scientific thinking. The correct way of
dealing with the archaic wishes which are unavoidably stimulated by the
study of telepathy is to control these wishes within oneself, by means of
constant self-analysis.
T h e D a t a ,a nd T h eir C haracteristics
Period of Observation: 20 years.
Documentation: The systematic taking of notes over a period of 10-12
years.
* Editor's Note. Due to circumstances beyond our control it was impossible to obtain
permission to translate and publish Dr. Istvdn Holl6s’ article “Psychopathologie all-
taglicher telepathischer Erscheinungen" (98), which both the advocates and the
opponents of the telepathy hypothesis recognize as one of the principal analytic con­
tributions to this much-vexed problem. Since Hollds’ paper is constantly referred to
in this anthology, and since, furthermore, it serves as a point of departure for Schil-
der’s paper (XX) and also, in a sense, for Servadio’s essay (XXI) , an attempt had to
be made to summarize Holl6s’ views and findings. It is always difficult to condense and
rearrange the ideas of a fertile mind. It is hoped that the following summary does not
distort too grossly the views of this eminent analyst.
l Freud also found the elaborate precautions of psychic research workers somewhat
repulsive (85).
 Number of Cases: Over 500. Other analysts also reported similar occur­
rences to Dr. Hollos.
Frequency of Cases: Telepathic incidents became especially numerous
during a difficult period in the analyst's life.
Elimination of Chance: Since telepathic phenomena occur in con­
formity with certain laws, and under conditions susceptible of being
specified, the possibility that they may be due to chance is automatically
eliminated.
Critical Characteristics: Telepathic phenomena occur spontaneously
and cannot be conveniently elicited in an experimental setting. An inci­
dent may be deemed to be telepathic only if one can exclude the possi­
bility that the communication may have been transmitted to the ordinary
senses, and if the “reception" does not occur at the end of a conversation
which may stimulate identical associations. Good examples of telepathy
are instances in which the analyst brings an idea of his own into the ana­
lytic hour, which the patient then expresses in his very first utterance.
Time Factor: As a rule, only a few seconds elapse between the sender's
thought and the receiver's utterance.
Direction of the Process: Usually it is the analyst whose thoughts are
transmitted to the patient, although in some instances it is the analyst
who receives the repressed thought of the patient.
Plural Reception: Sometimes more than one patient receives the an­
alyst's thoughts. The reception occurs either in dream or in a waking
state, and produces parallelisms which cannot be explained in terms of a
common non telepathic external stimulus.
Dynamic Characteristics: The “message" is connected with a wish
which is not yet in a state of repression, but is in the process of being
repressed. A tendency to repress such wishes is always present, and per­
vades the entire psychic apparatus, from the ego, via the preconscious,
to the unconscious. The analyst's thought is, as a rule, strongly cathected
and usually represents a deviation from the analytic task at the expense
of the patient. The analyst is therefore torn between duty and wish; he
wants to conceal his thought from the patient and also wishes to expel
it from his conscious.
The Influence of the Libido: Only libidinally cathected ideas can be
involved in telepathic incidents, whose occurrence therefore presupposes
the existence of transference. The occurrence of such incidents in ordi­
nary medical practice, and also in connection with perfect strangers, sug­
gests that the libido's sphere of action is greater than that of the sense
organs.
Affect: In some instances there is a mobilization of affect, which may
even reach down into the unconscious, and which one seeks to repress or
to re-repress. Such an affective state is frequently a condition of the occur­
rence of telepathic events.
T h e T e l e p a t h ic P rocess
Neurological Hypothesis: In 1915 the author discussed with Ferenczi
the problem of the crossing of nerve bundles. In co-operation with a
physicist, the author formulated the hypothesis that the purpose of the
crossing, respectively of the axial torsion, of the nerve bundles is to
abolish disturbing induction currents and that these crossings or torsions
are located only in places where the nerve bundles do not conduct com­
patible stimuli. A discussion about the problem of nerve induction led
Ferenczi to the topic of telepathy, which he defined as an induction
process taking place between the unconscious spheres of two persons.
Some years later Hollos advanced the hypothesis that there is a genuine
logical nexus between the explanation of the crossing of nerve bundles
by means of “neuromotor induction” and the induction process of the
unconscious. In other words, this theory implies that if an intraindividual
nerve induction exists, then an interindividual one may also exist. This
induced remote effect of nerve stimulation within the nervous system of
one organism may provide an explanation of telepathic effects involving
the nervous systems of two or more persons.
The Message: The material communicated telepathically is usually
a private thought of the analyst. The analyst's free associations some­
times deviate from the topic which the patient happens to discuss at that
time. Such deviations are partly unavoidable, and partly a consequence of
the analyst’s free-floating attentiveness. The analyst’s free associations
need not disturb the analysis. In fact, they often facilitate analytic work.
Nonetheless, the analyst’s free associations can become too self-centered.
The patient seems to sense this, which may explain why his telepathic
productions sometimes seem reproachful. An unnamed analyst even told
Holl6s that the patient’s telepathic productions are, generally speaking,
always reproachful, because the unconscious of the patient is asking the
analyst to pay more attention to him. Hollos points out, however, that
this impression may be due to the analyst’s own feelings of guilt. Be that
as it may, both Holl6s’ cases and his own comments reveal that the
“message” emanating from the analyst is usually an ego-dystonic and
unpleasant idea of a personal nature, which has little to do with what
the patient is saying at that time. In this sense, the idea contained in the
“message” reveals that the analyst had deviated from a strict adherence
to his analytic duties and even to analytic technique.
Relationships Between the Thought of the Sender and That of the
Receiver: The patient's thoughts do not elaborate the analyst's thoughts,
but are related to them somewhat in the manner of free associations; for
example, the way the manifest dream content is related to the latent
dream thought, or the way neurotic symptoms are related to the real
wish. The primary process reigns supreme. This is a uniformity (Gesetz-
massigkeit) which finds expression in the process itself. The occurrence of
telepathic incidents is contingent primarily upon the presence of re­
pression. Elements split off from the conscious are subjected to the pri­
mary process. When, as in the return of the repressed, these elements
reappear, they reveal the general characteristics of the primary process.
In other words, the patient reproduces the analyst's ideas in a distorted
form. This uniformity (Gesetzmassigkeit) is of special interest to the
analyst. There seems to be an analogy between slips of the tongue and
telepathic phenomena. At the same time, there is also an important dif­
ference. In telepathy the “slip of the tongue" which reveals the uncon­
scious thought is not made by the person who repressed that thought in
the first place, but by someone else. In a way, the patient seems to “make
the analyst's slip of the tongue."
Numbers are reproduced in the form in which day-residue numbers
appear in dream. They are reproduced correctly, but in a different con­
text. The relationship between the numbers is usually reproduced in an
unmistakable form.
T h e E xperiencing of a T elepath ic O ccurrence
Subjective Reaction to Particular Incidents: Telepathic incidents
invariably occur in a startling and unexpected manner. One reacts to
them as one reacts to parapraxes: One feels surprised and unmasked, and
experiences the homely and yet uncanny proximity of the unconscious.
Laughter, which represents the release of the dammed-up energies of the
“ambushed" ego, also occurs quite frequently. Though baffling, such oc­
currences do not gratify one's wish for a miracle. Reports of one's tele­
pathic experiences seldom seem to convince one's listeners, who usually
feel impelled to try to cap such stories with experiences of their own.
This observation reveals the importance of the narcissistic element in the
desire to experience miraculous occurrences.
The Failure to Experience Telepathic Occurrences serves to reassure
the analyst that all is well with him, since such incidents take place pri­
marily during crises in the analyst's life.
Practical Consequences: The analyst may have to take into account
the possibility that his unvoiced thoughts are transmitted to the patient.
In other words, he must give due consideration to factors which manifest
themselves in an unpredictable manner and independently of his knowl­
edge and intentions. The technique of analysis seems to have been influ­
enced by a dim awareness of this unconscious relationship between analyst
and patient. Thus, the analyst can use his own associations in interpret­
ing the dreams of others, because all men have similar mechanisms of
repression, defense and symbol formation. His associations will be ap­
propriate if he himself is free from the complexes which trouble the
patient, and is therefore able to associate freely. When the analyst and
the patient have the same unresolved complexes, the analyst will be on
the defensive whenever the patient brings up material of this kind. Only
when the analyst does not have the same unresolved complexes as the
patient is he sensitive to the patient’s repressed material. It is precisely
the patient's repression, conjoined with the analyst's freely receptive un­
conscious, which creates a condition suitable for communication between
the analyst's and the patient's unconscious spheres. Sometimes, after
countless, well-understood, but ineffective interpretations, a single word
uttered by the analyst may finally bring about a true and effective con­
viction. This word may be a condensation, and may therefore pertain to
all areas of the patient's problem. It may even be the most deeply re­
pressed word which, due to the favorable analytic situation, was some­
how “transmitted" to the analyst.
Conclusion: Holl6s recommends that telepathy be investigated fur­
ther, even though such studies are beset by many difficulties. He stresses
once more that a “lofty" skepticism sometimes seeks only to mask an in­
completely resolved credulousness.
 PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY
TELEPATHIC PHENOMENA*
Remarks Concering I. Hollos' Article (98, XIX)
By PAUL SCHILDER, M.D.

Freud's chapter on “Dreams and the Occult" (VIII) has revived in­
terest in problems of the occult in analytic circles. Although Freud does
not state specifically that telepathy (i.e., the transmission of thoughts
without the mediation of the sense organs) really exists, his whole atti­
tude leaves no doubt that he does believe in telepathy, and that only sci­
entific caution impels him to wait until the evidence regarding this mat­
ter is complete. I. Holl6s, however, has gone beyond such doubts. He
considers the existence of telepathic phenomena as proven. In fact, he
feels that telepathic phenomena are quite common occurrences. Hence
it does not seem to surprise him that in the space of some ten or twelve
years he was able to collect more than five hundred instances in which
the thought of the analyst and that of the analysand were telepathically
linked with each other. In fact, he is of the opinion that such phenomena
can be of the greatest importance in the course of daily analytic work.
One could, to begin with, inquire why the analyst, as analyst, should
be especially interested in occult phenomena.
For example, it might be legitimate to assume that the existence of
telepathy simply raises a problem regarding the reality or nonreality of
certain facts, and that the discovery and exploration of these facts could
be accomplished without the help of psychoanalysis. In the same sense,
the question of whether, e.g., wireless telegraphy is possible also lies
outside the field of analytic competence. It is a fact that, quite inde­
pendently of analysis, many students of the occult have come to the con­
* Originally published in German in Imago, 20:219-224, 1934. Translated by George
Devereux and published here by permission of Dr. Lauretta Bender, and of Drs. Ernst
Kris and Robert Waelder, the last editors of Imago.
elusion that telepathy does exist, i.e., that experience A, in individual X.,
elicits an analogous experience A 1 in individual Y. However, already at
this point we observe certain divergencies. Ax is not always entirely iden­
tical with A. A beloved person, Y., dies, and individual X. “sees” the death
of Y. At this point one can think of all kinds of variations. Thus, X.'s
watch may have stopped at the exact moment of Y.'s death, and X. may
have had the idea that the stopping of the watch signified the death of Y.
The greater the difference between A and Alf the more difficult it is to de­
termine the telepathic fact objectively. One could attempt to create such
situations experimentally. Thus, X. could decide to experience A so in}
tensely that Y. is contaminated thereby, and therefore experiences Ax. My
experiments with noted “telepathists" have never yielded such results.
Consequently my attitude toward the assumption that such telepathic
phenomena exist is a negative one, even though my experience with such
matters is, admittedly, a limited, and therefore inconclusive one. But, re­
gardless of what the ultimate decision may be, investigations of this type
are not psychoanalytic ones. From the analytic point of view it does not
matter whether the individual experiences that which he does experi­
ence telepathically or nontelepathically. Even from the point of view of
analytic technique, it would not make a great deal of difference if the
analysand transferred his conscious thoughts to the analyst telepathically.
In many ways it would be far more awkward if the conscious thoughts of
the analyst became conscious also to the patient. Daily experience mili­
tates decisively against such a transmission of thought. The analysand
betrays no knowledge of the analyst's conscious thoughts. However, Hol­
los shows very little interest in such conscious thought transmission. He
finds that the patient’s associations do not develop his own thoughts in a
logical matter, but are related to them only in the manner of free associa­
tions—somewhat as the latent content of the dream is related to the man­
ifest content thereof. “The primary process reigns supreme." Indeed, al­
most all of Holl6s’ examples suggest only a “symbolic" relationship be­
tween A and Ax. Only numbers seem to form an exception to the rule;
they appear unchanged, although in a different context. Freud, too, em­
phasizes primarily such “symbolic" connections, which obey the laws of
the unconscious. If, however, A ± is only the symbolic equivalent of A,
then a knowledge of the analytic theory of symbols would indeed be an
important, and even an indispensable, adjunct in the investigation of
telepathic phenomena. If such a telepathic transmission is possible, and
if it is not an all-too-rare occurrence, then the implications of telepathy
would open well-nigh limitless vistas for analytic theory and practice.
Holl6s does, in fact, stress these fortunate possibilities, and asserts that
telepathic thought transmission helps the analyst to understand the un­
 conscious psychic life of the patient. However, in the case of a sufficiently
well-established thought transmission, the analysand would, in turn, re­
ceive telepathic information regarding the opinions and “prejudices"
of the analyst, and would reproduce them in a symbolic language. In
that case the analyst would run the risk of hearing from his patient ev­
erything which he, himself, transmitted telepathically to the analysand,
arid, what is more, he would hear it expressed in a language with which
he is especially familiar, and which is especially important to him: i.e., in
the language of the unconscious.
£ It is therefore a question of tremendous urgency whether or not the
phenomena described by Holl6s can really be viewed as telepathic. For
quite some time now the problem of symbolic-telepathic transmission has
been of special interest to me. When I experimented with Hanussen,
who during the post-World-War-I period enjoyed the reputation of be­
ing a great telepathist, and, in the course of these experiments, visualized
a round table, Hanussen drew a circle from which radiated several lines
—five, to be exact. This drawing suggested to me the idea of symbolic
transmission. This occurrence remained, however, an isolated one. When­
ever one chose as A a sufficiently specific mental image, the telepathic
results were almost humiliatingly negative. For a long time past, I have
taken an interest in coincidences, and will now proceed to cite some of
them.
Two members of a certain psychoanalytic society resembled each
other to some extent. The career of one of these, whom we shall call M.,
was a successful one, while the other, named N., disappeared from my
ken. One day I accidentally meet M., the successful one, and I think of
N., his near-double, whose name I do not manage to recall, although I
am trying hard to remember it. The next day I receive from a distant
country a letter written by an attorney, whose name is likewise N. This
name already appears on the envelope. Now, it so happens that, at least
among my acquaintances, the name N. is a rare one. Aside from N. him­
self, I know only one other person of that name. This latter, I might
mention in passing, had a tragic end. The lawyer's letter informs me that
a certain woman patient, whom I treated unsuccessfully for a long time,
had died more than a year ago, and had bequeathed a small sum of money
to me. I cannot seem to recall having thought of this patient since I lost
sight of her. I am deliberately reporting this story in great detail. The
analytic significance of my having forgotten the name is a transparent
one. I am apparently denying my hostility toward M., which my uncon­
scious imputes to me, and which expresses itself in my comparing him
to N. It is, however, difficult to establish a relationship between M., N.,
and my female patient. The latter was a real problem, and had made
other doctors quite impatient. Finally she took refuge in her bed for
several years, and no psychotherapy could lure her out of it again. One
must assume that she finally succeeded in killing herself in this manner,
since her neurosis forbade her to obtain adequate treatment for her
tuberculosis of the bones. When I recognized the futility of more ener­
getic forms of psychotherapy, I confined myself to the role of a consoler,
for which the patient was very grateful to me. It is possible that I had
patted myself on the back for my “goodness," which was attested also by
the patient. The fact that I compared M. to N. may have raised legit­
imate doubts about my goodness. However, the letter had been mailed
ten days before I met M. I did not know the lawyer named N. He lived
in a city which I had never visited. Why did his name become effective
precisely on this day? True, I did meet M. I do not always think of N.
when I happen to meet M. Did the telepathic influence of the writer of
this letter happen to manifest itself precisely at this point? This I un­
hesitatingly deny. This was a coincidence, and not telepathy. In my
opinion this also explains why—as Holl6s already pointed out—such in­
cidents do not make a great impression upon those who are not person­
ally involved in them. One is left with the feeling of having been ‘‘found
out." It is true, of course, as Holl6s himself stresses, that every coincidence
flatters one’s narcissism; it makes one’s own life seem more meaningful
than it probably is in reality; but narcissism is not the only reason why
others show so little interest in our own private coincidences.
In another incident the “amazing coincidence" aspect of the situa­
tion is even clearer. I must write a letter to the editor of a series of books
on economics, concerning a matter which is of considerable importance
to me. I completed parts of this letter already on Monday, but, because
of certain technical difficulties, I could not mail it. This matter preoc­
cupies me a great deal. That afternoon I hypnotize a female patient, who
had been brought to the hospital suffering from amnesia. (At present I
do a considerable amount of hypnosis.) Naturally, it is of special im­
portance to learn the patient’s address. To my great surprise, the patient
recalls under hypnosis that she lives in a street whose name is the same
as that of the editor in question. Although I am told that the name of
the editor is not a very unusual one, I do not recall ever having heard
this name in another context. The very existence of this street was un­
known to me—and, in fact, could not have been known to me, because it
is an insignificant street, in a suburb of which I have never even heard
before. It is impossible to assume that the patient became amnesic be­
cause she lived in that street. Her preconscious thinking of that street
could, conceivably, have induced me to hypnotize her, although such an
assumption is a far-fetched one. The identity of the names is, however,
simply a coincidence. It is my interest in the matter which makes this co­
incidence significant. Next morning I mailed the letter.
The next incident is a striking one. The problems and attitudes of
the analyst play no role in this instance. The incident involves a coin­
cidence in the analyses of two analysands, named R. and S. respectively.
Both have been analyzed for approximately one hundred hours, although
they had not started analysis at the same time. S. does not want it to be
known that he is in analysis. I must therefore take precautions that he
should not bump into other analysands, such as R., whom he may con­
ceivably know. On a certain Sunday I must arrange my schedule so that
S/s hour follows that of R. I therefore warn S. to be a little late. S. is
greatly preoccupied with thoughts concerning the identity of the person
whom he is not supposed to meet. R., in whose analysis matters pertain­
ing to castration come more and more to the fore, brings that day a long-
ish dream, the first part of which concerns a horse with short hind legs.
Finally he wishes to enter a house, but his key does not fit; he feels con­
fused. Someone follows him. He becomes blind and tries to run away.
Then he knocks loudly on the door.
His associations reveal a great curiosity about the excretory and sexual
functions of animals. He believes that animals cohabit per anum. At
present his eyes are giving him trouble; he thinks he will have to have
new glasses; he is shortsighted. One of Kipling's books comes to his mind.
S. arrives for the next hour. The previous day he went to the oculist.
Homatropin having been instilled into his eyes, he could barely see the
rest of the day. This is the first time in nine years that he had had his
eyes examined. An intruding fantasy forces him to wonder whether he
would prefer to be blind or deaf; and what would happen were he unable
to walk. His wishes are centered on the task of object relations—especially
sexual ones—and also concern regression to pregenital and narcissistic
stages.
Neither of the two analysands had previously spoken of going blind.
Never before had their hours been consecutive ones. Furthermore, never
again in the course of the next 180 hours of analysis did blindness play
a role in their productions. Naturally, I asked myself to what extent my
own unconscious tendencies could have influenced the analysands. In so
far as an answer to this question is at all possible, the answer must be a
negative one.
Is it possible that S. had sent a telepathic message to R., whom he
may not have even known, and whom he could certainly not have sus­
pected of being in analysis? Both analysands' “eye" experiences occurred
before they had come to their respective analytic hours. R. did not know
that he was not supposed to “see" the analysand whose hour succeeded
his own. If the existence of a connection is, nonetheless, assumed, then
the path of the telepathic communication is very hard to understand.
The two experiences do not coincide in time. In the case of S. the ex­
perience occurred in the afternoon and evening; in the case of R. at
night, in a dream. In S.'s case it is a transitory idea; in R.'s case a full­
blown perception. One notes how many divergencies occur even in an
example which, like the present one, seemed conclusive at first. A and Ax
do not stand in an unequivocal temporal relationship to each other, and
are not entirely identical; quite apart from the fact that, despite external
similarities, A and A 1 had different analytic meanings.
If one examines Freud's and Holl6s' examples, one is struck by the
divergencies. Three consecutive patients report that they are afraid of
going insane. The name Forsyth resembles the word “foresight"—i.e.,
caution (Vorsicht) (VIII). In this instance A and A* are related to each
other in the same complicated manner in which manifest dream thoughts
are related to latent ones. This point Holl6s formulated very clearly.
He also collected many such examples. A female patient speaks of hussar-
roast, while Holl6s himself thinks of the number 20 which, in Hungarian,
is called kusz.1 (Hollos usually gives only very vague indications as to the
length of time which elapsed between his own thought and the remark
of his patient.)
If, however, one considers as a fact the existence of the nexus be­
tween A and Ai, whenever a symbolic connection, however remote, hap­
pens to exist between the two, then one opens all doors to complete ar­
bitrariness. My studies of the development of thought have indicated
that, by means of schematic diagrams, thought progresses rapidly from
the general to the concrete, and traverses large areas of possible thoughts.
By using this path—the path through the “sphere"—alternative thought
possibilities are rapidly exhausted. It is true, of course, that there exist
typical symbols, which are well known to all analysts. Expressed in other
words, the language of the system Unconscious shows deep-going con­
gruencies in all human beings. The objects which have significance for
the system Unconscious are, of necessity, a priori limited in number. But,
as already Marbe (133, 134) has shown, within a given culture area the
possibilities of independent thought are, likewise, very limited. Human
beings have very little originality. Usually analysts and analysands both
belong to the same culture area and to similar social strata. Thus, even
though the analyst may speak very sparingly indeed, he has, nonetheless,
characteristic manners of expression and of thought, which are perceived
by the analysands; for the most part through identification in the system
Unconscious. If all of these possibilities are taken into consideration,
then the examples of Freud, as well as those of Holl6s, can be explained
without the hypothesis that thought can be transmitted otherwise than
through the senses. In brief, no real proof of the existence of telepathic
phenomena has been adduced. It is possible that psychoanalysis may be
of help in finding such a proof. It seems probable even to me that, if
telepathic transmission does indeed exist, it would utilize the mechanisms
of the unconscious, rather than those of the preconscious or of the con­
scious. But, for the time being, all this is nothing more than a play with
ideas. One can, of course, be of the opinion that each game is but a
preparation for the “real thing," and that psychoanalysis should be in­
tellectually prepared to fit telepathic phenomena in its framework,
should the existence of such phenomena be really proven some day. One
can, however, also be of the opinion that it is altogether premature to
“think through" theoretical possibilities before the relevant facts have
been fully established.
l Editor’s Note. Holl6s points out that, in Hungarian, Huszdr (hussar) means liter­
ally: "value of twenty” or “price of twenty” (98) .
 By EMILIO SERVADIO, M.D.1

Although Freud devoted a whole chapter of his New Introductory

Lectures on Psychoanalysis (VIII) to our topic, the scientific legitimacy
of this subject is still doubted even by psychoanalysts who are close to
Freud. I wish to stress that, in my opinion, those who continue to doubt
the existence of telepathic phenomena betray thereby either their ig­
norance of matters pertaining to this problem, or else their prejudices.
People behave toward telepathy in a manner reminiscent of Andersen's
famous tale about the Emperor who wore clothes invisible only to the
stupid. No one wants to be the first to describe what he has seen. Every­
one is afraid of seeming stupid. I think that many people are convinced
of the existence of telepathic phenomena and may even possess proofs of
their existence. Yet the fear that one may be accused of being fixated
upon an infantile mode of thought—i.e., of being inclined to view the
world as magically animated—deprives almost everyone of the desire to
express convictions of this kind. Those who have kept themselves aloof
of such matters can enlighten themselves by reading the copious litera­
ture devoted to this topic. In this connection I wish to mention especially
W. F. Prince's “The Sinclair Experiments Demonstrating Telepathy"
* From a lecture delivered before the XIII International Psychoanalytic Congress
at Lucerne, August 30, 1934. Originally published in German in Imago, 21:489-497,
1935. Translated by George Devereux and published here by permission of Dr. Emilio
Servadio and of Drs. Ernst Kris and Robert Waelder, the last editors of Imago.
l Author’s note, 1951: This paper has mainly a historical interest. It was one of the
very first psychoanalytic contributions on the subject of telepathy after the appearance
of Professor Freud's stimulating 2nd chapter of the New Introductory Lectures on Psy­
choanalysis (VIII). As such, it is nowadays largely quoted by a growing number of
analysts who have shown interest in parapsychological phenomena. The author wishes
to state that, as a consequence of his own work and of the progress of research from
1934 onward, his views on telepathy and extrasensory perception have considerably
changed and developed in several respects. His present-day outlook has been sum­
marized in a recent paper (176) which, we hope, will soon appear in an English trans­
lation.
(151), which contains a most careful account of the principal experiments,
as well as a bibliography.
In the following pages I propose to discuss telepathic occurrences dur­
ing analysis, so-called “telepathic dreams/* and also cases of telepathic
transmission occurring in the waking state, with special reference to so-
called “telepathic hallucinations/’
I
Several analysts have published papers about telepathic occurrences
during analysis.
Helene Deutsch (XII) is, in principle, disposed to accept the possibil­
ity of telepathy. As regards the problem of telepathy in the course of
analysis, she differentiates telepathic phenomena from occurrences which
are rooted in the analytic situation itself. As Freud already warned us,
the analyst should “bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ to­
ward the emerging unconscious of the patient; be as the receiver of the
telephone to the disc” (74). In the opinion of Helene Deutsch, such situa­
tions often establish a psychic contact which is “outside the conscious
apparatus/1 In such cases we are not dealing, however, with telepathy,
but with a kind of “intuitive empathy," which is only imperfectly an­
alogous with telepathic phenomena. Be that as it may, both this kind of
intuitive empathy and true telepathic occurrences during analysis are
connected with the patient's transference behavior on the one hand, and,
on the other hand, with the partial identification (countertransference)
of the analyst. The three examples cited by Helene Deutsch substantiate
this point of view. In the first two cases the patient managed to get hold
of the analyst’s preconscious thought content, which was then cathected
with psychic energy derived from the patient’s own complexes. In the
third case a telepathic relationship came into being between a woman
patient and a third person, although, in this instance too, analysis may
have exerted a certain influence upon this relationship. In all three cases
the analysand identified the person with whom he stood in a telepathic
relationship with another person who was close to him, i.e., in two cases
the patient identified the analyst with the mother, while in the third case
a certain man was identified with the patient’s brother.
The distinction proposed by Helene Deutsch, while theoretically ac­
ceptable, creates certain difficulties of a practical order. The criteria
which enable one to make such a distinction can be found only in certain
details of the occurrence. The smaller and more general these criteria
are, the more probable is it that one is presumably dealing with “intui­
tive empathy," of a kind familiar to every analyst. Conversely, the greater
and the more specific they are, the more probable it is that one is con­
fronted with telepathy proper. If, however, one accepts a broader defini­
tion of telepathy, many cases belonging to the first category will fall into
the second category. The startling and “dramatic" cases of telepathy,
which find their most extreme expression in telepathic hallucinations,
must not make one lose sight of the fact that telepathy can also occur in
a more unpretentious, and one might even say “normal," manner.
What interests us more in this context is Helene Deutsch’s assumption
that incidents of a telepathic nature may occur during analysis (XII). In
Freud’s (VIII) most recently described cases the phenomena under con­
sideration were likewise elicited by the transference relationship. Holl6s
(98) published an even richer, and in part greatly enlightening, case ma­
terial. I myself have also been able to observe a few relevant cases in the
course of the analyses which I have performed.
In my opinion telepathic transmission in the course of analysis is
made possible by two sets of conditions: First of all, by conditions which
apply to telepathic transmission in general and, next, by the numerous
special conditions of the analytic situation. We now propose to examine
these conditions.
Investigations of telepathy have established, among other things, that
the optimal, and perhaps indispensable, conditions for telepathic trans­
mission are the following:
1. The unconscious character of the transmission of thoughts, repre­
sentations and emotions.
2. A partial or total clouding of consciousness (as in sleep, in hyp-
noid states, etc.), especially on the part of the receiver.
3. An appreciable emotional cathecting of the thoughts.
These three conditions are more or less present in analysis. It is self-
evident that two of these conditions—the unconscious character of the
telepathic transmission, and the emotional cathecting of the material—
apply primarily to the receiver, i.e., in general to the analysand. How­
ever, Helene Deutsch, who followed in the footsteps of Freud, as well as
Reik (152)—the latter without reference to the problem of telepathy—
have shown that these conditions also apply to a certain extent to the
analyst.
The second set of conditions is occasionally connected with the
analytic situation. I wish to discuss these conditions in detail. We are
dealing here with considerations which are still sub judice. I shall start
with a personal experience.
One of my friends had just begun to translate the present paper into
German; this matter was close to my heart. In the first analytic hour
which took place after the work of translation was begun, one of my
patients reported the following fantasy: "I would like to go out among
people like that Emperor—you know what I mean?—the one who wore
a coat which made him invisible." I completed his allusion, and reminded
him that he was referring to a famous tale by Andersen. I also remarked
that, in reality, the Emperor had not been invisible, but had merely
gone out nude among the people. I interpreted this to mean that my pa­
tient’s uncomfortable feeling that he was being looked at concealed, in
reality, an exhibitionistic urge.
When, on my part, I began to analyze the factors responsible for this
singular “coincidence," I had to recognize that the example which I had
chosen, and which I have cited above, did not satisfy me very well, be­
cause it seemed too narcissistic to me. On the other hand, while reading
the first lines of the German translation, I thought with a certain embar­
rassment of the defectiveness of my German pronunciation and also of
the fact that I would nonetheless be compelled to display it in public,
when delivering this lecture.
The most striking feature of this case is the convergence between a
telepathic event and a certain process in my own psychic life. Dynam­
ically, this was a process of repression. Topographically the process prob­
ably took place between the conscious and the preconscious, or, perhaps,
as in true repression, between the preconscious and the unconscious.
These characteristics of the process are not accidental ones. Holl6s
(98) provides us with data about the psychic state of the analyst. Deutsch
(XII), in turn, describes for us the psychic state of the analysand in such
occurrences. This confirms my inference, which I formulated somewhat
later than, but independently of, Holl6s, who was the first to publish it
and to give it a final form.
Holl6s believes that in telepathic occurrences during analysis one gen­
erally finds that, as regards the analyst’s psyche, the content of the tele­
pathic message is made up of elements which are about to be repressed.
“We are not dealing here with the results of repression present in the
unconscious. We are dealing with a dynamic state, with a tendency to
repress, which pervades the whole psychic apparatus all the way from
the ego, via the preconscious, to the unconscious . . . . the emerging asso­
ciations of the patient do not develop the analyst’s thoughts in a logical
manner, but are related to them in the manner of free associations . . . .
as the manifest content of the dream is related to the latent dream
thought, or as a neurotic symptom is related to a real wish." “The
primary process . reigns supreme." Holl6s further remarks that the
mechanism of telepathic transmission during analysis is related to that
of the parapraxes. The only difference is that whereas the latter betray an
unconscious tendency of the subject, remarks of a telepathic origin reveal
the unconscious tendencies of another person, i.e., in this case, those of
the analyst. Consequently the element surprise, characteristic of telepathic
occurrences in the course of analysis, is a common feature of both te­
lepathy and parapraxes. They are, so to speak, “revelations” and “un-
maskings." “I could observe that such occurrences became especially fre­
quent at times when life confronted me with difficult tasks, or when I
was in conflict with myself, or when I had worries.”
On the basis of both his own observations, and of demonstrations re­
garding telepathy in general, Holl6s concludes that one must broaden
one's conception of the sphere of action of both the libido and the trans­
ference, and that one must pay more attention to the unconscious rela­
tionship which comes into being between the patient and the analyst.
The observation described above confirms Hollos' views. My case, too,
involved urges which were in the process of being repressed, and which
“betrayed" themselves to the patient by means of a telepathic message.
We shall return later on to the topographic point of view. For the
time being, one may draw the following conclusions from what has been
said above:
1. During analysis there may occur occasionally certain telepathic
incidents, which are primarily, and generally, determined by the special
relationship obtaining between analyst and analysand.
2. This relationship bears the mark either of a positive or of a nega­
tive transference.
S. The content of the telepathic transmission is, in general, subject
to a process of repression, which, in the case of the analyst, has just be­
gun, and, in the case of the patient, belongs to one of his established spe­
cial complexes. (Dynamic point of view.)
4. The connection occurs between the conscious and the precon­
scious, or—perhaps in cases of deeper telepathy—between the precon­
scious and the unconscious. (Topographic point of view.)
5. In analytic practice one must give due consideration to such oc­
currences—and, to be specific, more consideration must be given to them
than has been formerly the case.
II
We now propose to inquire whether telepathic dreams do indeed ex­
ist, and whether the knowledge thereof can contribute anything of gen­
eral importance to the psychoanalytic theory of dreams.
The occurrence of telepathic phenomena during sleep, in the form
of dream images, is proven by a large number of testimonies and data.
In fact, “the telepathic dream" seems to be the more general form of
paranormal thought transmission. This is not surprising, in view of the
fact that certain of the aforementioned conditions for the occurrence of
telepathy are fully realized in the dream state.
Only Freud (VI) examines the question whether a telepathic trans­
mission of images may occur during sleep, and whether this would af­
fect the psychoanalytic theory of dreams. He answers the latter question
in the negative, because, in his opinion, “The telepathic message has
been treated as a portion of the material that goes to the formation of a
dream, like any other external or internal stimulus, like a disturbing
noise in the street. The telepathic message . . . can thus make no
alteration in the structure of the dream; telepathy has nothing to do
with the essential nature of dreams." Freud also asks whether the visual
manifestation of an authentically telepathic occurrence during dream
may be called “dream" at all. He concludes that such an occurrence is
not a genuine dream; one could only call it “a telepathic occurrence in
sleep." In the New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis (VIII) Freud
states that, in certain cases, only psychoanalysis is able to detect the tele­
pathic element contained in a dream or in a communication, because the
element in question had been subjected to the same processes of distor­
tion as the instinctual strivings which, in general, reveal themselves in
dreams, in parapraxes, etc.
In principle, I am in agreement with Freud: Either a dream is pseudo-
telepathic, in that it contains elements which only seem to be telepathic,
but are actually reducible to certain other factors which analysis is ca­
pable of revealing; or else one is dealing with genuine telepathic trans­
missions, which take advantage of the state of sleep in order to elicit in a
person images which resemble dreams only because both of them have
the same external appearance. Let us suppose now that one or more tel­
epathic elements enter into the dream, and, like the day residue, are then
subjected to dream work. This process not only does not call for a the­
oretical modification of the psychoanalytic theory of dreams, but, on the
contrary, actually provides us with an important practical criterion for
the investigation of telepathy.
In the light of the above considerations, our most important task
seems to be the demonstration of the occurrence of ‘‘pure" telepathic
phenomena, i.e., of the intrusion of certain thoughts into the psyche of a
person, solely as a result of a telepathic message. I was unable, however,
to convince myself that incidents of this type do occur, and consider them
therefore as quite exceptional in comparison with other and more gen­
eral forms of telepathic phenomena.
The occurrence of such phenomena during analysis gives us an in­
sight into those special complexes and emotional states of both the
analysand and the analyst which seem to determine the occurrence of
such incidents. We are therefore inclined to assume that in the over­
whelming majority of telepathic incidents occurring in the waking state
as well as in sleep—and, were it not for scientific cautiousness, we would
even be inclined to say simply: in all cases—the telepathic incident per se
is determined and facilitated by the special complexes and by the special
psychic situation of the subject on the one hand, and by the special emo­
tional state of the sender on the other hand. I will content myself with
the enumeration of a few arguments in support of this point of view:
First, there is the already mentioned principle of “affective charge” (it
being probably known that 99 per cent of all cases of spontaneous tele­
pathy pertain to events which deeply affect the receiver, arid usually in­
volve the sickness or death of close relatives or friends). Second, there is
the fact—which I myself was the first to establish, and to elucidate in psy­
choanalytic terms (168)—that, even in experimental telepathy, images
which mobilize the special complexes of the receiver are especially easily
transmitted, particularly as symbols of certain other representations and
thoughts which are also closely linked with these special complexes. The
analysis of several telepathic dreams disclosed both to me and, according
to what they have told me, also to other analysts, the manner in which
telepathy “breaks through” at certain definite points of the psychic
structure. This “break-through” occurs at certain points whose “specific
nature” favors the appearance of telepathic manifestations, and is ca­
pable of endowing them with the “cathexes” which they need in order to
be transformed into psychic representations.
If our argument is correct, i.e., if the telepathic phenomenon is in­
deed essentially determined by circumstances whose nature analysis can
elucidate in suitable cases, then it is legitimate to demand, as a matter of
principle, that the telepathic element be given due consideration in
dream analysis. This would not require a change in one's basic frame
of reference, but would merely add a new element to it. This, in turn,
would be very advantageous, since it would prevent the interpretation—
which initially seeks and, in fact, must seek to ignore the hypothetical
telepathic element—from being pushed beyond the limits of probability.
Every interpretation of a dream of this type eventually reaches a point
at which it is more scientific to concede the possibility of the occurrence
of a telepathic phenomenon.
At this point all that is left for us to do is to examine the reverse of
the problem. In other words, following in the footsteps of Freud, Hitsch­
mann (X), and R6heim (XIII), we must seek to establish how, by means
of purely psychoanalytic criteria, one may demonstrate that a dream—
which, at first glance, seems to be telepathic—can be explained in full
solely by means of the general psychoanalytic theory of dreams. However,
in the present study, I do not intend to discuss pseudo telepathy, but will
limit myself to an examination of “genuine” telepathy and its significance
for our field of inquiry.
Ill
The theoretical interpretation of the psychic mechanism of telepathic
transmission in dreams is an extension of that which has been postulated
for telepathic hallucinations (170). Indeed, “hallucinatory” telepathy is
one of the most frequent and best-known types of spontaneous telepathy.
We might even say that telepathic hallucinations and telepathic dreams,
taken together, constitute nine tenths of all cases of telepathy. Paradig-
matically, one could describe a hallucinatory telepathic occurrence as fol­
lows: A., a relative or friend of B., is in serious danger or near his death.
At the same instant, or a short time thereafter, B. suddenly perceives the
image of A. This vision often leads B. to conclude that something dread­
ful had happened to A., or that A. had died. This type of spontaneous
telepathy can manifest itself in the form of a vision occurring during
sleep, in the waking state, or in half-sleep.
The basic mechanism of telepathic hallucinations not only continues
to be a riddle, but even appears to contradict both our experimental and
nonexperimental findings. In thought-transmission experiments, and the
like, one transmits the image of the object or person of whom the sender
is thinking. In the case of telepathic hallucination, precisely the opposite
happens: The receiver sees the picture of the sender himself and not, as
one might perhaps expect, his own picture, upon which, in all prob­
ability, the sender’s thoughts must have been focused. How can we ex­
plain this singular phenomenon, which occurs in an identical form also
in telepathic dreams?
We must appeal in this context to the psychoanalytic theory of hal­
lucinations. According to Freud, hallucination is a manifestation of an
instinctual wish of the id. The impulses of the id are striving for a hal­
lucinatory gratification, which is denied to them by strong counter-
cathexes. In dreams and in states of amentia, hallucinations, functioning
as expressions of instinctual gratification, come into being through the
removal of these countercathexes. Freud has stressed the primitive-archaic
character of this type of instinctual gratification in the psychological
chapter of his Interpretation of Dreams (66), in his “Formulations Re­
garding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (72), and also in his
later publications. This form of gratification is renounced after the “re­
ality principle” becomes established.
In the case of telepathic hallucinations, a stimulus, usually of an emo­
tional nature, abolishes in some unknown manner these inhibitory
mechanisms, so that a hallucination can occur. In addition to these gen­
eral problems, telepathic hallucinations also confront us with certain ad­
ditional questions: (a) Why do these stimuli liberate precisely the hal­
lucinations of the sender, or—expressed more carefully—of the person
who is at a distance from the receiver? (b) Why is it precisely this stimulus
which removes those inhibitions and causes the receiver to revert tem­
porarily to a psychic mode of expression which corresponds to a primitive
and infantile state? Needless to say, the latter problem does not arise in
connection with telepathic dreams, since in dreams the psychic apparatus
always expresses itself in an archaic manner.
In addition to certain known mechanisms the answer to this question
is provided by Edoardo Weiss' illuminating discussion of the role of
“knowledge about the existence of the object" (197—199).
The id, which knows only the pleasure principle and does not dis­
tinguish between “real" and “unreal," has the capacity to elicit hallucina­
tions both in dreams and in amentia. In the ego, however, which is inter­
posed between the id and the external world, there occurs a testing of
reality, which prevents hallucinatory gratification. The id's incapacity
for renunciation is one of the factors which necessitates the painful work
of mourning, in the course of which the ego is modified. As Freud already
pointed out, whenever reality becomes too painful to be endured, the ego
breaks off its relations with reality and permits the occurrence of hal­
lucinations. In this way states of amentia come into being. However, even
when, as is usually the case, the psychic apparatus submits to the demands
of reality, analysis shows that the ego introjects the lost love object in
order to appease the id. Weiss (197) explains the vividness wherewith the
victim's image appears to the person who had harmed him (e.g., to
Macbeth) in the following manner: When the imago of the object or
else the object itself have been harmed, the id is deprived of the object
or of its substitute, and is therefore forced to fall back upon hallucina­
tions.
For the very young child only that exists which it can actually per­
ceive. When the mother is out of sight, she no longer exists. Hallucina­
tion can, however, replace the lacking perception of the object. Later
on, the establishment of reality testing gradually enables the child to
understand that the mother can continue to exist even when she is tem­
porarily beyond the reach of his senses. Thus, when the actual perception
of the object is lacking, it is replaced by a psychic attitude consisting in
the “knowledge" of the existence of the object which, just then, is not
being perceived. It is precisely this "knowledge" of the ego which serves
to appease the id. If, however, this “knowledge" of the ego ceases, or if
the ego learns that the love object no longer exists, then the id is de­
prived of those elements which appease it. This, in turn, triggers off the
work of mourning as well as the processes which culminate in outright
amentia.
Weiss (198, 199j2 shows that an actual misdeed can elicit exception­
ally intense feelings of guilt, if the injured party knows that he has been
wronged. In the case of misdeeds committed in secret, this “knowledge"
may be transmitted telepathically. It seems to me, therefore, that the
“knowledge” of the deadly peril or actual death of a person could be
telepathically transmitted to another person who was emotionally closely
linked with the victim. Thus, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, a factor
—i.e., the “knowledge” of the existence of the object—which had hither­
to served to gratify the id, ceases to exist. This explains why the hallu­
cination of the love object is no longer suppressed. Under ordinary cir­
cumstances, reality testing is re-established rather rapidly and inhibits
such hallucinations. However, at least in the beginning, there occurs a
phenomenon whose basic mechanism is closely related to that of the hal­
lucinations of amentia. This suggests that “knowledge of the existence
of the object” may be impaired without the ego knowing it.
The element of surprise—i.e., the fact that the stimulus impinges
upon the recipient’s unconscious by endogenous means—seems to weaken
or to abolish temporarily the inhibitions, thus enabling the id’s hallucina­
tory creative act to unfold itself freely. This process is even more evident
in dreams. In dreams, the conditions are practically the same as in the
cases described by Weiss. There is one difference, however. In cases of
telepathy, the stimulus which brings a hallucination into being reaches
the recipient by paranormal means and does not merely impair an imago
or an introject, but also undermines or abolishes the “knowledge” of
the real object. However, the emotional elements, the weakening of the
inhibitions, and the final culmination of the process in a hallucination
which lasts until the mechanisms of inhibition are re-established, are,
in both instances, the same.
The general problem of hallucinations—i.e., the question of why the
receiver hallucinates the image of the sender—may be answered as fol­
lows: The image which forms the content of the telepathic hallucination
is a product of the receiver’s psychic act. Expressed more clearly, it rep­
resents a regression to a primitive type of performance, in order to ob­
tain a compensation for the damage inflicted upon the love object’s per­
ceptual equivalent. The lesion in question was inflicted upon the love
object by the same stimulus which impinged also upon the unconscious.
Needless to say, this explanation applies also to telepathic transmissions
during sleep and in dreams.
2E. Weiss's papers (198, 199) had not yet been published at the time when the
present paper first appeared (1935).
 Our investigation of telepathy during sleep, and in the form of hal­
lucinations, must be supplemented by, and connected with, the results
yielded by the investigation of telepathic incidents occurring during psy­
choanalysis.
From the topographic point of view, it is probable that the telepathic
event usually unfolds itself between the preconscious and the uncon­
scious, or, to be more precise, in that psychic zone in which the un­
conscious resistances of the ego manifest themselves. Were it impossible
to overcome these resistances, the telepathic phenomenon could not be­
come conscious. One might also add that the telepathic phenomenon
finds an expression in the conscious in a form which is typical of the
primary process in general. As Holl6s has shown, this is due to a topo­
graphic regression to that psychic system in which both dreams and hal­
lucinatory processes unfold themselves.
As regards the dynamic point of view, our findings are as follows:
The content of the telepathic transmission is a product of the receiver's
special complexes or emotional components on the one hand, and of the
sender's emotional states on the other hand. More specifically, these com­
plexes, etc., are not those which are already fixated and static, but those
which still have an effectively dynamic character. In the light of these
findings, we can now complete our discussion of topographic regression
by saying that in telepathy there occurs a regressive utilization of the
effects of existing psychic energies, and a regression to ontogenetically
earlier modes of expression. This, in turn, makes one wonder whether
this regression is not also a phylogenetic one, and induces one to suspect
with Freud that the telepathic mode of expression is “the original,
archaic method by which individuals understood one another, and which
has been pushed into the background in the course of phylogenetic de­
velopment by the better method of communication by means of signs ap­
prehended by the sense organs. But such older methods may have per­
sisted in the background, and may still manifest themselves under certain
conditions____” (VIII).
It should also be noted that even in experimental telepathy—which
I do not propose to discuss in detail in this context—one seeks, as far as
possible, to duplicate the conditions of spontaneous telepathy, e.g., by
seeking to divert the subject's attention, by trying to create artificial emo­
tional states, etc. In my opinion no form of telepathic transmission—not
even experimental telepathy—can come into being solely by means of
pure, logical, rational and conscious thought. Thus, in this field of in­
quiry too, as in so many others, only psychoanalysis can provide us with
an understanding of phenomena which impress us at first as utterly il­
logical, irrational and unconscious.
 Part V
The Eisenbud—Pederson-Krag—
Fodor— Ellis Controversy
 Chapter 22
TELEPATHY AND PROBLEMS
OF PSYCHOANALYSIS*
By JULE EISENBUD, M.D.

I
One of the most remarkable facts in the history of the psychoanalytic
movement is the indifference with which Freud’s publications on the
subject of telepathy have been received, an indifference all the more
significant in the light of the exegetical tendencies not uncommonly
present among Freud’s followers. In the more than twenty years that
have elapsed since Freud's first publication on the subject in 1922,
scarcely more than a half dozen psychoanalytic authors have made clinical
contributions to the field, and most of these have published single com­
munications followed by strange and enduring silences.
In contrast to the paucity of psychoanalytic contributions in the field
of telepathy and allied phenomena there exists an extensive and provo­
cative literature on the subject which has been developing in other quar­
ters, much of it of the highest scientific caliber. For the past nine years
The Journal of Parapsychology, a quarterly publication devoted princi­
pally to statistical and experimental work, has been appearing from
Duke University, and in 1938 the American Psychological Association
devoted a symposium to the consideration of extrasensory perception.
For some years, furthermore, a growing number of highly trained inves­
tigators have been concerning themselves with extrasensory perception
and other parapsychological phenomena as a fruitful field of enquiry
legitimately held to be within the scope of general psychology.
* Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 15:32-87, 1946. Published
here by permission of Dr. Jule Eisenbud and of the editors of The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly.
 II
Although Freud was not the first psychoanalytic observer to draw
attention to telepathy as a phenomenon with possibilities for analytic
interpretation (182) he was the first, as far as I am able to determine, to
suggest that its modus operandi might profitably be studied in the psycho­
pathology of everyday life and in the analytic situation. When he brought
up the subject for the first time in 1922 (VI) Freud claimed to have only
one observation at his disposal. This instance was that of a man (a cor­
respondent, not a patient) who dreamed that his second wife had had
twins and a day later found out that at the time of the dream his daughter
by his first wife, who lived some distance away, had given birth to twins,
the confinement occurring about a month earlier than the expected date.
With characteristic canniness and circumspection, Freud declined to seize
upon this as a demonstration or even an evidence of telepathy. Having
first scouted a number of alternative hypotheses, he simply took the
position that if one made the assumption of telepathy, then an acceptable
interpretation of the dream lay readily to hand. In such a case, one would
have to allow that the unconscious wish that the daughter replace the
wife had combined with the telepathic communication to produce the
dream as altered by the dream work. Psychoanalysis, he asserted, had
discovered a possible telepathic event which otherwise would not have
been recognized as such.
At the time of this publication, Freud carefully refrained from taking
a position one way or the other on the reality of telepathy. He had never
himself had a telepathic dream, he claimed, nor had any of his patients
in twenty-seven years of analytic practice. Nevertheless, he returned to the
subject in 1925 with a somewhat more positive attitude. At this time he
writes (84): “If reports of telepathic occurrences (or, to speak less exactly,
of thought transference) are submitted to the same criticism as stories of
other occult events, there remains a considerable amount of material which
cannot be so easily neglected. Further, it is much more possible to collect
observations and experiences of one's own in this field which justify a
favorable attitude to the problem of telepathy, even though they may
not be enough to carry an assured conviction. One arrives at a provisional
opinion that it may well be that telepathy really exists and that it pro­
vides the kernel of truth in many other hypotheses that would otherwise
be incredible.” Freud centers his discussion upon the analysis of a
prophecy that had been given to one of his analytic patients by a fortune­
teller some years before. The patient had been told that by the time she
was thirty-two years old she would have two children, but the prophecy
 had not been fulfilled. The woman, now forty-three, was still childless.
Analysis revealed, however, that at the time of the stance, the prophecy
represented the strongest unconscious wish of the sitter which, Freud
suggests, the fortuneteller had telepathically (and, of course, uncon­
sciously) perceived. “All of this,” concludes Freud, “has only this much
to do with dreams: if there are such things as telepathic messages, the
possibility cannot be dismissed of their reaching someone during sleep
and being received by him in a dream. Indeed, on the analogy of other
perceptual and intellectual material, the further possibility arises that
telepathic messages received in the course of the day may only be dealt
with during a dream of the following night. There would then be noth­
ing contradictory in the material that had been telepathically communi­
cated from being modified and transformed in the dream like any other
material.”
For eight years, following his remarks in 1925, Freud kept his silence
on the subject of telepathy. Then, despite his admitted and, I am sure,
readily understandable ambivalence, he pushed his observations some­
what further when he took up the subject once again in the New Intro­
ductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (VIII). Here he reviews once more
the instance of the dream of the birth of twins, and also the case of the
unfulfilled but psychologically satisfying prophecy. He goes on to men­
tion a whole set of such prophecies which he had collected where analysis
revealed that in every instance the fortuneteller had merely given expres­
sion to the thoughts and particularly the secret wishes of the clients.
Taking all the evidence together, he concluded, there remained a heavy
weight of probability in favor of thought transference.
The final example cited by Freud in this communication had to do
with the phenomenon of telepathic interplay between the analyst and the
patient during the analytic hour itself. Freud's patient was a man who
was deriving no particular benefit from the analysis other than the feel­
ing of security and comfort arising from a pleasant relationship to a kind
and tolerant father figure. It had been agreed between Freud and this
patient that the analysis would be brought to a close as soon as the end
of the war permitted Freud to resume his analyses with students from
other countries. The day came, finally, when the end of the patient's
analysis was heralded by the arrival of a visiting physician from England.
While the patient had no way of knowing consciously that this event
had occurred, he nevertheless exhibited in his associations, in such a
fashion that it required analysis to disentangle the threads, unmistakable
jealousy of the rival for Freud's attentions who had just appeared on the
scene. The patient, moreover, far from being conscious of the meaning
of his associations, might have been completely baffled if confronted with
an interpretation based upon facts of whose existence he had no conscious
knowledge. Freud gives no indication that he communicated such an
interpretation to the patient but simply asserts that as far as he was
concerned, similar observations on the part of other analysts, if confirmed,
would “put an end to any remaining doubts of the reality of thought
transference."
It happens that similar observations have been made without, how­
ever, putting an end to anyone's doubts except those of some of the
observers. Clinical material reported by other analysts has amply borne
out Freud's hypothesis that telepathy is an activity of the unconscious
mind and that the laws of unconscious mental life could be taken for
granted as applying to telepathic activity however it might manifest itself
in the behavior of the individual (18, X X II, 37, 60, 98, XIII, XXI).
Despite these contributions the subject of telepathy has won little notice
in analytic circles and, except for occasional articles of critical import
(X, XVIII, XX) in which, on the whole, the hypothesis was neither ad­
vanced nor convincingly attacked, an attitude of fairly complete apathy
and disinterest has held the field.
Ill
The reticence and reserve of psychoanalysts in connection with a sub­
ject that has occasioned such widespread interest and bitter controversy
in other psychological circles is itself a phenomenon worthy of considera­
tion. Freud recognized (VIII) that analysts had a right to be somewhat
more distrustful of the “occult" than other investigators since they were
only too well aware that the stern discipline imposed by reality often leads
to an inclination to credit the miraculous, the supernatural and the
irrational. Nevertheless, Freud asserted that the reluctance to view the
data springing from “occult" sources must be overcome. The matter is
simply a question of fact and ought to be capable of decision by obser­
vation. As to our intellectual resistances, Freud warns us that such prej­
udices were inimical to psychoanalysis itself when it brought forth the
discovery of the unconscious.
One's intellectual prejudices against “paranormal" psychological phe­
nomena are likely to be considerably undermined if one investigates the
nonanalytic literature on the subject and takes the trouble to integrate
the data and correspondences provided in some of the standard works in
the field (88, 154, 194). Nevertheless, when one has occasion to deal di­
rectly with possibly telepathic phenomena in analysis, a favorable atti­
tude toward the subject thus gained is apt strangely to desert us as
suspicion and incredulity once more urge us to minimize or disregard the
events observed. One soon becomes aware that the resistance opposing
any inclination to give the hypothesis earnest consideration is far more
powerful than we might have supposed; and it is not difficult to convince
oneself that such resistance springs from deep unconscious sources. An
example or two may make this clear.
A middle-aged patient brings in a dream in which she sees Mrs. X.,
a casual acquaintance whom she has not seen in some months, leading
a group of children down a steep incline. Suddenly one of the tots starts
to run ahead and before anyone can prevent it, the child plunges head­
long into a ravine and goes hurtling downward. The dream lends itself
to fairly simple analysis in terms of the patient's childhood and current
conflicts. She was the oldest of five children and had on four childhood
occasions to struggle with destructive wishes against discernible but still
unborn siblings. She is now repeating the process in relation to her
daughter-in-law whose first pregnancy she obviously wishes to see termi­
nated in a miscarriage. Question arose only in connection with the repre­
sentation of her daughter-in-law by the figure of Mrs. X. in the dream.
True, the dream fusion had incorporated one or two tenuous linkages
between the two, but not enough by any means to account for the speci­
ficity of the substitution. Three days afterward, however, the patient
happened to learn that Mrs. X., whom she had not seen in many months
and of whose pregnancy she had been totally unaware, had had a mis­
carriage on the night of the dream. On two other occasions in the space
of a year this patient had dreams in which the telepathically perceived
miscarriage of an acquaintance figured. In the first of these she repre­
sented the event by the symbol of losing the contents of a purse. On the
last occasion she did not bother with distortion but pictured the event as
it actually occurred—in the bathtub.
Another example:
A patient dreams: “I went with my wife to a movie. It seemed like a
midnight performance. The cashier in the box office had some baguettes
with him as if he were a diamond dealer. He gave me a check for $X as
a sort of refund ” The dreamer’s association to “refund” was his feeling
of having been overcharged by two physicians whom he had consulted
before coming to me for psychoanalytic treatment. This was obviously a
substitution for a feeling of resentment at being mistreated by me, the
basis of this resentment becoming clear in connection with his associa­
tions to “baguettes.” On the previous evening the patient had paid a visit
to a friend who dealt in diamonds and to whom the patient had applied
for advice concerning a type of stone called “baguette,” one of which his
business partner had just given to his wife as an anniversary gift. The
patient also was considering giving such a gift to his wife and wanted to
know something about the value and appropriateness of this kind of
diamond. As it happened, the patient’s friend, the jeweler, was in some­
what low spirits during the evening because he had just sent his only
child off to a college two thousand miles away, and he expressly cautioned
the patient and his wife against having only one child. On the way home
the patient's wife seized the opportunity to speak again of her wishes for
a second child, an idea the patient was reluctant to entertain, preferring
instead to make his wife the gift of a baguette. The dream utilizes the
possibilities of a pun on the word “baguette" (pronounced like “beget")
to effect the substitution of one idea arising in association with the pre­
vious evening for another, since the connecting link is the friend who is a
purveyor both of the gem “baguette" and the idea of “beget." The dream
may be interpreted as a fear that the analyst (cashier in the movie) will
uncover the patient's inhibitions anent sexual intercourse (a midnight
performance) and will take the side of the patient's wife by trying to sell
the idea of “beget" (the cashier strangely deals in baguettes). The patient
feels resentful at this and protests that if this is the way the analysis is
going to go, then he is being swindled, just as he felt himself taken in by
the earlier two physicians who did absolutely nothing for him and de­
manded outrageous fees. If I, the analyst, am going to insist on forcing
the issue of “beget," then the patient wants a refund.
Everything in the analysis of this dream (even the suggestion that the
root of the patient’s sexual inhibitions was related to primal scene ma­
terial) fitted together very nicely—except for one fact: no specific deter­
mination for the idea of a refund was to be found in the patient's asso­
ciations. Nor would I have expected it to be, since the idea was filched
directly from the “day's residue" of my experience. I had just sent a check
(note that it was a check too in the dream, not currency) for the precise
amount of $X as “a sort of refund" to a refugee who had sent me in
payment for a consultation an amount I considered entirely out of pro­
portion to her circumstances. My analytic patient, it seems, was not going
to allow this favoritism to pass without a demur. He too was a refugee,
as it happened, and for this reason, if for no other, felt an equal claim
to my benevolence.
It turned out, curiously, that this patient was not alone in feeling
slighted. An analytic hour following his on the same morning was inter­
rupted several times by telephone calls. Following one of these interrup­
tions my female analysand remarked: “I'm sure that if you added up all
the time you take for these phone calls, it would certainly amount to an
hour by the end of the analysis. I think that at the end you ought to give
me a check for $X as a refund. Again the precise amount of $X, and again
the insistence on a check. Had I not many times before observed this
woman making similar remarks when competitively goaded on by a tele­
pathic rivalry with some other patient, I might have ascribed the present
remark to pure coincidence.1
On surveying such material as the foregoing, one is naturally
prompted to heed any alternative hypothesis that might render the
assumption of anything like telepathy superfluous. One is inclined to
check each episode for the possible contribution of sensory cues, of
intuition, of the exquisitely complex unconscious calculations which we
i This, for reasons that will appear later, is the only instance in my experience
where telepathy brought to light a commendable impulse on my part.
know to be a nightly pleasure of the dullest dreamer and, finally, one
does not neglect to scan the material for the possibilities of interpretative
extravagance to which one may unwittingly, but nonetheless purpose­
fully, lend oneself. Here one may find a loophole, there a possible leak,
here again a tantalizing ambiguity, and there again the question of a
chance factor. One finds oneself weighing, evaluating, appraising, but all
to little purpose: the disturbing sense of the miraculous persists and,
although with each new episode we are seized all over again with the
overwhelming conviction that only telepathy could account for the facts
observed, the lapse of a few hours finds us once more doubting the reality
of the extraordinary and by now alien experience, haunted still by the
need for definite, clear, absolutely unequivocal proof.
One is led to suspect that the source of the resistance against dealing
easily with such material must be the need to hold tightly in repression
one's infantile narcissistic inclinations toward magic and the belief in the
omnipotence of thought. Freud pointed out that it is only with the
greatest difficulty that we relinquish such trends as we learn gradually
to accept the stern demands imposed by reality, and he quite rightly
suspected this to be the source of the omnipresent human trend toward
superstition and the search for the miraculous. But the coin has another
side to it: once we have learned to overcome our infantile strivings, we
are quite susceptible to the development of anxiety whenever these striv­
ings threaten to emerge from repression, and it is precisely the danger of
being overwhelmed from this quarter which forces many of us to develop
rather rigidly effective reaction formations against our more primitive
trends. This, it need hardly be emphasized, is particularly true of those
who turn to science as a way of life. Thus while we indulge ourselves with
great pleasure in stories of the occult and the supernatural, in whatever
escapes into the miraculous and the mysterious that the stage and screen
are able to offer us, it is decidedly otherwise when we are faced in
actuality by occurrences which beckon us to the all but forgotten world of
childhood where fantasy is king. The so-called occult is no threat to us
when we can view it with the comfortable assurance that it has no reality
beyond that of the dramatic device; when it brushes by us in life itself,
we have on our hands another problem entirely. In such a circumstance,
we maintain our composure only by unconsciously marshaling against the
unexpected event all our powers of dissociation and disbelief and setting
ourselves in an attitude that we can tranquilly assume to be the result
exclusively of hardheaded, critical thought.
 IV
Early in my experience with paranormal processes my need for proof
led me to devise experiments which, I hoped, would provide the type of
demonstration I sought. As it turned out, my experiments miscarried and
I found myself back where I started, when simply taking whatever
analysis had to offer in the way of telepathic incident. Nevertheless I shall
describe one of these experiments since, although they miscarried in the
sense that they failed directly to give me the type of proof that I naively
(I now think) demanded, they nevertheless miscarried so instructively
that to have asked for more would have been base ingratitude on my part
toward whatever powers concerned. In any case, the backfiring of the
following experiment illustrates as well as anything the air of magical
happenings from which, I maintain, the well-ordered mind would nor­
mally, and from perfectly healthy instinct, shrink back.
The objective of this experiment was to effect the telepathic trans­
mission from one person, the agent, to a second, the percipient, of a three­
digit number chosen at random. If successful under the conditions laid
down for the experiment, the results would at once obviate the question
of interpretative latitude and at the same time provide a mathematical
tool for the precise calculation of the factor of chance, or the ratio of the
probability of the occurrence to its improbability. The procedure of the
experiment was derived from the clinical observation that the activity
of telepathy is usually unconscious in both agent and percipient and
functions best (at least that portion of it which is most easily observable)
under conditions of not too deep repression, that is, where the material
exists in the preconscious thoughts and is capable of emerging into con­
sciousness without too much difficulty. (This topographical observation
had also been made by Freud, Hollos, and, in effect, by many nonanalytic
investigators.) It was thought that the best method of achieving the re­
quired degree of minimal repression was to have both agent and per­
cipient operating under the conditions of a light hypnotic trance
terminated with an induced posthypnotic amnesia.2
Both subjects were young women whom I had formerly treated psychi­
atrically for minor difficulties. The percipient was told under hypnosis
that after she awoke she would respond to a given signal by writing on a
slip of paper a number which would spring to her mind. In another
room, the agent was hypnotized and in this stage shown a large sheet
of paper on which was drawn in large figures the number 827. A few
2 In other experiments, in order to introduce the required affective charge, the
method of the “induced complex" was used to good effect.
seconds after the agent was awakened with the command for posthypnotic
amnesia (that is, at the time when she was expected to be actively repress­
ing the number she had viewed in the trance state) an experimental
accomplice gave the percipient in an adjoining room the prearranged
signal for her to follow out the posthypnotic command to write down the
number that came to her mind. She promptly wrote down the number 15.
The experiment as performed was certainly not a success. The per­
cipient had short-circuited our elaborate preparations by going off on a
track of her own, the significance of which I thought I was able to perceive
from certain casual remarks she later let drop about where she was living,
travel, distances, her wish that she could live in the center of town where
I lived, etc. It would seem that her posthypnotic choice of a number had
probably given expression to her wish to live with me, which it accom­
plished simply by canceling out the numbers 3 and 4 which made the
number of her address, 135, different from mine, 145, leaving the num­
bers 1 and 5 or 15 which, as it were, we then shared in common. A dream
which she had that night and later mailed to me confirmed this
interpretation.
Any wish to have done with numbers and their manipulation that the
miscarriage of this experiment might have left with me was soon thwarted
by a striking occurrence from an unexpected quarter. On the day after
the experiment, one of my analytic patients reported a dream which she
had had on the preceding night—that is, sometime within a few hours of
the experiment. The significant thing about it was that in it the dreamer
found herself looking at a bulletin board on which the number 218 was
prominently displayed. What inspired the notion that this number was
of extraordinary significance was that despite the obvious and pointed
emphasis put on it in the manifest context of the dream (bulletin board:
“Take note!”) there was little in the dreamer's associations to bring it
into relationship to the latent content, which had to do with the patient's
ambivalent attitude toward a woman, a close friend, who had just made
off with a returned soldier whom the patient was trying to attract. The
patient's only association to the number other than that it might represent
a train time was the names of two metropolitan dining places, Club 21
and Club 18. Although the train time association bore broadly, but not
specifically, on a matter possibly relevant to the latent content of the
dream, the second association seemed to lead the patient nowhere. But it
did convey the idea that some manipulation was being suggested: getting
218 out of the addresses 21 and 18 seemed suspiciously like the process
whereby the experimental percipient got 15 out of the addresses 135 and
145. Furthermore, the fact that the number in the dream was shown on
a bulletin board seemed clearly to suggest the large sheet of paper on
which the experimental number was shown to the agent. Suddenly it
appeared that if 218 were reversed into 812 and then added to 15 we
would have 827, the number we had tried to transmit telepathically. This
was indeed a most provocative turn of events. But what justification had
we to perform such a manipulation? Would it not savor of the tricks of
the numerologist whereby it is possible, with a little juggling and a few
twists, to extract any desired fact or prophecy from any given set of
dates? I am afraid that the strict scientific methodologist would forbid
such wholesale manipulation of innocent data, but I felt that since in any
case I was long since beyond the pale of the logicians of science, if not of
the logic of science, I might as well venture one step further. Two facts
of unquestionable relevance, beyond what has already been cited, seemed
to offer themselves in support of the right to manipulate the figures in
the manner indicated. First, the analysis of the latent content of the
dream revealed that the principal mechanism through which the manifest
content had been elaborated was inversion. Everything in the dream,
point for point, was the inverse of what appeared in reality; and this was
no doubt related to the circumstance that the principal fact which the
dreamer was concealing from consciousness was riot the anger and disap­
pointment she felt because her woman friend had taken the man away
from her, but precisely the reverse—her anger at the man because he had
robbed her of the affection of her woman friend. (This was, of course, an
exact replica of what had happened a quarter of a century before upon
her father’s return from the war when the patient was two years old.) It
seemed, therefore, that if one wished to translate the manifest number
218 into its latent equivalent, one could do no better than to invert it
along with everything else in the manifest content of the dream.
The second fact of relevance is that if we follow the dreamer in the
hypothesized numerical operations, we see that she is acting entirely
within the spirit of the dream as she thrusts herself jealously in front of
her rival, the experimental percipient who wishes to move in on me, and,
by succeeding where the other has failed, asserts her superior claim to my
attention. One cannot help but marvel, finally, at the appropriateness
of the medium in which the threatened patient pleads her lifelong cause,
a medium perhaps necessary to the infant whose consciousness has not yet
become entirely separate from that of the mother and whose other means
of communication, possibly for related reasons, are comparatively limited.
One need not pause here to evaluate the probabilities for and against
the factor of chance in the foregoing events. If, taking everything into
consideration, one does not already suspect that the probabilities against
these events being due to chance are enormously great, the following
occurrences ought to prove somewhat more convincing.
I should preface the following account by stating that the occasion on
which my unhappy patient had so unceremoniously invited herself to my
experimental party was not the first time she had manifested such beha­
vior. This occurrence was completely in consonance with the transference
behavior she had exhibited from the very start of her analysis, and she
had repeatedly in telepathic dreams, telepathic associations during the
hour and in telepathic acting out, attempted to vie with other patients
and even with friends and associates of mine who she felt were claiming
too much of my love. With infantile competitiveness she would attempt
to imitate or surpass what they did or to warn me against them and ex­
pose their hidden weaknesses, all the while with a keenness of telepathic
perception which was astonishing. As a matter of fact, her tactics in this
regard, as one would expect, were not very different from those trends
in the more visible portions of her life which led her inevitably into
painful difficulties with her family, friends and business associates. (I
might add, that as far as analysis was concerned, the telepathic manifes­
 tations of the patient's characterological tendencies were found to be
more precise, more revealing and more useful in interpretation than her
more visible activities.)
At any rate, my jealous patient was not yet done with her predatory
telepathic activities when she succeeded in exposing the arithmetical
deficiencies of my experimental subject. Two nights later she again took
to the warpath, this time against another of my analytic patients, a
woman who was currently working through a difficult problem in her
relationship to me. This woman, of course, was completely unknown to
the first patient since the treatment hour of one had never followed that
of the other. What happened was that on this night the first patient had
a dream in which, using the second patient as a scapegoat for an attack
on the hated, rejecting side of her mother, she dragged in, with almost
documentary detail, all the hidden anal conflicts of the second patient
that were responsible for the latter's tragic rejection of her children, just
as the almost identical character traits of the first patient's mother had
led her to reject this patient. On the following night the second patient
had a dream in which she replied to the first in no uncertain terms,
referring in the process to certain painfully embarrassing matters that she
had lifted out of the first patient's life specifically for this occasion. It
was possible to analyze these two dreams, or, more accurately, this reve
a deux, only as mutually complementary structures since even the mani­
fest portions dovetailed with a high degree of particularity (i.e., in five
intersecting points), the interrelationships in the latent contents fanning
out geometrically therefrom. I shall not go into this analysis here since it
is not strictly necessary for an understanding of what follows.
On the day following this mutually recriminatory interchange be­
tween my two patients, I was struck by a sudden, strange and highly dra­
matic change in the second patient's attitude toward me. Hitherto cold,
critical, consistently negative, all at once, in an abrupt change from all
the preceding hours, she began to manifest highly possessive and almost
flagrantly erotic behavior toward me. This started at the very outset of
the hour when she came into the room cosmetically made up as I had
never before seen her, exhibiting a new and much too striking coiffure,
and dressed in a decollete that seemed, as far as I could make out, entirely
inappropriate to that hour of the day. She crossed the threshold, swept
to the couch in the manner of a heavily stylized actress and settled herself
into a sirenesque pose in front of me. Completely baffled and unable to
make head or tail of this strange burlesque, I soon asked the patient for
an explanation. To my surprise, she replied that the realization had
finally come that all further resistance on her part would be useless, that
she knew now that she loved me passionately, and that she could not
imagine how she was able to conceal this from herself these many months
past. More puzzled than ever, I settled down to listen and to await fur­
ther developments. It was when I heard her dream, a little later, and was
able to perceive her involvement with the first patient that the fact
dawned on me that the woman was really, in a sense, “possessed." With
this in mind, I lost little time in telling her something of what I took to
be the background of her behavior (which would otherwise, of course,
have been completely inaccessible to her consciousness) and communi-
eating to her my feeling that she had somehow been provoked into this
ego-alien acting out by the aggressive tactics of an unknown rival who
had called for a showdown. I suggested to her that her strange acting
out, which she had attempted to legitimize in a manner familiar to us
from the observation of posthypnotic rationalizations, was the only way
in which she felt, unconsciously, that she could compete with the per­
formance of the other patient, just as, when she was a child, she had felt
she could never match her mother’s keenness and wit (for which the
latter had been greatly admired) but countered instead, in the struggle
for the father, with a blatantly exhibitionistic physical and emotional
display. I then told her that she might have been particularly nettled by
the other patient’s “scoop” in the experimental situation (which I now
described to her, omitting, however, the actual details and implying sim­
ply that the other patient had “guessed” a number directly) because this
would especially have suggested her mother, a tradeswoman with a re­
markable “head for figures.” The last interpretation threw the patient
into a panic. She became frantic and almost uncontrollable. Not in the
slightest disturbed by the telepathic aspects of the interpretation, of
which she had already had some experience, she was simply wild at the
thought that she was being called upon to give a performance as dazzling
as that of her rival, now that I had made her conscious of what was going
on and had pointed out the manner in which she had attempted to evade
competition by throwing herself at me sexually. She begged me to tell
her the number and allow her thereby to default, since she feared other­
wise to become distraught in a futile attempt to pick the unknown num­
ber out of the air. She cried that never in a million years could she do
what the other patient had done, and agitatedly protested that she should
not be expected to. She wept and stormed and accused me of tricking her
into a hopeless position. I tried to calm her as best I could, but I re­
frained from giving her the number she was trying to wring from me,
nor did I give her any indication of how it was arrived at or even the
number of digits involved. Although I tried to impress upon her that
she should feel no compulsion either to compete with the other patient
or to run away from competition in the manner elected, the patient left
the hour in considerable dismay.
The next day the patient returned in marked anxiety. Gone was the
false and farcical behavior of the day before; in its place the crestfallen
demeanor of an unhappy child. In a painful and frightened manner the
patient confessed that she had had the following dream fragment while
asleep for a moment on the subway coming to my office. “I was a little
girl in pigtails. I said, ‘If this is the way it's going to be, I'm going away/
and I started walking down the road. Then the number 492 occurred,
just like that ” The patient winced when she came to the number, cov­
ered her face with her hands, said she felt like a fool. She was certain she
had failed; now I would have good grounds for preferring the other
patient, etc.
But the patient had not failed. A curious circumstance proved that
she had succeeded with honors. It will be recalled that in the description
of the procedure whereby I had tried to effect the telepathic transmission
of a number chosen at random, I had mentioned an experimental accom­
plice. The accomplice in question, not a physician, was a very close friend
of mine who occasionally sat in on my experiments and when necessary
helped with the details. On this occasion I had suggested that he too try
his luck in “guessing" the number and that he write his result down on
a slip of paper immediately he had given the experimental percipient the
prearranged posthypnotic signal for her to do the same. The number he
had written down was 325, the significance of which he did not discuss,
nor did it occur to me at the moment to question him about it. However,
a peculiar and puzzling fact now stood out: if we added the patient's 492
to my friend's 325, just as initially we had added the first patient's 812 to
the experimental percipient's 15, we got—not 827, but 8171 Now it
appeared equally improbable that such a result could have been due
either to chance or to telepathic perception since it seemed incredibly
close for the former and too far away for the latter when we remind our­
selves that the unconscious does not make simple mistakes of this sort.
I had no recourse but to tell my patient the truth as it appeared then
and there: she had come very close, had succeeded even in almost dupli­
cating the first patient’s dynamically determined twist of emphasizing
how far short of the mark her rival had fallen by making good the differ­
ence (with a polite disclaimer, however, of any suspicion of inversion);
but she had not, for some reason, hit the bull's eye. Far from being dis­
gruntled or apologetic on account of her slight inaccuracy, however, the
patient was greatly elated and unbelievably pleased with herself for hav­
ing come as close as she had. When I questioned the possible accuracy
of her recollection and suggested that perhaps (although this did not
seem likely to me) the number she had seen was 502, the patient ada­
mantly stuck to her number: 492, as plain as thatl
Immediately upon the termination of the hour I telephoned my
friend and accomplice to tell him of the puzzling event. Before I gave
him the news, however, I took the precaution of first asking him what
number he recalled having written down on the night of the experiment.
(I had his slip of paper right before me, but wished to take no chances.)
The number he had written down, he answered, had been 325. Then,
before I had a chance to say another word, he began to tell me of the
most curious slip he had made in connection with this number, a slip
whose significance he could not quite make out. When he came to write
down the number, he said, the first thing that came to his mind was his
home in England, whereupon he promptly wrote down the 325 which
occurred in its address. Afterward he realized that he had unconsciously
performed a peculiar fusion in that 325 was the number of a New York
apartment he had formerly occupied whereas his English address num­
ber, which he mistakenly thought he was writing down, was 335!
Here indeed was a thrilling finish to our telepathic steeplechase, with
more excitement than we had originally bargained for. We now discover,
in the first place, that even my friend, who had considered himself a flat
failure as a telepathic percipient, had in a way (but strictly in keeping
with his typical British reserve) come off not so badly. He, it appears, had
placed himself very subtly in competition with the main experimental
percipient who wished to share my address. Telling himself on the sur­
face, in response to an unconscious telepathic perception of his experi­
mental rival's attempt to achieve proximity to me, that he for his part
would just as soon go back to England and leave the field to her, he
nevertheless makes a slip whereby he finds himself in an apartment only
a few blocks from mine that he had occupied at a time when I had been
able to see much more of him than I was currently able to do. But the
joke of it is that my analytic patient joins the fray and, all the while
keeping an eye on the rival analytic contestant whom she is telepathically
engaging in another corner, corrects his error of address as well as his
arithmetical deficiency. To him she says, “Not so fast, there. You belong
in England. Anyway, I can give your friend what you failed to give him.
325, your bad guess, plus ten, your unconscious error (which you will
permit me to correct) plus 492, my contribution, makes 827, which is
just what the doctor wants." To her unknown rival in analysis she says
“Seel I can do anything you can do."
V
We have seen enough thus far to account for strong resistances on the
part of any investigator who has to deal directly with the data of the
telepathic unconscious. The material seems to be alive with potentialities
for evoking our most deeply repressed infantile strivings and for reopen­
ing questions that were ostensibly settled long ago both in the historical
development of the individual and in the forward march of science.
The proudest possession of science and the greatest triumph of the indi­
vidual has been the hard-won ability to separate from “reality" the wish­
ful, magic trends of subjective evaluation; and now both science and the
individual are confronted by data which seem to indicate that the once
powerful wish, lately reported to be in somewhat reduced circumstances,
has all the while retained sufficient strength and vigor to be able still to
influence events in the outer world.
Although this state of affairs would seem sufficient to explain the
origin of resistance to viewing the data of telepathy as one would view
the data of any other scientific investigation, it still does not account for
the strange backwardness of psychoanalysts (who, as Freud pointed out
(V), should be especially qualified to deal with such resistances in them­
selves) in showing interest in a subject of research that is being advanced
very briskly by nonanalytic psychologists.3 Analysts may answer, and with
3 For the most part the investigators in this field have swung away from an exclusive
preoccupation with attempts to prove the reality of what they term extrasensory per­
ception (ESP), and have shifted their attack to other operational problems where
data of great significance have been uncovered. Practically all informed criticism of the
experimental methods in ESP has ceased, and as long ago as 1937 a formal statement
from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics affirmed the complete adequacy of the
mathematical methods whereby Rhine and his associates demonstrated that the proba­
bilities against the chance origin of the results of their experiments in ESP were of
astronomical magnitude.
some justification, that they are not obliged to exhibit any great interest
in something with which they have no occasion to deal, and that for
this reason they are not in a position to form a judgment on the question.
It would seem paradoxical, however, that the methods of analysis should
not uncover some counterpart to a phenomenon which, at one end of the
scale, turns up here and there in the general population with the force
and vividness of lightning and, at the other, manifests itself as a statis­
tical regularity which can be teased out of a great many, perhaps all
people, by elaborate experimental and mathematical procedures. One
should imagine that if human beings can and do function telepathically,
analysts ought to be in a particularly advantageous position to study
such a function, just as by virtue of their methodology they are privileged
to study other human behavior whose subtle manifestations are unap­
proachable through less tortuous avenues. To render the situation more
paradoxical, the data now being uncovered by the laboratory experimen­
talists in ESP are beginning to point directly to the necessity of studies on
the unconscious mental processes of the subjects.
One outstanding fact which sooner or later must emerge from the
study of telepathy as observed in analysis resolves the paradox: the tele-
pathic episode is a function not only of the repression of emotionally
charged material by the patient, but of the repression of similar or related
emotionally charged material by the analyst as well. This condition,
which apparently does not obtain in the case of the laboratory experi­
mentalist, may considerably limit or totally block the perceptive capac­
ities of the analyst.
Of the earlier investigators, Holl6s and Servadio appear to have
arrived at this discovery, each independently, and to have formulated it
in explicit terms. Holl6s, in discussing the difficulties encountered in
reporting his material, wrote (98): “It soon became clear that the material
divulged more of the inner life of the investigator than was convention­
ally permissible/' He states that in the telepathic process as it manifests
itself in analysis, there is a return of the repressed from repression, just
as in a dream, a symptom or a slip, but that here this return occurs in
another person and is subject to the latter's rules of distortion. He for­
mulates this insight in the curious phrase that “it is the patient who
makes my slip" (“der Kranke es ist, der mich verspricht”). Servadio con­
firmed the observations of Holl6s and summed up his own position, as
follows (XXI): “1. In the analysis, there occur with greater or lesser
frequency telepathic instances which in general are conditioned by the
special relationship between the analyst and the patient. 2. This occurs
during both the positive and the negative phases of the transference. 3.
The content of the telepathically transferred material is subject to the
process of repression, which takes place in the analyst and is related to
special complexes in the analysand."
Holl6s’s paper is particularly rich in penetrating observations on the
way in which telepathy manifests itself in the analytic situation, and
should be studied at first hand. Unfortunately, however, the data of both
Hollos and Servadio in support of their hypothesis of the relationship
between the telepathic occurrence and the joint repressions of patient and
analyst are fairly meager. For this reason I offer several of my own data
in some detail—but not, for obvious reasons, without a certain degree of
misgiving and some unavoidable reservations.
A patient reports the following dream: “I am looking at the mech­
anism of a watch through the far end of a watchmaker's conical magni­
fying piece. The larger rim of this eyepiece which ordinarily fits into the
eyeball socket was attached somehow to the rim of the watch. I saw the
various wheels turning, and everything was going. On the watch was an
inscription: ‘Made in U.S.A.' or ‘Made in Switzerland.' I think it was
U.S.A." The patient’s interpretation of this dream was that it related to
the process of self-evaluation taking place in analysis. He had no associa­
tion to the fact that he was examining the watch from the wrong end
of the magnifier but readily accepted my suggestion that it might mean
that he was looking himself squarely in the eye (having substituted the
watch rim in the dream for his eyeball socket). He associated the inscrip­
tion “made in U.S.A." or “made in Switzerland" to the difference in
quality between the watches manufactured in these countries. He was
of the opinion that Swiss watches were of a far superior quality. His
feeling that the inscription had actually read “Made in U. S. A." (inferior
quality) somehow did not tally with the fact that he had lately come to
feel that he was really a superior person (which indeed he was), whereas
before analysis his major complaint was that of a lifelong feeling of
worthlessness and inadequacy.
We need not trouble here to go into a many-layered analysis of this
dream. The aspect pertinent to our present thesis was the lack of corre­
spondence between the patient’s lately achieved release through analysis
from feelings of inferiority and the representation in the dream that the
watch, presumably a symbol for the patient himself, was of an inferior
(made in U. S. A.) quality. This paradox remained unresolved until an
event of the day following the dream cast a new light on the entire
problem. On this day the patient received a telephone call from the
lawyer in charge of settling his father’s estate. The patient’s father had
died some years ago, but the settlement of the estate had dragged out
until a few months before, when the patient finally had been informed
that everything down to the ultimate detail had at last been taken care
of. Now the patient was informed by the lawyer, from whom he had not
heard in some time, that an old and valuable pocket watch of the father’s
had turned up and had to be disposed of. The patient was told that on
the watch was a worn and illegible inscription which indicated (thought
the lawyer) that the watch had been a gift. In telling of this episode the
patient remarked that he did not really want the watch but supposed
that for the sake of sentiment and propriety he would have to accept it.
Characteristically enough, the patient was not struck by any connection
between this event and his dream about a watch on the night preceding
the lawyer's telephone call.
An analysis of the dream, taking into account that the watch really
represented the patient's father and not the patient himself (except, per­
haps, for that self-critical and punishing portion of himself which, like
the watch, was a paternal inheritance), at once resolves the paradox aris­
ing from the earlier interpretation of the dream. The patient is really
evaluating his father, looking the latter squarely in the eye and bringing
him down to size. (“Made in U. S. A.": Father was not the superior per­
son he always made himself out to be.) This interpretation corresponds
well with the patient's lately acquired feelings of self-confidence and is
readily understandable in terms of the steady, day by day work of the
analysis which the dream now sums up in a succinct symbolic rep­
resentation.
In this dream there are symbolic overdeterminations (Chronos,
“Father Time," whom one can never overtake and defeat) that perhaps
paved the way for the patient's telepathic percipience of the lawyer's
about-to-be-discharged duty regarding the father's watch. One wonders,
however, to what degree and in what way the following circumstances
might also have had a determining influence on the emergence of the
patient's conflict into such a dream, with its particular symbology, at this
time. This is the fact that I was currently concerned with a matter having
points of essential similarity to the patient's experience. Twelve years
previously I had inherited a fairly valuable pocket watch from my father
but I had never used it and had kept it unwound and rundown in my
desk drawer. About six months prior to this episode, mindful of the
wartime difficulties encountered in getting watches repaired, I had taken
this watch to a jeweler to be set going again, thinking to use it as a spare
in case the watch I was wearing went out of order. Two or three weeks
after I had brought it to the jeweler, the latter notified me that although
the watch had been “made in the U. S. A.," it was no longer possible to
obtain a necessary part for it, and he requested me to call for it at my
earliest convenience. For some reason I had not called for the watch
although the jeweler's shop is just around the corner from my office and
directly in my path many times during a week. I kept finding myself
either forgetful, in too much of a hurry, or on my way some place where
I would not find it convenient, etc. The fact remains that I had not
bothered to retrieve the watch.
A few days before the patient's dream my negligence in the matter of
picking up this watch came to my mind in some connection, and for a
fleeting moment the singularity of my tactics of procrastination and my
seeming wish to lose the watch struck me as somehow significant. Strange
as it may seem, however, I put the matter quickly out of mind without
achieving the insight that undoubtedly strikes the reader as perfectly
obvious: the watch represented my father and I was simply acting out
an incompletely resolved attitude of ambivalence toward him. It was only
in connection with the later analysis of my patient's dream that the
meaning of my behavior in regard to my father’s watch became all at
once clear to me in a sudden, affective insight.
What was of particular importance in the final analysis of the pa­
tient’s dream was the aspect of it that seemed clearly to give expression
to one of my hidden, repressed wishes, along with a similarly repressed
wish on the part of the patient which, I am afraid, I might have allowed
to remain unanalyzed had not an awareness of the telepathic latent con­
tent of the dream (which derived, as it were, from both of us) forced me
to unrepress. This wish is clearly represented in the dream element:
I saw the various wheels turning and everything was going. It is apparent
that the bit of acting out I had indulged in in relation to my father’s
watch was only one side of the equation: the other side was the deep
wish, obscured by my forgetfulness and apparent indifference, to have
my father alive again and enjoy his love (the homosexual aspect of which
is plainly revealed in the symbology of the dream). The painful thought
occasioned by the jeweler's pronouncement was that my father, like the
watch, could not be brought to life again; but this verdict is reversed in
the dream where the watch is running as if it had never stopped. It was
only by achieving this insight (which I had, of course, achieved many
times before but which, like all insights, seemed to teeter in a precarious
balance demanding a watchful eye and a repeated process of “working
through”) that I became aware of a dangerous tendency on my part to
block on related material in the patient. My corrected attitude evoked an
immediate reaction in the patient who responded by bringing up a con­
siderable amount of hitherto repressed, affect-laden material from the
corresponding side of his ledger.
Another example:
A middle-aged woman patient dreams: “I was at Atlantic City where
I met you on the boardwalk. You were dressed in a very loud sport jacket
and in general looked very ‘Holly woodish/ I was carrying some books,
a paper bag and my little notebook. You gave me a look as if to say,
‘What! Still running around busilyV ”
The analysis of this dream can best be approached by beginning with
what my look seemed to mean to the patient. This had reference to the
fact that her energetic pursuit of social and professional activities, as I
had frequently pointed out to her, had for the most part the character
of a compulsive flight from certain anxieties, especially those of a sexual
nature. In the dream she is at a resort, presumably for a holiday and a
rest which, in reality, she cannot enjoy because she would then become
prey to anxiety. In the dream situation, however, she has decided to face
this anxiety directly since the paraphernalia she is carrying tell us plainly
what her wish is: sexual gratification. The paper bag is the kind used by
department stores for small purchases; in the dream it symbolizes the
vagina. The patient's association to the books she was carrying was the
books she returned to the library: usually she has not finished with them
and asks for and receives an “extension.” Together in the dream the bag
and the books mean: “Here is my vagina; give me an 'extension’ (erec­
tion).” The little notebook in the dream was the one the patient always
carried with her. In it she marked down what she was “out of”: sugar,
oranges, kleenex, hardware, etc.; it was a symbol of her need, of that
which she lacked: a penis, and love. In this dream it was love that she
wanted.
The patient had no specific association to Atlantic City other than
to its character as a resort. She had not been there in years. Her asso­
ciation to my loud sport jacket and general “Hollywoodish" attire was
that it was just the type of outfit she could not picture me selecting or
wearing. It is in these two items that the telepathic component of the
dream is to be found.
Three days prior to the patient's dream I had purchased a sport
jacket that was about as staid and conservative as the jacket of a business
suit. The salesman had tried to talk me into selecting something on the
brighter side and had begged me to try on various plaids and checks.
When I demurred and remained adamant, he reluctantly let me have my
way. When I got home I realized that, as usual, I had made an inhibited
choice, that the garment was entirely undistinguished, and that I seemed
still unable to break away from a conservatism in dress that I always
later regret.
The second item of telepathic percipience in the patient's dream de­
rived again from my day's residue. On the night of the patient's dream I
had been agitating at my household for a “long week-end" holiday at
Atlantic City. I had been trying to persuade my wife to allow me to
make all the arrangements and secure the necessary accommodations, but
she had raised one objection after another to my proposal: it was a bad
season, it would be too expensive, it would tire the children who were
in the middle of their school term, etc. Why couldn't I just go myself,
she wanted to know; why did I have to make a family pilgrimage out of
it? The idea of going alone did not appeal to me, however, and I dropped
the entire idea.
I had originally intended to include in this communication a fairly
explicit self-analysis based on the material which found its way into the
patient's dream. As I glance through my notes, however, I am somewhat
taken aback at the degree of self-revelation this would entail and am
forced to leave the reader chiefly to his own interpretative devices. How­
ever, the reader will find himself aided in this task by the patient, who
too has apparently assumed interpretative carte blanche. In her dream
the patient comments on my conflicts, as well as her own. And she obvi­
ously makes use of the telepathically perceived facts that I had just pur­
chased an ultraconservative sport jacket and had, on the night of her
dream, been vetoed by my wife on the plan for a holiday at Atlantic
City. She says in the dream: “If your wife does not wish to accompany
you to Atlantic City, why don't you take me with you? Then we can re­
ally get on with our work!" The phrase, “What! Still running around
busily?" implies that my therapeutic efforts with the patient have not
been particularly successful. The reason, according to the patient's (and
perhaps not exclusively the patient's) latent thought, is that I have not
used a direct, “extended" approach to her problem. If only, she fantasies,
I were the kind of person who would choose a loud, Hollywoodish sport
jacket instead of the sober thing I did select, then I might also have gone
 to Atlantic City, as my wife had prodded me to do, and would have had
no scruples about taking her along and making love to her. But, she com­
plains, I am apparently just as afraid of a chance romantic adventure as
I am of wearing a sprightly sport jacket. “How, then, do you expect to
cure me?” she implies.
VI
The real subtleties of psychological interplay between analyst and pa­
tient, and the most instructive sidelights on otherwise hidden aspects of
the transference-countertransference relationship, are to be found in the
phenomenon of telepathic cross association between the two during the
analytic hour. Here, however, the comparative photographic fixity of the
dream is lacking and we do not have the benefit of that framework, that
“caught moment,” in which to examine the telepathic process and
analyze its labyrinthine threads in unhurried leisure. In associative re­
lationships of this sort it is generally a quick, touch-and-go affair with
the telepathic incident being suddenly struck off like a spark which in a
brief moment will lose its glow and fade into unreality. Furthermore, it
is much more difficult to assure oneself in such a situation that factors
other than telepathy—intuition, coincidence, suggestion, and the like—
are not at play. Nevertheless, when one determinedly snatches the pass­
ing event out of the air, as it were, and pins it down for closer scrutiny,
one can generally convince oneself that it is really telepathy at work and
that the principles underlying its emergence are precisely those which we
have discovered operating elsewhere. But one soon ceases to ask oneself
each time anew whether it is really telepathy that has been demonstrated.
In the long run one comes to accept the fact that this is by far the
simplest assumption one can make, even if the evidential value of this or
that particular instance is alone not enough on which to base a belief in
a hypothesis for which we have as yet no physical foundation. This, of
course, is more or less the way in which we come to accept the hypothesis
of the unconscious itself: ultimately we find that such an assumption ex­
plains more than any other assumption or set of assumptions in the situa­
tion we are studying.
The phenomenon of cross association comes about when a thought
or a fantasy in the mind of the analyst suddenly intersects a thought or
fantasy articulated by the patient, or vice versa. There are numerous in­
stances, of course, where this intersection can be easily accounted for on
the basis of the fact that the analyst, who is not concentrating too in­
tently on what the patient is saying but following with “free-floating” at­
tention, is identifying himself with the patient to the extent that the
latter's associations may stimulate sympathetic chords so that the analyst
will respond associatively with thoughts or fantasies that are derivatively,
even though cryptically, related on a demonstrably nontelepathic basis.
In many cases, however, it is impossible to account for the observed cross
association on such a basis alone, even though the conventional explana­
tion may carry us part of the way. The organism always acts with utmost
economy of function, and the telepathic process can generally be ob­
served to utilize whatever ordinary stepping stones lie to hand; but there
comes a moment, just as when two electrodes approach that distance
from each other at which the potential is able to snap the current across
the intervening gap, when the spark occurs, and one can retrospectively
observe that to achieve this spark, the patient, the analyst, or both—as if
influenced by some unseen force—have been pulled slightly (sometimes
greatly) out of the line of their expected individual orbits.
A simple example will serve to introduce us to the phenomenon of
telepathic cross association.
I had just come from a conference on hypertension and coronary
thrombosis. During an analytic hour I began to ponder the question of
differential organic neurotic adaptations. Why hypertension or coronary
artery spasm in some cases and convulsive seizures or migraine in others?
All have the factor of repressed aggression. So has the obsessive and de­
pressed middle-aged patient on the couch before me; yet he has no phys­
ical symptoms and no clinically demonstrable organic difficulty. How is
it that with his lifelong neurotic conflicts he has still managed to escape
organic injury? Perhaps he is the “silent" type who will one day get a
sudden coronary attack.
At this point my patient, who had been weeping and complaining
about his unhappy lot, said, “Why don't I die? Why don’t I simply get a
heart attack and die? Others do. The trouble with me is that I’m so
damned healthy." This was a fantasy new to the patient. He often spoke
in an obsessive way about suicide, but never before, to my recollection,
about having a heart attack.
It would not be difficult to pass by this episode, if one noticed it at
all,4 with the feeling that it represented nothing more than sheer, mean­
ingless coincidence (whatever this well-worn concept means). Neverthe­
less here, as in most instances of this kind, there exist signs to indicate
that the probabilities against the event having occurred in a chance man­
ner are rather high. First, as a closer scrutiny of the data will demon­
strate, there occurs not one point of intersection between my associations
and the patient’s fantasy but two: heart disease and the question of dif­
ferential adaptation in different individuals. (Note the patient’s remark:
“Others do [get heart attacks, why don’t I?]. The trouble with me is
that I’m so damned healthy.") Although these are potentially linked
4 One soon recognizes that in the process of becoming aware of such a “coincidence”
one has to work against a strong tendency toward a sort of isolation-dissociation. One
can only speculate on the number of such instances which never survive our repressive
defenses, the very mechanism which gives rise to the occurrence in the first place.
ideas, they are far from being necessarily so; so far as they occur together
in both myself and the patient, without a reasonable background for the
expectation of such an occurrence in the latter, the factor of chance, as
the elementary theory of probability tells us, is greatly reduced.
Next to consider is the matter of timing or temporal coincidence. If
the patient's remarks had followed my fantasy by a matter of minutes
one would not judge the occurrence to be in any way remarkable (al­
though one might therein be wrong). One would expect both in the case
of dreams and in cross associations, that instances where the material of
the analyst and patient is related with such manifest and latent specificity
would be distributed with a certain temporal diffuseness if a chance fac­
tor alone were operating. However, even allowing for corrections of ex­
pected ebbs and flows in the trends toward mutual identification in
analyst and patients, and taking into account the greater difficulty of
perceiving and integrating material separated in time, such is not the
case. The fact is that we do not find what we might expect to occur on a
chance basis: namely, a striking similarity (i.e., beyond the usual results
of a common symbolic heritage) between the current dream of one patient
and the dream of another days or weeks hence, or an equally striking
relationship between what the analyst happens to be thinking at one mo­
ment and what the patient says twenty minutes or a day later. Actually
we find these occurrences lumping up in a fashion quite out of keeping
with any hypothesized curve of chance distribution. In most instances, as
in the instance under discussion, the condition of absolute simultaneity
seems to prevail. Unfortunately, the precision of timing involved is a
factor of such delicacy that its effect can scarcely be communicated. One
has to experience repeatedly this sensation of simultaneity before one
comes to the realization that such exquisite timing is integrally a part of
the telepathic process and is rarely, if ever, approximated by even the
"straight" unconscious.5
The final factor indicating that the probabilities against the chance
occurrence of an event such as we are considering are rather high, is that
this "coincidence" can without difficulty be patternized or interpreted in
a manner completely in conformity to our accepted notions of the dy­
namics of the transference-countertransference situation. In the present
instance the patient is reacting to my repressed hostility toward him (dis­
guised by my associations which, when analyzed, add up to the fantasy:
"Why doesn’t this troublesome, complaining fellow get a heart attack
c The one exception seems to occur in instances in which the analyst is the per­
cipient of the patient's preconscious thoughts, and where the direction of telepathic
flow, so to speak, is from the patient toward the analyst. Here it often happens that
the analyst, who may otherwise be rarely given to obsessive thought tendencies, may
find himself strangely ruminating a thought or fantasy for a few seconds or even a min­
ute before the circle is suddenly broken by the patient's intersecting thought. It is as
if the analyst begins to react when the thought enters the patient's preconscious and as
if he is compelled to hold obsessively (and often in a peculiar, ego-alien way) to this
thought until the patient releases his provoking material into consciousness. At this
point discharge occurs and the analyst is suddenly liberated from his obsessive preoc­
cupation. But even this is widely different from anything we might expect on a chance
distribution basis.
and leave me in peace?”) by developing a fantasy of typical masochistic
compliance (“Very well, I will get a heart attack, if that's the way you
feel about me!"). Such an interpretation happens to fit this patient's char­
acter structure squarely, and certainly does no violence to my feelings in
the matter, as every analyst who has had a patient of this kind will read­
ily understand. The reader will recognize that it is not as easy to contrive
an acceptable analytic patternization of events linked at random as the
opponents of psychoanalysis, who customarily raise this objection to
analytic interpretations, may imagine. Obviously this condition applies
with equal force to presumptive telepathic events.
The following is an example of cross association with features some­
what similar to the first.
During an analytic hour, my eye catches a volume of Baron's History
of the Jews standing among other volumes between book ends on the
mantelpiece. I remind myself that I should start collecting notes for a
study of anti-Semitism that I have in mind. I recall the article on this
subject that I read last night in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The name
of the author, Wolf, comes to my mind and nests there for a moment or
two somewhat obsessively, as if there were something strange about it. It
is not a specifically Jewish name, and I wonder if the author is a Jew. I
resolve to get a copy of a larger work by this Wolf, a work cited in the
bibliography.
At this moment the patient mentions that he was paid a visit the day
before by a woman who had just brought her daughter from a Mrs.
Wolfs dancing class. This amuses him. “That's what you have to look
forward to, doctor: your daughter going to Mrs. Wolf's dancing class. I
guess that's the thing for all well-bred Hebrew girls to do." He laughs at
this fantasy.
What is striking here is not simply the fact that the patient mentions
a name of which I am thinking; it is the fact that he mentions the name
in connection with the Jewish question, which I am also thinking about
in relation to this name. With this coupling the anti-chance probability
rises considerably since neither in the case of the patient's association of
the name Wolf with the Jewish question nor in mine do these two ele­
ments have as high a degree of the self-determinating, non-random
linkage factor as it might at first appear. A moment's reflection will reveal
that I could have thought of the anti-Semitic question in a hundred ways
without having dragged in Mr. Wolf. As a matter of fact, I need not even
have thought of the problem of anti-Semitism at all, since this is scarcely
a direct and inevitable consequence of my eye having spied a volume on
Jewish history. Then again, we might ask why in the first place my eye
singled out this volume standing inconspicuously, from the standpoint
of size, color and position, with eleven others on my mantelpiece. In the
case of the patient's association, an even greater looseness in this kind of
determination would seem to have obtained.
The episode under consideration becomes significant in the light of
other, behind-the-scenes factors related to this telepathic interchange be­
tween the patient and myself. The aspect of the anti-Semitic question
which interests me in particular is the degree to which the socially am­
bitious Jews who attempt to identify with the traditions and social values
of the Gentiles have to repress their fear of and hostility to the latter. I
believe that this common tendency has unexplored consequences leading
to an increase in the anti-Semitic potential and resulting in a vicious
circle which can never be broken until the hidden aggressions are once
again found and, as such, given adequate and vigorous expression in
overt social and political activity. I have been particularly impressed
with the difficulties experienced by any Jew who has not become fully
conscious of where he stands on this question in achieving a satisfactory
measure of personal and social integration.
My patient, a Jew, is a Gentile camp-follower. His notion of social
success is the extent to which he can make himself indistinguishable from
the Gentile and be accepted by him. Yet the closer he comes to this ideal
the unhappier he is. He frequently pokes fun at himself in this regard
but cannot yet free himself from this neurotic compulsion.
In his remarks during this episode, besides poking fun at himself and
his friends, the patient is also twitting me. In effect he is saying: "You,
too, Doctor, will be finally unable to withstand the social pressure. Don't
fill your head with theories on the Jewish question. When your daughter
grows up you too will be taking her to dancing class along with all the
other ‘well-bred' Hebrews." His choice of the term "Hebrew" instead of
"Jews," incidentally, points up the incongruity he means to suggest.
In this instance all the signs indicate that the direction of telepathic
flow was from the patient to me: that I, in other words, had perceived
telepathically something that was in the patient's preconscious which he
was about to communicate to me. It is possible that I have developed a
reaction formation on the Jewish question and find the notion that I
might "sell out" an unpleasant idea against which I must defend myself
by protesting the opposite. This I accomplish by responding to the pa­
tient's preconscious accusations with the thought: "You are quite wrong.
So far am I from selling out that I am even now preparing a study which
will prove that such a tendency is disastrous all around." The episode
reveals to me, however, that I had better analyze my reaction formation
before I proceed very much further either with my projected study or
with the analysis of this patient in relation to whose conflicts, it now be­
comes clear, I am not sufficiently detached.
VII
One can observe that in the telepathic interplay between analyst and
patient there is no special type of material that favors the development
of the telepathic process more than any other, unless, of course, it hap­
pens to be related to those complexes in himself with which the analyst
may have most difficulty. Still, this will occasion only a statistical pre­
dominance of one type of material, not the qualitative exclusion of other
kinds, and one finds that repressed material of all categories—sexual,
aggressive, oedipal, preoedipal, narcissistic, etc.—can be thrown into the
spotlight through emergence in a telepathic episode. At certain times
one is likely to find one type of material coming to the fore, other types
at other times, a circumstance which provides us with an invaluable tool
for self-analysis and the stabilization of the countertransference.
One of the difficult conditions of analytic practice is the negative
phase of transference during which the patient may attack the analyst
with unremitting fierceness. In such a circumstance, the analyst, despite
his general understanding of the situation and the buffering effect of the
interpretative process, may have to repress an impulse to defend himself
or retaliate. A consequence of such repression least harmful to both pa­
tient and analyst is that the latter's counterhostility be transformed into
keener analytic activity which, of course, satisfies his aggressive needs at
the same time that it provides for him a means of vindication. The fol­
lowing is an example in which the analyst in such a circumstance is pro­
voked into telepathic percipience.
A patient reported a series of dreams in which a central theme was
her unwillingness to accept her lack of a penis. In the first dream she had
a broken front tooth, and her angry feeling in the dream was that where­
as other women might make the best of such a defect, she was not going
to put up with it. In the second dream she was in a Red Cross blood
bank giving blood in memory of a male acquaintance in the army who
had been “reported missing.” Instead of giving the usual pint, she gave
just a small amount, and the blood was thin and watery. (Menstrual
blood “in memory" of the missing penis.) In the third dream she was in
the bathroom with “Betty" X. and was looking for a thermometer which
she found hidden in the bathtub drain pipe. (Concealed penis, anal
equivalent.)
The patient reported these dreams in rapid succession, not pausing to
associate to any of them on the way. Immediately thereafter she launched
into a sniping attack on my technique, my competence, my soundness,
etc. After a few minutes of this I interrupted her to point out that her
dreams indicated how keenly she felt the lack of a penis and that this was
somehow related to her need to act in a castrative way toward me. I sug­
gested then that we return to her dreams for a more detailed analysis of
their contents, whereupon the following exchange took place.
I: “Now who is this ‘Betty* you refer to in the last dream?"
Patient: “Her name isn't ‘Betty/ it's ‘Bessie/ "
I: “Oh—I was giving her name Ye Olde Tea Shoppe touch,
wasn't I?"
Patient: “As a matter of fact she spells her name B-e-s-s-y-e." (Pause.)
“I guess that is Ye Olde Tea Shoppe touch if ever there was one."6
6 This is an example of how the analyst can be provoked into saying something
quite superfluous and out of place from the conventional technical standpoint, as if
motivated by an unconscious compulsion. Holl6s cites a similar instance.
 Here quite obviously, I was reacting to the patient's castrative attack
by exhibiting my intellectual phallus (telepathic percipience). At the
same time, however, and as a result of gratifying my repressed sadistic
retaliatory impulse, I had stumbled upon something of crucial im­
portance which the patient was attempting to conceal behind the ana­
lytically imposing facade of a series of dreams whose very obviousness
should have invited suspicion. This crucial point was precisely what lay
concealed behind the seemingly innocent change from “Bessie” to
“Bessye" (“Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" touch). It is possible that the patient
might not have mentioned the point had I not reached down and dragged
it out in this manner.
The change in this name from “i" to “y" in either printed or written
form signifies the substitution of a penis for a vagina, as a study of the
basic shape of these letters will indicate. It is, however, a change that is
camouflaged behind a seeming move in the direction of increased or in­
tensified feminity. Yet the entire “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" idea is really a
burlesque of true femininity behind which lies an aggressive snobbishness
that can be used quite castratively, especially against men. This was pre­
cisely what existed in the patient as a very subtle, deeply rooted and per­
sistent trend, something which had come up again and again in the
analysis and which in the past the patient and I had come to refer to as
the “parasol, lavender and lace" complex. The patient had many sadistic
ways of exhibiting this trend, while concomitantly utilizing it to buttress
her inflated notions of exclusiveness and superiority over the common
run of people. Now, through the analysis of this dream in which “Bessye"
(with whom she identified) was with the patient in the bathroom where
she found her concealed, anal penis, it became clear that not only was
this “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" or “parasol, lavender and lace" touch an at­
tempted repudiation by the patient of her concealed anal gratifications
(which were penis substitutes) but it was also a direct compensation for
her lack of a penis, just as Bessie compensated for her lack by changing
her name to Bessye. (It should be mentioned that the patient had
changed her name from a Semitic to an Anglo-Saxon one which, in con­
nection with her social ambitions, was just as much a compensation for
her lack of a penis as the change from “Bessie" to “Bessye.") As it turned
out, Bessie's name change and what it represented was the only reason
for the use of “Bessye" in the dream.7
This brings us to a final factor in the telepathic interplay between
me and the patient in connection with this name change. While the pa­
tient's attack on my analytic competence had clearly dealt a blow to my
narcissism, another area of vulnerability in me has to do with my name
“Jule," which is weak and feminine instead of strong and masculine like
“Jules" or “Julius." My name has often occasioned joking remarks (par­
ticularly by women who are eager, like the patient, to expose some fem­
inine weakness in me) and I not infrequently get circularized letters
7 I have invariably found that where a woman has preferentially adopted a "y” in
place of an “i” or “o” in her name (e.g., as in Edythe, Caryl) observation will disclose
a strong but usually inverted penis envy throughout her entire character structure.
This may also, curiously enough, be observed in the case of men.
addressed to “Miss Jule—.” The full import of my telepathic percipience
in this instance, thus, is not only my effort to vindicate myself and punish
the patient for her attack, but my attempt at the same time to demon­
strate my superiority in a particularly appropriate and cutting way. This
is accomplished by a telepathic perception in which I demonstrate my
prowess, expose a hidden character weakness of the patient arid, at the
same time, finally hold up to her the fact that in my case only my name
is feminine whereas in her case no matter what she does to a name or its
equivalent she cannot really get a penis.
VIII
A study of the finer currents of the transference-countertransference
relationship as they manifest themselves in telepathic interplay reveals
that the therapeutic relationship between analyst and patient is not al­
ways a one-way affair with only the analyst in the role of therapist; there
are instances where, on the inarticulate, unconscious level of thought
transference, the therapeutic balance is tipped in favor of the analyst.
One gets the impression that the anxiety potentials in the analyst and
patient exist in a free fluid state constantly striving to achieve equilib­
rium, with the analyst unconsciously seeking out in the patient the neu­
tralizing areas for his own anxieties at the same time that the reverse is
going on. The use of the patient for these purposes by the analyst is, of
course, a well-known phenomenon that is looked upon ordinarily as a
perversion of the analytic relationship. However, in so far as the analyst
is a human being striving for the satisfaction of his needs, it is not an
easy matter for him to keep his strivings from seeping into “the sessions
of sweet, silent thought,” however much they are inhibited in the more
overt aspects of practice. The following is a relatively simple illustration
of this phenomenon.
At the start of the hour a patient began to talk about his young son's
upper respiratory infection which had just been controlled by sulfadi­
azine. My attention began to wander somewhat and my thoughts turned
to a matter apparently provoked by my eye just having rested on Pro­
fessor X.'s book on psychotherapy which was wedged into place on one
of the shelves at the far side of the room. It was a bad book, and I re­
called the scathing review of it which I had written. What somehow
seized the center of my thoughts at this moment was a parenthetical re­
mark in this review that had been deleted by the cautious editor. “Psy­
choanalysis,” I had written, “is referred to by the author as ‘mental
liquidation' (where he picked up this banker's cant, he does not state).”
I smiled to myself as I recalled this remark about “banker's cant” but
silently conceded that the editor had been right to delete my envious
allusion to the fact that the professor must have had bankers as patients,
a fact widely known.
 My thoughts must have been somewhat obsessively revolving about
this circumstance for a half-minute or so when the patient began to tell
me a dream of the night before in which he was standing on a station
platform with Herbert Hoover to whom he was giving a few pointers on
administration, explaining to the ex-president why he had missed his
chance of becoming historically great. The patient laughed in some em­
barrassment on recounting this dream and insisted on immediately giv­
ing me its background in order to demonstrate that the idea of his chat­
ting with Hoover was not such a grandiose delusion as it might seem
from the dream. He explained that on the preceding evening he had had
two bankers to dinner, friends of his of long standing. They had talked
of the fact that a few evenings before they and other bankers had been
to a dinner with Hoover at which certain matters of party policy had
been discussed.
The unconscious interplay between the patient and myself in this in­
stance would seem to have followed the pattern of purposive behavior in
so far as the psychic apparatus acts in a way to reduce tension. Here my
needs are met by the immediately forthcoming associations of the patient
which provide a reassuring fantasy for my frustration at not having
wealthier people or even bankers as patients. “Some of my best friends
are bankers,” the patient informs me. “If you treat me nicely, perhaps
some day I will send you one as a patient.” It should be stated, of course,
that I had had no idea that my relatively new patient traveled in such
circles since he himself was a teacher with, as far as I knew, an essentially
middle-class and somewhat liberal background.
The question occurs as to whether the patient's information about
his circle of acquaintances would not have given me just as much of a
lift without my prior preoccupation with bankers and “banker's cant.”
What economy of function, in other words, was served by my setting up
a situation of tension in order, apparently, to meet the patient's tension-
reducing device half way? It is as if my reservoir of latent anxiety, like an
electro-magnetic field, were capable of transiently developing high po­
tentials in those areas close to an avenue of possible discharge, with a
temporary redistribution of anxiety being effected in order to develop
the optimal concentration at the point most suitable for this discharge.
This kind of behavior may be observed again and again, but I am afraid
that answers by analogy to the questions it raises cannot be very satis­
factory.
There is another aspect of this cross association that is of sufficient in­
terest to warrant mention. This is the fact that although I had not con­
sciously thought of my review of Professor X.'s book for a long time, I
cannot recall ever in the past having thought of it without a twinge of
regret and perhaps resentment at the deletion of my “choice” paren­
thetical remark. How does it happen that when it springs to mind at the
current moment, I finally bestow upon the editor absolution for his
crime, think of the deletion with no resentment, applaud the editor's
superior tact and smile at my own envy and bad taste? Had a genuine
therapeutic progression taken place for my attitude to have changed as it
had? It might at first appear that a “working through” had occurred.
Reference to the patient's forthcoming associations, however, and taking
into account the assumption that I had telepathic access to them, would
indicate that no real insight or working through had occurred in me any
more than it can be said to occur in a miser who tips his porter a half­
dollar just after he has learned that he has inherited a fortune. In my
instance, I am finally permitted to think with some charity of both the
author and the editor simply because I too am about to learn, as it were,
that I may some day inherit a banker. (The patient, I am afraid, was
clearly resorting to tactics of reassurance therapy instead of forcing me
to analyze out the deeper unconscious determinants of my attitude.)
Not all cross associations are as comparatively simple as the ones cited.
Sometimes they are extraordinarily complex, involving besides the ana­
lyst two or three patients severally participating in an equilibrating sys­
tem that moves across the analytic day with the analyst at the vortex and
the others being drawn in one by one, all giving to the system according
to their capacities and taking according to their needs. I have at hand,
as I write, the detailed and extended notes on one such telepathic series
that I had intended to include in this communication because it illus­
trates very well the temporary reversal of roles in the analytic situation
and demonstrates conclusively that the two patients involved were giving
me a much needed supportive therapy. However, my better judgment
now warns me to forego such an extravagance and to omit the exposi­
tion of this series since, when I identify with the reader (who, I realize,
does not have at his finger tips the interstitial data and background in­
formation that I unconsciously call upon and use), I find myself ex­
tremely hard put to follow the threads of the projected demonstration.
In any case it cannot be too frequently emphasized that the outstand­
ing characteristic of practically all telepathic occurrences as seen in
analysis is the involvement of the analyst himself to the extent that his
repressed, affect-laden material therein relates itself dynamically to the
repressed material of the patient. This material, as Holl6s pointed out,
may be held in repression at any and all levels of the psychic apparatus,
from the preconscious to the deep unconscious, and has its derivatives,
naturally, in all temporal and topographical aspects of the individual.
Although frequently the case, the repressed material of the analyst need
not always be “identical” with or similar to that of the patient so long
as the one can function in relation to the other in such a way as to re­
duce anxiety in one or both. The one apparent exception to the rule that
the analyst, if he search deeply enough, will always find himself involved
in the telepathic occurrence in analysis, is where two patients dovetail
in a telepathic dream or dreams without seeming to involve the analyst
in the transaction except as a passive middleman. There seem to be in­
stances in this category in which the analyst can still find himself unrep­
resented after an honest and thorough search of the data. Yet even here
it would be safer to consider the exception merely “apparent,” pending
further investigation. The following is a relatively simple example of an
occurrence of this nature which initially appeared as if it might be one
of the exceptions but which later turned out to follow the general rule.
A woman patient in analysis reported the following dream of the
night before: “I was in a vegetable store. I said to the clerk: 'Give me
two potatoes—what am I saying—I mean two pounds/ " An analysis of
this dream based exclusively on this patient's associations and day's resi­
due indicated that its meaning was precisely what one would have im­
mediately suspected from the transparent manifest content: the patient
would like to obtain male genitalia. Curiously, despite the simplicity and
seeming transparence of the dream's manifest content, it had been elab­
orated from a great amount of overdetermined latent material which had
been dealt with by distortion, displacement, condensation, etc., just as if
the manifest content had been cryptic and complicated. One wondered
what all the fuss was about. However, the analysis of the dream did
serve to demonstrate conclusively that the patient (whom I knew in any
case to have a strong penis envy) wanted testicles—not breasts or ovaries.
Two hours later a male patient in analysis reported the following
dream of the night before: ‘ I was a grocery clerk in some store selling
shredded wheat, grape nuts, etc ” This patient suffered from sexual im­
potence associated with an intensely passive, dependent attitude toward
life. I had frequently pointed out to him that despite his conscious
protestations to the contrary, he would not welcome the return of sexual
activity but would unconsciously do everything in his power to maintain
a state of genital quiescence and inactivity. To demonstrate my point I
had arranged for him two days before to have an injection of male sexual
hormone, which he had long requested me to do. Several hours following
the injection he began to experience intense anxiety and telephoned me
in a panic to be reassured that the physician who had injected him had
not made a mistake in the dosage (a point to which I shall refer later).
During his hour on the day of the dream (i.e., the hour preceding the
one in which he reported the dream) I had pointed out to the patient
that his anxiety could not have been due to the chemical stimulation of
the hormone, since this would not have taken effect for several days to
come, but was due to the inner threat that it might work. This was a dis­
turbing prospect not only because of his castration anxiety, but also be­
cause it would mean, by implication, that he might have to relinquish
the infantile, passive way of life to which originally he had regressed as a
secondary compensation for his genital inactivity but which now had
achieved a powerful momentum of its own.
This patient's dream taken by itself would seem simply to be an at­
tempted repudiation of the passive, dependent wishes that I had cited in
him: “I do not wish to be served on an oral, infantile level,” he would
appear to protest; “on the contrary, I wish to serve others in this fashion.”
Taken in conjunction with the dream of the first patient, however, this
dream exhibits a concealed self-castrative wish (Rado's “riddance reflex”)
in complete conformity with my interpretation of the day before. When
my female patient expresses a dream wish for the male genitalia, this pa­
tient says, “Here, I'll give you mine (grape ‘nuts').” When this interpreta­
tion was communicated to the patient, along with the evidence that had
made it possible, he responded with an immediate confirmation by re­
calling fantasies of self-castration that he had never before brought up—
not even, strangely, during the analytic sessions of the preceding days
which had dealt with the same trends.
Here was an instance where I found it difficult to plot my own posi­
tion along the ordinate of my female patient and the abscissa of my male
patient. Conceivably I might have managed to work myself in somewhat
hermaphroditically since, at the very least, I was in any case involved
with the attitudes of each patient in the transference situation and the­
oretically should not have found it too difficult to find somewhere in my
unconscious a corresponding set of anxieties to each. However that may
be, the fact remained that any latent anxieties in these areas that I might
have had were not discoverably in evidence at this time, since a careful
search among the data failed to reveal one specific reference to me and
my problems.
With some apologies for the manner in which this exposition must
unavoidably be organized, I wish to return now to an aspect of the
dreams and their interrelationship which is brought to the fore by the
item we temporarily shelved a while back: the matter of injection and
dosage. As we stated earlier, the first patient's dream—as it stood—had
been elaborated from an imposing mass of overdetermined latent mate­
rial from the experience of the patient herself; and we apparently had no
need to borrow from other sources in order to render it completely in­
telligible to ourselves and to the patient. When the second patient's
dream was reported, it appeared at first blush as if it were solely and ex­
clusively a dependent, parasitic structure, deriving its entire life and
meaning from the manifest and latent material of the first patient's
dream and contributing nothing in return. It appeared, in other words,
as if the first patient's dream—a distinct and unified entity in itself when
annotated by the patient's own associations—could have been dreamed
at exactly the same time and in exactly the same terms had not the second
patient even existed, whereas the second patient's dream manifestly
hinged on that of the first. If this were so, such an event, contradicting
the rule of telepathic reciprocity, would pose a problem of considerable
theoretical significance.
Actually, deeper study of these dreams revealed that the first was not
as independent in its derivation as it had appeared to be. One of the
latent sources of this dream had been an experience of the patient on the
day of the dream. She had gone to the grocery store with the idea of
buying one hundred pounds of potatoes. When she got there she decided
to buy only ten pounds because the weather had become warm and she
feared that the larger amount would spoil. But the sudden change in the
weather had also provoked another thought in the patient: soon she
would have to exhibit herself on the beach. This was always an unpleas­
ant thought because it meant unconsciously: “Everyone will see that I
have no penis, that I am only a woman.” In the dream one thought dis­
places the other but utilizes the same mechanism of adjustment to the un­
conscious requirements of the situation: “If I can handle one situation by
asking for ten pounds instead of one hundred, why cannot I meet the
other threat provoked by the warm weather by making a seeming slip
and asking for two potatoes instead of two pounds.” During the analytic
hour in which the dream was reported the patient made several puns and
showed a tendency consistently to sink into slang expression. This was so
marked that the patient herself commented on it. This trend was, as it
were, an extension of the dream pun (potatoes: testicles) and provided a
clear hint as to the mechanism on which the dream elaboration hinged,
as well as seemingly explaining the meaning behind the manifest dream
element “what am I saying ” (The element of transformation and magic
substitution contained in punning is often at the roots of such a tendency
in women with a strong penis wish.) At the time this dream was ana­
lyzed, the foregoing material appeared completely adequate to account
for the elements found in the manifest content, especially when taken in
conjunction with other of the patient's associations (potato races, her
unusual competitiveness, prizes, her compulsive need to search for four-
leaf clovers) and a slight bit of acting out (a confessed unwillingness to
take off her jacket during the hour despite the heat). What did not reveal
itself at the time, however, was a thread of latent data that I did not per­
ceive until after I had already communicated to the second patient the
interpretation which seemed—even as it stood—adequate enough. When
the data were subsequently combed, the following striking and hitherto
unsuspected correspondence emerged, throwing a new light on the ques­
tion that had arisen in my mind. During the first patient's summer holi­
day almost a year before, she had asked a young country doctor to give
her an injection for hay fever (which, in her case, had a strong phallic
component). Through some slip a mistake had been made in the dosage,
and she received in a single injection ten times the correct amount, an
error that almost brought on a state of shock. Although the patient did
not bring this up in association to the dream element of a slip involving
metrically related amounts, I now recalled the episode in connection with
the second patient's injection and his frantic telephone call to ascertain
whether a mistake might not have been made in the dosage. It became
clear from this that the first patient had made use of this event and had
woven it into the already firm fabric of her dream by substituting it for
her metrically overdosaged injection of the past summer. In other words,
if any male sexual hormone was being given out, she wanted to be in on
it, and if any slip in dosage was being made—well, as long as it was male
sexual hormone, the more the merrier.
Thus we see that an apparent exception to the rule of telepathic
reciprocity has lost its claim to be an exception when a more detailed
analysis of the data was undertaken. And if the reader now spies what
else has emerged from the additional data, he will see at once that an ex­
ception to another rule has fallen by the wayside: namely, the analyst is
involved in this interplay after all. It is all too clear now that the first
patient also wanted an “injection” from me, and that the reason I prob­
ably repressed any sexual response to her was because she did not want
the “injection” as such (this is a painful, not a pleasurable business to
her) but only as a means of extracting from it the phallic potency it
might bring. Thus I find that my castration anxiety, which initially I
had thought was not in evidence in relation to this telepathic episode,
was present after all, conscientiously guarding my integrity and seeing to
it that some one else was found and pressed into service as a sacrificial
victim. A final survey, then, of what I as an active and reactive middle­
man had engineered would seem to indicate that I had thereby done
each patient a disservice. But it allows me to hold with more conviction
the impression that I have mentioned earlier: future investigation may
reveal that no telepathic occurrence in analysis, even in the category of
the reve a deux or a trois among the patients, excludes the analyst and
his repressions from taking an active role therein. And I should not
neglect to mention, finally, that where my dreams get mixed with those
of patients, I always turn out to be heavily involved, as one would natu­
rally expect, no matter how tenuous the linkage might at first appear
from an examination of the manifest contents. Fortunately, I have no
occasion to cite this material since the principles involved are sufficiently
explicable in terms of data to some degree less personal.
IX
The reader can gather from the foregoing examples that the func­
tional range and complexity of telepathic phenomena far transcend what
may be simply subsumed under the term “extrasensory perception,” and
for this reason it might be wiser to continue with the term “telepathy,”
faulty though it may be, until a better one suggests itself. Telepathy, in
other words, is no more a matter of isolated, dissociated perception than
is any other purposeful human activity: it is obviously a thoroughgoing
part of the total behavior of the individual, suited to his homeostatic
needs, and capable of—in fact, necessarily—integrating itself into the
main currents of his life and being. No mere concept of the unitary
“mental” function, in the tradition of the older, elementalistic psy­
chologies, can cover the dynamic gestalt of fantasy, emotion, activity
which we see exhibited in these phenomena, any more than it could the
complexities of individual behavior that psychoanalysis has formerly de­
scribed. As a matter of fact, once we have grasped the reality of the
telepathic unconscious, it becomes immediately clear that we cannot
make a division between one side of life that has telepathic determinants
and another side that has not, any more than we can say that the uncon­
scious is at work in one set of human activities but not in another. It is
simply a question of quantitative and qualitative relationships that have
yet to be fully explored.8
8 For example, it is no more mysterious or supernatural for a telepathic stimulus to
occasion an asthmatic attack or any other set of physiological events than it is, on one
hand, for a telepathically perceived stimulus to be reacted to in a dream, or, on the
 It would not be difficult to speculate widely about the possible im­
portance of telepathy in a fuller understanding of psychiatric, psycho­
analytic, biological and sociological problems. For the present, however,
I prefer to remain within short tether of the data as observed in analysis;
beyond this, every man to his own fancies.
As far as analysis goes, an understanding of telepathic behavior seems
to place in our hands an instrument of definite potentialities at the same
time that it points unmistakably toward certain ultimate limitations in
our ability to perceive and comprehend the psychological activities of
the patient. The promise of the instrument lies in the sharpened focus
with which we may in this way view the patient’s unconscious life, the
deepened background out of which interpretations can be communicated,
and the greater measure of control afforded the analyst in the transfer-
ence-countertransference relationship, where a feed-back system is an
urgent necessity. The limitations suggested are chiefly in the extent to
which we can expect to carry our analysis of dream material when we
realize the broadened scope of the background out of which the “day's
residue” can possibly be derived.
There are many instances in analysis where the use of the telepathic
hypothesis brings to light material that otherwise—at least at the time—
would appear not to be accessible to analytic approach. This is particu­
larly true where the patient holds his deeper attitudes and feelings to­
ward the analyst in such tight check that it is difficult even to glean them
from ordinary dream material. In such cases an analysis of telepathic
dreams has succeeded again and again in forcing the patient to face feel­
ings which conventional analytic techniques seemed unable to bring to
the fore. Naturally this involves communicating to the patient the tel­
epathic background of his dream and supplying him with the telepath­
ically perceived data which otherwise he would be unable to bring to
consciousness and assimilate. One of the most surprising aspects of this
process is the reaction of patients to this type of interpretation: they are
not baffled or disturbed but seem immediately to grasp the core of the
situation as if it were an everyday experience, and repeatedly exhibit the
well-known evidences of a correct and effective interpretation—laughter,
delighted astonishment, confirmatory material, the resolution of a symp­
tom. I have yet to discover a contraindication to this kind of interpreta-
other hand, for a nontelepathic stimulus to be reacted to in bodily terms, a circum­
stance which is now accepted as commonplace enough. In analysis I have seen several
examples of psychosomatic developments on a telepathic basis where the dynamics
were no less clear—and no more mysterious—than in the instances of telepathy in an­
alysis already cited. However, since these examples do not illustrate any basic prin­
ciples beyond those already described, there is no need to include them in this paper.
tion, nor would there seem to be any limitations to its use other than the
discretion necessarily involved in touching upon the intimate secrets of
others, or the extent of the analyst’s reluctance to disclose details of his
own personal life. The tendency of the patients to make capital of this
“special” type of linkage to the analyst must, naturally, be analyzed along
with other aspects of their transference strivings.
The only instances I have seen in which interpretation based upon
telepathic data was even mildly disturbing occurred in the cases of two
obsessive neurotics. But in the case of one of them, a woman who was
severely crippled by her obsessional neurosis, such interpretations, it must
be said, were hardly more disturbing than other aspects of the analytic
approach: it was simply that anything which threatened to penetrate her
excessively intellectualized defenses was sufficient to provoke her scorn
and hostility. The other patient had an obsessive character neurosis and
the basis of her negative reaction turned out to be related to specific
childhood oedipal fantasies which had been deeply repressed. When this
was analyzed out in the course of telepathic dream analysis, a clear turn­
ing point in the patient’s treatment was reached. Lest it be imagined that
something in the structure of the obsessional neurosis itself might render
difficult the use of interpretation based upon telepathic data, I should
mention that a third obsessive neurotic, a middle-aged man with classical
features of the illness, took to the telepathic aspects of analysis with
great ease.
As to the reactions of other types of individuals, it would be hard at
this point to delineate any outstanding differential characteristics. Nor
would it be possible to state that certain types of individuals are mark­
edly more given to telepathic functioning than others, unless, perhaps, it
be those highly involved in the oedipus complex and having a good deal
of primal scene material in the repressed background.9 However, one
could not state without further study that these individuals function
telepathically to a greater degree than others; it may simply be that the
way in which their material is assembled and elaborated makes it easier
for the analyst to perceive the interrelated patterns. Since accustoming
myself to deal quite easily with telepathic material, I have not yet come
across an analytic patient who appeared without the capacity to function
telepathically, and my experience includes borderline psychotics and
epileptics, as well as neurotics. The phenomenon can also be easily ob­
served in nonanalytic patients and even persons who come for single
consultative visits.
The question naturally arises as to what conditions in the analyst
would favor the emergence of comprehensible telepathic episodes in
0R6heim (XIII) brought out this connection in the case he described.
analysis. The answer probably is to be found in a study of the fluctua­
tions of the analyst’s anxiety level and his characteristic mechanisms of
defense. Obviously, if the hypothesis relating to the role of active repres­
sion in the analyst as a condition for the telepathic occurrence is correct,
an analyst who never experienced anxiety would hardly have occasion to
see the phenomenon; however, the peculiar conditions of analytic work
are usually sufficient to guarantee even the sturdiest practitioner a cer­
tain percentage of off-key days. Holl6s stated, as an auxiliary demonstra­
tion of his thesis in regard to the analyst’s role, that on days in which he
was for some reason anxious or in conflict, when everything went wrong,
the frequency of telepathic occurrences was so great that these seemed to
crowd out all other material. He felt reassured by the fact that fewer
instances seem to have occurred toward the end of his twenty years of ex­
perience with telepathic phenomena. I cannot draw such a simple curve
from my experience. On days on which I am out of sorts or in sub­
jectively felt conflict over some matter, I sometimes perceive few or no
telepathic occurrences in analysis; on days when I am active, have a sense
of well-being and am well disposed toward the world and my fellows
(that is, if I am slightly on the hypomanic side) I am likely to see as much
telepathy as under any other conditions. In the latter circumstance I do
not have less latent anxiety than when I am feeling less buoyant or out
of sorts, but my repressive mechanisms are probably working better. It
would appear as if the analyst’s role in the telepathic process followed
the curve of a parabolic function: too little free-floating anxiety would
not favor the emergence of the telepathic occurrence; too much might
block his perception. As to Holl6s’s assertion that he encountered fewer
manifestations of telepathy in his later years. I am inclined to think that
this may possibly be related to the natural waning of the biological pow­
ers with age. Many types of data have led me to suspect that the tel­
epathic function is more closely geared to the strength of the instinctual
drives, particularly the sexual, than are the more specific sensory func­
tions.
The most important question to be settled in connection with the
role of telepathy in analysis is not the optimum degree of anxiety
or freedom from anxiety in the analyst but his genetic type of psycho­
logical constitution and the way in which his anxieties are structuralized
and related to his defense mechanisms. The question this raises as to
whether or not the technique of analyzing telepathic material can ever
have general applicability will have to be settled by future research.
Whether or not the technique of analysis of telepathic material ever
achieves general applicability, the very fact that telepathic functioning
occurs at all—and this, I believe, can ultimately be proven to the satis­
faction of most—must be considered seriously for the implications it
holds in regard to dream analysis. Freud maintained that the majority
of dreams in a difficult analysis are virtually unanalyzable by means of
the dreamer's own associations (83). This he attributed to high resistance.
“If the pressure is high, one may perhaps succeed in discovering what
the things are with which the dream is concerned, but one cannot make
out what it says about these things. Least of all can one learn any­
thing from them upon the recurring question of where the dreamer's
wish-fulfilment may lie hidden." When one has studied many telepathic
dreams in which wish fulfillments are to be found in events occurring
outside the direct and immediate experiential scope of the dreamer him­
self, one wonders if it is not a fortuitous occurrence when we do manage
satisfactorily to analyze a dream without these contributory factors, par­
ticularly since the patients' resistances may attempt to utilize these very
elements for added concealment, not only from the analyst, but, of course,
from the dreamers' own egos. Fortunately there exist helpful signs to
indicate when a particular dream is apt to incorporate telepathically
perceived residues and under what conditions one should be especially
on the alert for these occurrences. This will have to be the subject of a
separate communication.
X
One of the greatest advances—to my mind the greatest—in the study
of telepathy and allied phenomena occurred when Freud made the simple
observation that psychoanalysis was capable of unmasking a telepathic
event which otherwise could not be recognized as such. In spite of this*
and perhaps because he lacked at the time the tremendous corroborative
value of the statistical work in the field which we now have, Freud re­
mained somewhat ambivalent toward his own discovery. He was partic­
ularly afraid of two things: that the future of psychoanalysis would
somehow be endangered if analysts became preoccupied with the “occult"
(V), and that the work might bring him once more face to face with his
old adversary—religion, perhaps in the sense that the data might be
seized upon by hungry religionists as proof that the materialist concep­
tion of the universe has not given us a correct picture of reality after all.
That the facts of telepathy in any way endanger the accepted body
of psychoanalytic findings cannot be maintained. If anything, these facts
augment, extend and validate what we already know and in no instance
have they revealed anything that might run counter to what has been
solidly established. In certain questions, furthermore, as in the problem
of anxiety dreams in which wish-fulfilling or anxiety-controlling elements
appear to be absent, telepathy provides the necessary data to bring many
apparent exceptions within the scope of the general rule. But I do not
believe that this was Freud's primary concern. No one had a more abso­
lute trust in the methods of science than he, and he repeatedly demon­
strated his capacity to examine a new hypothesis with equanimity and
candor. What was of greater concern to him was the possibility that
psychoanalysis—should its devotees become known as trafficking in a
subject savoring of the black arts—might have on its hands a war on two
fronts when one was troublesome enough.
Such a possibility, nay, almost a certainty should a widespread inter­
est in telepathy develop among analysts, cannot be lightly dismissed.
However, psychoanalysis is in a much stronger position to wage such a
war today than in its earlier years, first because it is at last firmly en­
trenched behind its own achievements and fortified by its diplomatic
successes in many quarters, and second, because its fighting allies possess
greater numbers and are of a much different caliber than what they
could have been twenty or thirty years ago. We do not today have to
align ourselves with discredited crystal gazers and table-lifters; we are
amply supported by researchers of the highest academic standing.
As to the religious question, psychoanalysis armed with the data of
telepathy is in a much better position than ever before—and, I believe,
in a much better position than any other critical discipline—to sound
the death knell for all the superfluous hypotheses that have constituted
the rationalistic background of the religious view of nature. What psy­
choanalysis has dealt with thus far has been the emotional origin of the
need for religion, and this, of course, will probably continue to be a
persistent factor in the future of society. But what psychoanalysis and
every other scientific critique of religion has hitherto neglected to deal
with is a considerable core of empirical fact woven into the texture of
religious doctrine which has immediate, personal significance to millions
upon millions of people. We need not (oftentimes, actually, we cannot)
attack these facts; but with the assumption of telepathy we are in a posi­
tion to strip the deity of his few remaining uses to the faithful as a
conceptual middleman. When the data of telepathy are explored psycho­
analytically, it can be shown that all evidences of divine mercy and love,
as well as of divine wrath, can easily be accounted for on the basis of
the unconscious telepathic interrelationships of mankind. Nor will the
survival hypothesis as it now stands (a hypothesis staunchly defended not
only by uncritical lay persons but by a great many scientists as well)
survive the spotlight of psychoanalytic investigation. Those who have
not studied the extensive data of cross correspondences compiled by
serious investigators in the field may imagine that it is an easy matter to
laugh away the idea of survival on a priori or other grounds. It is not.
I was surprised to find that the hypothesis is buttressed by a good deal
of provocative evidential material and that its demolition would require,
in fact, at least one missing link. But even now that link can be supplied
by the assumptions of both psychoanalysis and telepathy, or rather by
the possibilities of telepathic phenomenology as revealed through psycho­
analytic study (140). All in all, psychoanalysts may be assured that
the study of so-called paranormal psychological phenomena can only
strengthen that view of man and nature which science in general and
psychoanalysis in particular has revealed to us.
Freud concluded an early paper on telepathy by citing the remark
a certain sexton used to add to his recital of the story of St. Denis, who
allegedly, after his execution, picked his severed head up in his arms
and took a step forward with it: “In cases of this sort," the sexton
would say, “it is the first step that counts." It is possible that Freud was
too hopeful in this instance and that many more steps will be needed
before people will take kindly to a hypothesis as unwelcome in its way
as psychoanalysis itself was. Fortunately we shall not be called upon to
convince anyone that an individual can function without his head—
merely that he frequently, as it were, makes good use of someone else’s.
 Chapter 23
THE DREAMS OF TWO PATIENTS IN ANALYSIS
INTERPRETED AS A TELEPATHIC
REVE A DEUX*
By JULE EISENBUD, M.D.

One of the most interesting aspects of telepathic behavior occurs

when two or more individuals who are unknown to each other effect a
psychological relationship in their seemingly separate dreams which
seems to transcend the conventionally conceived barriers of time, space
and ordinary sense perception. Such dreams appear to be by no means
rare and are occasionally seen during the course of analyses, where the
analyst may be privileged to explore the conditions of such an occur­
rence with greater or less success. In a previous publication, one pair of
dreams in this category was described (XXII), and another was men­
tioned in passing in the course of the discussion of a series of events
following an experimental attempt to bring about the telepathic trans­
mission of a number (XXII). In this discussion, no description of the
manifest portions of the dreams or analysis of their latent contents was
given because this would have involved a lengthy and unnecessary di­
gression from the main point of the exposition. Subsequently, however,
many interested readers felt, on varying grounds, that the separate pub­
lication of these dreams was warranted and that the description of the
entire series of events surrounding that experiment ought thereby be
completed.
An analytic patient reported the following dream:
“I was walking the street in a very heavy downpour and came to the
house of a next-door neighbor where I decided to ask for shelter. The
house seemed to be a palatial mansion. I was a little afraid to go in
because these people were very snobbish; but I reasoned that they couldn't
refuse me shelter from such a downpour. When I came inside I was very
conscious of my clothes which were not only soaked and dripping but
very shabby besides
* Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 16:39-60, 1947. Published
here by permission of Dr. Jule Eisenbud and of the editors of The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly.
 On the following night, another analytic patient dreamed:
“I was living in an old shack. Outside there was a heavy downpour.
Some neighbors came in from the rain, of whom the only one I could
identify was Selda X. Although she had just come in from a heavy rain
she was absolutely dry and seemed faultlessly and even glamorously
dressed. She was saying that she always had her things done at the
Chinese laundry because they were returned so white and clean. She also
said that she had a reciprocal arrangement with another neighbor
whereby if she were out when the laundry was delivered, the neighbor
took it in, and vice versa ”
Superficial inspection of the manifest contents of these dreams reveals
an interesting coincidence: one patient seeks shelter from the rain in a
neighbor's house; the second patient gives shelter to some nighbors who
come in from the rain. The coincidence appears even more striking when
one considers the strangeness of the fact that in each case refuge from
the rain is sought not in the dreamer's own house, which would seem
to be a more natural haven, but in a neighbor's.
Beyond these points of coincidence, there seem to be no obvious simi­
larities in the manifest contents of the two dreams. Nevertheless, certain
differences between them strike us at once as being differences with some
relatedness rather than as unrelated or haphazard variants; in fact the
points in which the differences are to be found appear, when we attempt
to relate them in some way, to be negations of each other. In one case
the house is a shack, in the other a mansion. In the first dream, the person
seeking shelter is conscious of her drenched and shabby clothes. In the
second, the dreamer takes special notice of the fact that a neighbor to
whom she has given shelter is completely dry and faultlessly dressed.
Now the process of negation or denial, with whose occurrence and sig­
nificance in dreams as well as in every other area of behavior we are
already familiar, ought in itself to occasion the analyst little trouble. The
difficulty here arises merely from the fact that these reversals occur not in
the dream or dreams of one patient, but in the dreams of two people who
are unacquainted with each other. Added significance to this set of
coincidences is given by the fact that the name of the person seeking
refuge identified by the second dreamer happens to be the first dreamer's
name with change of only the fourth of five letters—a difference, let us
say, like that between Selda and Selma.
For the sake of convenience, let us arrange these coincidences in
parallel columns.
Dream I Dream II
1. Heavy downpour 1. Heavy downpour
2. Someone seeks shelter from 2. Someone seeks shelter from
rain rain
3. Refuge in neighbor's house 3. Refuge in neighbor's house
4. Palatial mansion 4. Old Shack
5. Clothes wet and shabby 5. Dry and faultlessly dressed
6. Selma (the dreamer seeking 6. Selda (the neighbor seeking
shelter) shelter)
 It is easy to see that even though some of these items are potentially
linked with the idea of rain, such as shelter, clothes, house, they are far
from being automatically threaded together, since a wide variety of other
items could just as easily have been associated with the occurrence of rain
in a dream. We may safely assume that the probability against their
occurrence in such a manner, along with the other items in these dreams,
through the operation of chance alone is very great, even though we do
not have a precise mathematical means of assaying and describing such a
probability ratio. It should be stated that there had been no rain or pre­
cipitation of any kind for days preceding or following the occurrence of
these dreams, nor had rain or the other items in the manifest contents
come up for discussion in the analyses of these patients at this time.
In any case, in addition to the evidence already cited to indicate that
the assumption of a telepathic relationship between these dreams is far
less improbable than that of a chance or non-telepathic causal relation­
ship,1 we have to take into account the fact that both dreamers were at
this time involved in a dream series revolving about an experimental
attempt to bring about the telepathic transmission of a three-digit num­
ber (XXII). Everything considered, it should not require profound
mathematical intuition to realize that the entire series, including the two
dreams under discussion, is virtually outside the realm of chance oc­
currence.2
1 The assumption of a telepathic process in a particular instance such as the one
under discussion does not require that the general hypothesis of the existence of tele­
pathic functioning be “proven'’ by this instance. It merely requires that the relationship
between the particular instance and the general hypothesis be such that the operational
legitimacy for the use of the latter be adjudged more or less reasonable in terms of
this hypothesis. The reader should bear in mind that I start by granting, on the basis
of an enormous amount of indisputable evidence of various kinds, that the belief in
the existence of telepathic functioning already rests on a foundation as firm as anything
in the realm of empirical science; he should also be aware that if, at the conclusion of
this article, he is inclined to feel that the existence of telepathy is “still" not proven, he
is simply indulging in a comfortable irrelevancy. It is necessary to make this point
clear because of the methodological confusion which characteristically befogs the ap­
proach to any issue where the discussants are not thoroughly versed in the backgrounds
of the assumptions utilized.
2It is possible to structure one component of this series—q.v. the occurrence of four
“random” numbers in relation to the number chosen for telepathic transmission—in
such a way that the problem of probability formulated from it is capable of precise
solution. It turns out that even if we allow no psychoanalytic assumptions or manip­
ulations whatever—that is, if we simply take the raw numerical data—the probability
against such an occurrence by chance is about one hundred fifty thousand to one. On
the other hand, if we choose to make one assumption based upon a perfectly legitimate
use of our psychoanalytic knowledge, the probability against chance rises to about one
and one half million to one.
It is not unlikely that similar experiments can be performed by others with substan­
tially similar results. Even if only what might be thought to be a negligible percentage
of such experiments were to yield data capable of formulation in accordance with the
rigorous demands of the mathematician, the over-all results of the few that might pan
out would be overwhelmingly significant because of the magnitude of the probability
ratios involved. This, of course, would only be a tour de force with less appeal to the
majority of analysts than a more fundamental demonstration of the psychological as­
pects of telepathy.
 As if these considerations were not enough to compel us to assume
that the two dreams we are discussing could profitably be studied in
relation to each other—as a reve k deux, so to speak—we have, finally, a
bit of significant internal evidence in the manifest content of the second
dream to buttress (or rather, to overdetermine) the case for such an
assumption. This is the portion of the second dream in which the
dreamer represents the person to whom she gave shelter as having a
reciprocal arrangement with another neighbor whereby if she were out
when the laundry was delivered, the neighbor took it in, and vice versa.
The symbol of the laundry with its variants—dirty or clean linen, having
things cleaned, etc.—is, as everyone knows, a common representation of
matters pertaining to the analytic process. The reciprocal arrangement
described is highly suggestive of some sort of telepathic relationship
which enables one patient to get a “delivery" intended for another,
should one or the other be “out.”3 We do not know as yet to what this
refers—to the experimental situation, to the dream mixup, or to some
fantasied advantage in the mind of one patient to be derived from such
an arrangement. This is vague, but at all events so highly suggestive that
one may justifiably proceed on the assumption that no complete under­
standing of either dream will come about unless both dreams are inves­
tigated with a full awareness of the possibilities of further links between
the two to be looked for in their latent contents.
The first dreamer's association to walking the street in a heavy down­
pour was the central fact of her emotional life, her sense of loneliness
and isolation.4 This inner sense of isolation was superficially cloaked by
the external appearances of her extensive social relationships in which
she laid claim to many—indeed, far too many—friends of both sexes. In
fact, her compulsive need for love and acceptance had led her to have
intimate sexual relationships from the age of eight, when she became the
sexual toy of a neighborhood gang of boys. Thus in connection with the
representation of herself as “walking the street in a very heavy down­
pour," the patient again touched on the fact that far from being able
to remember the names of the men with whom she had had casual sexual
relationships, she could not even estimate their number—any more than
she could the drops of rain in a downpour.
The patient's feeling about the drenched and shabby condition of her
clothes, of which she was conscious in the dream, related to her feeling
of having soiled herself in this behavior. Actually, she had never suc­
3 Telepathic dream symbolism will be taken up in a later publication.
4 The manuscript of this communication was submitted for checking and validation
to this patient, merely because the charge is so often made that analysts can invent
interpretations or unconsciously distort patient’s associations to fit a preconceived
pattern. Such a question, of course, would be particularly apt to arise in the present
instance because of the controversial nature of the hypothesis employed. Although it
is several years since the patient completed her analysis, and although her claims to a
trustworthy recollection of the events described (on which I had taken full notes at
the time) cannot perhaps be taken at face value, she has, in any case, gone to the
trouble, for whatever it may be worth, of attesting in writing to the correctness, authen­
ticity and validity of the associative details described. For reasons which will become
apparent later, the manuscript was not submitted to the second patient.
 ceeded in accepting this ego-alien, compulsive side of herself, and ex­
pressed great concern about what I might think of her.
The house she entered in the dream was actually the house of a priest
who lived two doors away, adjoining a convent. She visualized this as a
mansion; nevertheless, in the dream the occupants of this house were her
next-door neighbors who in reality lived in the house between hers and
the priest’s. The patient stated her mother had taken a violent dislike to
these people, saying they were snobs who had nothing to be snobbish
about. The woman was “cheap, low, shanty Irish,” and it annoyed the
mother particularly that the Jewish husband of this woman had been
converted to his wife’s Catholicism. This woman's brother, a prominent
political figure, had just broken into the newspapers in connection with
certain shady transactions which were being investigated.
The patient suspected that her mother's violent reaction to the neigh­
bors had something to do with her own conflicts since she too was a
Catholic who had married a Jew, the patient's father, but had assumed
the distinctly Semitic name of her husband who had never been converted
to Catholicism. The patient surmised that this fact might account for her
mother's almost chronic anxiety, since in the eyes of the church the
marriage of a Catholic to a Jew was not regarded as valid and hence her
mother, who had been brought up from childhood as a devout believer,
must unconsciously have been suffering from the accumulated guilt of
years of living in sin. The patient derived great satisfaction from this
fantasy, since she was consciously hostile to her mother; but not until it
was pointed out to her did she see the connection between her preoccu­
pation with her own sinful status and her effort to prove that her mother
too had been living in sin all these years. The patient's mother had
strong symptomatic and characterological reaction formations against
unconscious anal trends, and her marrying a “dirty” Jew and assuming
a Semitic name was merely one form of the return of the repressed which
had plagued her throughout life. Thus, besides the sexual source of
anxiety of which the patient suspected her mother, there was another
aspect of the latter's “living in sin” that was just as troublesome to her
and which she had never been able to resolve: the fact that she had for
so many years been “living in dirt.” She was constantly laboring under
the onus of “cleaning up” this situation and atoning for it. As a matter
of fact, one could almost have postulated this about the mother simply
from an awareness of the implications of that portion of the dream in
which the patient was very conscious of her soaked and shabby clothes.
However, we have no need to indulge in postulation at this point because
in connection with this item in the dream the patient recalled occasions
when she had endured painful tension (the mother's wrath and rejection)
from fear that she might wet or soil herself.
Despite a strong desire formally to change her Semitic name to an
Anglo-Saxon one, a change to which she felt entitled and one which she
envisaged as having a great many advantages, the patient had nevertheless
never been able to take this step because of her unconscious fear of
alienating her mother. But she had never developed her mother’s reactive
prejudice against “turncoats,” and her tolerant attitude on this topic was
one of a thousand issues which provided ammunition for constant bicker­
ing between her and the mother.
With the foregoing associative material, much of which was new since
the patient was comparatively a beginner in analysis, an interpretation
of the dream material can be attempted. The patient brings to the analyst
(priest’s house) the guilt of her soiled life, desiring absolution and for­
giveness. To counteract the fear that her plea will be met not with abso­
lution but with snobbish disapproval, she peoples the priest’s house with
her next-door Catholic neighbors against whom she can defensively pro­
ject her mother’s attitude that there is no justification for such snobbish­
ness, since the woman is “low, cheap, shanty Irish" and her brother is
being investigated for shady dealings. This is the familiar “You’re an­
other" defense. From here, however, we either lose ourselves in vagueness,
or deal with associative details which, although they seem to make some
sense in themselves, are nevertheless confusing and contradictory in rela­
tion to the apparent scheme of the dream. Our specific difficulty is that it
is from the fact of her mother's “living in sin" that the patient is able to
derive some comfort and not from the status of the neighbor next door,
since the wife of that union in the eyes of the church is sexually guiltless,
the Jewish husband having been converted to Catholicism. Thus the
specific guilt from which the patient is suffering is not shared by the indi­
vidual against whose snobbish disapproval she needs a weapon, and the
question arises as to why this neighbor was brought into the dream at all.
One wonders what advantage the dreamer hoped to gain by fusing the
priest with the neighbors, since in respect to sexuality, the latter turn out
to be virtually as guiltless as the former. In other words, the association
(leading to the discovery of the mother’s technical sinfulness) appears
valid for the dreamer’s purpose, but not the manifest portion of the
dream into which we might suppose it to have been elaborated.
Passing on to the queston of the reason for the transformation of the
neighbor’s house into a mansion, the patient cited that the scandal involv­
ing her neighbor’s brother had to do with his misappropriation of public
materials for some building that he had planned around his country
mansion. In this association the patient would appear to achieve some
projective gain by the fusion; nevertheless, the gain is not in specific
relationship to the sexual problem with which she is dealing, nor does
this association, as a projective device, seem to be at all applicable to the
patient’s mother or the analyst, against whom the defense must ostensibly
serve. The transformation of the house in the dream into a mansion
would thus appear to be a completely unnecessary bit of dream work, an
operation entirely lacking the specificity typically seen in such processes.
To sum up, the interpretation of this dream in terms of the associative
material can only be accomplished when the focus is left blurred and
vague. The moment we begin to adjust for a finer alignment, the super­
imposed images show a decidedly imperfect fit and the highly specific
connection which we seek between the latent dream thoughts and the
precise elements of the manifest dream is not to be found. It is possible,
of course, that had more associations been provided and had a more
exhaustive analysis been attempted, a precise fitting together of all the
pieces might have been accomplished. As this was unfortunately not
practicable, nothing remains except two alternatives: either to leave the
analysis of the dream at this point and be content with what little we
have been able to extract from its meaning, or, on the assumption that
this dream might be telepathically linked to that of the second patient, to
suspend further consideration of its analysis pending investigation of the
latter dream. Since the second course appears to offer a less hopeless and
in any case a more instructive prospect, we might as well make full use
of our assumption and proceed to this task directly. Unfortunately, the
very nature of such a step involves the temporary retention of a confusing
mass of material “in solution," as it were, and for this reason the reader
might do well to turn back at this point and review the manifest content
of the second dream.
From the dream of the second patient, the patient associated “living
in a shack" with the dissatisfaction she felt with her suburban house.
She often called it a shack when discussing it with her husband and was
very anxious to move to a smart apartment in the city which could serve
as a base for her many social aspirations. It was precisely these aspira­
tions, however, which reflected a continual conflict within her. On one
hand she was incessantly preoccupied with fantasies of a glamorous role
in society, feeling that her husband, relatives and friends were far beneath
her; she felt uneasy, on the other hand, with the title of “snob" which
these fantasies earned her and which she, in fact, consistently applied to
herself in her frequent self-critical moods.
When she came to analysis, the patient had been trying to solve this
conflict by a sort of double or two-stage reaction formation in which half
of her activity consisted of the pursuit of “swank," the other half consist­
ing of measures by which she hoped to convince herself that she was not
a snob. She married a man whom she considered considerably beneath
her and whose lower-class Jewish family she regarded privately with con­
tempt, and she developed a secret slovenliness about her person and
home which she misidentified with proletarian virtue. This return of the
repressed from repression served merely to stimulate further reaction
formations, such as her need to persuade her husband to change his
Semitic name to an Anglo-Saxon euphonym (which he did) and, as men­
tioned earlier, her agitation for a smarter residence.
The patient’s other association to “shack" was the condition of her
once beautiful face and figure which she now felt were beginning to show
the dreaded but inevitable signs of middle age. She kept reassuring her­
self that if she chose to bestow the necessary amount of care and attention
on herself, she could become as beautiful as she had been.
In these facts are two or three striking relationships to the content of
the first patient’s dream. First, it is apparent that the second patient is
struggling unsuccessfully with unresolved anal difficulties which closely
parallel the problems of the first patient's mother. There appears to be a
good deal of similarity in the character structure of the two, even in the
ways in which they had attempted to handle their conflicts—each, for
example, by marrying beneath them. There is thus no difficulty in con­
ceiving of the second patient as an easily workable imago of the feared
and hated aspects of the first patient's mother. Next, we have the second
patient's aspirations, for both social and deeper symbolic reasons, to a
palatial mansion, which the first patient provides, seemingly so casually,
in her dream. (We suspect a catch to this largess: there is a suggestion of
the illicit, of shady dealings and ultimate penalties attached to such
aspirations, as in the case of the politician who figured in the associations
to the first dream; but of this, more later). Finally, we have the second
patient’s self-admitted snobbish tendencies (like the neighbors in the
manifest portion of the first patient’s dream) and the significant fact
that she, like the neighbor in the association to the first patient’s dream,
had persuaded her husband to renounce—nominally, if not spiritually—
his Jewish origin.
The patient’s association to Selda X., the one “neighbor” she recog­
nized, was most striking of all. Selda X., it turned out, was not really a
neighbor but a woman she had met at a summer resort who was known as
the “whore of X. Beach” because of her indiscriminate and promiscuous
amours. This woman she described as “somewhat hard and tawdry on
close inspection, but as always dressed expensively and in the best taste.”
The patient had not seen or heard of this woman for many months and
was at a loss to account for her turning up—out of the rain, as it were—
in the dream. Nor did what this woman said in the dream about her
laundry arrangements shed much light on her presence. The patient’s
association to “Chinese laundry” was that she had recently sent all her
curtains to such a laundry and that they had been returned in such a
faded and shrunken condition as to be absolutely useless. Her house was
temporarily without curtains, and this considerably disturbed the patient
who felt that now all the domestic goings on would be visible to the neigh­
bors. As related to her deeper problems and as used in the dream, this
association obviously applies to the embarrassment she feels at having her
inner “dirty” emotional life revealed in analysis and her fear that the
analytic undermining of her defenses (taking down the curtains) would
leave her shamefully exposed. However, in the dream “the whore of X.
Beach” tells her that this is not the case—that she always patronizes a
Chinese laundry and gets her things white and clean that way.
What the soiled Selda X. said in the dream about a reciprocal arrange­
ment with her neighbor reminded the patient of something she had dis­
cussed in analysis a few weeks earlier. At that time she had been com­
plaining of the fact that her two young children, aged three and six, were
lacking in playmates of their own ages and usually spent their afternoons
in lonely play carelessly supervised by the maid. When I expressed my
surprise at the inferential absence of other children living nearby, the
patient remarked that there were in fact several children of this age
group in the neighborhood—indeed, that her next-door neighbor, with
whom she had only a nodding acquaintance, had two children of the
same ages. Now the explanation of this “poverty amid plenty” was that
the patient, ashamed of her “dirty” children just as she was ashamed of
and defensive about the primitive “dirty” core of her deeper emotional
life, virtually prevented the children from having normal contacts with
their own cultural group. Her rationalization—that is, her conscious
fear—was that her children would never measure up to the standards of
behavior, intelligence, beauty, charm and cleanliness of other children,
and would always draw unfavorable criticism upon themselves and her,
 When the older child began to attend school, the patient felt considerably
relieved that geographical limitations had obviated the question of the
child's attending a private “progressive" school where, the patient feared,
she would certainly be outshone by the other children.
When I learned of the pathetic social imprisonment of these children,
caught up as they were in the patient's anal conflicts, I suggested to the
patient that she approach her next-door neighbor, whose children appar­
ently were allowed to play with other children, and broach frankly the
matter of some arrangement whereby the children could play together.
The patient, as if this suggestion offered an unexpected solution that she
could never have seen herself, replied that this was a very good idea and
that perhaps she could work out a reciprocal arrangement with her neigh­
bor whereby one day the children could play at one house, the next day
at the other. The patient even calculated that this arrangement would
leave each mother more free time to go out on alternate days—although,
as I have hinted, the patient was away from home most of the time any­
way and the care of the children devolved on the maid.
As it turned out during the analysis of the current dream, for which
this material provided the associative background, the patient had not
yet approached her neighbor with the scheme of “taking in the other's
laundry" when the one was “out."
Working backward from this associative material, we find that we are
soon confronted with problems similar to those which confronted us in
our attempts to analyze the first patient's dream. The associations appear
to provide a general background which, however, fails to fit precisely into
the specific framework of the manifest dream. A latent fear is felt that
the analysis threatens to break through the concealments (curtains sent
to the Chinese laundry) hiding the patient's inner, anal trends and that
the patient will be revealed in all her essential dirtiness (domestic “goings
on" visible with curtains down). A wish for the opposite is expressed in
the manifest dream: the laundry comes back white and clean—or, at
least, so says the “whore" who visits her as a neighbor. But here the fit
becomes imperfect. First, there appears to be no ineluctable necessity for
this “whore" having been assigned a role in the dream; second, the
“reciprocal arrangement" equation—as it relates to the patient's need
to be found “white and clean" on trial—is decidedly not satisfied by the
terms of an association which stresses the patient's fear that precisely the
opposite would occur, for which reason, in fact, she had not even yet
made this neighborly contact (her fear, that is, that if she sent her fecal
children to her neighbor’s house her dirtiness would become apparent).
In view of the unsatisfactory results of attempting isolated, individual
interpretations of these dreams, and invited forward by the several appar­
ent points and planes of intersection between them, let us attempt a reso­
lution of the contradictions by proceeding on the assumption that each
patient had telepathic awareness of the problems of the other—just as
might have been the case had they actually known each other intimately
and been aware of the other's analysis. Let us then see what interpreta­
tion will yield under these conditions.
 D ream I
The patient is “walking the streets” in a very heavy downpour. She is
very conscious of her clothes, which are not only wet and dripping but
very shabby besides. This refers, as we have seen, to the patient's feeling
that she had soiled herself by the indiscriminate and casual sexual rela­
tionships in which she had indulged. Behind her anxiety on this score,
however, there existed her fear that she would be found unclean in an
anal sense besides, since this was one reason for her mother’s early rejec­
tion of her. Thus it was her need to rebel against the rejecting mother’s
standards, as well as her great need for love and acceptance, that had led
her to become sexually promiscuous at a very early age.
The patient decides to ask for shelter in the house of a next-door
neighbor. The house is a palatial mansion. In the dream the patient fuses
the house of her next-door neighbors with that of a priest, who in reality
lives two doors away. Why does she insist on such a fusion? The priest
represents the analyst, of course, since one can reasonably hope for abso­
lution and forgiveness from him. But why does not the analyst-priest
alone suffice? Why does the patient drag in the neighbors, of whom the
woman seems to have some connection with her mother? Apparently the
patient has not yet accomplished a comfortable substitution of the analyst
for the parental imagos (she has been in analysis only three months) and
evidently still hankers for a blessing from the mother herself, the need
for whose love, though doomed to perpetual frustration, she is not yet
prepared to relinquish for the still untested security which the analyst
might offer. Her attitude toward the analyst is unconsciously tinged with
the same anxieties as those which characterize her attitude toward her
mother, and under these conditions she needs a defense. Her defense is
of the tu quoque variety. “You too have been living in sin—both in
sexual sin and in dirt,” she wants to say to the mother. But here it turns
out that the next-door neighbor, a Catholic, who, like the patient’s
mother, had married a Jew, has not been living in sin (in the eyes of the
Church) because the husband of the union had been converted to Ca­
tholicism. However, my other patient—her neighbor in analysis—happens
to be a very serviceable mother image on several counts and, like her ac­
tual neighbor, is a snob “with nothing to be snobbish about.” In this
woman, as a matter of fact, the patient has the fulfillment of an often
expressed fantasy that her mother was the one who should be in analysis.
Now she is in analysis, as it were, and is forced to reveal to the analyst
all the hidden anal conflicts which had led her to reject the patient as
a dirty child. This, then, is the person who rounds out the fusion with
the priest-analyst (other determinants for this will be seen later) and this
is really a good defense.
The patient still has something up her sleeve. “I was a little afraid to
go in because these people were very snobbish, but I reasoned that they
couldn't refuse me shelter from such a downpour ” The last phrase, “I
reasoned that they couldn’t refuse me shelter . . . is a subtle attack on
the moral position of the second patient in which is also incorporated
a possible allusion to a chink somewhere in the armor of respectability
of her mother. The second patient, as it happens, had been leading a
perfectly respectable sexual life ever since her marriage. Before this,
however, she too had engaged in a series of more or less casual sexual
relationships, not, it is true, to the extent of and the variety of the first
patient, but still sufficient to be conventionally termed promiscuous.
This then must be the meaning of the phrase "/ reasoned that they (she)
couldn't refuse me shelter. . ” since, everything considered—that is, the
sexual and anal derelictions of the second patient (who represents a fan-
tasied image of the mother)—the argument would seem to be perfect.
As to the second patient's aspirations to social elegance and her fan­
tasies about regaining her former beauty, this is neatly disposed of by
the first patient's associations to the palatial mansion which the house
she sought refuge in seemed to be. “You are a fraud," she challenges,
“and you will undoubtedly be exposed in due time, just as was the poli­
tician whose shady dealings in building his mansion were ultimately
brought to light." Here too it would appear as though a perfect fit were
obtained by incorporating the second patient into the triple fusion per­
formed in the first patient's dream, a fit that could not be achieved,
apparently, through any other assumption.
D r e a m II
In terms of our analysis of the first patient's dream, and continuing
to utilize the assumption of a telepathic interrelationship between the
two, an analysis of the second patient's dream presents few difficulties.
“I was living in an old shack ” This, as we have seen, refers to the
patient’s anxious concern about the deterioration of her beauty, as well
as to her frustration at not having a smarter residence and a more glam­
orous role in society. The first patient’s dream provides a specific wish
fulfillment, the palatial mansion. Unfortunately there is a catch in this,
a threat of punishment which springs, I am inclined to think, from the
second patient’s unconscious guilt and anxiety in these matters as well as
from the first patient’s vindictiveness.
“Outside there was a heavy downpour ” This is difficult to account for
solely in terms of the second patient’s associations, which were, as a
matter of fact, not forthcoming on this specific point. The emphasis oil
“outside” might refer to the feeling of comfortable sexual respectability
that the patient’s marriage afforded her, even though she felt her mar­
riage to be frustrating and inadequate on other grounds. This, of course,
is my association, not the patient’s, but there are good grounds for be­
lieving that such an association is psychologically tenable. The relation­
ship of this portion of the manifest content of the dream to the first
patient’s dream, however, and the analogy of similar occurrences in other
dual dreams of this category, would easily explain its presence as part of
the necessary stage properties, so to speak, without requiring us to look
any further. Significant is the fact that both dreamers used the phrase
“heavy downpour"—not simply in one case “it was raining’' and in the
other “outside it was raining very hard," or some other variant.
“Some neighbors came in from the rain ” Here again the dreamer is
at a loss for associations in terms of the day's residue or other material.
The most likely explanation would appear to be that offered by the
telepathic hypothesis in which “some neighbors” refers to other patients
in analysis with me—in particular, Selma, the first patient. The fact that
this patient simply “came in” without having been specifically invited
would, of course, have been perceived on a level so far from the patient's
consciousness that the connection could never have been apprehended by
association.
“The only one I could identify was Selda X.” The names Selda and
Selma (the actual names have been changed) are almost identical and
would ordinarily, I am certain, occasion the analytic interpreter little
difficulty in identifying the person for whom the appellation was in­
tended, provided such a person could be identified from a knowledge of
the dreamer's acquaintances. In this instance, we have to extend our
conceptual horizon to include the possibility of a person consciously un­
known to the dreamer, but to whom the dreamer was nevertheless react­
ing on a telepathic basis.
Of course the identification of “Selda X.” as the first patient does not
exhaust the sources from which this dream figure was derived. This per­
son, who is identified as “the whore of X. Beach,” refers also to a fan-
tasied image of the dreamer's mother, a shopkeeper whom the patient
bitterly remembered as joking and carrying on with the men customers
while she, a little girl, sat forlorn and neglected in a corner of the store.
Later, the mother, who was reputedly a great beauty as well as a woman
of great charm and wit, left the thriving business in the hands of others
while she blossometh forth as a lady in local society. Here she had undis­
puted sway over the admiring men of the community, but over none was
her hold so secure as over her own husband and doting son, the patient's
considerably older brother. Thus it was that at a later age as well as in
childhood, the patient, who was still trying unsuccessfully to outshine her
mother in the eyes of her father and her older brother to whom she had
turned for affection, was balked by her mother's secret charm. We can
recognize in the dream figure and its associations an allusion to the
sexually alluring mother not infrequently encountered under similar cir­
cumstances. But what in the current life of the patient had provoked her
to revive this old issue and to elaborate upon it with such specificity in
a dream at this time? And what specific determinants dictated the choice
of this particular “whore,” Selda X., for whose perfect type casting the
patient had had to drag the files of her memory for months back whereas,
presumably, almost any woman of similar description, of whom there
were several in the circle of the dreamer’s acquaintances, could ostensibly
have served as well?
The answer to the question of why this issue at this time, was not to
be found in the patient's current and conventionally considered psycho­
logical stimuli. But with the assumption that the dreamer was reacting
telepathically to the first patient's number scoop in the experiment (q.v.:
her clever mother winning out all over again with father and brother)
and then to this patient's dream two nights later, where the latter called
the turn and dictated the symbolic necessities, we do not have to look
any further. These patients are competing for the analyst. What the
second dreamer is specifically replying to the first patient's dream, then,
amounts to nothing more than a resentful slur: “The absolution you
hope to gain from the analyst will never get you very far. You may clean
yourself up externally as my mother and your near namesake Selda did,
but you will remain a whore for all that; people will always recognize
you as such despite your latterly acquired outer accoutrements of taste
and respectability." Thus in the item “She was absolutely dry and seemed
faultlessly and even glamorously dressed,” the dreamer appears to provide
a specific resolution for the anxieties expressed by the first patient in
her dream; but just as there was a catch in the first patient’s gift to her
of a palatial mansion, there is in her seemingly generous fulfillment of
the first patient’s wish to be found dry and immaculate a concealed
booby-trap to be found only through deeper investigation.
As to the second question, the reason for the choice of the person who
was known as “the whore of X. Beach’’ to represent both the mother and
the rival patient, it might seem that we have only to look as far as the
near identity of this person’s name with that of the rival in question in
order to arrive at an answer. According to the laws of ordinary dream
interpretation, this fact would have been sufficient as a differential speci­
fication to account for the choice. In the laws of telepathic dream inter­
pretation in analysis, however, there is usually—perhaps always—an
added determinant: something referable to the analyst. In this instance
I cannot but think that the dreamer was attempting to besmirch three
women with one wild slur since it was at X. Beach some years ago that
I met and fell in love with my wife.5 X. Beach, incidentally, does not
happen to be a too well-known resort.
We come now to the remaining portion of the manifest content of
the second patient’s dream: "She [Selda X.] was saying that she always
had her things done at the Chinese laundry because they were returned
so white and clean. She also said that she had a reciprocal arrangement
with another neighbor whereby if she were out when the laundry was
delivered, the neighbor took it in, and vice versa” We have already seen
that the patient’s associations to “Chinese laundry’’ were anxious ones
(her curtains were spoiled), and that her association to a reciprocal
arrangement with a neighbor was scarcely such as would serve to resolve
this anxiety. It is apparent that we have to look in other directions in
order to find the gain to be derived from the substitution of “laundry"
for “children" and the incorporation of these unpleasant residues into
the dream. Assuming a telepathic relationship between the two dreamers,
this gain is to be found in the way in which the second dreamer turns an
unacceptable suggestion of the analyst to her advantage by applying it in
5 Theoretically, to complete the triangulation generally observed in instances of
this kind, a more specific point of derivation for this dream element should have been
looked for in a day's residue of mine—possibly something having to do with the kicking
up of my latent ambivalence to my wife springing from similar repressed fantasies
about my own mother in the “immoral” oedipus. Unfortunately, any more specific ma­
terial of mine bearing on this point must have gone down the drain when this episode
was worked over because I had not yet at this time come fully to appreciate the almost
invariable deep involvement of the analyst’s unconscious when he is even slightly repre­
sented somewhere in the manifest content of a telepathic dream, and consequently 1
did not prosecute the exacting search for such residues that I habitually now do.
a situation other than that for which it was intended. It will be recalled
that I had suggested to her that she make some arrangement for her
children to play with the neighbor’s children, and that the patient had
thought at the time that a reciprocal arrangement in which she and her
neighbor might alternately supervise the children would be advantageous.
But the patient had actually done nothing about the matter, which
merely illustrates the futility of an analyst’s attempt to bring about a
situation strongly opposed by a patient's unanalyzed resistances. What
happens is that in her dream the patient utilizes this suggestion not to
dispose of but to fortify her resistance. “You are evidently very approving
of and reassuring to my rival," she says, “and I have the feeling that my
rival gets all the absolution she seeks in analysis" (her things come back
white and clean from the laundry). “Since you insist on my effecting a
rapprochement with a neighbor, why not let it be this neighbor in an­
alysis? There a reciprocal arrangement will really net me something,
since I will then get some of the reassurance I want about matters anal,
of which I feel I am now deprived."
And here, I must confess, the patient seems to have a point since it has
probably struck the reader that my countertransference attitudes toward
the first patient were decidedly more benign than toward the second—
or rather, perhaps, that my counterresistance is considerably more in evi­
dence against the second patient than against the first. These attitudes
on my part, of course, are derived from my infantile and childhood expe­
riences and are related to conflicting identifications which more than
once have caused certain difficulties in my analytic work. My attitude of
counterresistance to the second patient springs from reaction formations
in my character structure against unconscious trends basically similar to
hers derived from identification with my mother, whose narcissistic
charm and “gentility," as well as whose extravagant anally-social ambi­
tions for herself and for me, I consciously disliked and resisted while
unconsciously seeking to please her. On the surface, I took more easily
to the solid, plebian, humanitarian ideals of my father, a somewhat
austere person whose having once been mistaken for a priest, inciden­
tally, played a large part in my childhood mythology. Thus we see that
the first patient, in representing me in her dream as a forgiving priest as
well as a person who is related in some way to the very characteristics of
the second patient and her mother which she is indicting, is quite within
her rights, and the symbolic fusion she performs in so doing is entirely
legitimate. I do not claim, naturally, that the patient’s perception of
these trends in me, though perhaps completely unconscious, need have
been in any way extrasensory.
Dream analysis based on the assumption of telepathic activity is
often a complex affair, and were it not for our suspicion, in line with
this assumption, that such processes mirror an aspect of common inter­
relationships between individuals that warrants deeper study, we would
perhaps not be tempted to deal in two or three dimensions when one so
often appears to suffice.
As Freud stated (83, 84), the occurrence of telepathy in dreams does
not require us to alter our conception of the dream processes. It merely
enlarges the field from which the dream sources are derived and raises
the interesting question of the ultimate authorship of the finished prod­
uct. Once we admit the possibility of telepathic activity in dreams, we
are no longer at liberty to assume that a given dream is exclusively the
private concern of the dreamer who had it, since analysis is capable of
demonstrating that one dream may be the vehicle for the latent material
of two, three or more individuals, or that two dreams are essentially one,
existing separately only in the way that two intelligence agents may carry
separately the complementary details of a plan which can be understood
only when both sections are viewed together. Thus the dreams presented
here would lead us to believe that the fulfillment of a repressed wish of
one patient may be found in the dream of a second, and that this can
be the case similarly with the dream manifestations of superego activity.
Nothing of this as yet necessitates any assumption beyond telepathy.
The fact that the dreams occurred a night apart should not occasion
any change in our point of view, since the timelessness of the unconscious
is nothing new (phenomenologically, at least) even though we cannot
profess to know much about time itself.6 But although we need not alter
our interpretations of these dreams because of the interval between them,
we still do not know why this interval occurred. This is a problem which
at present we can -afford to neglect since analytically we are on safer
ground if we take as our basic axis the flow of anxiety rather than of
time.

6 Experience with telepathic phenomena has convinced me, as it has many others,
that time is an artefact belonging to the ego and simply- exists in the realm of events
which is structured by the ego. Other analysts have arrived substantially at this opinion
without using the telepathic hypothesis, notably Bergler and R6heim, in their article
on the “The Psychology of Time Perception” (10).
 Chapter 24

By GERALDINE PEDERSON-KRAG, M.D.

This report offers corroborative evidence of one phase of telepathy

as it may be seen in clinical psychoanalysis.
The observation in question, as enunciated by Eisenbud (XXII), is
“The telepathic episode is a function not only of the repression of emo­
tionally charged material by the patient, but of the repression of similar
or related emotionally charged material by the analyst as well." This
writer gives credit for the discovery also to Holl6s (98) and Servadio
(XXI).
The above statement has been confirmed by a series of recent expe­
riences of my own. These started when my interest was roused by hearing
a paper on telepathy read, and I wished that I too might participate in
telepathic happenings. Upon discovering the motives that led to this
wish, I suppressed it.
Three days later a new acquaintance came unexpectedly to see me.
During his stay he told me that he had written several books and had
been behind enemy lines during the war, both as a fugitive and as a
prisoner.
Prisoners of war are conventionally considered with compassion and
guilt because they suffered while others more fortunate did not. For me
the phrase had associations with my family, connected with ideas usually
repressed. Aware of my psychic discomfort, I brushed aside the memories
which the words “a prisoner of war" roused in me. I called my guest
“Major” until I discovered that he was a colonel. The discourtesy was
slight and entirely accidental but gave me more concern than was war­
ranted, unless it expressed an impulse which I could not happily admit
to myself. I tried to consider my miscalling on a purely superficial basis
and not to let it disturb me.
A few hours later my patient A. had a dream which he told me the
following day.
# Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 16:61-68, 1947. Published
here by permission of Dr. Geraldine Pederson-Krag and of the editors of The Psycho­
analytic Quarterly.
 “/ was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp with my brother, Colonel
A. It was after V-J day. Why was I there? I could contact the outside
world but feared being beaten ”
His associations were the following. “A Jap Camp was the worst kind;
you were tortured, beaten and starved. Being a prisoner is like analysis.
A corporal of my name—but no relation—was behind enemy lines and
sent back very good accounts of his adventure. I envied him. I have been
trying to get the books of a writer who suffered under the Germans, be­
cause they disprove your ideas that neurotic behavior cannot all be
blamed on present adverse circumstances. I have no associations about
colonels; it is a high rank and I don't know any."
Coincidentally, the writer whose books the patient sought was my
visitor. Reviews of his books had led my patient to erroneous conclusions
about their contents.
A. had been long in analysis, and had a strongly dependent, erotic
and hostile attachment to me. He was, according to his dream, a prisoner
who could get free but excused himself for not escaping by blaming the
cruelty of his captors. His habitual defense against the transference was
intellectualization. He had not mentioned to me his unsuccessful search
for books to confound my opinions. What he repressed, his feelings for
me and his defense against these feelings, was told in the dream about
what I wished to forget: prisoners of war and the rank of colonel.
During the same night a patient, B., had a dream which he related
the next day.
“I was a deserter from the Army and hiding in a cubbyhole from the
English Army. I was joined by two other escaped prisoners of war, a Jap
and an English Colonial. . . we were caught ”
Associating, he stated, “The English in Palestine are as bad as the
Nazis. The colonials were more genial than the people from England. I
don't know any of them. I felt inferior hiding in the cubbyhole."
What little this patient B. knew of my life and of my way of speaking,
made him associate all things English with me. He had strong but incon­
stant feelings toward me of which he was ashamed. Their negative aspects
were mainly concerned with the fact that he felt belittled in analysis: by
the transference, by being a patient, and by the material revealed by the
interpretations; yet he believed that analysis would eventually help him.
This phase of the transference is shown in his dream. B. did not want
to face his emotions, but they appeared in guise of what I was trying,
that very night, to repress—prisoners of war, colonels or colonials.
At this time I had invited some friends to my house, and became
troubled by doubts as to whether I had enough silverware for the number
of guests. I debated whether to buy more and replace those missing from
my original set, or to use inferior cutlery. My parsimony conflicted with
my desire to entertain in a dignified way. This dilemma, common to hos­
tesses, recalled childhood tensions which for a time made me shelve
rather than solve this problem. Between the time when I realized the in-
 GERALDINE PEDERSON-KRAG 279
adequacy of my silverware and of my acting upon this realization, patient
C. told me a dream she had had.
“I dreamed I had company coming to dinner. My hair was uncombed,
I wore a Hoover apron. 1 was at my wits' end. A mean ruthless man as­
sociated with my father was there. There were a lot of guests. I discov­
ered I had not set the table. At least one leaf was missing from the table
in the middle, and I put a tray in its place. I put my silver knives, forks,
etc., on the tray. The silver was all a mess. Was there enough? This im­
portant mean man looked down scornfully at my table.”
Her associations were, “The table with the tray between two leaves
was like the laundry tubs in my old home. In the middle one, my Christ­
mas presents were always placed. I wanted a Christmas tree but never
had one. I don't know why I worried about my silver. I had several sets
of it and more than I can use."
C. has strong penis envy. In the dream this is shown by her desire that
was never satisfied for a Christmas tree, the missing leaf in the middle
of her table, and the feeling that the fatherly man despised her because
of her unpreparedness. Her transference was an identification with me,
while denying any relationship between us. This ignoring of differences
and similarities between people and of her feelings for others was one of
her principal defenses against her penis envy.
I was trying to forget my wanting silver forks, knives, etc. C. placed
the silver which she owned in her dream in the position where her lack
was most evident.
When my friends finally came to the house, there was a stranger
among them who brought a puppet which he manipulated. I wondered
what my guests thought of this, as the performance was unnecessary and
rather poor. This annoyance, so trivial in itself, caused undue discomfort
and self-analysis showed it to be because of a connection with long re­
pressed memories of former embarrassment. That night the patient B.
dreamed:
“I was back in a place where I was once unhappy and two other un­
happy colleagues were with me. We were in a big room comparing notes ”
Associations were: “We were acting like puppets. I don't often see
puppets. I don't want to see them. I feel I am like a puppet being pulled
around by my outworn emotions."
In his first dream, B.'s sense of inadequacy, which he hopes analysis
will cure, was depicted by his hiding in a cubbyhole. It was now ex­
pressed as being a puppet at a time when I was trying to forget the in­
adequacy of a puppet show with which I had been associated and made
uncomfortable.
A few days later I became overtired and decided to start my working
day with the patient C.'s hour. This entailed cancelling appointments
with patients who came before, among them a young secretary who habit­
ually wore a brown tweed dress. She came so much earlier than C. that
they had never encountered each other. On the day I began working at a
later hour, C. reported a dream.
“I came to your house . . . . and your secretary came in and said, *The
doctor is sick. Go away.* She was a nice, quiet-spoken girl in a tailored
tweed suit with brown shoes. I met your mother and she told me a lot of
things about your family life [these details were mainly accurate]."
Associations revealed that my house was her childhood home and that
she was learning things she should not know. This dream came as one of
a series of dreams concerning the primal scene and a woman’s sexual
functions. Now C. no longer identified herself with me, but considered
me as her mother. The thought of C/s parents having sexual relations
was repugnant to her. She concealed her dislike of the idea by deriding it.
This differs slightly from the other dreams reported. C. could not face
what she undoubtedly knew about her parents, and instead dreamed of
my private affairs. I do not consider the material she offered here as neces­
sarily telepathic, as C. might have arrived at the same knowledge by in­
ference and observation. However, she could not have known by or­
dinary means the profession and usual garb of the patient whose hour
had been canceled.
Though my physical unfitness did not cause me quite the same kind
of psychic distress as did the other dream contents I have mentioned, I
was unwilling to let patients know about it. For my lassitude I received
excellent care from a medical colleague who refused to take payment. I
puzzled over what I could give her as a gesture of gratitude. I left the
decision in abeyance as I did not know her tastes and lacked the time or
energy to do extended shopping. This neglect made me guilty again for
more than obvious reasons, and I tried to forget what I considered an
obligation. During my wondering, patient B. had a dream.
“There was a grey-haired bustling hostess who appeared very pleasant,
but I didn*t care for her because she was just like a woman who had
asked a great deal of treatment from me, and then refused payment be­
cause she was related to a colleague in a remote town and said that pro­
fessional courtesy was due her.*'
Associating, B. did not want to dwell on the incident because he felt
he had not been firm enough with this woman. Her personality reminded
him of mine. B. told of what he wanted to forget, his inadequacy as ex­
emplified in dealing with demands for professional courtesy, by mention­
ing what I wanted to forget, my inadequacy in dealing with professional
courtesy and what this entailed.
Shortly afterward, my children and I met a colleague for dinner in a
restaurant. He wished to pay for the entire party. I insisted on paying
my share which came to a little over six dollars, and his was only two
dollars. I disliked the situation and the discussion because of certain im­
plications and soon forgot them. That same night, B. dreamed:
 GERALDINE PEDERSON-KRAG 281

"I was taking my girl out to dinner. She ate about seven dollars'
worth of food and my meal only came to two dollars. I was rather mad
but said nothing about i t ”
B.'s resentment at what women demand of him, shown in this and in
the previous dream is the reverse of his constant disappointment that
women do not give him enough. In each dream he used a current sup­
pressed disturbance of mine to declare a feeling he usually denies.
I began to think that my wish for telepathic experience was realized
and expected each new domestic vexation to be reflected in a patient's
dream. This did not happen again until months later, when I was think­
ing of matters other than telepathy.
One Saturday evening I visited a street and neighborhood previously
unknown to me. What happened there bothered me because it reminded
me of other occasions I wished to forget. That same week end a patient,
D., dreamed that he was in that same street.
He said he had lived in that street as a boy. His father's funeral had
taken place there. D. had an outspoken transference to me of a docile
boy to a tyrannical father. He had been angry with me as he felt the
analysis was driving him to maturity. He had not dared to show or even
recognize this anger until it was revealed by the association with his
father's funeral. An emotion which he wished to hide was declared by
mentioning a locality I wanted to forget.
Though other dreams occurred about this time which suggested te­
lepathy, I choose only for demonstration those where there was no pos­
sibility that the dreamers could have inferred their knowledge of my
mind from details seen or heard as they came into my office. All of these
telepathic dreams have some common features.
1. All but one occurred when I had a special attitude toward te­
lepathy of slightly suppressed eagerness to participate.
2. They occurred only in patients resistive to analyzing their trans­
ferences.
3. The manifest content of the patients' dreams relating to my life all
had unpleasant connections for me, and I had decided to suppress each
of them. They appeared in the dreams connected with the patients'
anxieties.
4. The incidents occurred in the patients' dreams at exactly the same
time I was trying to avoid them.
Why telepathic phenomena became recognizable in the dreams of my
patients, and why they appeared frequently at a certain time and seldom
at others would seem to be connected in time with my wish to participate
in telepathic happenings. This wish had only been fulfilled very occa­
sionally in reality. I had excluded it from conscious fantasy.
It is probable that this wish in operation helped overcome the
anxiety which would usually prevent me from recognizing the repressed
content of my own mind in the dreams of others. It is possible that this
wish, communicating itself by means not yet understood, told my pa­
tients, “Here is a matter about which the analyst is particularly vulner­
able. You can hurt her by mentioning it, while at the same time pretend­
ing to please her with telepathic knowledge." As the wish became ful­
filled, the telepathic phenomena ceased.
Many speculations have been made regarding the nature of telepathy.
Saul quoting Alexander (XVIII) says, “One possibility among others is
that perceptions once operative have been lost or overlaid due to domes­
tication and the development of the intellect along with other animal
powers such as the sense of smell." Thouless and Wiesner (187), non-
analytic writers, offer a similar hypothesis.
The same idea may be considered in neurological terms. Before their
sensory and motor apparatus were differentiated, our primeval unicel­
lular ancestors displayed irritability, the faculty of reacting appropriately
to variations in their environment. It is immaterial whether they were
affected by the radiations to which we respond now or by others. Early
the evolutionary process altered amorphous free swimming creatures into
beings with something like a head and a tail, a fore and an after end.
Greater importance was given to stimuli upon the end connected with
alimentary intake and aggression rather than to those affecting the
eliminative and more passive part of the organism. Prototypes of tactile,
olfactory, auditory or visual organs appeared at the forward end. A nerv­
ous system was developed to interpret and to produce reactions suitable
to the information these receptors predominantly provided. Stimuli from
other parts arising from the innate irritability of the organism were
redundant. The reflex paths of the nervous system were not designed to
deal with them. Such stimuli therefore had to be ignored.
The persistence of early extrasensory perception might have hindered
development. If men could have communicated by simple telepathic
means speech with its cumbersome use of symbols and concepts would
have been unnecessarily laborious, and never elaborated. Awareness of
one another's naked erotic and aggressive impulses which telepathy of­
fered had to be repressed when men became communal beings.
 Chapter 25
TELEPATHY IN ANALYSIS*
A Discussion of Five Dreams
By NANDOR FODOR, LL.D.

The existence of telepathic phenomena was first drawn into the

framework of psychoanalysis by Freud. He was exceedingly careful and
circumspect when he first touched upon the subject in 1922 (V, VI). In
1925 (VII) he became slightly more positive. In 1933 (VIII) he was ready
to state that “psychoanalysis has prepared the way for the acceptance of
such processes as telepathy." In spite of this “green light" and Freud's
express request to his followers that “you should think more kindly of
the objective possibility of thought transference and therefore also of te­
lepathy," the number of contributions to this important subject has been
remarkably sparse.
Jule Eisenbud (XXII, XXIII), one of the pioneers of telepathy in the
field of psychoanalysis, finds this analytic resistance almost as remarkable
as the facts of telepathy. He echoes the independent finding of Hollos
(98) and Servadio (XXi) that “the telepathic episode is a function not
only of the repression of emotionally charged material by the patient,
but of the repression of similar or related emotionally charged material
by the analyst as well." The writer's own finding, in an earlier, inde­
pendent paper, was that “The telepathic dream reflects like a mirror the
contents of the unconscious mind of the agent, paralleling it by similar
contents in the recipient's mind which are shaped into a personal dream.
The similarity or parallelism of psychic content may be the predisposing
factor rendering telepathy a possibility. The interpretation of such
dreams of the recipient is not always possible without knowing the
agent's dream. In some rare cases the telepathic influence becomes so
♦Originally published in The Psychiatric Quarterly, 21:171-189, 1947. Republished
in: Fodor, Nrindor: New Approaches to Dream Interpretation. New York, Citadel Press,
1952. Published here by permission of Dr. N£ndor Fodor, of the editor of The Psychi­
atric Quarterly, and of Citadel Press, New York.
overwhelming that the freedom of personal dream work is curtailed, as
for instance, the freedom of the hypnotized subject when he is com­
manded to dream about a chosen thought. But just as the hypnotized
subject performs certain feats because of his transferred love of the oper­
ator, in other words, because he wishes to, so also the freedom of per­
sonal dream work is abrogated only because the dreamer wishes this. In
other words, telepathic communication can be only received because
there exists in the dreamer's unconscious a psychic content which, in its
latent meaning, corresponds to the manifest content of the message" (60).
The subject, however, is by no means fully surveyed. Holl6s (98) used
a curious phase, “It is the patient who makes my slip," meaning that the
return of the repressed occurs in another person. In the present report
there is a case in which “it is the patient who makes my interpretation."
The report concerns five dreams, involving four persons, including the
writer of this paper. The circumstances are such as to rule out coin­
cidence as more fantastic than the recognition of some unknown mech­
anism. Two of the dreamers are husband and wife, Arthur and Nancy S.,
patients in the last stage of analysis; the third is Arthur's secretary, Mary,
who was drawn into the analytic circle by chance when Arthur and
Nancy were compelled to move from New York before their analyses had
been completed. The writer suggested that since so much progress had
already been made, it might be possible to continue the analysis by cor­
respondence; that if it proved not to be, he would recommend another
therapist. Somewhat to everybody's surprise, Arthur's severe neurosis was
resolved in a short time in sudden and dramatic fashion; the analysis of
Nancy also continued successfully but along more conventional lines.
Mary's participation came about through the circumstance of cor­
respondence.
Arthur is a clinical psychologist; and both he and his wife came to
analysis with considerable theoretical knowledge of the dynamic uncon­
scious. They are in their middle forties. Mary, in her late twenties, was
recommended as a secretary to Arthur by the present writer, for whom
she had done editing and manuscript typing. Because of this work, she
also had considerable analytical knowledge. When Arthur—because of
strong emotion concerning a personal tragedy—was “blocked" in writing
to the analyst, she readily consented to take dictation and transcribe the
material for him.
The telepathic dreams to be discussed are one shared by Mary and
Arthur, one shared by Nancy and Arthur, one by Mary and Nancy, one
by Nancy and the analyst, and a fifth in which Arthur dreamed material
completely meaningless to him but meaningful to the analyst. To under­
stand the phenomena, it is necessary to comment on the personal rela­
tionships involved. Those of Arthur, Nancy and the writer are the con­
ventional ones of analyst and patient, with, in Nancy’s case, an unusually
strong transference. Mary’s place in the circle is difficult to describe and
her role in the analysis hard to evaluate. Apparently she participated ac­
tively—through affection and the mechanism of identification; and she
appears to have derived considerable benefit from it, for both Nancy and
Arthur report that the girl whom the analyst remembers as quiet and
reserved has undergone a personality change and can now be described
as radiant and glamorous. It should be said—because of the obvious
sexual elements in the dream contents—that there is no “triangle situa­
tion" here. The relationship appears to the analyst to be an unusually
adult one of mutual trust and affection; the women identify with each
other and each other’s problems readily; and Arthur reports dreams in
which he has identified with both. '
It should be said that the dreams here reported came near the end of
the analyses and were not particularly significant for the analyses, except
that the joint dream of Mary and Nancy appeared to indicate progress
on the part of both. Mary appears to have initiated the telepathic dream­
ing. To explain the first dream and understand the significance of its
symbolism, as well as the facility with which Mary and Arthur exchange
dream symbols and enter into each others’ dreams, a shared dream which
was not telepathic may be reported. Mary dreamed of clock hands, one
above the other; since she had no “boy friend" at the time and the clock
was the office clock, the dream needed no interpretation. It is of interest
chiefly because, after she had reported the dream to Arthur, he dreamed
of a world populated by little copulating clock hands.
Shortly after this, Mary acquired a boy friend. It was not too difficult,
therefore, when she dreamed of winning $110 at Bingo to interpret it in
the light of the clock hand symbolism and the addition of a feminine
symbol as “girl gets two boys." A further dream, that she was doing office
work in which two masculine symbols—but of a different type—were in­
volved, seemed to confirm this, as well as point toward the unconsciously
preferred figure; the “boy friend" was not being taken too seriously.
The third dream of “girl gets two boys" repeated the symbolism of
110 and is the first of the five telepathic dreams. Mary dreamed she was
standing on skis. She attached no importance to the dream and did not
mention it until Arthur remarked in the office, “I wish you’d tell me
why I took you skiing the other night; I don’t ski; and I’ve never been
on skis in my life." Arthur’s dream was simply that he and Mary were
skiing through the woods; he was skiing with ease; and Mary more nearly
floating through the air than skiing. The dream was a delightful one and
the dreamer enjoyed it; but both the simple transparency of the inter­
course symbolism—which was not characteristic of his dreams—and the
choice of skis, when he had never been skiing and had never wanted to
ski, puzzled him. But the skis in Mary’s dream were meaningful symbols,
the girl, Mary in person this time, again getting two boys. Mary does not
ski and, except for symbolic reasons, would be unlikely to be on skis in
her dreams. The skis were very long ones, which is a matter of some im­
portance in the dream interpretation.
The analyst interprets this joint dream as primarily Mary’s, built
again on the theme of “girl gets two boys." The fact that the skis were
very long ones pointed in the direction of Arthur, as he is much taller
than the other man in Mary’s life at that time. If there is motivation in
such a shared dream, and everything anybody has ever been able to learn
about unconscious dynamics shows that there is always motivation, the
length of the skis would account for Arthur's skiing. Mary wanted to
"ski” with Arthur, but didn't; Arthur, less repressed, did it for her; but
he protected her with her own symbolism.
The second of the telepathic dreams came to light because, like the
first one, it made no sense to the dreamer who received it from the
dreamer who initiated it. It appears to have been Nancy's dream, “inter­
cepted” by Arthur, who remarked to her at breakfast the following morn­
ing that he wished he knew why he had “kissed Alice Brand last night.”
She replied that she did not know unless it was because she had been
calling on Alice Brand and on Alice's mother in her own dreams “last
night.”
To the analyst, one of the most interesting of the points indicating
telepathic communication is the slenderness of the thread leading to
“Alice Brand.” She is a former acquaintance of Nancy whom Arthur had
met only once and by whom he had not been particularly impressed. Fur­
thermore, she is of a physical type which—although undeniably beautiful
—has never attracted him. Both Arthur and Nancy report that they
probably had not thought of the girl in the last nine years; and that she
should have entered their dreams by coincidence is to ask too much of
coincidence.
Arthur's dream was a simple one. He was sitting on the corner of a
couch on which a girl in a gray-blue dress was lying with her feet curled
under her. The girl was Nancy in all respects, figure, posture and charac­
teristic pose; but her face was Alice Brand's. Nancy has dark hair and
black eyes; Alice has light hair and blue eyes. In the dream, Arthur
leaned over and gently kissed the girl. Except for that kiss, the dream was
a re-enactment in all respects of a scene of years ago when Nancy and Ar­
thur had first met, and Nancy, worried and ill, had lain on a couch and
Arthur had tried to comfort her. In the actual occurrence, he had not
kissed her, although he realized he loved her and wanted to; and the
writer would point out that a dream often completes some greatly de­
sired action which for some reason or other was never completed in the
past. Nancy remembered only a fragment of her dream. In it, she was
entering a door to pay a call on Alice Brand and her mother.
Neither of the participants nor the analyst questioned from the start
that the dream was telepathic; but the basis was difficult to determine.
Nancy had had a determinant for the dream in that she had been laugh­
ing the evening before at a cartoon showing a hut labeled “Library” with
two live lions chained outside and an African chief explaining to another
that he had gotten the idea from his U. N. tour of New York. Nancy had
been associated once in library work with Alice Brand which raises the
supposition that she initiated the dream. The purpose of the dream
eluded dreamers and analyst for some time. It seemed evident that it was
concealed in the word “brand.” Since drinking to relieve neurotic tension
had been one of Arthur's problems, the writer ventured that the inter­
pretation was “brandy” as equaling liquor; but the lack of anxiety of
both dreamers and the fact that Arthur's dream was enjoyable seemed to
rule out that interpretation. The key seems to have been in the manifest
contents of the dreams themselves. Alice Brand's mother was a witness
years ago in a divorce suit by which Nancy had ended an earlier unhappy
marriage. It meant the beginning of a new life for her, with prospects of
remarriage. The scene in Arthur’s dream similarly meant the beginning
of a new life for him, that with Nancy. “Brand new" appears to have
been the clue to the dream, with Nancy the instigator and Arthur re­
ceiving it. The writer’s present interpretation is that both envisioned
themselves as once more entering “brand new" lives, lives free from neu­
rosis. As Arthur’s principal symptoms had already disappeared, Nancy’s
dream seemed encouraging evidence of progress in analysis and appeared
to indicate that she too was recognizing her new freedom.
The third dream was inspired by a piece of current scatology. It was
heard by Mary and apparently reacted to by Nancy before she herself
heard it. A word of explanation is in order here that the writer, in dis­
cussing with Mary the taking of her present secretarial job, had pointed
out the primitive, anal, urethral and genital material which a clinical
psychologist’s secretary must come in contact with and had advised ac­
cepting life however raw one found it, laughing at it when it was worth
laughter—whatever the source—and not borrowing its tragedies. The
advice has worked well and has contributed to the positive enjoyment
of a job many a young woman would have found repugnant.
The story, slightly bowdlerized, which inspired the dream concerns
the woman who went to the grocery for sugar and was told she could not
have any without coupons. The following day she could not buy beer
because the grocer would not sell it unless she returned empty bottles.
So the third day, she marched in, planked a bag down on the counter
and announced, “Here’s a bag of feces; give me two rolls of toilet paper."
Mary heard this story one evening. She recalls no dream of that night;
but Nancy dreamed of defecation. She was seated on an old-fashioned
toilet with a pull-chain. All she remembers is that she defecated success­
fully and was quite happy about the whole thing.
The following morning, Mary told the story to Arthur, who repeated
it to Nancy that evening. That night, both girls dreamed. Nancy dreamed
that she was riding in the front seat of an automobile driven by an older
woman. Her part of the seat seemed to be a toilet seat; her clothes were
arranged for defecation, so she defecated in it. Then she found she could
not flush it. She appealed to the older woman who seemed somewhat sur­
prised and remarked that she thought the people who owned the car
probably would not like it, but not to mind, they would stop somewhere
and wrap it up in something and throw it away. Nancy had no toilet
paper but did not care in the least.
That same night, Mary had a dream. Mary dreamed that she was on
a toilet seat in the bathroom of a private home which had two seats in it.
She noticed that there was no toilet paper near the toilet on which she
sat, that the only paper in the room was on the wall above the other
toilet which was on a wall at right angles to hers and that she could not
reach it. She defecated anyway, however, and was not at all bothered by
the fact that she could not reach the paper. Then she thought, “Why,
this toilet must be out of order and can’t be flushed; that’s probably why
the paper is over the other one." But she was not disturbed about it at
aH.
The writer does not think that by any possible chain of reasoning,
this dream and Nancy’s two, that of the preceding night and that of the
same night, can be attributed to coincidence. There was no apparent in­
centive for Nancy’s first toilet dream, and the writer suggests, for a reason
which will appear, that the suggestion came from Mary’s mind and was
inspired by the story Mary had just heard and which Nancy had not yet
heard; but that the dream suggested was dreamed by Nancy instead of
Mary because it served Nancy’s analytic purposes. That Mary determined
the circumstances of the dream seems indicated by the pull-chain toilet.
Nancy was obviously dreaming of her childhood, as the old-fashioned
toilet indicates. But she does not recall ever having lived in a house with
a pull-chain toilet; Mary spent her childhood in such a house and recalls
it vividly. Nancy was obviously sitting on Mary’s toilet.
The joint dream of the following night may be interpreted as Nancy’s,
picked up telepathically by Mary. Admitting the common determinant
in the grocery store story, it is far too much to expect of coincidence that
the dreams should have four elements in common: Both girls defecated
in the wrong place; neither could flush the toilet; neither had paper;
neither was in the least concerned about it.
That Nancy instigated the dream seems clear from the fact that the
punishing mother figure of her toilet-training days was changed in her
dream to a permissive mother figure who made light of her misdemeanor
—a necessary step in the analysis, for unconscious fear of the mother was
a factor which it was important to bring to light and dissipate. Further­
more, Nancy’s automobile is itself symbolic of progress.
That, in Mary’s dream, Mary was Nancy is evident. They had iden­
tified in dreams before; and there is other evidence in addition to the
four common dream elements. Nancy is fond of Mary and has joked to
her to the effect that she would like to have polygamy legalized and add
Mary to the family, after which, for reasons of no importance in deter­
mining the telepathic dream features, she remarked that there would
have to be two seats in the bathroom. Mary was obviously Nancy, defecat­
ing in Nancy’s remodeled bathroom with its two seats. But she was also
Mary herself; she was defecating in a toilet which would not work be­
cause polygamous marriage in Nancy’s two-toilet house would not work
and was an idea never to be taken seriously. The writer interprets the
toilet over which the paper hung as Nancy’s—the only one which would
work. The fact that the toilet which apparently would work was against
the wall at right angles to Mary’s is also suggestive. The two-toilet idea
was not the “right angle” for her; and the dream thus served a purpose,
though a less important one than it did for Nancy, in pointing this out
to her. There is an interesting determinant for Mary’s share of the dream,
which may have made her unusually receptive to the telepathic influence.
She had had dinner the evening before in a restaurant in which one of
the toilets in the women’s room was out of order and could not be
flushed.
As in the case of the skiing dream, this joint dream was brought to
light by-accident. Arthur said to Mary in the office, “Listen to what your
story did to Nancy last night,” and reported Nancy’s dream. Mary gasped
and said, “Why I dreamed the same thing.” She had attached no im­
portance whatever to her dream, had not meant to mention it and had
not tried to interpret it.
The writer is reporting the fourth dream with some embarrassment
for it involved him in a horrifying nightmare, his first in years; and he
feels that a well-balanced analyst should not have nightmares. It was ini­
tiated by two short dreams by Nancy on a single night and was picked
up by the analyst the following night, after she had reported it in a letter
to him but before he had received the letter. It seems probable that Ar­
thur—although he has no recollection of having dreamed on either night
—also had some active participation in it, for the writer had once told
Arthur, while Arthur was still having terrifying nightmares, that the
analyst would enjoy a good nightmare. The writer had completely for­
gotten this remark; but Arthur’s note, “You asked for it,” and his unre­
strained glee at the writer’s terror in the dream suggests that he had some­
thing to do with the unusually terrifying affect.
Nancy’s first dream was that a neighbor’s house was on fire. By asso­
ciation of last names, she realized in the dream that the house was Mary’s.
A huge column of smoke was rising from the middle. Arthur, dressed in a
fireman's raincoat and carrying a long hose, ran up to the house and
stood looking at the smoke. He evidently decided that everything was
under control and went away again. Nancy thought in the dream, “Aha,
he's wrong about that; he'll have to come back.” She had no affect what­
ever about the fire or the fireman incident and she would not have been
disturbed if the fireman had come back.
In her second dream of the same night, Nancy was listening to Liszt’s
Second Hungarian Rhapsody. She thought that she had always been fond
of it and that this time it sounded particularly beautiful. But she knew
in the dream as well that the music was not Liszt but was Sir Arthur Sul­
livan’s The Lost Chord.
The first dream reflected Nancy's very real concern about Mary, who
has not been able to accept the partial solution made by increasing num­
bers of girls of her age for their sex problems. The second, of course, was
a plain manifestation of transference; together with what the analyst in­
terprets as a declaration that she had at last lost her hampering umbilical
cord.
The analyst’s nightmare took place the following night without his
conscious knowledge of Nancy’s dreams. The writer reported it and in­
terpreted it to her by letter substantially as follows:
“I had a bad nightmare last night, and it seems to be your doing. I
dreamed that there were, perhaps, two women in my apartment. The
door suddenly opened. In the corridor was something like steam rising
in patches from the floor. Then a man rushed by and said, *Jumpl’
Though he did not say it, I understood the hotel was on fire and every­
body was jumping out of the windows. The firemen were below holding
canvases. But I did not want to understand. I was asking questions to
which there were no answers. There was an urgency about jumping. I
woke up with a thumping heart.
“The first thing that occurred to me was that I had had an earache
for the last few days which, according to the doctor, was due to a slight
inflammation of the middle ear. This morning I woke up with a good
deal of pain in the ear, which may have been a continuation of the
dream; fire, inflammation. That is, the somatic antecedent and sequel.
“Fire is not my type of nightmare. Nor is jumping out of the window.
I was suspicious. ‘Is this the dream of a patient? Will I have somebody
this morning bring me a dream of a house on fire?' I had two patients in
the last few days with dreams of fire. The first one—who I thought might
bring me a fire dream this morning, and who started the fire dreams—is
called Anna. That sounds very similar to Ann. [The reference here is to
Mary's older sister, with whom the analyst is also acquainted, and who
had been mentioned several times in recent correspondence.] I recalled
that I knew an Anna in early youth. (I am not sure now that her name
was Anna, but that was my first impression.) This Anna lived in a Hun­
garian town called Kassa. Kassa was mentioned to me last night and I
tried to recall whom I had known there. I thought of this girl but could
not remember her name. That would be sufficient reason for creating a
telepathic receptivity for Ann. But now I recall also that the reason I
am not sure that the girl of Kassa was called Anna is because there was
another Anna in Budapest, Anna Ince. I liked that girl, and Inci happens
to be a childhood pet name of my wife.
“Here is where your nefarious telepathic influence begins. Anna had
a lover called Herman. Doesn't Arthur's middle initial stand for Her­
man? Now look at your dream. Smoke risingl In my dream, I have steam
rising. Your neighbor's house is on fire. So is my hotel. The house ties
up with Mary. You made the association through her and your neigh­
bor's last names. Mary's last name means something to me. I don't know
what. I suspect it is a name I know from the books of the greatest Hun­
garian romantic novelist, Maurus Jokay, on whose books we grew up as
children. Also, if you drop a syllable at the beginning, her last name is
a Hungarian word which is a term of the tenderest endearment. You
had the fireman. I had firemen below but no hose. You were not afraid
of the fire. You could afford it because I got your fear. I was badly
frightened. Displacement of affect by way of telepathy. Then you had
the radio and Liszt as a reference to me. It may interest you to know
that I was sitting at the same table last night with a man called Liszt, a
Viennese who came to visit my lodge. So we got the Liszt twice in com­
mon. Perhaps the second Hungarian rhapsody refers to that, also the
harmonious echo.
“So now, why did you set my house on fire? You say, ‘It was quite all
right with me if the fireman came back and used his hose.' Was that
because you had your own way of getting even? Were the two women in
my apartment you and Ann or you and Mary or all three? Oddly, there
was something important in the conversation, but the shock of the fire
made me forget it. Also, my feeling was that the jump was to be done
from a great height, much higher than the seventh floor on which I live.
“You figure out the rest. Arthur will be tickled to death that he got
me involved in this dream chain. Tell him to stop grinning. Let him do
the jumping. I would rather have a shot at the hose.”
To the writer's surprise, both Arthur and Nancy replied with the
interpretation of “jump” in double meaning. They both agreed that the
feminine figures in the dream were Nancy and Mary and that the order
to jump was an order to “jump” the women as well as an order to jump
from a great height, the former representing a great fall for a psychoan­
alyst with women patients. The writer had never heard the phrase
“jump a woman" but agrees that his patient’s interpretation of his own
dream might reveal his own repressed desires to take advantage of the
transference situation. Nancy inquired if the writer still had a secretary
or nurse in his office; the writer’s reply was no, but that on the day
she wrote the letter about the fire and Liszt dreams, he had complained
that he needed a larger office with room for a secretary—a further ap­
parent determinant. In view of Arthur’s unusual enjoyment of this
dream, the writer interprets the male figure in his own dream, who
ordered him to jump, as Arthur. He finds another possibility of Arthur’s
unconscious participation in the fact that Arthur has an unusually clear
mental image of Nancy’s dream—although it does not coincide with
Nancy’s—and that he would definitely have ulterior motivation in order­
ing the jumping of the women if he himself were identifying with the
analyst.
The final dream of the series is one for which the dreamer himself
has partial amnesia. Arthur dreamed—and remembers it perfectly—
that he was an amputee with whom experimentation was being carried
on. At one point, he had parts of arms and legs; at another, he was little
more than a trunk; but he was proud of the way he was getting along
with this, that and the other part gone; he said mildly—and had his
way—that he did not intend to submit, however, to amputation just
below his chest, for he did not want to lose his penis which, although it
was not in a state of erection, Nancy and Mary were both admiring. He
thought during the dream that he was certainly undergoing all the
varieties of castration; but there was no threat of genital castration in
the Freudian sense; the suggestion to amputate just below the chest was
merely a suggestion, not a threat. And the dream was accompanied by
no affect whatever.
The part of the dream for which he has complete amnesia was re­
ported to him by Nancy the following morning. He sat on the edge of
the bed, sound asleep, but preparatory to a trip to the bathroom. Nancy
asked, “What are you doing?” He replied, “Looking for my napkin,
Mary put it underneath somewhere.’’ Nancy forgot the incident itself
until something reminded her of it at breakfast. Arthur said immediately
and in some wonder, “I must have been looking for my sanitary napkin;
I don’t understand it.”
The dream and its symbolism made so little sense to Arthur that he
suspected at once that he could not have instigated it. It had been
months since he had been dreaming castration dreams. His former cas­
tration dreams had been accompanied by an affect of great terror. This
castration dream had no affect whatever. When the dream also proved
to make no sense to Nancy and Mary, Arthur reported it to the analyst,
to whom it did prove to make sense.
The writer had received word, in the same mail with the letter report­
ing the dream, that his paper on birth and castration had just been sent
to the printer with the title amended at the author’s suggestion to
“Varieties of Castration” which was a phrase in Arthur’s dream. In
psychical research the term "monition of approach" is used to describe
such phenomena as thinking of a far-away person and seeing him turning
in around the bend of the street, or dreaming of an unusual letter and
receiving it in the following morning's mail. As the writer had playfully
threatened to give Arthur hell if he ever sneaked in again on his dreams,
it may be that the writer's own monition of approach was intercepted by
Arthur and, owing to the threatened punishment, was clothed into a
dream of amputation. This possibility is strengthened by the fact that
Arthur and the writer had been in correspondence concerning the ad­
visability and possibility of publishing the first four telepathic dreams,
and the author had just received the approval of Arthur, Nancy and
Mary for an attempt to do so.
The writer interprets the napkin not as a sanitary napkin but as a
diaper and considers the apparent identification with a feminine figure
a redetermination of the castration theme. The man who uses a sanitary
napkin is a woman, and he is a woman because he has been castrated.
Arthur accepts the interpretation on the basis of the fact that he had
been cut down to the size of a baby in the part of the dream he remem­
bered, adding that the analyst had taken him back to extreme infancy in
the course of his analysis. In looking for his sanitary napkin, he was not
a feminine figure but a baby on whom Mary, as a beautiful and desirable
mother figure, had put a diaper "somewhere underneath." That the inci­
dent was connected with a bathroom visit for urination or defecation
also supports the latter conjecture.
The dreams discussed are by no means the whole of the series which
is still continuing with more and more joint dreams uncovered because
the participants are now aware of the mechanism and are looking for
them. Detailed analyses of them would add little to that which has
already been said and would become unwieldy.
It might be mentioned, however, that Nancy and Arthur dreamed
jointly of visiting barrooms operated by two women. In another instance,
employing the mechanism of dreams five and six, Nancy dreamed that
she was in need of a permanent and planned to go to a department
store—which was contrary to her custom—to get one. She did not know
until the following morning that Mary had gone to a department store
for a permanent the preceding evening.
D iscussion
If the first or second of these apparently telepathic or paired dreams
were to be considered alone, it would be difficult to dismiss the possibility
of coincidence, since there was only one dream element in the manifest
content which could be derived from any mind except the dreamer's. If
they are considered together, however, it seems fantastic that one dreamer,
Arthur, could, by coincidence, "share" a dream with two different per­
sons and dream another, the fifth, which had meaning only for still
another person. (
The third of the shared dreams, that between the two girls, has, as
has been noted, at least four elements in common. The fourth, that be­
tween Nancy and the analyst, has no less than eight: (1) fire, (2) the rising
of smoke or steam without actual flames, (3) the presence of a fireman or
firemen, (4) the apparent presence of the same two female figures—as
dreamer and dream figure in Nancy’s dream and as two dream figures in
the analyst’s, (5) the apparent presence of the same central male figure,
(6) the significance of Mary’s surname to both dreamers, (7) the identi­
fication of Mary by related names—in the analyst’s dream by her sister’s,
in Nancy’s by a similar last name, and (8) Liszt, through music in
Nancy's dream and as a dream determinant for the analyst’s.
The purpose of this presentation is, first, to demonstrate the reality
of telepathic phenomena to understandably skeptical readers, and, second,
to discuss the conditions under which they may occur. If coincidence
can be ruled out—and to the writer, it is unthinkable that coincidence
could explain the fifteen different elements shared by the dreamers in this
series of five dream pairs—the alternatives are to concede the reality
of the phenomena, however inexplicable, or consider all four dreamers
either pathological liars or so pathologically suggestible that they joined
in imagining dreams which had never occurred. The writer suggests that
acceptance of the phenomena, with an attempt to understand the con­
ditions of their occurrence, is the reasonable course.
The writer wishes to place emphasis on the fact that the telepathic
phenomena reported here came to light by a series of accidents; the first
was the experimental attempt to conclude two analyses by correspond­
ence, then came the consequent involvement of the four principals in
this dream series in active discussion of their dreams, and finally came
the chance discovery that pairs of the dreamers proved to have dreams
with common elements.
It may be supposed, if one assumes that telepathy occurs only on the
unconscious level, that it is not an unusual phenomenon. Dream telep­
athy in particular would pass unrecognized because comparatively few
persons understand dream mechanisms, and still fewer report their
dreams and discuss them. If uninformed dreamers had reported either
the first or second of the paired dreams noted in this paper, they would
have dismissed them with, “What an interesting coincidence," and for­
gotten the whole matter. The recognition that a dream has a purpose
and some ability to detect the purpose would be essential to the recog­
nition of telepathic dreaming.
A further reason for failure to recognize telepathic dreams may be
that to one of the dreamers the telepathic dream seems unimportant.
This held true for the five pairs in this series. The first and third, coming
to light by accident, meant virtually nothing to the recipient and in the
ordinary course of life never would have been mentioned. The second
and fifth were disclosed because the dream material seemed so irrelevant
to the dreamer that it aroused his curiosity. The fourth seemed so unim­
portant to the agent that it never would have been reported except in
analysis. In all five dreams, either the affect, the symbolism or the content
meant something to one of the pair concerned, less or nothing to the
other.
If this supposition is correct, investigation of the seemingly affectless
or meaningless dream in relation to persons with whom the dreamer has
close emotional ties might reveal much dreaming of this sort. It might
be a fruitful field for research.
Five pairs of dreams are a small series from which to draw broad
conclusions. Some speculation, however, appears to be in order. Like
Freud's material, the material presented here is all from the unconscious
and can be interpreted only in terms of the unconscious. Like Freud's
material—with the exception of his fortuneteller (V, VII), whom one
may assume to have been of abnormal personality make-up—it is derived
from a group knit very closely by ties of mutual trust and affection.
Speculation as to the mechanism of telepathy seems futile at this
point. Whatever it is, it does not appear subject to conscious control.
Whatever it is also appears to operate independently of time and space.
In two of the dreams here reported, agent and recipient were miles apart;
in two others, the distance was hundreds of miles; and in one of these,
there was a lapse of 24 hours between the agent's dream and the
recipient's.
The purpose of the dreams in this series seems obvious, the achieve­
ment by the agent of emotional contact with a recipient for whom there
is affection or with whom there is identification. But it should be noted
that the unconscious contacts may not be recognizable to the recipient
or serve any purpose for the recipient. In only one of the dreams, the
first, did the recipient know about whom he was dreaming; and he did
not recognize the source of the dream, discovering it only by accident. In
the fourth pair of dreams, the affect of the analyst's nightmare could not
have been desired by the agent. There was a slight negative transference
at the beginning of analysis, but it disappeared long before the telepathic
dream series, at which time a very strong positive transference existed.
The affect could have been desired by the agent’s husband, a reaction
again emanating not from a negative transference but from resentment
during the period when the analyst was urging Arthur to endure his
terrifying nightmares and saying by way of encouragement that the an­
alyst would like to have one himself.
According to present analytic assumptions [Holl6s (98); Servadio
(XXI); the author (60)], the essential fact about telepathy is the demon­
stration of the return of the repressed through another person attached
to the dreamer by strong emotional bonds. Contrary to his previous
assumption, the writer now suspects that this is only a functional aspect
of 'telepathy and that it might be nearer to the truth to postulate telep­
athy as a cognitive faculty of the unconscious, shared by humans and
animals alike; that besides the pressure of the repressed, the need for
companionship, for sharing warmth and affection, as well as the need
of protection and reassurance as in the case of fear and anxiety, might
be sufficient motives to set the telepathic mechanism going. To illustrate:
The writer recently dreamed that a member of his fraternal order, with
whom he has no particular ties, became his patient. Jokingly, he asked
him the following night, “What is the matter with you, I dreamed that
you became my patient?" The friend's remark was surprising, "My man­
ager told me that his son needed psychoanalysis; I was thinking of you
and told him I had someone for him." In this case, the telepathic “mes­
sage" originated in a temporary appreciative concentration by the agent
on the recipient, and the “message" must have been received during the
day, emerging through the dream mind in the narcissistic regression of
the sleep state. Similarly, in the first dream of the present series, the
strong attraction the agent has for the recipient may be a sufficient deter­
minant; in the second, identification of husband and wife may account
for the dual dreaming. In the third dream, if the story she had not yet
heard accounted for Nancy's preparatory dreaming, one would assume
identification mechanism also; for the actual dual dreaming, there was a
sufficient determinant for both girls in the toilet paper story. The nu­
merous determinants for the receptivity of the analyst for the fire dream
were discussed in the report of the interpretation which he made for
Nancy. For the fifth dream, identification of Arthur as recipient with the
analyst as agent again seems to be the answer—the identification as a
consequence of discussion of publishing the dream series.
The writer subscribes to Dr. J. N. Rosen's view, that “everybody's
unconscious perfectly understands everybody else's unconscious" (165).
The writer would add to this observation his own view that telepathic
dreams might be explicable on the basis of the theory that when persons
are bound closely together emotionally, the tie of love opens one uncon­
scious to another.
Since close emotional ties are a condition of the analytic relationship,
this would seem to raise the question of whether telepathy may not be
a universal but unrecognized and unconscious factor in analytic trans­
ference and countertransference. However variously one may phrase it,
love and complete acceptance are the means by which the analyst cures his
patients—or better, enables his patients to cure themselves. In analysis
one extends love and acceptance to the patient by means of sympathetic
interpretation of unconscious desires and unconscious mechanisms. If
this series has demonstrated, as the writer believes, that telepathic
dreams occur between persons close to each other emotionally, why
should not unrecognized telepathy play its part in the emotional inter­
change between analyst and patient? Every analyst has made apparently
“inspired" interpretations. It seems to the writer to be a question whether
these could not be explained more readily as telepathic than inspirational.
Su m m a r y

1. The writer has presented a series of four paired dreams and a

single fifth dream, all of which he interprets as telepathic. An impressive
total of elements in common would seem to rule out coincidence.
2. The view is expressed that telepathy is a mechanism operating
wholly or predominantly on the unconscious level, possibly due to a spe­
cial cognitive faculty of the unconscious.
 3. The suggestion is made that, since this dream series occurred
among persons with strong emotional ties, such ties may be a prerequisite
for telepathic dreaming, and that the investigation of dreams apparently
meaningless to the dreamer in relation to the dreams of persons to whom
he is emotionally bound might reveal that the phenomenon is widespread.
4. The question is raised of whether unrecognized telepathy does not
play an important part in analytic transference.
 Chapter 26
A. TELEPATHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS:
A CRITIQUE OF RECENT “FINDINGS”*
By ALBERT ELLIS, Ph.D.

There has recently been something of a minor epidemic of articles on

telepathy and psychoanalysis. Thus, in the first half of 1947, no less than
three articles on the subject have appeared: one by Jule Eisenbud
(XXIII), one by Geraldine Pederson-Krag (XXIV), and one by Ndndor
Fodor (XXV). Since all three of these articles report dream incidents of
a supposedly “telepathic” nature involving analysts and analysands; since
all three authors enthusiastically come “all out” for the indubitable exist­
ence of such “telepathic” phenomena; and since all three encourage the
investigation and reporting of similar incidents by other analysts, a'crit­
ical review of the literature on telepathy and psychoanalysis would seem
to be desirable at the present time. Considerations of space preclude a
detailed analysis of all the “telepathic” findings in the psychoanalytic
literature; consequently, the present article will be limited to a discussion
of the “findings” of Eisenbud, Pederson-Krag, and Fodor.
E isen bu d ’s “ T e l e p a t h ic ” F indings
Eisenbud reports a “telepathic” dream sequence as follows:
“An analytic patient reported the following dream:
“ 7 was walking the street in a very heavy downpour and came to the
house of a next-door neighbor where I decided to ask for shelter. The
house seemed to be a palatial mansion. I was a little afraid to go in be­
cause these people were very snobbish; but I reasoned that they couldn't
refuse me shelter from such a downpour. When I came inside I was very
conscious of my clothes which were not only soaked and dripping but
very shabby besides/
“On the following night, another analytic patient dreamed:
* The entire controversy, together with a subsequent Letter to the Editor was orig­
inally published in The Psychiatric Quarterly, 21:607-659, 1947 and 22:156-157, 1948,
and is republished here by permission of Drs. Albert Ellis, Jule Eisenbud, Ndndor
Fodor and Geraldine Pederson-Krag and of the editor of The Psychiatric Quarterly.
 " *I was living in an old shack. Outside there was a heavy downpour.
Some neighbors came in from the rain, of whom the only one I could
identify was Selda X. Although she had just come in from a heavy rain
she was absolutely dry and seemed faultlessly and even glamorously
dressed. She was saying that she always had her things done at the
Chinese laundry because they were returned so white and clean. She also
said that she had a reciprocal arrangement with another neighbor
whereby if she were out when the laundry was delivered, the neighbor
took it in, and vice versa’ ” (XXIII).
After noting that the name of the person seeking refuge identified by
the second dreamer happens to be the first dreamer’s name with a change
of only the fourth of five letters (a difference like, say, between Selda and
Selma), Eisenbud finds six coincidences in these two dreams:
Dream I Dream II
1. Heavy downpour 1. Heavy downpour
2. Someone seeks shelter from rain 2. Someone seeks shelter from rain
3. Refuge in neighbor’s house 3. Refuge in neighbor's house
4. Palatial mansion 4. O ld shack
5. Clothes w et and shabby 5. Dry and faultlessly dressed
6. Selma (the dreamer seeking shelter) 6. Selda (the neighbor seeking shelter)
In regard to Eisenbud’s “telepathic” findings, these points may be
observed:
1. Although Eisenbud holds that these two dreams have at least four
elements in common, they strictly speaking have only one: the heavy
downpour. He blithely talks of the occurrence of “random numbers in
relation to the number chosen for telepathic transmission,” implying that
his “coincidental” elements are equivalent to such random numbers. But
four of his “coincidences”—someone seeking shelter from rain, taking
refuge in a neighbor’s house, a mansion or a shack, and wet or dry
clothes—are highly correlated with heavy downpours, and are therefore
very far from consisting of random numbers or events. Probably, in most
instances where a person dreams of a heavy downpour he also dreams of
someone seeking shelter from the rain, or refuge in a house, of the kind
of house in which the refuge is taken, and of the condition of the per­
son’s clothes who is caught in the rain. The fact that the two dreamers
reported by Eisenbud also had similar elements in their downpour
dreams is far more predictable than surprising, and proves nothing so
far as telepathy is concerned.
2. Eisenbud’s sixth “coincidental” element consists of dreamer No. 2
meeting a person in her dream having a name (Selda) similar to the
actual name of dreamer No. 1. This is surely a very common, not to
mention very partial, “coincidence.”
3. Dreamer No. 2's dream occurred the night following that of
Dreamer No. 1. This means that, strictly speaking, telepathy was not
involved; since telepathic communication becomes meaningless when it
is stretched out over a period as long as twenty-four hours. Eisenbud
excuses this point by cavalierly referring to the “timelessness of the un­
conscious”; but even he has to admit that this is no full explanation of
the matter. The fact, moreover, that there was a twenty-four-hour-lapse
of time between the two “telepathic” dreams means that Eisenbud, as
analyst, may have actually suggested to the second dreamer the contents
of the first dreamer's dream; or that some other direct or indirect com­
munication may have been made between the two dreamers.
4. Eisenbud states that “both dreamers were at this time involved in
a dream series revolving about an experimental attempt to bring about
the telepathic transmission of a three-digit number.” This means that
the two dreamers and the analyst were already, before the “telepathic”
dreams took place, convinced of the truth of telepathic occurrences and
were doing their best to re-prove these to themselves. Eisenbud also states
that “I start by granting, on the basis of an enormous amount of indis­
putable evidence of various kinds, that the belief in the existence of
telepathic functioning already rests on a foundation as firm as anything
in the realm of empirical science.” On the contrary, however, the exist­
ing evidence on telepathic functioning, including the extrasensory per­
ception experiments at Duke University, is exceptionally disputable in
that it never seems to have been duplicated by objective experimenters
who did not, a priori, passionately believe in telepathy. The fact that
Eisenbud accepts this questionable evidence so naively, and the fact that
he “operationally” hypothesizes telepathic functioning in such a manner
as to beg the question of its proof or disproof, give ample evidence of
his prejudicial stand regarding telepathy and his biased determination
to support it at all costs.
5. By associative interpretation, Eisenbud makes the two dreams and
the problems of the two dreamers dovetail beautifully into each other,
so that one dreamer appears to be dreaming out the other's problems
and symptoms and vice versa. Pertinent in this regard are these points:
(a) Eisenbud's interpretations are made several years after his analyses
of these two patients were completed. One patient later authenticates
his interpretations; but this is not surprising, since almost any success­
fully analyzed person would similarly corroborate her analyst's inter­
pretations.
(b) Any capable analyst who is consciously looking for associative and
interpretative connections between the lives and dreams of two ex-
analysands should have very little trouble finding them. Neither objective
proof nor disproof of such interpretations (or of conflicting interpreta­
tions made by some other analyst) is ever likely to be found.
(c) Eisenbud specifically makes a point of the fact that “the dreams
presented here would lead us to believe that the fulfillment of a repressed
wish of one patient may be found in the dream of a second, and that this
can be the case similarly with the dream manifestations of superego ac­
tivity. Nothing of this as yet necessitates any assumption beyond telep­
athy.” But since nearly all repressed wishes may easily be subsumed
under a few general headings; since nearly all patients have m an y re­
pressed wishes; and since wish fulfillments are exceptionally common in
almost everyone’s dreams, it would be almost impossible to find a re­
pressed wish of any given individual, X., picked at random, which would
not, sooner or later, have its analogue in the wish fulfillments of any
individual, Y., also picked at random. And the same thing may be said in
relation to superego activity. Instead of concluding with Eisenbud that
“nothing of this as yet necessitates any assumption beyond telepathy,” it
might much more scientifically be concluded that nothing of this as yet
necessitates any assumption of telepathy.
(d) Both dreamers were patients of Eisenbud and could very easily
have had their modes of expression, their activities, their associations, and
even their dream symbols mutually intertwined through the analyst's
connection with them. Consciously as well as unconsciously any analyst
is going to exert a great influence over the thoughts and dreams of his
patients; so that two concurrent patients may easily have dovetailing
waking and dreaming representations precisely because they have a com­
mon analyst. To deem their coincidental ideations telepathic is to flout
Lloyd Morgan's famous law of parsimony: which states that the simplest,
and not the most complex, explanation of a given phenomenon shall
be taken as the most plausible explanation unless otherwise disproven.
P ed erso n -K rag ' s “T e l e p a t h ic ” F indings
Pederson-Krags First Dream Sequence. Pederson-Krag's first reported
“telepathic" sequence occurred after she had been unintentionally slightly
discourteous to a colonel, an ex-prisoner of war, who came to call on
her. She had been disturbed at her own discourtesy. She reports:
“A few hours later my patient A. had a dream which he told me the
following day.
" 7 was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp with my brother, Col­
onel A. It was after V-J day. Why was I there11 could contact the outside
world but feared being beaten' ” (XXIV).
Pederson-Krag also states:
“During the same night a patient, B., had a dream which he related
the next day.
“ 7 was a deserter from the Army and hiding in a cubbyhole from
the English Army. I was joined by two other escaped prisoners of war, a
Jap and an English Colonial. we were caught/ "
Regarding this dream sequence, the following points may be noted:
1. The one common element to the three occurrences is that prisoners
of war are involved in all three. But since these dreams and Pederson-
Krag’s encounter seem to have occurred during or soon after the greatest
war in history, in which many prisones of war were taken on both sides,
and much publicity was given to prisoners of war, there is nothing unu­
sual about the coincidental occurrences.
2. Pederson-Krag contends, on the basis of patient A/s dreams and
associations, that “what he repressed, his feelings for me and his defense
against these feelings, was told in the dream about what I wished to
forget: prisoners of war and the rank of colonel.” Granted, as she states,
that A. had a strongly ambivalent attitude toward the analyst (a common
occurrence, indeed, in analysis); and granted that the analyst had
thoughts that she wished to forget (certainly a frequent occurrence with
all human beings, including analysts), connecting the analyst’s unpleasant
thoughts with almost any dream of patient A. would be exceptionally
easy. Thus, the analyst’s discomfort in this instance was directly related—
she indicates—to topics like war, prisoners of war, discourtesy, colonels,
her family, Germany, Japan, etc. By process of association, her unpleasant
thoughts were doubtless related to hundreds, if not thousands, of other
things. Consequently, whatever patient A. might dream about—partic­
ularly when his associations were included with the dream; and par­
ticularly when he had a strongly ambivalent feeling toward the analyst—
could easily dovetail in many respects with the analyst’s unpleasant
thoughts and their associations. If A. had dreamed about people, place,
things, or events of any sort, it would not be difficult to find connections
between them and the many associations which Pederson-Krag had to her
unpleasant incident of the day prior to A.’s dream.
3. Pederson-Krag admits at the start of her article that “The obser­
vation in question, as enunciated by Eisenbud, is 'The telepathic episode
is a function not only of the repression of emotionally charged material
by the patient, but of the repression of similar or related emotionally
charged material by the analyst as well’ The above statement has
been confirmed by a series of recent experiences of my own. These started
when my interest was roused by hearing a paper on telepathy read, and
I wished that I too might participate in telepathic happenings. Upon dis­
covering the motives that led to this wish, I suppressed it.” (Italics mine.)
That is to say: she was (a) convinced, to start with, of Eisenbud’s
theory of telepathy and analysis; and (b) rather desirous of finding con­
firmatory evidence for it. Now anybody—including any analyst—may
have several emotionally charged incidents which are subsequently re­
pressed almost every day of his or her life. And any analyst who believes
ardently in telepathy, who wants to prove that the repression of emo­
tionally charged material will telepathically turn up in her analysand’s
dreams, and who keeps actively looking for such occurrences, is bound,
sooner or later, to find them. Thus, while Pederson-Krag tells of one set
of repressed emotionally charged feelings that she had on the particular
day of the “telepathic” dream sequence, she probably also had one or
more other such feelings that she has now forgotten. Consequently,
almost any dream that patient A. may have brought her that day might
have fitted easily into one of her repressed feelings of that day. The fact
that the prisoner of war dream actually fitted one of Pederson-Krag's
feelings so nicely, therefore, is not in any way surprising. On the contrary,
on the basis of the laws of chance alone, it is quite predictable.
4. Patient B/s “telepathic” dream occurred the night after Pederson-
Krag's unhappy experience with her ex-prisoner of war visitor. Whether,
in the time between this visit and B.’s dream, she actually had an ana­
lytic session with B., in which she could have unconsciously suggested
some of the elements of his dream that night, is not recorded. But even
without the occurrence of such an intervening session, B/s dream might
have easily been coincidental with the analyst’s experience and with
A/s dream—particularly, as stated before, since all three experiences
occurred during or immediately after (the author does not make clear)
the greatest war in history. Moreover, while A. and B. both had prisoner
of war dreams, none of Pederson-Krag's other patients simultaneously
did. Since she presumably saw several patients around the time of her
emotionally charged encounter; and since presumably all of them had, in
one way or another, ambivalent transference attitudes toward her, it is
hardly too coincidental that two of them should have turned up with
prisoner of war dreams around this period. The significant point seems
to be not that such a common coincidence occurred, but that Pederson-
Krag was so intent on reading “telepathic” phenomena into it.
Pederson-Krags Second Dream Sequence. Pederson-Krag's second
reported “telepathic” dream sequence occurred after she was embarrassed
about having to decide whether to buy more cutlery for a party she was
giving or to serve her guests with inferior cutlery. Before she made her
decision, she reports:
“Patient C. told me a dream she had had.
" 7 dreamed I had company coming to dinner. My hair was un­
combed, I wore a Hoover apron. I was at my wits' end. A mean ruthless
man associated with my father was there. There were a lot of guests.
I discovered I had not set the table. At least one leaf was missing from
the table in the middle, and I put a tray in its place. I put my silver
knives, forks, etc., on the tray. The silver was all a mess. Was there
enough? This important mean man looked down scornfully at my table.'
“C. has strong penis envy. In the dream this is shown by her desire
that was never satisfied for a Christmas tree, the missing leaf in the
middle of her table, and the feeling that the fatherly man despised her
because of her unpreparedness. Her transference was an identification
with me, while denying any relationship between us. This ignoring of
differences and similarities between people and of her feelings for others
was one of her principal defenses against her penis envy.
“I was trying to forget my wanting silver forks, knives, etc. C. placed
the silver which she owned in her dream in the position where her lack
was most evident.”
Aside from the fact that Pederson-Krag and C. were both disturbed
about silverware (one, very literally; the other, quite symbolically)—and
such a coincidence may easily occur when an analyst goes over the
dreams of several patients during a short period of time—there seems to
be nothing extraordinary about this “telepathic” sequence. Pederson-
Krag's interpretative conclusion about the relationship of her own to
C/s preoccupation with silverware problems appears to be a classic
example of non sequitur.
Pederson-Krags Third Dream Sequence. Pederson-Krag reports her
third “telepathic” dream sequence as follows:
“When my friends finally came to the house, there was a stranger
among them who brought a puppet which he manipulated. I wondered
what my guests thought of this, as the performance was unnecessary and
rather poor. This annoyance, so trivial in itself, caused undue discomfort
and self-analysis showed it to be because of a connection with long
repressed memories of former embarrassment. That night the patient B.
dreamed:
“ 7 was back in a place where I was once unhappy and two other
unhappy colleagues were with me. We were in a big room comparing
notes.'
 “Associations were: 'We were acting like puppets. I don’t often see
puppets. I don’t want to see them. I feel I am like a puppet being pulled
around by my outworn emotions.’
“In his first dream, B.’s sense of inadequacy, which he hopes analysis
will cure, was depicted by his hiding in a cubby-hole. It was now ex­
pressed as being a puppet at a time when I was trying to forget the inade­
quacy of a puppet show with which I had been associated and made
uncomfortable.”
Analysis of this incident shows the following:
1. For one who is a practicing analyst, Pederson-Krag has, by her own
admission, for three times in a row suffered “undue discomfort” over
“trivial” incidents. It is to be suspected that (a) her own analysis has not
been truly completed as yet; or (b) she is going out of her way to find
disturbing incidents, in order to relate them, if humanly possible, to the
“telepathic” dreams of her patients. Let it be remembered here that she
started with the assumption (Eisenbud’s) that emotionally charged ma­
terial of the analyst that is repressed will turn up in “telepathic” dreams
of the analysands. It certainly would appear that she went out of her
way to find enough repressed emotionally charged material in her own
life with which to work out her original hypothesis.
2. There is nothing at all unusual about an analysand who has
ambivalent attitudes toward his analyst dreaming about himself acting
like a puppet. Pederson-Krag’s patients may frequently express them­
selves in similar terms; and it may easily be coincidental that, for once,
she encountered a real puppet prior to listening to this kind of a dream.
3. If Pederson-Krag, herself presumably a thoroughly analyzed indi­
vidual, can have so much affect in connection with a puppet perform­
ance, there is a good chance that puppets have a pronounced meaning
in her own life; and that, because of this, she unconsciously suggested
the term or the concept to patient B. before he ever dreamed of puppets.
Pederson-Krag’s Fourth Dream Sequence. Pederson-Krag reports her
fourth “telepathic” dream sequence as follows:
“A few days later I became overtired and decided to start my working
day with the patient C.’s hour. This entailed canceling appointments
with patients who came before, among them a young secretary who
habitually wore a brown tweed dress. She came so much earlier than C.
that they had never encountered each other. On the day I began working
at a later hour, C. reported a dream.
“ 7 came to your house . . and your secretary came in and said,
“The doctor is sick. Go away ” She was a nice, quiet-spoken girl in a
tailored tweed suit with brown shoes. I met your mother and she told
me a lot of things about your family life (these details were mainly ac­
curate)/
“Associations revealed that my house was her childhood home and
that she was learning things she should not know. This dream came as
one of a series of dreams concernig the primal scene and a woman’s
sexual functions. Now C. no longer identified herself with me, but con­
sidered me as her mother. The thought of C.’s parents having sexual
relations was repugnant to her. She concealed her dislike of the idea by
deriding it.
 “This differs slightly from the other dreams reported. C. could not
face what she undoubtedly knew about her parents, and instead dreamed
of my private affairs. I do not consider the material she offered here as
necessarily telepathic, as C. might have arrived at the same knowledge by
inference and observation. However, she could not have known by ordi­
nary means the profession and usual garb of the patient whose hour had
been canceled."
Here the following items may be observed:
1. C/s dream involved Pederson-Krag's secretary and not her patient.
The “telepathic" equation of secretary = patient is made entirely by
Pederson-Krag, and not by C.
2. Secretaries very commonly wear tweed suits; are, in fact, rather
noted for wearing them. The fact that the dreamer should see a secre­
tary wearing such a suit is hardly even coincidental
3. The secretary was only one of the patients whose appointments
were canceled for C/s hour. If there were several such patients, then no
matter what kind of an individual C. dreamed about, her dream image
would be very likely to fit one of them.
4. Pederson-Krag's statement that “I do not consider the material
she offered here as necessarily telepathic" is an accurate appraisal of all
the elements of this particular dream sequence.
Pederson-Krag's Fifth Dream Sequence. Pederson-Krag's fifth “tele­
pathic" dream sequence occurred after she had experienced guilt feelings
over hesitating to get a present for a medical colleague who had given
her some gratuitous treatment. She states that:
“During my wondering, patient B. had a dream.
“ 'There was a grey-haired bustling hostess who appeared very pleas­
ant, but I didn't care for her because she was just like a woman who had
asked a great deal of treatment from me, and then refused payment be­
cause she was related to a colleague in a remote town and said that pro­
fessional courtesy was due her/ ”
It may be noted, in connection with this “telepathic" dream of B.,
that it occurred during Pederson-Krag's wondering—which apparently
stretched over several days or weeks (she is vague about this point). But
since B., who apparently is a physician, may well dream, from time to
time, of patients who do not pay for their treatment by him, there is no
novelty in his having such a dream during the period of Pederson-Krag's
wondering. In fact, if Pederson-Krag delays her decision long enough,
B. will be almost certain to have a dream in which a nonpaying relative
of a colleague is concerned.
Pederson-Krags Sixth Dream Sequence. Pederson-Krag's sixth “tele­
pathic" dream sequence occurred when she was embarrassed over splitting
a dinner check with a colleague whose share came only to two dollars,
while hers came to six dollars. She reports:
“That same night, B. dreamed:
“ 7 was taking my girl out to dinner. She ate about seven dollars'
worth of food and my meal only came to two dollars. I was rather mad
but said nothing about it.'"
The coincidence involved in this dream certainly seems somewhat
unusual; but that is hardly a good reason for assuming that there were
any truly telepathic elements in it. Moreover, since Pederson-Krag pre­
sumably had several analytic patients at the time, and only one reported
a dream incident similar to a real-life occurrence of hers, there is only
slight reason to believe that there was anything telepathic in the dream.
An explanation in terms of coincidence appears to be far more plausible.
Pederson-Krags Seventh Dream Sequence. Pederson-Krag’s seventh
and final “telepathic” dream incident occurred after she was bothered
by visiting a certain street on a Saturday evening. “That same week
end,” she states, “a patient, D., dreamed that he was in that same street.”
Since, although she had been consistently looking for “telepathic”
dream incidents, this particular one did not occur for months after her
previously reported instances, it is only logical to assume that it was a
purely coincidental, chance-based occurrence. Any analyst who habitually
looks for “telepathic” incidents in the dreams of her patients will cer­
tainly, on a purely chance basis, eventually—and, probably, quite
often—discover them.
Pederson-Krags Summary Statement. Pederson-Krag notes, in sum­
mary, several points relating to her seven reported “telepathic” dream
sequences:
1. “All but one occurred when I had a special attitude toward telep­
athy of slightly suppressed eagerness to participate.” This admission of
Pederson-Krag’s confirms the facts that (a) she looked eagerly for such
“telepathic” phenomena; (b) she was determined to find them; and (c)
she went out of her way to interpret them in such a manner as to cor­
roborate their “telepathic” content.
2. “They occurred only in patients resistive to analyzing their trans­
ferences.” This is a rather meaningless categorization: since there are very
few patients of whom an analyst may not say that they have some degree
of resistance to analyzing their transferring. Assuming, however, the
legitimacy of Pederson-Krag's distinction, it may mean (a) that Pederson-
Krag was naturally more involved with such analysands because of their
resistance, and more aware of every nuance of their dream behavior; (b)
that she was exerting a more pronounced suggestive influence on the
behavior and associations of these resistant patients; and (c) that these
patients were more aware of the analyst—because she was one of their
main problems—and consequently more apt than her other patients to
weave her directly or indirectly into their behavior, dreams, and asso­
ciations.
3. “The manifest content of the patients* dreams relating to my life
all had unpleasant connections for me, and I had decided to suppress
each of them. They appeared in the dreams connected with the patients'
anxieties.” This is quite predictable: since unpleasant experiences are
precisely the ones Pederson-Krag would have on her mind and would
tend to pounce upon when (by sheer coincidence) they were mirrored in
her patients' dreams.
4. “The incidents occurred in the patients' dreams at exactly the
same time I was trying to avoid them.” Once again, this fact is explicable
in the light of Pederson-Krag's incentive to notice and to track down any
dream incidents of her patients which happened to hit upon a sore spot
in her own life. Thus, if she, say, had a delicious meal one day, and a
patient reported dreams of having a delicious meal that night, the analyst
probably never would notice this dream. But if Pederson-Krag were em­
barrassed about dinner, and a patient dreamed that he were similarly
embarrassed, she would immediately notice it, and consider it as evidence
of “telepathy."
F o dor ' s “T e l e p a t h ic " F in din gs
The basic facts of Fodor’s five reported “telepathic" incidents are
these: Fodor has been analyzing Arthur and Nancy, who are married to
each other; and when they move to another city, continues the last stages
of their analyses by mail. Mary is now Arthur's secretary, having been
recommended to him by Fodor, “for whom she had done editing and
manuscript typing." All Arthur’s letters to Fodor are dictated to Mary.
Mary is also on very friendly terms with Nancy.
Fedor's First Dream Sequence. Fodor first reports that:
“Mary dreamed she was standing on skis. She attached no importance
to the dream and did not mention it until Arthur remarked in the
office, ‘I wish you’d tell me why I took you skiing the other night; I don’t
ski; and I’ve never been on skis in my life.’ Arthur’s dream was simply
that he and Mary were skiing through the woods; he was skiing with
ease; and Mary more nearly floating through the air than skiing. The
dream was a delightful one; and the dreamer enjoyed it; but both the
simple transparence of the intercourse symbolism—which was not char­
acteristic of his dreams—and the choice of skis, when he had never been
skiing and had never wanted to ski, puzzled him. But the skis in Mary’s
dream were meaningful symbols, the girl, Mary in person this time,
again getting two boys. Mary does not ski and, except for symbolic
reasons, would be unlikely to be on skis in her dreams. The skis were
very long ones, which is a matter of some importance in the dream
interpretation" (XXV).
Fodor’s interpretation of this dream, partly based on the fact that
two of Mary’s previous dreams indicated that she wanted to have sexual-
amative relations with Arthur as well as with a new boy friend of hers,
is as follows:
“The analyst interprets this joint dream as primarily Mary’s, built
again on the theme of ‘girl gets two boys.’ The fact that the skis were
very long ones pointed in the direction of Arthur, as he is much taller
than the other man of that time in Mary’s life. If there is motivation in
such a shared dream, and everything anybody has ever been able to
learn about unconscious dynamics shows that there is always motivation,
the length of the skis would account for Arthur’s skiing. Mary wanted
to 4ski’ with Arthur but didn't; Arthur, less repressed, did it for her; but
he protected her with her own symbolism."
While it is of course possible that the dreams in question were tele­
pathically congruent, it is more likely that they were merely a product of
coincidence. Indeed, since Arthur and Mary worked closely together;
since there was doubtless some male-female attraction between them;
since they both understood dream symbolism—and, through their con­
tact with Fodor, the same kind of dream symbolism—it is hardly sur­
prising that they should express their desires for each other in similar
dream wish fulfillments. Moreover, if one of them had come in contact
with an actual skiing incident the day before, there would be a good
chance for the other to have similarly come in contact with it. Again: it
seems (though Fodor is vague about this) that Mary's previous dreams,
which already had involved Arthur, were under analysis before the so-
called “telepathic” dream sequence took place—even though Mary was
not being analyzed. Consequently, the discussion of her two previous
dreams with Arthur and Nancy and Fodor could easily have laid a basis
for a dual dream incident in which Mary and Arthur were involved.
Fodofs Second Dream Sequence. The second ‘‘telepathic” dream,
Fodor relates, “appears to have been Nancy's dream, ‘intercepted' by
Arthur, who remarked to her at breakfast the following morning that
he wished he knew why he had ‘kissed Alice Brand last night.' She replied
that she did not know unless it was because she had been calling on Alice
Brand and on Alice's mother in her own dreams ‘last night.'
“To the analyst, one of the most interesting points indicating tele­
pathic communication is the slenderness of the. thread leading to ‘Alice
Brand.' She is a former acquaintance of Nancy whom Arthur had met
only once and by whom he had not been particularly impressed. Further­
more, she is of a physical type which—although undeniably beautiful—
has never attracted him. Both Arthur and Nancy report that they prob­
ably had not thought of the girl in the last nine years; and that she
should have entered their dreams by coincidence is to ask too much of
coincidence.
“Arthur's dream was a simple one. He was sitting on the comer of a
couch on which a girl in a gray blue dress was lying with her feet curled
under her. The girl was Nancy in all respects, figure, posture and char­
acteristic pose; but her face was Alice Brand's. Nancy has dark hair and
black eyes; Alice has light hair and blue eyes. In the dream, Arthur
leaned over and gently kissed the girl. Except for that kiss, the dream was
a re-enactment in all respects of a scene of years ago when Nancy and
Arthur had first met and Nancy, worried and ill, had lain on a couch
and Arthur had tried to comfort her. In the actual occurrence, he had not
kissed her, although he realized he loved her and wanted to; and the
writer would point out that a dream often completes some greatly desired
action which for some reason or other was never completed in the past.
Nancy remembered only a fragment of her dream. In it, she was entering
a door to pay a call on Alice Brand and her mother.”
Two important points may be noted in connection with these “tele­
pathic” dreams:
1. Fodor reports that “neither of the participants nor the analyst
questioned from the start that the dream was telepathic; but the basis
was difficult to determine.” In other words: Even though they had as yet
no basis in fact on which to assert the telepathic nature of these dreams,
both participants, as well as the analyst, were utterly convinced that they
were telepathic. Indeed: They were apparently determined to prove the
dreams' telepathic nature.
2. Although Nancy and Arthur first reported that they “probably
had not thought of the girl [Alice Brand] in the last nine years,” Nancy
later recalled having laughed, the evening before the dream occurred,
at a cartoon involving a library. “Nancy,” Fodor states, “had been asso­
ciated once in library work with Alice Brand which raises the supposition
that she initiated the dream.” Whether or not Nancy directly shared her
laugh with Arthur (a point which is not made clear in Fodor’s presenta­
tion), it is certainly very possible that she somehow communicated the
idea of the library and of Alice Brand to him before they retired for the
evening; and that, in consequence of this shared communication, Arthur,
too, dreamed of Alice Brand that night. Fodor, with involved inter­
pretations, gives other reasons why Arthur may have dreamed of Alice
Brand that night. But since it is established that Nancy did have concrete
associations leading to Alice Brand during the evening before the dream;
and since it is very likely that these associations were consciously or un­
consciously communicated to Arthur, any more involved interpretations
of Arthur’s coincidental dream seem to be unnecessary.
Fodor’s Third Dream Sequence. Fodor’s third report of a “telepathic”
dream sequence involves Mary and Nancy. After Mary heard a scatological
anecdote, involving feces, Fodor reports:
“She recalls no dream of that night; but Nancy dreamed of defeca­
tion. She was seated on an old-fashioned toilet with a pull-chain. All she
remembers is that she defecated successfully and was quite happy about
the whole thing.
“The following morning, Mary told the story to Arthur, who repeated
it to Nancy that evening. That night, both girls dreamed. Nancy dreamed
that she was riding, in the front seat of an automobile driven by an older
woman. Her part of the seat seemed to be a toilet seat; her clothes were
arranged for defecation, so she defecated in it. Then she found she could
not flush it. She appealed to the older woman who seemed somewhat
surprised and remarked that she thought the people who owned the car
probably would not like it, but not to mind, they would stop somewhere
and wrap it up in something and throw it away. Nancy had no toilet
paper but did not care the least.
“That same night, Mary had a dream. Mary dreamed that she was
on a toilet seat in the bathroom of a private home which had two seats
in it. She noticed that there was no toilet paper near the toilet on which
she sat, that the only paper in the room was on the wall above the other
toilet which was on a wall at right angles to hers and that she could not
reach it. She defecated anyway, however, and was not at all bothered by
the fact that she could not reach the paper. Then she thought, ‘Why, this
toilet must be out of order and can’t be flushed; that’s probably why the
paper is over the other one.’ But she was not disturbed about it at all.
“The writer does not think that by any possible chain of reasoning,
this dream and Nancy’s two, that of the preceding night and that of the
same night, can be attributed to coincidence.”
In relation to this “telepathic” sequence, the following points may
be noted:
1. Mary, who was not being analyzed, and who was merely supposed
to be Arthur’s secretary, went out of her way to relate a scatological story
to him; and he, in turn, went out of his way to relate Mary’s story to his
wife, Nancy.
 2. Mary, Nancy, and Arthur (as well as Fodor) were already, at this
stage, convinced of the “telepathic” quality of two previous dream
sequences, and were definitely on the look-out for more “telepathic”
occurrences.
3. Fodor is probably correct in assuming—in view of the two points
just listed—that this third “telepathic” dream sequence cannot be attrib­
uted to coincidence. On the contrary, it seems very probable that it was
the result of deliberate planning and determination—both conscious and
unconscious—by Mary and Nancy (not to mention Arthur and Fodor) to
bring on another “telepathic” incident. Let it not be forgotten, in this
connection, that if two or more people who believe in telepathy con­
sistently get together to discuss their dream sequences every day, they are
statistically bound, sooner or later, to turn up with some “telepathic”
dreams. Such “telepathic” findings are merely a capitalization of the laws
of chance. Moreover, three people who know each other so intimately
that they can even relate scatological anecdotes and dreams to each other;
three people who consistently go over each other's dreams each day to see
if coincidences occur in them; and three people who are particularly
trying to find “telepathic” occurrences—such a trio, especially when they
are cognizant of psychoanalytic principles and of symbolic dream inter­
pretations, will soon get to know each other's lives and dreams so well
that they can literally predict, beforehand, many of the types of dreams
which will later occur to the other two members of the trio, and can
sometimes manage, because of their incentives to find “telepathic” dream
sequences, to dream similar manifest and symbolic contents into their
own nocturnal representations. Although deliberately dreaming the same
kind of dreams that you expect another person to have is assuredly not
an easy feat to accomplish, there is no reason why, on the law of aver­
ages, it should not be accomplished, say, with about as much frequency
as winning at the racetrack may be achieved if one takes enough trouble
to find out all the salient data about the horses that are running. In both
instances, the laws of chance alone are bound to result in some winnings;
and diligence and perspicacity may possibly (though not necessarily) lead
to successes far above the laws of chance expectancy.
4. Fodor keeps stressing the point that the “telepathic” dreams he is
reporting were brought to light “by accident.” He writes: “As in the
case of the skiing dream, this joint dream was brought to light by acci­
dent. Arthur said to Mary in the office: ‘Listen to what your story did
to Nancy last night,' and reported Nancy's dream. Mary gasped and said,
'Why I dreamed the same thing.' She attached no importance whatever to
her dream, had not meant to mention it and had not tried to interpret
it.” It is exceptionally difficult to see any “accident” in the case where
three people, all of whom are definitely looking for “telepathic” occur­
rences, habitually and immediately go out of their way to report to each
other (a) intimate details of their daily lives, including scatological
anecdotes they have heard; and (b) dreams of even the most personal and
most embarrassing nature. This seems to be about as “accidental” as
catching fish in a frozen lake—after you have spent the better part of an
hour chopping a hole through the ice.
 Fedor's Fourth Dream Sequence. In Fodor’s fourth reported “tele­
pathic” dream sequence, Nancy dreams as follows:
“. . . a neighbor's house was on fire. By association of last names,
she realized in the dream that the house was Mary's. A huge column of
smoke was rising from the middle. Arthur, dressed in a fireman's raincoat
and carrying a long hose, ran up to the house and stood looking at the
smoke. He evidently decided that everything was under control and went
away again. Nancy thought in the dream, ‘Aha, he's wrong about that;
he'll have to come back.' She had no affect whatever about the fire or the
fireman incident and she would not have been disturbed if the fireman
had come back.”
The next night, before learning by mail of Nancy's dream, Fodor also
dreamed about fire. As he subsequently reported his dream to Nancy:
“ ‘I had a bad nightmare last night, and it seems to be your doing.
I dreamed that there were, perhaps, two women in my apartment. The
door suddenly opened. In the corridor was something like steanr rising in
patches from the floor. Then a man rushed by and said, “Jump!” Though
he did not say it, I understood the hotel was on fire and everybody was
jumping out of the windows. The firemen were below holding canvases.
But I did not want to understand. I was asking questions to which there
were no answers. There was an urgency about jumping. I woke up with a
thumping heart.' ”
Concerning this “telepathic” dream sequence, the following points
may be made:
1. The manifest contents of the dreams have little in common, except
that they are both about fire and both involve two women and a man.
Fodor, by tortuous interpretation, gives the two dreams a congruent
latent content. But it would be almost impossible for a competent an­
alyst who wanted to “prove” telepathic dream occurrences—who was
analytically involved with the other dream participant, and who actually
participated in one of the dreams himself—it would be almost impos­
sible for such an analyst not to find intertwining latent dream contents
under these circumstances.
2. Nancy's fire dream, Fodor states, seems to have been inspired by
her genuine concern over Mary, who was sexually on fire and not in a
position to do much about it. Fodor's fire dream was apparently moti­
vated by a slight inflammation (fire) of his middle ear. Since there were
good reasons for both Nancy and Fodor to have fire dreams; since such
dreams are rather common; and since the two dreams did not even take
place during the same night, it seems almost certain that whatever con­
currence there may have been about them was the result of sheer coinci­
dence, and not “telepathy.”
3. Fodor declares that “fire is not my type of nightmare. Nor is
jumping out of the window. I was suspicious. ‘Is this the dream of a
patient? Will I have somebody this morning bring me a dream of a
house on fire?' I had two .patients in the last few days with dreams of
fire.” The bias of the analyst in favor of “telepathy” is so pronounced
here as to make him hardly trustworthy as a discoverer of “telepathic”
dream sequences. In spite of the fact that two of his patients in the last
few days actually brought him fire dreams, thus making him association-
ally rather likely to experience a fire dream himself, he dogmatically
states that “fire is not my type of nightmare,” and is absolutely certain
that some other patient will quickly bring him a “telepathic” counterpart
to his fire dream. What scientific objectivityl
4. Fodor’s far-fetched interpretations regarding his and Nancy's
dreams—which interpretations, of course, can neither be proved nor dis­
proved—take him all the way back to his childhood days. They are so
pin-pointed that they even link his and Nancy's fire dreams with Nancy's
subsequent nonfire dream concerning Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhap­
sody. These interpretations prove only, at most, that there is a connection
between Fodor and Nancy. But of course there is: Since he is her analyst,
there is a strong transference relationship; and, according to his actions,
there also seems to be a strong countertransference. Since Nancy knows
perfectly well that Fodor is of Hungarian extraction, she may well include
in her dreams themes like the Second Hungarian Rhapsody. But as for
genuine “telepathic” phenomena—they seem to be nowhere in evidence.
Fodor's Fifth Dream Sequence. Fodor's fifth and final report of a
“telepathic” dream sequence consists of Arthur's having his first castra­
tion dream in months; and of Fodor's receiving in the same mail with the
account of Arthur’s dream a report that his, Fodor's, newly-titled paper,
“Varieties of Castration,” had just been sent to the printer. “Varieties of
Castration,” coincidentally enough, is also a phrase used in Arthur's
dream.
In regard to this “telepathic” dream the following points may be
observed:
1. No documentary evidence is presented that Arthur used the exact
phrase “Varieties of Castration” in his dream; or that he used it prior to
knowing something about the content of Fodor's article.
2. Fodor's paper on castration had apparently been written some
time before Arthur's dream took place; and the idea for it had doubt­
lessly been in Fodor’s mind for some time prior to its writing. But since
Arthur was Fodor’s analysand, he could hardly have helped knowing
about Fodor’s article, in substance if not letter; nor, probably, could he
have helped hearing Fodor use, at some time, the phrase “varieties of
castration”: since, even if this were not the original title of Fodor's article,
it must have been one of the fairly common phrases in his vocabulary.
3. Arthur’s castration dream could have been caused, as Fodor him­
self points out, by Fodor's recent joking reference to punishing Arthur,
if he kept sneaking into Fodor’s dreams. And Arthur may easily have
“sneaked into” Fodor’s affairs again precisely because Fodor made a
point of his previously having done so, and because both Arthur and
Fodor were unusually well alerted, through their mutual wishes to have
repeated “telepathic” performances, for precisely such an eventuality.
4. When this “telepathic” dream occurred, Fodor had just received
the approval of Arthur, Nancy, and Mary to publish* the four previous
“telepathic” dreams in which they had participated; so that, once again,
Arthur and Fodor certainly had a great incentive for dreaming up, as it
were, the materials for another “telepathic” incident, and for finding
such an incident even if they had to stretch more than one point to do so.
5. Let it be particularly noted that there was a distinct time lag in
this dream as well as in some of the other dreams in Fodor’s "telepathic”
sequences. Thus, in the case of Arthur’s castration dream and its con­
nection with Fodor’s castration article, the account of the dream and the
references to the article arrived in the same mail; but obviously the letter
about the dream and the letter about Fodor’s article were not written at
the same moment. Again, in Fodor’s fourth reported “telepathic” se­
quence, Fodor’s dream followed Nancy’s by one night. On the other
hand, Fodor’s first, second, and third “telepathic” dream reports related
incidents which occurred during the same night, though not necessarily
simultaneously. It must be pointed out now, that, strictly speaking, tele­
pathic events must occur at almost precisely the same moment for two
observers. When the meaning of the term is stretched so that “telepathic”
events are said to occur either before, during, or after the events to which
they are supposedly congruent, it becomes most probable that coincidence
and not telepathy is involved in their occurrence. Thus, if at midnight
on July 1, 1947, I have a premonition that a close friend of mine is
dying, and I later discover that he actually died at precisely that hour, I
will be inclined to think that telepathy rather than coincidence may have
accounted for my premonition. But if my friend actually dies an hour, a
day, a week, or a year later, or dies some time before my premonition of
his death takes place, I will doubtlessly suspect the long arm of coinci­
dence. Fodor, however (as well as Eisenbud and Pederson-Krag), is so
intent on proving the existence of “telepathic” occurrences that he ig­
nores the factor of time sequence also entirely. His use of the term
“telepathy” is so watered down as to make it almost meaningless. His
experience as director of research of the International Institute for Psy­
chical Research in London seems to have borne little fruit as far as his
applications of strictly scientific techniques of investigation are concerned.
D iscussion

Summing up the accounts of “telepathic” phenomena presented by

Eisenbud, Pederson-Krag, and Fodor, it may be said that all their “find­
ings” rest on flimsy evidence. The principal reasons why they found
“telepathic” occurrences seem to have been these:
1. They were all quite convinced of the existence of telepathic phe­
nomena, and were eagerly on the look-out for even the slightest evidences
of them.
2. They all interpreted the term telepathy very loosely, and found
“telepathic” evidence when one event occurred simultaneously with, prior
or subsequent to a supposedly congruent occurrence.
3. They all preferred to accept coincidental and chance dual occur­
rences as unmistakably “telepathic” ones.
4. They all leaned over backward to interpret normal analytic occur­
rences so as to make them dovetail with preconceived telepathic notions.
They conveniently linked material that was manifest or latent, conscious
or unconscious, symbolic or nonsymbolic, interpretative or noninter-
pretative, whenever and wherever such material could possibly be made
to fit into a telepathic hypothesis.
5. They all presented “telepathic” dreams relating to patients who
were closely involved with them, and who frequently were themselves
convinced of the occurrence of telepathic phenomena. They also pre­
sented dream sequences whose content and associative material could
have easily been consciously or unconsciously suggested to the patient
by the reporting analyst.
6. They all tended to capitalize on the laws of chance by continually
looking for “telepathic” dreams in all their patients; so that, eventually,
some coincidental dreams were certain to be discovered.
In view of the foregoing reasons why Eisenbud, Pederson-Krag, and
Fodor, using the biased research techniques reported by them, should
have found the “telepathic” evidences for which they were so desperately
seeking, it can only be concluded that nothing that they have thus far
presented in any way substantiates telepathic claims. While there is no
doubt that the evidence reported by these authors may have been tele­
pathically based, nothing in their reports shows that it also may not have
been. Indeed, their “findings” are, in toto, so flimsy as to throw consider­
able doubt on the claims made for them, and to leave the burden of
proof still resting entirely on the shoulders of these three authors. While
Eisenbud, in particular, makes a valiant effort to escape from this burden
of proof by “operationally” taking refuge in a very vague “telepathic”
hypothesis, the fact remains that no scientist may legitimately accept the
existence of any phenomenon—whether it be telepathy, clairvoyance,
soul, god, or what you will—until its objective existence is indubitably,
unmistakeably, unquestionably, and repetitively established. Perhaps,
eventually, telepathic occurrences in psychoanalysis will truly be verified;
but such verification is distinctly not evidenced in the recent papers
reviewed here.
It may be said, in conclusion, that before telepathic dream phenom­
ena can truly be established as having a solid base in fact, several criteria
for their substantiation are requisite. These include the following:
1. There must be no possibility that the “telepathic” occurrences
could have been suggested, either consciously or unconsciously, through
the association of the participants, or through their common association
with a third person (particularly, an analyst).
2. The “telepathic” content of dreams or other incidents should be
entirely manifest, specific, and concrete, and never vague, general, or
capable of more than one interpretation. Symbolic, latent, unconscious,
or interpretative representations, particlarly those which are common to
human beings in general, should under no circumstances.be accepted as
evidence of “telepathy,” since a clever individual can always read into
such representations almost anything he wishes to find in them.
3. The alleged “telepathic” events should occur simultaneously; or,
at the very least, so closely together that there can be no possibility of
one participant's being directly or indirectly informed of the content of
the other's “telepathic” representation; and so that there can be no
possibility of one participant's waiting for the other eventually to have
a representation involving similar elements with his own.
4. The participants in “telepathic” incidents, as well as the reporter
and interpreter of such incidents, should under no circumstances have a
vested interest in “proving” their existence. These participants should
definitely not be ardent believers in telepathy; and most certainly should
not be individuals who have embarked on.a determined search for “tele­
pathic” phenomena. They should at all times be objective observers
who have a very healthy degree of skepticism concerning the occurrence
of telepathic incidents.
5. All verbalized material relating to “telepathic” events should be
immediately recorded, by phonograph or sound film, in the original
words of the participants relating such incidents, with each participant,
of course, recording his representation independently of all other par­
ticipants. All printed reports of such occurrences should consist of direct
transcriptions from the original phonographic or film record, which
should itself be available for further reference by interested readers.
Only after a good many “telepathic” representations have been gath­
ered and substantiated in the foregoing manner, and their relationship
to sheer coincidence has been utterly disproved, will any serious evidence
of analytic telepathy be available. That which exists at present is only
of the most suggestive, biased, untrustworthy, and unscientific kind.
DISCUSSIONS
B. The Eisenbud Findings
By JULE EISENBUD, M.D.
A breakdown of the eight major points raised by Dr. Ellis in his
critical attack on my recent paper reveals that they deal with: (1) ques­
tions of fact relating to statements and the alleged implications of state­
ments in my paper; (2) questions of fact regarding parapsychological re­
search and the status of the telepathic hypothesis; (3) questions relating
to method and inferences from data. I shall begin by attempting to organ­
ize as best I can those points raised by Ellis which fall within category 3
while leaving categories 1 and 2 for discussion in proper context.
In category 3, Ellis' chief arguments seem to be:
(1) That the coincidence of manifest elements in the two dreams I
cite, which I claim to be clearly outside the realm of chance occurrence,
is actually far more easily construed as the result of chance than other­
wise—indeed, is "far more predictable [on this basis] than surprising.”
(2) That the coincidence of these elements does not, as a matter of
fact, have to be explained even on a chance basis, since:
(a) "Eisenbud, as analyst, may have actually suggested to the second
dreamer the contents of the first dreamer's dream”; (b) "Some other direct
or indirect communication may have been made between the two
dreamers”; (c) "The two dreamers and the analyst were already, before
the ‘telepathic* dreams took place, convinced of the truth of telepathic
occurrences and were doing their best to re-prove these to themselves”;
(d) "Both dreamers were patients of Eisenbud and could very easily have
had their modes of expression, their activities, their associations, and
even their dream symbols mutually intertwined through the analyst's
connection with them/9
Before taking up the content of these arguments, a brief word as to
their form. Dr. Ellis seems to have gotten himself into the paradoxical
position of denying a causal relationship between the dreams (since every­
thing in them, he claims, can be explained on a purely chance basis) and
then proceeding to account for their coincidence in a variety of causal
terms—direct suggestion by analyst, direct or indirect communication
between dreamers, conscious or unconscious collusion between analyst
and patients, unconscious identification of both patients with analyst.
(I might state, incidentally, since Ellis has dragged in Morgan's law of
parsimony, that the ultimate complexity of these causes, as we shall see,
does not exactly testify to any particular niggardliness on his part.) Now
an event is either a chance occurrence or it is not. If it is, there is hardly
need to turn the place upside down searching for causal determinants,
while if allegedly adequate causal determinants are to be found at every
hand, the customary procedure is to relinquish the hypothesis of chance.
Ordinarily a disputant contents himself with one side of the fence at a
time, but Dr. Ellis has apparently elected to take both positions simul­
taneously. Such thoroughness, not to say agility, is indeed a challenge;
let us, by all means, confront him in these positions in turn.
To start with, take the argument concerning chance. Barring any
purely intuitive evaluation of the probabilities, since this leads my oppo­
nent and me to opposite conclusions, the ideal method for determining
the role of chance in any series of complex dreams would be to compile
 as large a catalogue as possible of actual dreams from which may be
determined by count the frequency with which any single item or com­
bination of items appears. Such a procedure, with minor corrections and
adjustments for imperfect randomness (sampling errors, individual pref­
erential deviations, etc.) would provide a fair gauge for the estimation of
probabilities in any given situation.
Unfortunately no such catalogue with accompanying frequency tables
exists, so I thought I would try to construct one applicable to the present
situation. The first thing I did was to go back over the last 100 recorded
dreams in my own notes to look for rain dreams. There was none. Next
I examined the 100 odd dreams cited in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
(66). No sign of rain. In desperation over an impending drought, I
turned to Stekel's Interpretation of Dreams (181) and ticked off the first
100 dreams there. Not a drop.
Right at the start it would seem that the only thing likely to give
water would be Ellis' firm conviction that chance is the obvious factor
behind the occurrence of the two dreams I cited. My preliminary ex­
ploration seems to have revealed that dreams of rain alone are uncommon
enough, to say nothing of rain in specific combination with five other
items.
Let us not be hasty. Mindful of possible sampling errors, etc., I will
not claim a full 300 to 1 (probably an undeterminedly higher) anti­
chance probability but will settle for 100 to 1. I now submit that the
probability against the purely chance occurrence of rain—just rain alone
—in the separate dreams of two patients at about the same time (the dif­
ference of a day I will come to later) is in itself at least 100 to 1.
We come now to the evaluation of the probabilities involved in the
combination of rain with the other specific elements, and of these ele­
ments with each other. Here we find ourselves stumped empirically be­
cause we can arrive at an ideal solution only if we had, say, 1,000 or so
rain dreams to start with in order to compute the frequencies of com­
binations like rain-shelter, rain-neighbofs house, rain-wet or dry clothes,
etc. But we have, in the sources surveyed, no rain dreams at all. The only
thing we can do is to proceed with an imperfect methodological tool and
attempt to correct for its inadequacy. For instance, we can jot down as
many possible dream sequences as we can think of in which rain is not
combined with the idea of taking shelter, just to get a feeling of the po­
tential diversity of ideational relationships which might figure in dreams.
Thus in less than five minutes I jotted down over 50 hypothetical dream
combinations like: There was a heavy downpour which suddenly turned
to snow, I grabbed my skis, etc., etc.; it was raining very hard when sud­
denly the sun came out in all its glory, etc.; it was raining very hard and
 I could not get my windshield wipers to work; it was raining cats and
dogs when suddenly the lightning lit up the whole countryside; it rained
so hard my geraniums were ruined; we were playing tennis when a
heavy rain came up and we had to stop our game; I was swimming in the
ocean when it began to pour in torrents, but I kept right on swimming;
caught in the rain, I could not get my umbrella to unfold, so I took my
new hat off and put it under my coat; I found myself in deep mud
caused by a heavy rain which was falling; etc., etc., etc. I have no doubt
that a person of average inventiveness could go on almost indefinitely
constructing possible dream fragments in which rain was not connected
with the idea of taking shelter—that is, where the idea of taking shelter
is not specifically represented in the manifest content and hence pro­
vides no link to the latent thoughts. Let us remember that items cor­
related in actuality are one thing and items correlated and specifically
mentioned in any given dream quite another.
Now the objection may be raised that this procedure is very slick but
does not actually duplicate what goes on when the dream is produced
by the unconscious. To this I might answer, first: My empirical observa­
tion of dreams has not yet disclosed any symbol or class of symbols which
inevitably presupposes any other specific symbol; second, even the type
of conscious inventive thinking we have indulged in has a high degree
of unconscious determination (as witness the very list of possibilities I
did cite); third, the diversity of possibilities to be found in dreams ought
to be much higher than in strictly conscious thinking since the dream is
to a much greater degree free from logical considerations.
In any case, for the purpose of argument let us proceed on the prin­
ciple that whereas there is probably an indefinite number of possible
dream combinations in which rain may not be combined with the idea
of taking shelter, we can be on the safe side only by putting our estimate
of probabilities absurdly low. Let us assume, then, that in the separate
dreams of two patients where the item of rain is given in both, the prob­
abilities against the occurrence on a chance basis in both of the idea of
taking shelter is of the order of 10 to 1. This now brings the probability
against the joint occurrence on a chance basis of rain and the idea of
taking shelter to at least 1,000 to 1, conservatively figured. Here we have
proceeded on the fundamental principle of probability theory that if n
is the mathematical probability of one event and m that of another in­
dependent event, the probability that both will occur together is the
product nm.
Let us go on. Having to resort again (for lack of actual rain dreams)
to our admittedly imperfect technique, we must try to determine what
the order of probability might be—given the idea combination of taking
shelter from the rain—of two separate dreams representing shelter as be­
ing sought in a neighbors house. Immediately we can think of a great
many ways of taking shelter without bothering the neighbors. First, of
course, it is conceivable that we might even brave the rain for a few
extra feet and go to our own homes; or we will probably be welcome in
the homes of any of our sisters or our cousins or our aunts. Getting away
from home and family, we might take shelter under a tree, bridge, can­
opy, ledge of rock or grandstand; we might duck into a doorway, taxi,
bus, subway or covered wagon; we can go into a restaurant, theater, drug
store, hotel lobby or library. I need not labor the point: Taking shelter
from the rain in a neighbor's house appears scarcely as “predictable” or
even as unsurprising as Dr. Ellis seems to think. I think I may safely
claim here another 10 to 1 factor in our compound anti-chance prob­
ability, bringing our figure thus far—and on a conservative basis—to
10,000 to 1.
I do not wish to bore the reader with unnecessary lists and computa­
tions, so I will deal briefly with coincidences 4, 5 and 6 in the manifest
contents of the two dreams I cited. Palatial mansion and old shack may
be assumed to be a psychological identity according to the laws that ap­
ply especially in dream interpretation. Here again the realm of actu­
ality (not to say of potential unconscious elaboration) includes a wide
variety of possible specifications that might apply to houses (colors, ma­
terials, periods, styles, etc.) I think we may safely assume a 10 to 1 anti­
chance probability that the only specification mentioned had to do with
elegance or non-elegance (let us not forget that there are odds to begin
with against the mention of any specifications). This brings our figure,
so far, up to 100,000 to 1 against chance. As to clothes, we are again deal­
ing with psychological identities, only this time of a double nature: wet-
dry, shabby-well groomed. Claiming, in order to hasten our argument,
an absolutely incontestable minimum of 2 to 1 odds against merely the
appearance of each item, we may quite safely assume the preposterously
low 4 to 1 anti-chance probability for the coincidence as a whole. At this
point our total anti-chance probability so far goes to 400,000 to 1. And as
for the names Selda and Selma, the originals of which are generically
identical, I do not think anyone will dispute the conservative claim of
10 to 1. Which gives us a final total of 4,000,000 to 1 as the inside odds
against the chance occurrence of the two dreams cited. This would not
ordinarily be termed good grounds for their predictability.1
l What undoubtedly threw my opponent off was his confused and unthinking as­
sumption of equivalence between what may be "highly correlated” in a given (i.e.,
actual) circumstance and what is antecedently probable or improbable in any possible
(e.g., dream) circumstance. The degrees of freedom are enormously wide apart in the
two situations.
 Now that we have, I trust, settled one aspect of the question of
chance, let us examine the list of possible causal determinants which Dr.
Ellis offers (quite illogically) in addition to the chance hypothesis. First
let me clear up one or two of Ellis’ misconceptions on matters of fact,
(a) “Eisenbud, an analyst, may have actually suggested to the second
dreamer the contents of the first dreamer’s dream.” The facts are these:
The first dreamer’s dream occurred on a Saturday night and the second
dreamer’s dream on Sunday night. I had last seen both patients on the
Friday before their dreams, and both dreams were reported to me on the
Monday following the dreams. This means that for me to have "actually
suggested99 to the second dreamer the contents of the first dream, I would
have had to go considerably out of my way to contact both dreamers
over the week end. I will grant that in neither of the papers in which
these dreams were mentioned did I make plain the fact that the dreams
occurred on a week end, and I can well see from the ambiguous way in
which the dreams are cited in the paper under discussion how Ellis came
to be misled. The facts, nevertheless, are as I now report them, and I
can only apologize for my naive assumption that these data were largely
irrelevant in relation to my major thesis, (b) "Some other direct or in­
direct communication may have been made between the two dreamers.”
When mentioning the occurrence of these dreams in my first paper (to
which Ellis refers and which I assume he read) (XXII), I had stated:
"This woman [the second patient]. . . . was completely unknown to the
first patient since the treatment hour of one had never followed that of
the other.” At the time I had thought this sufficient to obviate the ques­
tion of direct or indirect communication between the two dreamers—
and, as a matter of fact, still do. I do not think a lengthy circumstantial
documentation for such a simple statement of fact was called for.
Now for the other speculations of Dr. Ellis as to how the occurrence
of the two dreams under discussion might have been causally related on a
nontelepathic basis, (c) "The two dreamers and the analyst were already,
before the 'telepathic’ dreams took place, convinced of the truth of tel­
epathic occurrences and were doing their best to re-prove these to them­
selves.” (d) "Both dreamers were patients of Eisenbud and could very
easily have had their modes of expression, their activities, their associa­
tions, and even their dream symbols mutually intertwined through the
analyst's connection with them ”
Granting that (c) is true, and that on a conscious or unconscious
level I and my two patients were ready to seize upon any pretext, how­
ever flimsy, for imagining that "telepathy rides again,” I still do not see
how, under the circumstances mentioned, we could have conjured up
the instance cited. The patients (who, I repeat, were totally unknown to
each other) brought in separate and highly specific dreams and associa­
tions. Even if I had indicated to both in some way that I was highly
pleased when they performed “telepathically,” and each had gone home
determined to cook up something good for me over the week end, their
performances would still be subject to precisely the same laws of prob­
ability that we discussed before and would not necessitate the slightest
alteration in our conclusions. It is not quite sufficient for Ellis merely to
mention the possibility in abstracto that an eager desire of each patient
independently to “re-prove” telepathy might have brought about their
joint performance; it is his job, if he brings the point up at all, to dem­
onstrate specifically and concretely just how such a mechanism might
conceivably work. I confess that I cannot.
As to (d), my argument is substantially the same. I grant that I in­
fluence my patients in many ways on both conscious and unconscious
levels, and that on any given day whatever I do and whatever my mood
is may make a deep impression on them. But I do all sorts of things, and
here again the matter of diversity introduces the same old issue of prob­
abilities. I smoke, cough, squirm in my chair, mutter imprecations under
my breath (when my patients are resistant), purr with satisfaction (when
they are not resistant) and in general contrive many ways of obtruding
myself upon my patients’ thoughts. Sometimes, as a matter of fact, I get
lonely and just want to talk to somebody. So, abandoning all pretense
of correct analytic technique, I talk to my patients—of shoes or ships or
sealing wax, of cabbages or kings, of whatever, in fact, comes into my
head. Worse than this, on certain days my obviously troubled mien, my
tone of voice and my very choice of words and compulsive preference
for certain types of interpretations are dead give-aways: Whether my pa­
tients are consciously aware of it or not, their infallible unconsciouses
know that I am orally, anally, genitally or narcissistically troubled, or
whatever the case may be. This will obviously affect them in some way.
Let us say they identify themselves with me, and each goes off after the
hour with his or her anal, oral, genital, etc., homework for the night.
But just as there are an infinite number of ways of proving any given
theorem or proposition, as the mathematician Poincar£ once demon­
strated, there are ordinarily an infinite number of ways, as analysts
know, of representing any repressed unconscious trend or conflict in
dreams. Now let us assume that my patients' association with me has nar­
rowed down their range of unconscious expression from a potentially in­
finite number to a considerably smaller finite number of ways of
representing a given repressed conflict. Still, unless I, and my patients
through me, were reduced to stereotypy, perseveration and abject pov­
erty of thought on a symbolic level, there would still be a considerable
range of expression left with which to dress up any given conflict situa­
tion in dreams. If this were not so, there ought to be, according to Ellis'
conception of the extent of my influence on my patients' thinking, no
diversity at all in their dreams: They should all—not merely two of them
—have similar or identical dreams every night and pretty much the same
associations every day, like a class of obedient zombies. So long as this is
not so, as obviously it is not, and so long as I as analyst am only one in­
fluence competing with innumerable others for representation in my
patients' dreams at any given time, the problem reduces itself to pretty
much the same one of probabilities against chance occurrence as was de­
scribed in the first instance, and there is no other way out. As a matter of
fact, a moment’s consideration should show Dr. Ellis that the problem
could not be much different even if I had come right out and said flatly
to my two patients: "Now, I want you both to go home and dream of
taking shelter from a heavy downpour in a neighbor's house. Further de­
tails I leave up to you: The house may be a mansion or a shack, and you
may get wet or stay dry as you please.” I suggest that Dr. Ellis try this
some time on two of his clients. The probabilities against a positive re­
sult on even this basis are enormous, as anyone who has ever tried to
dream of a consciously selected topic will know.
I think we have now adequately ruled out as explanations of the two
dreams both chance and the group of causal determinants proposed by
Dr. Ellis. Our analysis had demonstrated, I believe, that even the pre­
sumption of the operation of the latter factors, singly or together, does
not appreciably alter the solution of the basic problem of probabilities
with which we are dealing. But does this mean that the only satisfactory
hypothesis remaining is that of telepathy? Not quite. First we must dem­
onstrate, granting that the dreams in question could not have occurred
on a chance basis, that there is no possible causal explanation more satis­
factory than the inadequate ones proposed by Ellis; second, we must show
that the telepathic hypothesis is really satisfactory: That is, we must at­
tempt to establish the validity of the telepathic hypothesis on grounds
completely independent of the present instance.
Barring telepathy, the only possibly adequate causal explanation that
I can think of off-hand would be fraud—deliberate, conscious fraud.
Anything short of this, like simple malobservation of the primary data on
my part, could not account for the facts as reported—unless, of course,
the extent of malobservation were so enormous as to amount virtually,
and for all categorical purposes, to fraud itself. As it happens, fraud is
perhaps the one nontelepathic causal hypothesis that has been more fre­
quently advanced in explanation of alleged findings such as those I have
reported, and might as well at least be mentioned here since it is the
logical extension of all the causal explanations advanced by Ellis. Unfor­
tunately, this is an issue which I cannot settle, and I must leave the
reader to his own conclusions. For those who somehow or other arrive
at a low order of probability that fraud was responsible for the "coin­
cidences” I reported, I shall now go on to a discussion of the telepathic
hypothesis itself.
"The existing evidence on telepathic functioning, including the ex­
trasensory perception experiments at Duke University," claims Ellis, "is
exceptionally disputable in that it never seems to have been duplicated
by objective experimenters who did not, a priori, passionately believe in
telepathy." The fact is that the Duke experiments have been repeated
and their results duplicated by experimenters all over the world who
started out with a high degree of skepticism and even a professedly nega­
tive bias. I need cite, for example, only the work reported by the psy­
chologist Riess of Hunter College (160), and that of the English mathe­
matician, S. G. Soal (179). Both of them had been violently outspoken
critics of the telepathic hypothesis and seem to have had what could have
been termed only a passionate a priori disbelief in telepathy' before they
were challenged to try experiments for themselves. After actually doing a
series of experiments along the lines of those done at Duke, both inde­
pendently came up with results showing odds of trillions to 1 in favor of
the telepathic hypothesis. The Duke experimenters, under the leadership
of Dr. J. B. Rhine, have for years publicly proffered an invitation to any
qualified scientist to repeat or participate in their experiments, or to ex­
amine and process their data for themselves. As long ago as 1937, the
American Institute of Mathematical Statistics publicly passed on the va­
lidity of the mathematical analysis of their data, and many hostile critics
have carefully studied the experimental procedures in an effort to find
methodological flaws. Where minor flaws were discovered, they were im­
mediately corrected; but the plain fact is that informed and responsible
criticism of this work as a whole has all but disappeared. There is not a
critic left who has a real leg to stand on, and some of the most hostile
have publicly admitted this as a matter of record. In the light of these
facts. I can only admire Ellis' fortitude in declaring that the existing
evidence on telepathy is exceptionally disputable. The Duke experiments
have been going on without a break for seventeen years and have pro­
vided us with an amount of positive evidence for telepathy and related
processes that is nothing short of staggering. Unless more valid objec­
tions to the experimental or mathematicostatistical aspects of this work
are forthcoming than those that have been advanced in the past, the
evidence will simply have to stand.
But the experimental work on telepathy does not begin and end at
Duke University. Modern organized research in telepathy and cognate
processes began over sixty years ago, and the amount of first-rate, con­
trolled work done and reported prior to the Duke experiments by psy­
chologists, physiologists, psychiatrists, biologists, anthropologists, phys­
icists, chemists, engineers, mathematicians, statisticians and professional
logicians—all of acknowledged competence if not of pre-eminence in
their fields—renders the Duke experiments almost superfluous as far as
the proof of telepathy goes. It is one of the major paradoxes of science
that this voluminous and significant literature has been overlooked and
neglected, but this is perhaps excusable if one has never been forced to
face the problem. It is scarcely excusable in one who has decided to ex­
pound on what’s what as Dr. Ellis has.
Ellis accuses me of naively accepting this “questionable evidence”
and thereby giving evidence of my prejudicial stand regarding telepathy
and my “biased determination to support it at all costs.” I plead guilty
to accepting a good deal of the evidence on telepathy—but not exactly
naively, unless Ellis considers it naive to bother at all to look at the evi­
dence before accepting or rejecting it. I plead guilty to having developed
a “prejudicial” stand on matters possibly relating to telepathy—on the
basis, I should say, of a good deal of study, sifting, checking and recheck­
ing of the available evidence. But this, it seems to me, is precisely what
evidence is for. Objectivity does not require that one completely insulate
oneself against data which might lead to a bias; and it may be that Ellis
is carrying his objectivity a little too far by relying exclusively on fifth-
hand information.
I think the point has now come where I may attempt to deal with
Ellis’ claim that the two dreams could not have been telepathically re­
lated because they occurred a night apart. I do not quite follow his rea­
soning. On one hand he implies that telepathic functioning has never
been proved and that belief in its existence is a naive assumption; on the
other hand he tells us how telepathy must work. I am afraid that Dr.
Ellis is once more backing himself into a very awkward position when he
insists on denying (or virtually denying) the existence of something and
then proceeds to postulate one of its properties. In any case, I wonder
if Dr. Ellis would claim there is no causal relationship between my paper
and the publication of his criticism because there was a considerable
time lag between the two? Or that something that is perceived today
cannot be represented in a dream tomorrow? Then why, I must ask, can­
not unconscious telepathic perception—if it exists at all—act in pre­
cisely the same mediative way as any other type of perception. The plain
empirical fact seems to be that it does. All I was bothered about in my
data was not simply that a time lag occurred, which does not run counter
to any principle of telepathic functioning that I know of, but that I
could not explain why it occurred in the instance I reported.
Before concluding with a short consideration of Ellis' proposals for
an adequate methodology, I wish briefly to take up his objections to my
psychological interpretations of the material. To begin with, I should
like to clear up two minor matters of fact. First, my interpretations were
not, as charged by Ellis, made several years after the analyses of my two
patients were completed. My paper was written after this interval, but
my notes, including interpretations, were fully recorded at the time of
the occurrence. I suggest that Dr. Ellis re-read my footnote 5 (XXIII),
where he undoubtedly went astray. The second of Dr. Ellis' errors is that
I solicited authentications of my interpretations from one of my patients
and then offered this in evidence of the validity of the interpretations
themselves. The fact is that this patient merely authenticated her asso­
ciative details, and was naturally not asked to pass on the validity of any
interpretations applying to them.
But it is scarcely warranted to make all this fuss over my particular
interpretations of the psychological dynamics behind the occurrence of
the dreams. From the standpoint of Ellis’ thesis that the dreams were not
telepathic in the first place, the question of psychological interpretation
is practically irrelevant. Such a thesis, or my counterthesis, can stand or
fall purely on a probability analysis of the dreams' manifest content;
and if Ellis does not fancy my interpretations, let him chuck them out.
My argument remains unaltered. The significance of the interpretations
in my paper was simply to demonstrate what could be accomplished with
the use of the telepathic hypothesis, but I stated very plainly that noth­
ing in the paper, including my interpretations, was offered as proof of
the hypothesis itself. If Ellis wants to attack the interpretations as inter­
pretations, and not merely as evidence contributing to proof, I suggest
that he write another paper. Nothing he has said in this paper has the
slightest relevance to either question.
We come finally to Ellis' five criteria for methodological soundness in
evaluating possibly telepathic dreams in general. His points 1 and 3 I
have already dealt with in the specific instance we are discussing, and I
believe that my arguments can be applied to the general case. It seems to
me that Ellis is being unnecessarily rigid in insisting that before the tele­
pathic hypothesis may be reasonably applied there be no possibility
whatever for a dream to have been influenced in any way by the dream­
er's association with the analyst; and equally rigid, to say the least, in
insisting that a hypothesized phenomenon behave as he insists it must
behave before he will deign to study how it does behave. Morgan or no
Morgan, this strikes me as carrying the desire for parsimony a little too
far below the subsistence level since either principle, if applied, would
automatically eliminate the possibility of psychoanalytic research on the
subject in the first place. It seems to me, moreover, that such rigidity be­
trays an unwarrantedly phobic attitude toward the laws of probability
which, after all, are there to protect all parties.
Point 2, relating to manifest and specific versus latent and symbolic
material, I have also discussed in a manner applicable to the general
case. The legitimacy of the use of latent or symbolic material and of in­
terpretations relating to this material depends entirely on what one is
trying to do in the first place. If one is trying to "prove" the occurrence
of telepathy, then it is of course out of bounds to use for this purpose a
set of assumptions that are themselves highly suspect in many quarters.
If, on the other hand, one is merely trying to see how far it is possible
to go with one hypothesis in terms of another, where both have (at least
in certain quarters) a reasonable antecedent and independent validity,
then one is quite within the pale o£ respectability. It is simply indulging
in a kind of pragmatic doodling without which science as a vital, evolv­
ing process could not exist. The fact that Dr. Ellis does not happen to
care for interpretations based on the assumption of unconscious menta­
tion is no reason for the world at large to throw away the scraps of fifty
years of psychoanalytic "doodling."
Ellis’ fourth point—that the "participants [in telepathic incidents or
experiments] should definitely not be ardent believers in telepathy; and
most certainly should not be individuals who have embarked on a de­
termined search for ‘telepathic’ phenomena"—is again rather on the
stuffy side. In any case, it is somewhat out of style today as an example
of general methodological principles and is a little reminiscent of the
quaint survivals which still sometimes find their way into college fresh­
man textbooks. It is like insisting that only those individuals should
carry on the fight for political reform who have never betrayed the faint­
est interest in politics, or that only those men should undertake to as­
sume the grave responsibilities of paternity whose judgment has never
been beclouded by the slightest sexual impulse. This might be a splendid
program were it not for the crucial incompatibility between perfect dis­
passionateness and any kind of action at all—or should we say, between
perfect dispassionateness and life itsdlf. In this respect science is not al­
together different from the other preoccupations of mankind: It does not
exist in a Platonic vacuum but is a human activity carried on only by
real, living people who have a deep vested interest in what they are do­
ing and in what they are trying to prove—whether or not they are aware
of it. Many enduring scientific achievements have been contributed by
people who were downright zealots in their own cause. Science does not
demand that her devotee have no vested interest in what he is trying to
prove, but merely that he do his best to take his own prior biases into
account and correct for them. In any event, if he does not, his equally
zealous but oppositely biased critics will; and it would of course be ideal­
ism of the sheerest and most dangerous sort even to attempt to apply Dr.
Ellis* rules to critics.
To Ellis* final point—that all verbalized material should be carried
only on wires, film, etc., etc., from the moment it is uttered until the mo­
ment it reaches the pinpoint-balanced interpreting human mind—I have
no categorical objection. It strikes me as a little compulsive, of course,
and as possibly putting the emphasis in the wrong places; but these are
minor matters and are probably only questions of taste. For big fish,
what I am doing appears to me to suit the situation fine; for little fish
with lots of decimal places, I consider Ellis* suggestions unsurpassable. I
shall certainly bear it in mind as something to be tried if ever the army
or navy should decide to take over psychoanalytic research. But until
then, 1*11 just have to limp along with the same old methods that gave us
The Interpretation of Dreams (66) and The Psychopathology of Every­
day Life (67).

C. The Pederson-Krag Findings

By GERALDINE PEDERSON-KRAG, M.D.
As “coincidental,'* Ellis designates the dream sequence recently re­
ported by me as telepathic (XXIV). Rightly so. My article was an at­
tempt to show that certain of my patients* dreams coincided in time and
in content with happenings in my own life of which the dreamers could
not be aware consciously. Ellis expands the meaning of “coincidental"
to include “chance-based.** Here again he is right, if he uses “chance** to
describe an agency or combination of factors which he understands im­
perfectly. However, he then contradicts himself by ascribing these coin­
cidences, not to chance but to specific causes: first, to my eagerness for
telepathic occurrences, which caused me to find them in commonplace
events; and, second, to the extreme frequency of such events—which
makes their coinciding more probable than otherwise.
This “Ellisian** theory of the occurrence of my coincidences is based
on certain data, which may be classified as follows: (1) psychoanalytic
concepts; (2) generalizations; and (3) matters concerning me personally.
The soundness of Ellis* theory depends primarily on the authenticity of
his facts. What he says can be validated in three ways, viz: (1) His psy­
choanalytic concepts by accepted psychoanalytic standards, as shown in
literature and practice; (2) his generalizations by observations to be
made or already made; and (3) his remarks about me, by myself. Ellis, to
my knowledge, is not acquainted with me and I feel that in this respect
I am the better judge.
By these criteria I have checked Ellis’ data. I have found that in every
case his grasp of psychoanalytic concepts is inadequate, his generaliza­
tions cannot be verified, and his assumptions about me are erroneous.
The report of findings on which I base these assertions runs into many
pages, and to avoid tedious repetition I will cite only enough typical ex­
amples to demonstrate the truth of what I have said. For instance, Ellis:
"For one who is a practicing analyst, Pederson-Krag has, by her own ad­
mission, for three times in a row suffered ‘undue discomfort’ over ‘trivial’
incidents. It is to be suspected that (a) her own analysis has not been
truly completed as yet; . . .”
Analysis does not produce, as Ellis implies, a Nirvana where emo­
tional contact with reality is lost. Even practicing analysts can still be
moved by the sufferings of kinsfolk imprisoned by the enemy, still feel
responsible for the entertainment of their guests. The important com­
mon factor was not the degree of suffering entailed by meeting an ex­
prisoner of war, or by unintentionally insulting him, or by mulling over
the best thing to do as regards my silver; the vital point, in each in­
stance, which Ellis failed to note, was that discomfort was produced
which could only be avoided by forgetting the associated ideas. Since I
did so, by suppression or repression, these ideas might be expected to
appear in my current dreams. Instead, they appeared in those of my pa­
tients.
To understand the significance of this, I suggest that Ellis read The
Interpretation of Dreams by Freud (66).
As for his generalizations, Ellis makes such statements as, ‘‘such a co­
incidence may easily occur when an analyst goes over the dreams of sev­
eral patients during a short period of time” . . . "Pederson-Krag’s pa­
tients may frequently express themselves in similar terms” . "there
is a good chance that puppets have a pronounced meaning in her own
life” (meaning Pederson-Krag’s). He is quite right. There is a good
chance that anything may happen. But this has not the same validity as
saying that something has actually occurred. As a matter of fact, none
of these possibilities mentioned by Ellis occurred.
Some of Ellis' generalizations might be verified. Thus when referring
to the occasion when I met an ex-prisoner of war and two patients
dreamed of being prisoners of war a few hours afterward, Ellis says "B/s
dream might have easily been coincidental with the analyst's experience
and with A.'s dream—particularly, as stated before, since all three ex­
periences occurred during or immediately after the greatest war of his­
tory/’ This implies that current events are apt to appear in the manifest
content of dreams. Such an implication could be verified by listing the
topics of the manifest content of a large series of dreams and noting
what proportion of these topics deal with current events. In the experi­
ence of myself and other analysts, the appearance of such topics is a rare
event.
Possibly Ellis has considerable first-hand knowledge when he says,
“Secretaries very commonly wear tweed suits; are, in fact, rather noted
for wearing them.” Yet however ardent and discriminating an observer
of ladies’ apparel Ellis may be, such a generalization has validity only if
it is made by one with professional rather than amateur status, such as
an editor of Vogue or Women’s Wear. If Ellis wants his statement to
command respect he must offer figures which would demonstrate (1) that
more than 51 per cent of all secretaries in a given area wear tweed suits
more than 51 per cent of the time, and (2) that a markedly smaller pro­
portion of other women, whatever their employment, wear tweed suits
markedly less often. Such research would constitute Ellis as an authority
in this field.
The most important of Ellis’ assertions about me personally is, “she
was convinced, to start with, of Eisenbud’s theory of telepathy and
analysis; and rather desirous of finding confirmatory evidence for it.” He
is speaking of me when he says, “any analyst who believes ardently in
telepathy, who wants to prove that the repression of emotionally charged
material will telepathically turn up in her analysand’s dreams, and who
keeps actively looking for such occurrences, is bound, sooner or later, to
find them.”
Actually, the reverse occurred. So far was I unconvinced and not de­
sirous of finding confirmatory evidence that when I noticed the correla­
tion between the patients’ repressions and my own, I thought I had
made an important find. Only after reading the literature did I see that
the same discovery had been described by Eisenbud (XXII, XXIII),
who gave acknowledgment to Holl6s (98) and Servadio (XXI) as well.
Possibly Ellis misunderstood my stating “my interest was roused by hear­
ing a paper on telepathy read, and I wished that I too might participate
in telepathic happenings. Upon discovering the motives that led to this
wish, I suppressed it.” Though this wish was active, it was active in the
preconscious rather than in the conscious as Ellis implies by his “actively
looking.”
Less important, but illustrative of Ellis' loose thinking, are his com­
ments on my meeting with the colonel. He calls it “Pederson-Krag's un­
happy experience with her ex-prisoner of war visitor." The adjective is a
libel on a pleasant evening and an entertaining guest. I reported, “For
me the phrase [prisoners of war] had associations with my family con­
nected with ideas usually repressed. Aware of my psychic discomfort I
brushed aside the memories which the words prisoner of war aroused in
me." “The discourtesy [calling a colonel a major] was slight and entirely
accidental but gave me more concern that was warranted. . . . I tried not
to let it disturb me." These statements Ellis paraphrased as “the analyst’s
discomfort . . was directly related to topics like war, prisoners of war,
discourtesy, colonels, her family, Germany, Japan, etc., etc." But neither
colonels, often charming gentlemen, nor my family, who live far off, dis­
comfort me. Germany and Japan are sad but not discomforting, since
one can bear with fortitude the trials of others. On meeting the colonel,
my actual thoughts ran thus: “My new friend knew the hardships en­
dured by my young cousin and his friends when prisoners of war. My
visitor is still alive. My cousin is not. Could more have been done for
him and his companions? No; my guilt is unwarranted. Forget it."
Ellis pictures thousands of unpleasant ideas loosely knit together.
What I described were ideas essentially innocuous, only troublesome be­
cause of specific associations. These I was repressing as my patients
dreamed of them. If Ellis is interested in the significance of the distinc­
tion he should read The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Freud (67).
Ellis is right in the main in his postulates for establishing dream
phenomena. I believe I have fulfilled these in their essential aspects.
True, I believe in the possibility of telepathic phenomena, but not to
the extent to impair my judgment or my practice of analysis. I have that
healthy degree of skepticism which Ellis demands since I have omitted
all dream sequences where there was any probability of any other agency
than telepathy present. Yet when recording I cannot share Ellis’ glorifica­
tion of the gadget, the gimmick, the electric wire and the sound film. I
cannot discard as worthless all opinions, memories or observations gar­
nered by the typewriter, the fountain pen, or the quill. However daz­
zling the performances of electrically-driven apparatus are to the naive,
the worth of a record finally depends today as it did yesterday on the in­
tegrity and acumen of its maker. This is especially true in cases where
the phenomenon observed is in the human mind.
So if Ellis considers this reply peremptory, if he wishes to press his
unbiased refutation of telepathy further, he need not wait till he can ac­
quire an expensive invention to communicate intelligibly with those in­
terested in telepathy and analysis. He need only study the basic writings
of Sigmund Freud. He would then understand the significance of trans­
ference and dream content as now he does not. He could avoid such ir-
relevancies as his frequent references to ambivalence, and his implication
that telepathy is the perquisite of the fully analyzed. He would see the
significance of such statements as this: “That [my colleagues and myself]
also presented dream sequences whose content and associative material
could easily have been consciously or unconsciously suggested to the pa­
tient by the reporting analyst.” If the suggestion were made consciously,
the analysts were guilty of serious technical errors, an assumption which
Ellis has no grounds for making. If their suggestions were unconscious,
then Ellis is talking about the occurrence of telepathy.

D. The Fodor Findings

By NANDOR FODOR, LL. D.
The surprising thing about Ellis' paper is his basic assumption that
because a man believes in what he is talking about and is anxious to
present evidence to others, his approach to telepathy is unscientific and
his findings valueless. It has never occurred to him that at one time, long
ago, the writers he sneers at may have been equally skeptical, and that
coincidence did not have to wait for his scientific acumen to be discov­
ered as a blessed explanation.
The number of former years which the present writer had spent in
NOT looking for telepathy did not advance, per se, his knowledge of the
human mind. In the present instance, the writer was not looking for te­
lepathy and was drawn somewhat reluctantly into his patients' experi­
ences by “Arthur,” “Nancy” and “Mary,” none of whom was predisposed
to believe in telepathy, knew much about it or had been asked to look
for it. They had yielded to the suggestion of their material only because
they had that precise intelligence with which Ellis refuses to credit them
and because they were perfectly aware that such things as Ellis' explana­
tory might-have-beens were had-not-beens. If their conversion, to Ellis'
liking, was too sudden, that should rather argue for the unusually strong
mental impression which the experience carried, than for the weakness
of their minds. Naturally, they were prepared thereafter for a repetition
of the experience. If Ellis had had it, would he have said, "Nunc dimit-
tis Domine” and become a hermit for the rest of his life?
Supposing a mineral prospector were looking for ores in rock forma­
tions where he had learned to find them, would he be guilty of an of­
fense against science because: he sets out on his exploration with a “bias?”
If he then discovered gold, would Ellis consider that gold spurious just
because the prospector had had no business finding it where he did, or
because its color is scatological?
This analogy is no cruder than Ellis' presumption to lay down the
rules for telepathic experiments without any recorded experience. To
take them point by point:
1. Every experimenter in telepathy knows that the elementary set­
ting in which telepathic phenomena function is emotional human rela­
tionship. Ellis on the contrary wants to find them in a vacuum. As to
“conscious or unconscious suggestions/'* it is part of the psychoanalytic
training to learn how to avoid them, and they can be easily guarded
against in correspondence unless the unconscious suggestion itself is
postulated to be a telepathic operation.
2. The demand that “the telepathic content of the dreams or other
incidents should be entirely manifest, specific or concrete and never
vague, general or capable of more than one interpretation" is, from a
psychologist, little short of astonishing. Since when has the unconscious
any respect for scientific evidence? Can Ellis order his patients to dream
according to his rules? If he did, the very compliance would vitiate his
results. His categoric assertion that the dream should be capable of a
single interpretation only, is quite novel to me. I have not yet seen a
dream of that kind. Ellis may have been more fortunate. If “a clever in­
dividual can always read into such representations almost anything he
wishes to find in them," isn't it equally true that another clever in­
dividual can argue against anything he wishes not to read in them?
What matter that he does not know the persons involved, that he is un­
aware of that undefinable feeling which close mental contact creates; all
he has to do is eliminate the analyst from the analysis, stop the patients
from continuing their business contact, from dreaming, thinking or talk­
ing; and, presto, he has the ideal conditions in which telepathy can be
proved a myth. It is easy not to believe and inexpensive to jeer at those
who claim to have found something and who have the courage to stand
up for it. However, the general experience has been that if science has ad­
vanced, it has been due to the efforts of such claimants and not to the
last-ditch fighters who would guard their vested mental interests at all
cost.
3. I wish Ellis had taken the trouble to study for a few years the sci­
entific literature on telepathy that first began to be published in the Pro­
ceedings of the British Society for Psychical Research over sixty years
ago. He would have learned, much to his surprise, that as far back as
1895 in the Census of Hallucinations (177) (a publication which he
should know about) twenty-four hours had been allowed for the delayed
emergence of telepathic perceptions. Hence his demand that “telepathic
events must occur at almost precisely the same moment for two ob­
servers/' only reveals his ignorance of previous experimental findings. It
is true that in the analytic situation special care must be exercised in in­
vestigating telepathy; but, as far as my material is concerned, perhaps I
should say that I have presented only the first five of more than twenty
instances of telepathic phenomena involving the three persons previously
reported and myself. Most of these additional instances have been ac­
cepted as genuine by persons other than myself who were well qualified
to judge such phenomena.
As to No. 4, Ellis fails to explain the “vested interest’1 he imputes to
my three telepathists. Did Einstein, in his opinion, have a vested interest
in proving his theory of relativity after he had conceived it? Should he
have waited until somebody else got the idea? Should this somebody else
also have waited for another somebody, etc., until an Ellis could an­
nounce that no claims have been made for anything by anybody, so let us
all go to sleep? Should the proof of any scientific claim really rest on the
shoulders of those who do not believe in it? And has Ellis, perchance,
succeeded in proving that coincidence is the ultimate answer to every­
thing he does not believe in anyway? It may also be worth while at this
point to define what his “healthy skepticism” means. Is it a refusal to be­
lieve that which, with a minimum of trouble, an analyst can discover for
himself if he tries to correlate his own dreams with those of his patients?
Eisenbud, Pederson-Krag and Fodor, unfortunately, have not discovered
telepathy and have not conspired to foist it on a better-deserving psy­
chiatric and psychoanalytic public. Freud and Stekel were credulous
enough to demand serious consideration for telepathy long before them.
5. Would Ellis kindly explain how anyone can make records of tele­
pathic events by phonograph or sound film when in the dream, or in the
experience, there is nothing at the time to indicate telepathic correlation
and only subsequent investigation can bring this to light?
As far as telepathic experiments are concerned, Ellis has only ex­
hibited woeful lack of information; and he is himself guilty of that lack
of care which he advises others to exercise.

E. Comments on the Discussants' Remarks

By ALBERT ELLIS, Ph.D.
Since it would take far more space than is at my disposal to comment
adequately on all the points raised by Drs. Eisenbud, Pederson-Krag, and
Fodor, and since the greater part of their objections to my paper seems
to be highly personalized, circumlocutory, and irrelevant to the main is­
sues, I shall confine my remarks to the most relevant areas of dissent.
1. My standpoint is that the reported “telepathic" dreams may have
been purely coincidental or chance-based—since there is no indubitable
evidence that they were not; but that if these dream sequences were not
chance-based, their causal determinants are more simply and logically at­
tributable to hypotheses like unconscious analytic suggestion than to the
hypothesis of telepathic communication. This hardly seems to be a con­
tradictory or a fence-straddling position.
2. While it is true that, on a chance-basis alone, a coincidental
dream-sequence like some of those reported by the discussants may nor­
mally occur only once in several thousand times, it is also statistically
true: (a) that the most improbable event imaginable will occasionally
occur over a long enough period of time; and (b) that almost any analyst
who patiently matches hundreds and hundreds of his patients' dreams
will sooner or later encounter unusual coincidences among them.
3. It is highly questionable whether more diversity is found in dream
imagery than iii conscious thinking. The work of condensation, which
Freud pointed out is such an important factor in dreams, may easily re­
duce dream diversity and increase the possibility of coincidence.
4. The fact that two patients are not known to each other hardly
obviates the possibility of the analyst's (quite unconsciously, perhaps)
putting them into effective communication with each other through their
mutual contacts with him. If the analyst on certain occasions uses the
analytic hour to display his own “obviously troubled mien" to two pa­
tients, it will hardly be surprising if these patients, in the next day or
two, both dream of being caught in a downpour, which to both of them
may symbolize gloom or depression.
5. While it is admittedly difficult for an analyst regularly to obtain
coincidental dream sequences from his patients by (conscious or uncon­
scious) suggestion, his occasional success in performing this feat is ex­
pectable rather than surprising.
6. While I do not believe that the discussants perpetrated any fraud
in the production of the reported “telepathic" sequences, it is possible
that, because of their avowed a priori enthusiasm for telepathic hypothe­
ses, they unconsciously deluded themselves in the obtaining and/or
recording of some of their published data. This, of course, any scientific
observer may do. But it has been empirically shown that experimenters
and subjects who are prejudiced at the start in favor of ESP evidence
have a definite tendency unconsciously to falsify their findings. John L.
Kennedy, a fellow in psychical research at Stanford University, experi­
mented extensively with the standard ESP cards and techniques, but
made certain that the scoring procedure of the telepathy-favoring ex­
perimenters was double-checked by objective observers. Kennedy reported
his findings in the Journal of Parapsychology, the official journal of J. B.
Rhine and his Duke University associates, as follows: “The direction of
the errors appears to lend some support to the hypothesis that the di­
rection of ESP extra-chance scoring may be influenced to some extent by
the expectancy of the recorder who tends to make errors in the direction
of his expectancy. . . . The GESP and DT methods as customarily used
do not eliminate the possibility that recording errors may, in large meas­
ure, be responsible for extra-chance scores (112)”
William L. Reuter, writing a doctoral dissertation at Temple Univer­
sity, als9 repeated Rhine's experiments with additional scoring safe­
guards. As a result of his experimentation, he reported that “the averages
of the students' responses were no better than what would be expected
on a chance basis” (153).
Not only is there a tendency for prejudiced proponents of telepathy
to score telepathic experiments as they wish them to be scored, but also,
as Kellogg, Gulliksen, Wolfe and other psychological critics have pointed
out, there is a concomitant tendency of ESP experimenters to omit the
reporting of negative results, while they of course rush to report the
positive ones. Consequently, even when their studies are not statistically
at fault (as they sometimes, in fact, are), the published results are de­
cidedly misleading.
7. The fact that some skeptics have been converted to belief in, and
confirmatory experimentation with, telepathic phenomena is hardly
proof of the validity of telepathic hypotheses and/or “findings.” Innumer­
able skeptics have been converted to diversified religious beliefs and have
concomitantly claimed to have seen, and talked with, angels, devils, and
gods. This hardly constitutes scientific proof of the validity of their
visions.
8. Informed and responsible criticism of J. B. Rhine's Duke experi­
ments has by no means disappeared, but was revived only a short time
ago by B. F. Skinner in his New York Times Sunday Book Review discus­
sion of Rhine's latest published volume. Dr. Skinner is one of the most
distinguished, respected and well-informed psychologists in America.
9. My own fairly extensive search of the organized researches in
telepathy, including those done under the auspices of the British Society
for Psychical Research during the last three-quarters of a century, has
thus far failed to reveal any significant controlled research prior to the
Duke experiments, or any amount of adequately controlled recording of
the experimental data up to, including, and beyond the Duke work.
10. It is difficult to understand how telepathy—which the dictionary
defines as thought transference or mind-reading—can, if it exists at all,
take place with an interval of a day or more between two “telepathic”
occurrences. Assuming, however, that this is theoretically possible, the
greater the lapse between the coexistence of two supposedly “telepathic”
events, the greater is the chance: (a) of there being some actual, direct or
indirect, sensory communication between the two minds involved; and
(b) of the communication's being the result of sheer chance factors.
Thus, if A. and B. both dream of a downpour on Monday night, that is
an unusual coincidence, and may possibly be telepathic in origin. But if
B. dreams of it a week later than A., he may have been directly or indi­
rectly influenced by A/s dream through normal sensory channels, and
he may have repeated A/s dream by chance-based and not so extraordi­
nary coincidence. If B. has a dream similar to A/s a year later, it could
hardly even be called concidental. The point is that while a lapse of time
between two “coincidental” occurrences does not necessarily prove them
to be nontelepathic, it usually throws considerable doubt on their “tele­
pathic” nature.
11. My standpoint was—and still is—not that the evidence presented
in the discussants' original articles is indisputably nontelepathic, but
that it is by no means sufficiently clear-cut to rule out all but telepathic
hypotheses. This evidence is quite inadequate, in other words, to uphold
the conclusions that telepathy has indisputably been shown to exist. The
burden of proof in such researches rests on the experimenter to demon­
strate beyond all reasonable doubt the validity of his hypothesis. This
was not done in the “telepathic” studies under consideration. The fact
that anyone who reads the researcher's paper is free to disagree with his
conclusions is no excuse whatever for this researcher to waste the reader's
(and his own) time presenting inadequately designed and improperly
concluded experiments.
12. While the scientific safeguards that I suggested would admittedly
make it difficult to study telepathy psychoanalytically, they would by no
means make it impossible to do so. Such safeguards mean that before a
psychological study is performed rigorous controls and a precise experi­
mental design must be employed. But if this is not done, the conclusions
from the experiment will usually be vague or invalid—which is indeed
the case in all psychoanalytic telepathic researches made to date. The
discussants seem to believe that no psychoanalytic research can be so ade­
quately designed and controlled as to afford data sufficiently objective for
accurate hypothesizing and conclusions. This I strongly doubt.
13. I entirely agree that, “Science does not demand that her devotee
have no vested interest in what he is trying to prove, but merely that he
do his best to take his own prior biases into account and correct for
 them.” My objections to the discussants' studies are that: (a) The subjects
of the experiments were frequently biased in favor of a certain outcome;
(b) the experimenter, who was also biased in favor of the same outcome,
was sometimes one of the subjects; and (c) the recording was done on an
entirely subjective basis by the biased experimenter. No safeguards what­
ever against the subject-experimenter-recorder's “own prior biases” were
reported by any of the discussants. While science does not demand a to­
tally unbiased researcher, it certainly demands unbiased research methods
from him. This demand was not at all satisfied in the discussants' studies.
14. It is difficult to comprehend how unconscious suggestion given
by an analyst to his analysand, and resulting in coincidental dreams by
the latter, can be taken as ipso facto evidence of telepathy. Suppose an
analyst feels threatened by some unusual event in his life, and dreams for
several nights about, let us say, walls closing in on him. Suppose that,
quite unconsciously, but by his attitudes and words, he communicates his
feeling of being threatened to several of his analysands. Suppose that
some of these analysands, becoming aware of the analyst's feeling that he
is threatened, also begin to feel threatened; and suppose, finally, that one
of these analysands also dreams about walls closing in on him. Where is
the telepathy involved here? If the analyst, without any sensory cues,
suggested to the analysand that the latter have a coincidental dream, then
telepathy might well be said to exist. But unconscious suggestion with
plenty of sensory cues—which is what seems to have taken place in most
of the reported “telepathic” dream sequences under discussion—is an
entirely different matter.
15. The technique of recording telepathic events by phonograph or
sound film can be—and should be—done by the simple process of record­
ing all the sessions of an analyst who is experimenting with these phe­
nomena. This would not only assure an accurate transcription of “tele­
pathic” dreams as they were originally recorded, but would also serve as
a check on the relative incidence of so-called telepathic phenomena. If it
is objected that this would be an expensive research procedure, it must
be repeated that ease and inexpensiveness of gathering data is no excuse
for inefficient and meaningless research.
16. Assuming that an emotional human relationship is “the elemen­
tary setting in which telepathic phenomena function”—though this is a
highly debatable statement—that is all the more reason why research which
is designed to prove the existence of these phenomena should be conducted
only within the most objective framework, with every possible scientific
safeguard. If the two dreamers, for example, must be emotionally in­
volved with each other, let us, at the very least, have some third objective
observer present to record, interpret, and report upon the allegedly “tele­
pathic” dream sequences. But to have everyone and every technique em­
ployed in the research thoroughly suspect of bias and subjectivity—that
is only to obtain evidence that will stand up in no scientific court of
inquiry.
In conclusion: None of the points raised by the discussants negates
the fact that inadequate, uncontrolled research techniques and observa­
tional methods were employed in the studies reported by them; and that,
in consequence, the hypothesis of telepathic occurrence as an explanation
of the reported coincidental dream sequences is only one of several
equally (or more) plausible alternative hypotheses. Telepathic dream
sequences may possibly occur as a result of psychoanalytic therapy; but,
thus far, no scientific evidence has been offered in support of this hypo­
thesis.

F. Letter to the Editor of the Psychiatric Quarterly

By JULE EISENBUD, M.D.; GERALDINE PEDERSON-KRAG, M.D.;
NANDOR FODOR, LL.D.

To the Editor of T he P sychiatric Q uarterly :

While the undersigned have no wish to prolong the present discussion
(XXVI a) indefinitely, they nevertheless feel that the reader is entitled to
certain information which may enable him better to evaluate the sig­
nificance of statements made by Dr. Ellis in point 6 of his “Comments on
the Discussants' Remarks."
A. On the significance of recording errors.
The Kennedy report cited by Ellis was submitted for study and evalua­
tion to a nationwide committee of psychologists, none of whom were
from Duke University and none of whom had ever expressed bias in favor
of the ESP hypothesis. Some of their comments follow: “The reviewers
all point out the significant facts, that the findings of this paper are
general and not related to the interpretation or criticism of any specific
research, and second, that the large extra-chance deviations obtained in
such experiments as Rhine's could not be explained by recording errors
of such slight magnitude as those found in these experiments . The
paper, in common with the preceding articles of Dr. Kennedy which have
been reviewed, betrays an unscientific bias in favor of a particular
result" (114).
B. On the omission of negative results.
1. The Duke group has made it a practice to report all results, posi­
tive and negative, whether from exploratory or formal experiments, and
has even attempted certain ingenious safeguards to insure that this prac­
tice be strictly followed at their laboratory (154).
2. While it is manifestly impossible to determine the actual number
of independent ESP investigations withheld from publication, it is equally
impossible to determine the ratio of investigations demonstrating positive
results to those demonstrating negative results so withheld. It has been
found, however, that a considerable number of independent investiga­
tions leading to positive results have been withheld from publication
because of the investigators’ fear that such publication would jeopardize
their academic security.
3. In any case, mathematicians have calculated that even at the rate
of concentrated experimentation done at Duke over the last few years, it
would require more than 6,000 years of consistently negative results to
offset the significance of the positive deviations already achieved.
 Chapter 27
ANALYSIS OF A PRESUMPTIVELY
TELEPATHIC DREAM*
By JULE EISENBUD, M.D.

The following is an account of certain events which took place over a

week end I spent in writing my reply (XXVI b) to Dr. Ellis' attack
(XXVI a) on one of my papers on telepathy (XXIII). I believe these
events to be of interest mainly because of the unexpected and to my mind
rather comic confirmation they provide for the very arguments with
which I had tried to meet the criticisms advanced in Ellis' paper. If this
account appears to be unduly long, circumstantial and involved, I can
only beg the reader’s indulgence toward what appears to me to be the
unavoidable necessities of an adequate presentation of the material.
Very little is included which is without bearing on the thesis advanced,
and I believe that careful study will reveal the pertinence of details that
at first glance might seem to be of no more than rhetorical interest.
To begin:
I had received the proofs of Ellis' article about a week before the
week end in which these events occurred, but had not done anything up
to this time beyond organizing in my head the gist of certain arguments
I wished to make and jotting down a few notes on key points. On Satur­
day and Sunday I worked pretty steadily on the formal composition of
my reply, and by Sunday night the manuscript was finished and typed.
All that remained was to go over it the next evening for minor errors of
grammar and phrasing; and except for two or three changes of this sort,
the manuscript I mailed off on Monday night was exactly as I had left it
on the day before.
Late that Monday afternoon an analytic patient reported a dream
which she had had on the preceding night. The following is a verbatim
account:
I had a lady analyst. I drive somewhere with her in the rain. I meet
her family. As we're going wherever we're going, she's talking about her
# Originally published in The Psychiatric Quarterly, 22:103-135, 1948. Published
here by permission of Dr. Jule Eisenbud and of the editor of The Psychiatric Quarterly.
 work with patients and I sense her insecurity because her talk is along
these lines: “I sometimes wonder how much good I do people. Every
now and then I wonder if I do them any good at all— but then I must do
some good ” and she names some prominent person. “Look at so-and-so.
He has great respect for my work. If he says so, it must be good,” and she
keeps on in this monologue. So I try to reassure her, but first I tease her
a little. I tease her about giving so much money to charities she likes,
and tell her this is a guilt manifestation. But when I see she's really con­
cerned and doubtful, then I really reassure her and tell her, “Of course
you are doing a good job ” But the more I tell her this, the more I begin
to doubt her myself. I have this double reaction— the external one and
the internal one. Then we get to wherever we are going. We have a car
and bags and so forth. I find that I have to do everything myself as she
is scared and helpless, and I make note of this fact. I eventually park the
car and take the bags into a department store.
Inspection of the manifest content of this dream as reported reveals
several points of particular interest. To begin with, the dream deals with
rain, thus falling into a category which has special interest for me at the
moment since I had just concluded an unsuccessful search for actual rain
dreams on which to base a refutation of one of Ellis' arguments (XXVI b).
As a rain dream, moreover, the dream presents several characteristics
which have striking relevance to one of the arguments I had advanced
against Ellis in reply to his critical attack. First, the idea of taking shelter
from the rain does not figure as such in the manifest content of the
dream: At the end of the dream the dreamer quite casually gets out of
her car and goes into a department store, and there is no special mention
of the idea of taking shelter. Second, in casually coming out of the rain,
the dreamer does not go into a house (much less a neighbor's house) but
into a department store. In my reply to Ellis I had argued that even if
the idea-combination of “rain" and “taking shelter from the rain," were
given, it could scarcely be predicted that shelter would be sought in a
neighbor's house. I had offered a number of what appeared to me equally
likely a priori possibilities, merely to illustrate the potential diversity of
dream element combinations. In this dream, the dreamer adds to my list
and in so doing buttresses my argument against Ellis with a genuinely
empirical demonstration. All in all, I could hardly have wished for a
more striking refutation of Ellis' contention that when rain occurs in a
dream it is entirely unsurprising and even predictable that shelter be
sought, in a house, and specifically in a neighbor's house.
There is one other highly suggestive point of relationship between
my argument against Ellis and the manifest content of the dream I cite
here. In my argument I had granted Ellis' contention that I influence my
patients in some way and had even suggested that my analytic behavior
is sometimes so unrestricted that my patients can scarcely fail to note how
troubled I am and what specifically is troubling me. In her dream, the
patient makes quite an issue of this. Assuming for the moment that the
lady analyst in the dream represents me, the patient pictures herself as
able to “sense [my] insecurity." The analyst talks to her unblushingly
of a specific conflict, and the dreamer plainly states: “I make note of this
fact."
 It seems to me that these correspondences between the manifest dream
of one of my patients and the specific content of the argument against
Ellis which I had finished writing on the very night the dream occurred
warrants closer study. I would say, in fact, that on the basis of the very
type of probability evaluation I had outlined in my reply to Dr. Ellis, we
already have in these correspondences a sufficiently reasonable basis for
the suspicion that the coincidence as a whole is beyond the realm of
purely chance occurrence. However, let us for the time being shelve
further consideration of this possibility and proceed to an examination
of those data the patient herself offered by way of association to specific
elements in the manifest content of her dream.
“Lady analyst ” (1) “There must be some reason I made you a lady.
It is belittling you. I recognize in this resistance to your ideas.” (2) An
old friend of the patient had some years ago consulted a well-known
woman analyst for help in making a crucially important decision. After
one interview, he seemed to have been able to grasp his problem quite
clearly and immediately resolved upon a satisfactory course of action.
Recollection of this fact led my patient to suppose that by representing
me in the dream as a lady analyst, she too wished to achieve help with
her problems in this quick and almost miraculous fashion instead of hav­
ing to work them through day after day, month after month, in a labor­
ious analytic way. (3) Some days before the dream the patient had been
to see a performance of The Medium. The central character of this opera
is a fraudulent woman medium who is finally overtaken by guilt and
attempts to demonstrate to her astonished clients that everything she has
ever done for them was accomplished by means of trickery. She reveals
all her tricks to them and, the better to convince them that they had all
been hoaxed, even goes so far as to throw their money back at them. At
the time she saw this performance, the patient confessed, she could not
help thinking of me because of my interest in telepathy, although she had
not gone so far, she protested, as to make a flat identification of me with
the medium on the basis of fraud.
'7 drive somewhere with her in the rain” On the day preceding that
of her dream, the patient and her husband had driven to the country to
spend a week end with some friends. They had had to drive in the rain.
(An examination of over one hundred recorded dreams of this patient
during the preceding year failed to reveal one mention of rain, although
it had often rained and she had often driven in the rain during this
period.)
“I meet her family” The patient had no specific association to this
other than that she had often wondered whether I had a family, what
they were like, and how I acted with them in my off-hours.
“She [the analyst] is talking about her work with patients and I sense
her insecurity ” etc. The analyst doubts that she does her patients any
good. “I begin to doubt her myself. I have this double reaction— the
external one and the internal one.” This, the patient thought, must
represent her ambivalent reaction to what had turned out to be a correct
and very fruitful interpretation that I had made to her the week before
on a basis that involved the fullest use of the telepathic hypothesis.1
Commenting on her dream as she imagined it to relate to this occurrence,
the patient stated (verbatim): “Last week I felt more encouraged about
analysis than ever before, and almost elated to see the telepathic method
work. I felt that you had saved me weeks and months of work and that
the method could be a short cut. This seemed to me like the big proof
that I did not have to take on faith and was utterly convincing. Maybe
on an unconscious level I resented being thus unmasked. The dream is
trying to say: ‘Don’t accept Dr. Eisenbud’s interpretation of this material.
Don’t be so sure that his methods are as good as you think they are, or
that this is as great a piece of analysis as you think it is; he is not really
sure himself.' I think it is this type of ambivalence that has gotten into
my dream.” This association is obviously linked to the one about the
fraudulent medium, since both enable the patient to deny the significance
of the painful interpretation which had been made the week before.
"Some prominent person . . . ‘He has great respect for my work, if he
says so, it must be good!’ 99 A day or so before the dream the patient's
husband had defended his point of view in a political discussion with
such lucidity and persuasiveness that a prominent lawyer present had
been very much impressed.
'7 tease her about giving so much money to charities she likes, and
tell her this is a guilt manifestation ” The patient’s first comment was
that the phrase “charities she likes99 seemed strange and foreign to her
for some reason. She pointed out that the qualifying words “she likes"
were words she never used in such a connection, and she wondered why
she had used them in her dream. To “charities" the patient associated the
fact that several days before the dream she had been to her first “card
calling" charity luncheon in which the names of donors were publicly
announced together with the amount subscribed. Although anyone at­
tending the luncheon could signify his wish to remain an anonymous
donor by so requesting on his card, many people reacted violently against
a money-raising technique which directly linked the matter of giving to
personal publicity. The patient had always taken a certain pride in the
fact that her contributions were made separately from her husband, and
on this occasion she had given more to this charity than she had in past
years. To “guilt manifestation" the patient had no specific association
other than the general relationship between guilt and giving to charity.
In relation to both “charity" and “guilt manifestation," I should
mention here an episode of some significance which the patient herself
did not spontaneously associate to her dream. The Friday preceding the
dream was the 31st of the month. On leaving her analytic hour on that
day, and seeing that I was apparently unprepared with her bill, the
patient had teasingly remarked, “No bill?" I told her that I would have
one ready at her next visit (which was to be Monday, the day she reported
the dream) but indicated that her anxiety on the subject was not without
meaning.
“Bags.99 When packing for the week end in the country, the patient
1 This material is too voluminous to include. The author will supply details on
request.
was faced with the problem of how to get everything she and her husband
might need into one bag. It finally turned out that two suitcases were
actually necessary, but when she and her husband arrived at their destina­
tion, she felt somewhat embarrassed when the host, spying the one suit­
case lying on the floor of the car (the other was in the trunk compart­
ment), remarked with evident relief and satisfaction, “Only one bag,
I see.” She and her husband were then shown to a rather small room
where she saved appearances (and her hostess' face, she thought) by hid­
ing one suitcase under the bed. For some reason, the patient told about
hiding the suitcase under the bed with great archness, as if she had con­
trived something extremely clever, and she seemed desirous of my admira­
tion at her ingenuity. But her disproportionate emphasis on so trivial a
detail succeeded only in puzzling me.
“I find that I have to do everything myself as she is scared and help-
less, and I make note of this fact ” Up to this point in her analysis, the
patient had suppressed her reactions to several persistently unremedied
defects in the decor of my office, like a missing lampshade, some horrible
dust'catching artificial flowers, and stacks of outdated magazines. She
confessed now that she often experienced a sort of maternal impulse to
take care of these things for me, since I obviously had no intention myself
of doing anything about them. She had not mentioned these thoughts
before “for fear of offending” me.
“Department store ” The patient is in the department store advertis­
ing profession and knows all about these stores and their problems. (She
also had an association to a particular department store in her early
years which involved the name Eisenstadt.)
It is possible now to attempt a provisional interpretation of the dream
on the basis of these associations, with some help on my part in filling in
and polishing up the rough edges. To start with, one can discern the
patient's attempt to deal with the emergence of certain painful material
in her analysis by projection. For several days during the week preceding
this dream the analysis had dealt with certain infantile oral fantasies
which had hitherto been repressed by the patient, and this confrontation
had been made possible by the use of highly specific material in her cur­
rent and past life which presumably had been perceived telepathically by
another patient and woven into the manifest and latent contents of one
of the latter's dreams. It was as if there had been the return from repres­
sion of the first patient's material in the second patient's dream, since this
suited admirably the defense needs of both of them (and, incidentally, as
the dream revealed in the most unequivocal way, of my own). In order
to make use of this material, I was obliged to tell my patient about the
other patient's dream and associations, and I rationalized this “indis­
cretion” on the grounds of inescapable clinical necessity and my certain
knowledge that the two had never met, in or out of my office, and in all
likelihood would never do so. I naturally omitted any identifying tags
and also refrained from revealing the specific material that only I, accord­
ing to my telepathic hypothesis, could have contributed to the final struc­
ture of the other patient's dream. At any rate, when the other patient's
dream and associations were finally shown to this patient in all their
dynamic significance as they applied to her, and when it was demon­
strated to her how on this basis, and on this basis only, a vitally important
and specific confirmation of a hitherto unvalidated reconstruction was
rendered possible, the patient had an immediate reaction. She suddenly
and with intense excitement recollected the previously repressed frag­
ments of a childhood memory that provided the missing link to a whole
phase in her psychosexual development. With this denouement she was,
as one of her verbatim associations to the dream under present discussion
indicates, utterly convinced of the correctness and importance of the
interpretations made on this basis. In her dream, however, she recants
completely and attempts to project her guilt onto me. “It is not I who
am insecure, but you,” she attempts to say. “It is not I but you who are
scared and helpless. It is not I who have such strong reaction formations
against infantile oral wishes to receive (as you are quick to judge from my
charitable activities and my alleged anxiety at not receiving a bill from
you) but you; you are the one who attempts to expiate your oral guilt by
giving so much to charity.” Through her associations to ”lady analyst”
she attempts to belittle me at the same time that she tries to show that
I am not as skillful as a certain woman analyst she knows of, and she
indicates that she would much prefer to achieve any short cuts through
the latter’s plain, wholesome, untelepathic and, no doubt, motherly
methods. By making me into a woman, furthermore, she tells me that
I am much too garrulous and cannot be depended upon not to gossip
about her, just as I have talked to her about my other patient. Finally,
through her association to The Medium, she alleges that my telepathic
technique is fraudulent from start to finish and that instead of receiving
a bill for my services, she really should get all her money back, like the
clients of the medium in the opera she had recently seen. With this, the
wheel comes full circle, and she is again a demanding infant; but from
this position she once more slides back into a denial of her dependency
through an association which thrusts forward her fantasy of mothering
me. She will take charge of my office, if I will allow her into my family.
She will assume all my burdens (bags) and manage my affairs as com­
petently as she manages her own business (department store). In fact, she
would be glad to take over in the analysis itself since I don’t know
enough to come in out of the rain and clearly have no notion of where
we are heading (“we’re going wherever we’re going”). Besides, I am ob­
viously insecure about whether I do my patients any good. She will give
me the reassurance I so patently need, but since she cannot help inwardly
doubting me, it might be better if she herself were to conduct the analysis
(drive the car) and carry it to a definite conclusion (“I eventually park
the car”) instead of driving around and around in the rain.
With such an interpretation, as far as it goes, I do not think there
would be much need to quarrel. It obviously has some basis in fact and
must have a certain correspondence with what the latent thoughts of the
dreamer probably were under the circumstances described. We see the
familiar mixture of plaintive demandingness and outraged vilification,
together with a fantasied reversal of our relative roles of mother and
child in an effort to deny the oral needs she so unmistakably expresses.
All very good. But the more we compare the dream and its associations
to the interpretation we have been able to construct from it, the more an
 uneasy suspicion grows upon us that as far as a thoroughly tight, theo­
retically adequate explanation of all the dream elements goes, we have
had to take too many broad liberties of an ultimately objectionable
nature. We have been too accepting of the dream's flimsy logic, and have
been unconsciously neglectful of certain direct and implied omissions.
For one thing, we have not been able to account at all for the “prom­
inent person" element which figures so conspicuously in the manifest
portion of the dream. No matter how ingeniously clever we permit our­
selves to become as ex-cathedra dream interpreters, we are unable to
justify the presence of this element in the dream in terms of the patient's
association, nor does there appear to be any inescapable contingency of
such an element upon the over-all scheme of the dream as a whole. Again,
we are at a loss to do anything very useful with the phrase “she likes," to
which the patient herself directs our attention as a significant and prob­
ably unaccidental feature of the dream. When we come to the other
dream elements, moreover, we discover that the use to which we have
been able to put the associations which do somehow appear to hang
together is not as precise and as specific as we should have desired or as
may be found in our best examples of tightly overdetermined dream
elaboration.
There should presumably always be an antecedent fitness almost
compelling the inclusion of a given element into a dream, on the ground
that it and it only will carry the maximum load of latent meaning. A
final symbolic choice must always be able to establish its claim to utiliza­
tion in a dream through definite, unequivocal superiority over any other
broadly equivalent symbol, and it is always in order to question the
credentials of any dream element whose presence appears to depend on
nothing more substantial than the fact that it, like a hundred thousand
equally expressive potential symbols for a given meaning, just happened
to be floating around in the psychological ether at the time. A positive
basis of selection must always be operative and, if possible, demonstrable.
But in the present dream, elements like “rain," “driving in a car,"
“bags," etc., seem totally lacking in this respect. The most that can be
said for them is that they are “day's residues" (a slight enough distinction,
considering the numberless items of an average day) and that they do
more or less fit the presumptive latent thoughts of the dream as these
gradually take shape from the examination of other and more depend­
able dream elements. But it cannot be demonstrated why the dreamer
chose these in preference to a great number of equally valid symbols
from the depths of her experience to express precisely what she wanted
to express.
Some of the dreamer's choices appear very tenuous indeed when
judged on the basis of our more exacting criteria, and very few of them
can claim more than one point of determination, a minimal prerequisite
without which it would be almost impossible to find any element in any
dream. Finally, we cannot neglect the fact that nowhere in the patient's
associations do we find any hint of an actual basis in fact for her projec­
tions—and aside from psychotic thinking (and perhaps there too), even
a dream requires a nucleus, however small, upon which a projective need
may securely take hold and burgeon.
 Where in the present instance does the patient reveal a specific basis
for the Hamlet-like speech she pictures me as making in the dream?
Certainly she may unconsciously perceive or deduce that I worry about
how much good I do my patients, but is there no better basis for this
particular speech as the psychologically perfect vehicle for the thought
she wishes to express? And as to “charities," there appears to be no basis
at all for her projection. In the last analysis, in looking back over our
dream and its interpretation, we find ourselves in the position of a tramp
who, having boarded a freight train in New Orleans, views his ultimate
arrival in Springfield with the complacent satisfaction that his train
didn’t leave the rails for one inch en route. How or why he didn’t wind
up in Des Moines or any other possible destination which, but for the
grace of several hundred switch-tracks that just happened to be turned
one way and not another, could easily have occurred, is a matter of com­
plete indifference to him. He is where he is and there is absolutely no
mystery about how he got there: One mile just naturally followed an­
other.
After all this, I realize that I have left myself open to the almost inevi­
table charge of setting up a situation that I can knock down from a
position I have prepared specially in advance and from which I am now
about to emerge with a shrill, if somewhat disingenuous, whoop. I will
obviously be accused of one-sided, patently purposeful selection in the
choice and alignment of data and arguments to suit a preconceived thesis
to which I am more than happily wedded and from which nothing can
ever pry me loose. And to this I plead guilty, at least on enough counts
to warrant that the reader never lose sight of the fact that I am a special
pleader of the worst sort. It may perhaps be claimed that had I proceeded
with more caution, more patience, and with a rigid determination to
follow up and take account of all seemingly minor associative details
which I should have insisted that the patient pursue in an atmosphere
of boundless leisure, a much fuller and better integrated picture of the
relationship between the dream’s manifest content and its latent thoughts
could no doubt have been achieved in time. This may appear to be a
reasonable-enough suggestion, but unfortunately it leaves us with only an
hypothesized bird in an assumed bush. Let us for the moment work on
the assumption that the fact of my obvious partiality to a special thesis
does not entirely and automatically eliminate every possibility of a cer­
tain amount of truth being on my side. Let us, then, turn to the bird
in hand.
It was mentioned at the beginning that several elements in the
dream’s manifest content seemed to bear a striking relationship to Ellis’
criticism of my paper on “A Telepathic Reve a Deux” (XXIII) and to
the argument I had just composed by way of reply. Here was a dream,
namely, in which the element of rain was not linked to the idea of taking
shelter and in which the dreamer did not go from the rain into a neigh­
bor’s house or a house at all but into a department store. By way of
attempting an empirical refutation of Ellis’ contention that the combina­
tion of rain, taking shelter and house in the dreams of two patients was
not only not surprising but even predictable, I had checked over 300
dreams from three sources in an effort to get a sufficient number of rain
dreams to give me some actual material to work with. I had not found
one rain dream in this number, and was consequently reduced to a non-
empirical source of argument. Thus balked, I could not have wished for
a better example of a rain dream than the one the patient now presents.
It is only one dream, of course, and is therefore not the series I would
have liked, but even so it definitely favors my side of the controversy
and appears to be as good as or better than any of the dream plots I had
made up out of my head in order to demonstrate to Ellis that consider­
able ideational diversity is possible in dreams. Besides this, the patient
represents me in her dream as openly talking to her of my own conflicts
and insecurity—to the extent of a monologue, and she makes “note of this
fact.” In my reply to Ellis, I had wished to grant for the purpose of argu­
ment that I influence my patients in all sorts of ways, and I had repre­
sented myself as not only going so far as to “talk" to them, but as even
revealing my specific conflicts in ways that they could not possibly fail
to note. My contention now is that even these correspondences render
the relationship between the patient's dream and my associations so
highly unlikely on a purely chance basis that in view of our not com­
pletely satisfactory interpretation in terms of the patient's associations
alone, we have every right, if not duty, to look for further correspond­
ences of this sort.
An element in the patient's dream which immediately struck me as
possibly having great significance was the fact that she was driving in a
car with the analyst, but I do not expect the reader to understand why
this might be meaningful without the following data as background. On
the day of the patient's dream, I was busily engaged in composing my
reply to Ellis. Ideally, the crux of my argument should have rested on an
empirical demonstration of the possible diversity of paths taken by
dreams which start with similar elements, but, as I have stated, it turned
out to be highly improbable that I could ever round up a sufficient num­
ber of rain dreams to make my demonstration specifically applicable to
the case at hand. Now the device to which I finally resorted—that is,
the attempt to show the possibilities of diversity on a basis which was
not really empirical—seemed to me to be only a tour de force with certain
obvious limitations, and I felt (and even showed in my reply) consider­
able defensiveness about its legitimacy (XXVI b). I must now confess that
privately I myself was not too impressed with the only arguments in
extenuation of this procedure that I could draft, and when I finished this
section of my reply I felt deeply concerned over the shabby methodo­
logical straits to which I had been reduced. As a matter of fact, I felt
downright guilty, as if I had been forced to offer something that to my
own critical scrutiny appeared wholly inadequate, despite its superficial
relevance. It was simply not empirical, and to claim any degree of corre­
spondence at all between what I had done and what an actual frequency
count might show was logically indefensible no matter how preposter­
ously low I might put the probability figures derived therefrom. What
was worse, I felt that if my argument were ever to fall into the hands of
a good mathematical logician (and I had two or three in mind in my
fantasy) I would immediately have to stand trial on the charge of delib­
erate weaseling with intent to bamboozle the jury. What was I to do?
The only way out of this dilemma that I could think of, short of frankly
admitting my powerlessness to deal adequately with the question, was to
see if I could find at least a moderately-sized group of actual dreams
centering around some element other than rain and, by doing a frequency
analysis of other elements in the manifest contents, in this way demon­
strate my point about possible diversity. The only hitch was that here
too the stern logician (to me a forbidding father figure, since my father
was known as one) would wag his finger disapprovingly on the grounds
that I could never demonstrate on an empirical basis the legitimacy of
reasoning from any non-rain dream category to that of rain dreams itself.
This brought me back to where I had started and left the outlook rather
hopeless.
At precisely this point in my labors I received an entirely unexpected
Sunday morning visit from an old friend—one of the very two or three
mathematical logicians whose disapproval I had been fearing in my
fantasy. And here I was caught red-handed with the smuggled goods
right on the typewriter in front of me. There was nothing to do except
make a clean breast of the whole affair and take my friend into consulta­
tion on matters of procedure. After acquainting himself with the back­
ground of the controversy and reading my reply (which was just through
the point where I had built my anti-probability figure up to the hand­
some size of 4,000,000 to 1), my friend agreed that from the strictly logical
viewpoint, my failure to find an actual rain dream in the first place was
the telling point of my argument, and that all the rest was merely win­
dow-dressing. But he felt that if I could, as I had suggested, get a dis­
persion index on a series of dreams dealing with something other than
rain, this might carry some empirical weight even though it could not
be assumed to have too high a correlation with such an index derived
from rain dreams themselves. At this point he took his leave.
Now we come to the point of this seeming digression. When I made
my count of the first hundred dreams in Stekel (181), I reached the 100
mark right in the middle of a series of automobile dreams (that Stekel
was citing), but I did not complete the reading of this series because I
was simply scanning for mention of rain and had reached my goal. But
now I went back to this series since here, I thought, was a ready-made
group of dreams on which to test my dispersion hypothesis. What was
my dismay to find that in the 17 automobile dreams cited, four dealt with
accidents or near-accidents, seven represented something going wrong
with the motor, and two showed something going wrong with other
parts of the car. This was definitely not a good illustration of the
dispersion hypothesis, and to cite such a series would completely ruin
my case. In vain, might I attempt to show the enormously wide
angle of dispersion among the other elements of these dreams, or to
point out that in Stekel's day autos were still a novelty and were no doubt
always colliding and breaking down in actual fact, or to suggest that this
whole series might have come from two or three patients who would
naturally tend to show repetitive trends. It was no use. I decided then
and there, but not entirely without guilt, to say nothing about this
empirical encounter and to let my argument rest exactly as I had left it
before becoming (as I now told myself) logical to the point of morbidity.
Besides, time was pressing, I would merely confuse the reader, the editors
would not welcome any additional material in an already overlengthy
reply, etc., etc. In a word, “I made as if" I had never seen an automo­
bile dream in the first place. As to a series dealing with some other and
not so obviously loaded item, I quickly gave up after a fruitless search
to get together five of anything.
But it is here that my patient's dream began to grow on me as more
and more significant. It was as if she had ferreted out my hidden guilt in
relation to both rain and automobiles (at least as far as the logic of my
arguments went) at the same time that she provided the specific empirical
vindication that I was seeking by fusing references to both in one dream.
Not only does rain occur with no mention of taking shelter or of taking
shelter in a house, but "automobile" occurs with no mention of collision
or of anything going wrong with the motor. And further (since I can no
longer refrain from riding the telepathic hypothesis at full gallop) it
seems to me that specific significance can be seen in her representation of
me as scared and helpless, and of herself as having to do everything for
me. In a word, the patient’s dream seems to incorporate several elements
that may provisionally be regarded as deriving from unpleasant and
suppressed (and on a deeper level, of course, repressed) day's residues of
mine. But if I wish to capitalize on this for purposes of demonstration,
I simply have to confess my sins—i.e., that I had put forward my fantasied
rain dreams while leaving out Stekel’s automobile dreams. Even at this
point, it would appear that in relation to her embarrassment at having
herself been spotlighted by the telepathic process during the week pre­
ceding this dream (a fact which she admits in her associations to the
dream) the patient now turns the tables on me rather neatly.
As long as we have ventured thus far with the use of the telepathic
hypothesis, we might as well go further. The patient's reference in the
dream to the analyst's charitable activities as a guilt manifestation ap­
peared to me to be not entirely accounted for solely in terms of her own
associations. For one thing, we do not have the actual basis in fact which
enabled the patient to project her own guilt on me. This was entirely
missing from her associations. Second, we are lacking the explanation of
the patient’s obviously pointed use of the specific phrase “charities she
likes ” a usage she herself remarked as seemingly alien and hence sig­
nificant. If we are to work in accordance with the empirical doctrine
that everything in a dream must be specifically and not loosely deter­
mined, then we are obliged to admit that the data given by the patient
herself are not sufficiently explanatory, even though they are helpful up
to a certain point. I can now offer the following data from my own
residues in supplementation of the patient’s.
Two days before the patient’s dream, and before I had actually started
to write out my reply to Ellis, I found myself thinking of suitable argu­
ments in defense of my position and possible measures of counterattack.
One of the things which most annoyed me in Ellis* article was his irre­
sponsible attack on the validity of the telepathic hypothesis itself, a hypo­
thesis with whose scientific background he was obviously and demon­
strably unacquainted. To me Ellis presented a type of uncritical criticism
regrettably all too prevalent, and I was eager once and for all to expose
the complacency and shallowness of its pretensions. But as I saw it, to
reply by simply taking an affirmative stand where Ellis had taken a nega­
tive one would be merely to offer one set of assertions in place of another,
and this could scarcely be very helpful to the reader who could not fail
to be aware that so far as effective argumentation went, the two parties
to the controversy were simply shouting at each other, nothing more. The
idea occurred to me of getting Ellis himself to do my job in a way which
would carry most conviction to the reader. I felt that if anybody were
actually to take the trouble to read even a small fraction of the volumi­
nous first-rate literature on psychic research (which I was certain that Ellis
himself had not done) he could not fail to bring in a verdict in favor of
the validity of the telepathic hypothesis. I thought that it would be a neat
stunt to get Ellis himself to do this and somehow force him to make a
public admission of his conversion. But how was I to induce him to do
the necessary reading, and afterward to announce the result publicly?
I hit upon the plan of using my reply as a platform from which to make
him a public offer of $1,000 if at the conclusion of 200 hours of assigned
reading in a bibliography that I would select he could still state, as he
did in his article, that the validity of the telepathic hypothesis was ex­
ceedingly disputable. The only other condition of the offer was to be
that if at the conclusion of his study he still felt that a negative verdict
on telepathy was justified, he would have to accompany this statement in
some issue of The Psychiatric Quarterly with a critical review of the
literature which he had been assigned. My first thoughts were that such
a plan would accomplish everything I desired since Ellis could scarcely
decline an outright offer of compensation at the rate of five dollars per
reading hour should he fail to find himself compensated by the effect of
the reading itself, while I was certain that the reading would have its
effect and that I would not ultimately have to part with the money
(which I thought of putting in escrow with the editors of The Psychiatric
Quarterly). So certain was I of Ellis* conversion that I felt the risk
attached to my offer to be negligible. The only thing that bothered me
about the plan was its questionable taste and the query in my mind as to
whether the editors of The Psychiatric Quarterly would countenance it
in the first place. Thinking that I had better get the perspective of a
more detached mind, I phoned Mrs. Laura A. Dale, research associate of
the American Society for Psychical Research, in order to get her reaction.
But Mrs. Dale, whose judgment I have come to value highly, immediately
pointed out an aspect of the matter which had not occurred to me—a
consideration, that is, which I had completely repressed: the publicity
which might develop in connection with such a venture. She feared that
the lay press might get wind of such an unusual stunt and play it for all
it was worth, and that the personal publicity which in such a case I
could not possibly avoid would very quickly blow up in my face. She
was, of course, absolutely right, and for me not to have foreseen such a
possibility myself could only have meant one thing: I was repressing an
unconscious wish for both the exhibitionistic display and the humiliation
which would surely follow. However, after Mrs. Dale brought up the
question of publicity, I was still reluctant to abandon the project and
I asked her about the possibility of having the offer made in the name of
the organization she represented, while I secretly put up the money. But
she felt that this would require the consent of the trustees of the society,
and that it would probably take too long to get them to act on such a
proposal, should they even consider it in the first place.
At the end of my discussion with Mrs. Dale, I was convinced that my
plan had altogether too many vulgar and debatable aspects for further
consideration. Moreover, Mrs. Dale had mentioned the possibility that
I might even lose my money should Ellis turn out to be a pathologically
rigid, uncompromising mentality, in which case, she thought, I was being
overly generous to offer such a large sum merely to have the literature
reviewed for the benefit of the reader at large. To this I had replied faceti­
ously that such an expenditure could no doubt be deducted from my
income tax, but the very mention of such a possibility made me shudder
and examine myself for hidden motives. What had led me, I asked myself,
to ignore all these untoward considerations in so brash a venture? Was I
trying to cover up for my own guilt, to deny my own doubts about telep­
athy? It might certainly appear so to the reader. In any case, when I
began to compose my formal reply the next morning, the idea of a public
wager with Ellis had completely disappeared from my thoughts.
If we take the foregoing suppressed or repressed “day’s residue" of
mine into account, the patient’s representation of herself in the dream
as teasing me for giving so much money to “charities I like’’ becomes
more, intelligible and meaningful than it would solely in terms of her
own association. For one thing, it provides the basis in actuality upon
which her need to project her own guilt may conveniently fasten. Second,
it renders especially meaningful and applicable the central point of her
association—the issue of publicity vs. anonymity. Third, it enables the
dream work to make specific use of the detail of “card calling’’ which
figured in her association, since the Duke experiments which Ellis
claimed to be so disputable (a fact which had led to my wager fantasy in
the first place) are known as “card calling’’ experiments.
One need not rely on these facts alone, however, to support the suspi­
cion that the patient had somehow perceived telepathically a specific
basis in me to suit her projective needs. Her unconscious tactics, and her
dream representation, appear to be somewhat overdetermined when we
scan the horizon for data possibly relating to the phrase “she likes,”
which she herself thought remarkable enough for comment. The follow­
ing facts appear to me to be highly significant.
Three months prior to the events we are discussing, a patient who had
been in analysis with me for two years took her leave of me and analysis
to sail for Paris, where she had been offered a position. I say “took her
leave” to imply that I had by no means dismissed her as cured but was
powerless to prevail upon her to remain in analysis any longer. She had
been a very difficult person to help analytically, and I had often asked
myself whether I was doing her any good at all—a question, I might add,
that the patient herself would put to me with irritating frequency. I was
so concerned with her failure to progress, as a matter of fact, that some
time before she took her final leave I had gone to another analyst in
order to review the entire case, hoping in this way to uncover any gross
blocks on my part that might account for my lack of influence with the
patient. We had parted on the friendliest terms, however, and not long
afterward I received a long letter from her giving me in the minutest
detail exactly what she had done from the moment of her arrival in
France, with the same rigid circumstantiality that I had never been able
to pierce during her analysis. About six weeks prior to. the present epi­
sode, I had written to her to ask if she would undertake some reading
and abstracting for me at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and I had listed
some five or six books and articles on telepathic research in the eight­
eenth and nineteenth centuries that I was unable to get in this country.
I had broached my proposition by stating to her that I was about to
provide her with a means of getting some of her money back from me,
and I ended by suggesting that she charge me at her regular secretarial
rates.
On the morning of the day that my current patient reported her
dream I received her answer, which had been sent by air mail five days
before. “I appreciated enormously your asking me to do the research for
you and have castigated myself daily against the delays in my going ahead
and doing it,” she wrote. Then she confessed that she had not done a
single thing about it. “and—well, I am afraid I am as much of a
disappointment to you as I am to myself.” She ended her letter with,
“Forgive me if you can about your research and if possible, leave it hang­
ing over my head; I should be more than crushed if you said it was
definitely too late.”
This event would seem to provide the specific missing link between
the later patient's manifest dream and her dream thoughts, providing
the telepathic hypothesis were used to enable it to be brought within the
circle of relevant data. Parapsychological research has demonstrated that
neither distance nor spatial barriers are of any moment in inhibiting the
direct communication between mind and mind, or mind and object, so
that in the present instance we would be entitled to conceive of alter­
native mechanisms, whereby my current patient came by her informa­
tion: Either she or I unconsciously but directly perceived the contents
of my former patient's letter by a process, strictly speaking, of clairvoy­
ance, and then had proceeded telepathically from there; or there was
direct telepathic intercommunication at the time of the dream between
my current patient, my former patient and myself. There is no opera­
tional way of deciding between the two hypothetical mechanisms in the
present instance, but since all investigators agree that either or both are
possible, there is no need whatever for deciding which mechanism was
at play here. At any rate, this question is irrelevant in relation to the
major issue of the psychodynamics involved. This, granting some sort of
telepathic or clairvoyant interaction, would have to be structured exactly
as if the dreamer had had conscious or preconscious knowledge of what
was going on between me and my former patient. In this case the pattern­
ing of the dream work would proceed along standard lines, and we may
conceive of the latent thoughts being somewhat like these: “I want you,
Dr. Eisenbud, to demonstrate your love for me by not giving me the
monthly bill I am to receive tomorrow; anyway, I don't like the telepathic
interpretations with which you have been confronting me, and I feel
that you, like the other fake medium, should give me my money back.
Now don't protest that you don't do things like that, because I happen
to know that you wanted to throw away a thousand dollars merely to
cover up your deep guilt about your own secretly ambivalent attitude
toward telepathy; and I also happen to know that you offered another
patient her money back if she would undertake some telepathic research
for you. How guilty you must have felt toward herl But why do you make
her one of the charities you like? She has failed you. Why not show your
liking for me instead, because I will do anything you want telepathically.
If you show me you love me by giving me my money back, I'll prac­
tically write your whole reply to Ellis, in relation to which you are now
scared and helpless. I'll answer Ellis for you, I'll ward off your threaten­
ing father (disapproving logicians), what's more, I'll provide you a means
of getting the effect of your silly offer of one thousand dollars without
your actually having to make the offer. I'll do all this for you—but make
me your pet charity."2
It appears to me that the foregoing facts can account for the manifest
content of the patient's dream in a way that is specific and unequivocal,
and go much further than anything the patient herself was able to offer
by way of conscious association. But it is not, of course, a question of
“either-or," since both sets of associations are mutually complementary,
and the patient's dream simply represents a joint vehicle for both her
and my repressed material—a fact completely in consonance with our
hypothesis concerning the mechanism of telepathic dreams based on all
past observation. In the present instance, knowledge of the foregoing
facts not only accounts adequately for the whole idea of the patient teas­
ing me about my charitable ventures, but even explains the guilty back­
ground of such impulses on my part, and specifically in relation to my
immediate critic and a former patient, both of whom really had me won­
dering whether I ever did anybody any good. Curiously enough, at the
time of the dream such self-doubt was completely repressed, since I had
had great success with all my patients during the preceding week; unhap­
pily, the dreamer forced me to un-repress these disturbing self-evaluations
which are, no doubt, always latent.
2 It might be mentioned here that this bridling response to an unconscious tele­
pathic perception of my “need” to return money to another patient is not without
precedent in my practice. I reported one such incident as the basis of a telepathic
dream in a former paper (X X II). At another time a young woman whom I had
treated for minor hysterical symptoms was unable to offer any payment for the five
visits she had had with me. I suggested to her that since she was a good hypnotic sub­
ject, I would gladly cancel her indebtedness if she would take part in certain of my
experiments in telepathy, to which she agreed. On the evening of our first experiment,
which involved the transmission of a three-digit number, an analytic patient who had
no conscious means of knowing about this transaction or the experiment itself dreamed
that she had taken her radio to be repaired in a place she associated to a fortuneteller's
booth, and that the shop owner, whom she abused for being a sharp trader, finally of­
fered her an adjustment on the price which, through association, turned out to be the
very number chosen for telepathic transmission. It happened that her bill too was due
on the day after the dream, and her wish to be offered the same terms as I had offered
my real experimental subject could not be missed.
 But she also forced me to understand another matter by dragging in
“some prominent person who says my work is good." It is apparent to
me now that my prime motivation in seeking a consultation with another
analyst on the patient who was doing badly was not so much for her sake
or for the sake of her parents (to whom I had suggested such a move)
but for my own sake: I wanted reassurance from “some prominent per­
son/* Furthermore, if ever I needed such reassurance again, now was the
time since I was under public attack (symbolically to me, my critic was
himself trying to make me into a “lady” analyst) and all my fears and
self-doubts were mobilized, although repressed and transformed into a
type of biting counterattack which might on the surface give the appear­
ance of considerable self-assurance and poise. My patient's dream made
me realize how really shaky I must be inwardly, how deeply in need of
reassurance from a kindly and approving father (“some prominent per­
son**). My fantasy must have been: “If only so-and-so or so-and-so would
tell me my work in telepathy is good, as Dr. so-and-so told me that my
work with K. was beyond reproach/* Unfortunately, most “people of
prominence** seem to be solidly aligned on the side of Dr. Ellis, a fact
which rankles deeply, no matter how immune I would like to believe my­
self to be from such criticism. An added meaning to this aspect of my
patient's dream and her association thus presents itself. It is as if she
were trying to say: “If only you could be as successful in argument as my
husband was this week end when he completely captivated an older and
very prominent colleague.** It seems to me that except in these terms, this
association of the patient has no possible relation to the dream, and the
manifest element “prominent person” (who thinks my work is good)
remains inexplicable.
There is little doubt that the patient*s representation of me as phi­
lanthropist out of guilt touched upon one of the central conflicts of my
life; and, at the risk of appearing unnecessarily self-revelatory or of seem­
ing to indulge in the well-known hypocrisy of trying to create a noble
impression under the guise of ruthless self-criticism, I ought to mention
certain facts for reasons which may later appear significant.
I am able to trace the origins of this particular guilty development to
the age of five or six, when I was already moved to compulsive generosity
toward a playmate who. was desperately poor and whose champion I
became against the cruel jibes of other children in the neighborhood.
This became a pattern which, for some hitherto unknown reason, I have
repeated with little variation throughout my life. In connection with my
patient's accusation that I am charitable out of guilt feelings, a vivid
preconscious memory of a certain incident in my relation to this child­
hood playmate presses forward to my attention and I seem able to re­
examine it now in a new light. I am led to believe, in a word, that the
origin of my guilt has to do with a forgotten sexual episode which oc­
curred between us. I remember lying on top of him under a bed, and his
struggling and crying out, “I have no comfortl I have no comfort!*' This
well-remembered phrase, twice repeated, has always bothered me because
of its obvious stiltedness, and it now occurs to me that in the develop­
ment of the screen memory which “charitably** blotted out any reference
to an overtly sexual transgression on my part, I have fused the more
likely actual phrase, “I am uncomfortable," with the phrase, “I have no
comfort," which would refer to my childish conception of my playmate's
poverty. The nature of my sexual transgression I can only deduce—but
I believe that the reader can do this as well as I if he will bear in mind
the restitutive character of the penance I imposed upon myself. This
deduction, incidentally, checks precisely with the far more graphically
portrayed repressed wish that was revealed to me through the preceding
week’s telepathic analysis (in which I was deeply involved) of the material
which my current patient so clearly resents having to confront, and which
led in the first place to the dream under discussion. It is as if in this
dream my patient has managed to focus the spotlight just as far back in
my life as I did in hers the preceding week, and is going to force me to
as painful a confrontation as she herself had had to endure, and for the
very same transgression—an altogether oral type of revenge, I should say.
At any rate, following my guilty escapade under the bed, the later devel­
opment of my fantasy must have been: ‘‘Since I have taken sexual advan­
tage of the poor, I must expiate through charity," and my childhood
playmate thus became, I believe, the first charity “I liked." A year or two
after this episode, I recall, I insisted that instead of giving me a birthday
present, my parents give the money to a certain charity which, as it
turned out, had a direct relationship to my poor little friend. Of course
my parents were immoderately pleased and impressed with my precocious
social awareness, since they could hardly have suspected behind my
altruism a need to expiate a specific neurotic guilt. Such behavior kept
up even through college, when I became a volunteer worker in an orphan
home where I managed to spend most of my pocket money on the youth­
ful charges I took for weekly outings. Following my analysis, which was
begun not long after this, my expiative needs were considerably reduced
but never quite eliminated since I found myself attempting to deal with
the residue by overcompensating into a coldly rationalistic attitude to­
ward the entire problem, and it was at this time that I became tremen­
dously impressed with the Shavian approach to Socialism, which com­
pletely disregarded, not to say denied, any of those motivating consider­
ations that might stem from ordinary compassion toward human
suffering.
I have never ceased to be aware of a still unresolved conflict in this
area which later on would manifest itself in extremes of behavior on one
or the other sides of the fence, and I still feel some guilt at my social
position as a psychoanalyst in a “luxury business." On one hand I tell
myself that as long as it is a luxury business, it might as well be a good
one; and I generally conduct my practice accordingly. On the other hand,
I continually find myself tempted to make Quixotic gestures, as, for
instance, when I went to considerable expense several weeks ago to get
a harmless young schizophrenic out of a state hospital where I thought
he did not belong, knowing full well that under the circumstances the
Department of Public Welfare would not take over his support without
a bitter fight, if at all, and that I would have to be solely responsible for
his maintenance in the meantime. I cannot maintain that I am not
perfectly delighted at the “forced" opportunity this paper affords me of
bringing this warmheartedness on my part finally to light; but unfor­
tunately, other very recent gestures of this sort in connection with char­
ities “I like"—which the dreamer seems to have caught in the full glare
of her telepathic percipience—I am not at all inclined to confess, and I
am going to have to allow my argument to rest, minus this evidence, on
a more discreet, if less compelling basis.
It is of course scarcely possible for me to defend the position that I
can keep these conflicts successfully hidden from my patients, and there is
little doubt that the present dreamer must in some way have been aware
of my expiatory trends. The very fact that I did not have my bill ready
on time was a detail whose unconscious significance could scarcely have
been missed. But I do maintain that the patient could have had no ordi­
nary means of knowing these facts about my need for charitable giving
which were topical and which are presumptively related with great spec­
ificity to the content of her current dream, as, for instance, my attempt
to give a rival patient some of her money back for doing some reading
for me in telepathic research, and my guilty (but fortunately restrained)
impulse to finance Dr. Ellis* education in the same subject. These facts
and these only, I submit, can properly account for the patient’s selective
use of her own associative materials in the elaboration of her dream,
while any explanation in terms solely of her own associations is clearly
inadequate.
One further fact before we leave the subject of charity: On the day
of the patient’s dream a colleague telephoned me to solicit my presence
at a charity dinner at a later date. Ordinarily I never attend such func­
tions, but on this occasion I was too busy with my reply to Ellis to argue
the point and quickly agreed to go, simply to be able to cut the conver­
sation short and get back to my work. Before consenting to attend, how­
ever, I made certain that there would be no public solicitation of funds.
I merely cite this fact to indicate how overdetermined from the stand­
point of my day’s residues was the patient’s dream reference to my chari­
table activities.
We are now in a position to complete the interpretation of my pa­
tient’s dream, making fullest use of the telepathic hypothesis. The only
items which still need clarification are “I meet the family ” “bags ” and
“department store ” As to the first, I need hardly point out that the
association offered by the patient—that she had often wondered about my
family—is entirely nonspecific and viewed by itself has no demonstrable
claim to representation in the dream. It appears to me that the only fact
which renders the fulfillment of the patient's scopophilic tendency pos­
sible at this time is this: If she goes to the trouble of actually piercing
my veil of relative obscurity to the extent of mixing into my controversy
with Ellis, she must also become privy to certain confessions about my
family relationships which I made in the paper that Ellis is attacking.
In this paper I found it necessary to bring in my early relationships to
my mother and father, as well as certain aspects of my relationship to
my wife. It is as if, on a deep unconscious level, the resistance the patient
had to overcome in order to espouse my cause in the first place through
such intimate knowledge of my affairs enabled her also to gratify her
deep wish to look at my family. I can see no other explanation which is
nearly so adequate.
 The patient's association to “bags” appears entirely nonspecific in
relation to the scheme of her dream unless we take into account the
latent thoughts outlined in the foregoing, arrived at by interpretative use
of the telepathic hypothesis, in which, for a consideration, she undertakes
to do my job for me and lighten my burden. During the composition of
my reply to Ellis, I was anxious at each step over the possible length to
which my reply might run. The editors of The Psychiatric Quarterly had
asked for a “brief' reply, and here I was trying to cram everything short
of a history of parapsychology into my paper. I really doubted that I
could ever get away with it. I condensed, I whittled, I omitted a great
many arguments I should like to have made—solely for the sake of
economy and for fear that the editors would find my reply unacceptable
because of its length. In other words, I—like the patient—was concerned
with the problem of “packing" for the week end, and was disturbed by
anxieties similar to hers. But whereas her association to bags, with its
happy ending, cannot be construed as having a too specific applicability
to the latent thoughts of her dream as illuminated by her other associa­
tions, it clearly has great significance in relation to the problem with
which I was immediately concerned and fits in beautifully with the inter­
pretation of her dream on the telepathic level. I think it quite possible,
moreover, that the patient's association of hiding a bag under a bed is
particularly applicable because of my associations to what went on be­
tween me and my childhood playmate, something I too was trying to hide
under a bed and which furthermore, as in the patient's association, bore
a curious relation to the question of “comfort." This would be in accord
with the now uncontested fact that the residue which finds its way into
the manifest content of a dream is the one into which may be condensed
the greatest number of latent thoughts. Only in this case it is my re­
pressed concerns which are packed into the patient's bag, as it were, and
not her own, since her association is more or less nonspecific in relation
to latent thoughts whose meaning for her could have been expressed by
any number of symbols. Only by taking my guilty material into account,
finally, can the puzzling overemphasis the patient put on her cleverness
in hiding the bag under a bed be properly understood.
A similar analysis will illuminate the patient's choice of “department
store ” Like “rain ” “driving in a car" and other elements in the manifest
content of the patient’s dream, this should not be regarded as one of
the accidental stage properties of a loosely-constructed fantasy. A play­
wright may write: “A large window at the rear looks out upon the rolling
hills beyond," and not care much whether the stage designer chooses to
make the window of casement or other type, or the hills barren or
wooded. But such freedom is never allowed in the elaboration of dreams,
where each element in the manifest content is rigidly determined. Cer­
tain points of negative determination for “department store," we have
already mentioned: It is not a house, in the first place, and is, in the
second, a worthy addition to the fifteen-odd alternatives to house that
I had mentioned in my reply to Ellis. But there must obviously be a more
positive determinant for this element, and such would be the fact that
“department store" represents the area of the patient's greatest compe­
tence, the area in which she is “boss" and can show me a thing or two.
This, it is true, is applicable in a not-too-far-fetched way to an interpreta­
tion of the patient’s dream based chiefly on her own associations. But a
far more specific fit can be found if we permit ourselves to utilize the
telepathic hypothesis. It is in the area of “department store” that the
patient is well acquainted with the problems of merchandising and pro­
motion; and her skill in influencing the buying habits of the public has
made her one of the top executives in the profession. My chief concern at
present, as I have indicated on several occasions, and specifically in a per­
sonal letter to the editor of the journal which published my initial paper
on telepathy, is not primarily with the superficial methodological sound­
ness of my approach to telepathic research, but mainly with the difficult
promotional aspects of so unpopular a subject. Long ago I decided that
to try to break down the buying resistance of an apathetic or hostile
scientific public by paying attention solely to the conventional standards
of methodological respectability—that is, by couching my communica­
tions exclusively in the timid pseudoscientific jargon of caution, which
is designed only as insurance against ever being hanged for a rash state­
ment—is positively futile. One doesn't win friendly adherents by being
meticulously neat and clean. The problem of parapsychological research
today is in large measure a promotional one; and, in my corner of the
field, I have found it necessary to utilize, within the bounds of absolute
clinical veracity, whatever merchandising techniques I have thought best
adapted to get my goods moving. Where I felt it advisable to shock, I
have shocked, and where I thought a little cajolery would do the trick,
I have shamelessly cajoled. I have always felt that there would be time
enough to polish the rough edges; my first concern was to present the
material in as striking a way as possible, and I have taken as my pro­
cedural motto the admirable prayer of St. Augustine: “Oh Lord, make
me chaste—but not quite yet.” Unfortunately, for all my scheming, my
techniques have brought only limited success, and I have had to face,
without the compensation of knowing that my departure from the usual
conventions of scientific presentation have at least had some effect, the
inevitable scorn of certain of my more esteemed colleagues who have told
me flatly that I have no conception of what a sound scientific methodol­
ogy is all about. This I do not find easy to endure. I am sometimes aware,
of course, that my rhetorical tactics in these matters, in which I often
prefer to rely on persuasion and suggestion rather than on sheer power
of demonstration, represent, to a certain extent, rationalizations for an
attack on my impregnably logical but somewhat stern and unapproach­
able father. Thus I frequently betray a deep sense of guilt and fear when
I find myself logically derelict, as I have pointed out before in this paper.
It is all this repressed guilt and fear that my patient seems to recognize
when she takes over my task and ends by taking me and the bags into
a department store. It is as if she were saying: “Here, you frightened
baby, let me handle this whole thing for you. Let me take you to where
I am a past master at promotion and merchandising, if that is what is
worrying you.” And it is indeed.
Let us now recapitulate. I have made no attempt in this communica­
tion to “prove” the existence of telepathy. I have merely endeavored to
demonstrate that if we make use of the telepathic hypothesis, the validity
of which I claim to have been more than adequately established on inde­
pendent grounds, we are in a position to construct an interpretation of
the dream under discussion which satisfies all the requirements of exact
dream interpretation, whereas no other method seems to suffice. To the
charge that in so doing 1 have self-indulgently favored my own associa­
tions to the neglect of those—actual and possible—of the patient, I can
reply only that this has by no means been the line of least resistance,
unless the reader wishes to believe that I positively enjoy conducting a
self-analysis in public (a suspicion, I admit, which I cannot absolutely
rule out). To me, it has appeared that I have simply followed the data
wherever they have led, even though this was not always accomplished
without difficulty, tremendous inner tension and continual attempts to
evade in one way or another the discomforts of self-confrontation. I have
undoubtedly succeeded in avoiding the deepest implications of the data
as they presumptively relate to me; and I can safely assume that despite
my efforts to be as scrupulous as possible, I have, nevertheless, managed
to present myself in a more favorable light than a completely detached
and omniscient view of the facts might warrant. I am even ready to grant
a certain exhibitionism. But this should be nobody's concern but my
own. The important thing is to determine—even with these limitations—
which of two alternative hypotheses can help us more successfully to
integrate a given body of data. These hypotheses are: (1) that only the
patient's associations are relevant, (2) that the patient's association and
my associations are relevant. I believe that I have demonstrated, within
the limits of the method I have used, that for every element in the mani­
fest content of the given dream, as well as for the dream as a whole, the
second hypothesis is incomparably more satisfactory than the first. In
terms of the first hypothesis, the presence of certain elements in the
dream's manifest content appears entirely gratuitous, and numerous other
elements appear to have been admitted at half-price. In terms of the sec­
ond hypothesis, not one element is left unaccounted for, and the dream
as a whole is revealed to be a massively overdetermined, highly condensed
vehicle for the mutually and dynamically interrelated latent thoughts of
both the patient and myself.
Just one or two concluding remarks. I have frequently observed that
telepathic dreams (at least in analysis) are likely to incorporate in their
manifest contents something that may be taken as an allusion to the very
fact that they are telepathic. Sometimes this self-reflexive tag is rather
cryptic, and its meaning has to be uncovered through an analysis of the
total situation. In this class I would put the reference to “reciprocal
arrangement" which figured in the reve a deux (XXIII) whose analysis
Ellis has attacked (XXVI a). Sometimes the symbolic references are almost
unmistakable, as, for instance, the elements fortuneteller and radio which
figured in the dream I cited in a footnote earlier in this article. I have
numerous unpublished examples of self-reflexive or self-referent dream
symbols which fit into this category. In the case of the present dream,
I am led to surmise that the dreamer’s statement: “I have this double
reaction—the external one and the internal one," is just such a self­
reflexive symbolic allusion to the telepathic nature of her dream, although
I realize that at best it is cryptic, requires broad interpretation and is
 perhaps more a part of the telling of the dream than of the dream itself.
(The last, as we know, is a distinction of not too great importance.) It is
not difficult for me to conceive of “this double reaction—the external
one and the internal one" as a bi-valved allusion, referring at once to the
patient's ambivalence to me and my interpretations and at the same time
to the double (exogenous and endogenous) origin of the dream material,
since the latter fact itself is generically one admitted cause of the patient's
ambivalence. It is on the other hand difficult for me to comprehend on
any other basis why this allusion is so pointedly made and so specifically
worded, since the mere fact of the patient's ambivalence is elsewhere in
the dream sufficiently well expressed without this seemingly superfluous
emphasis.
The final remarks I shall permit myself in relation to my already
overextended argument have to do with the very way in which the dream
was dreamed and presented, bearing in mind my thesis that the dream
is an attempt (and a competitively stimulated attempt) on the part of the
patient to pull my chestnuts (!) out of my fiery controversy with Ellis—
at a price. Granting the assumption of the patient's telepathic awareness
of my specific problems and my needs arising therefrom, we have seen
how she came through to buttress weak points in my argument, how she
enabled me to capitalize (while she herself capitalized) on my jesting
claim that I of course cannot hide my insecurities and conflicts from my
patients, and how, most deliciously of all, she enabled me to realize the
effect of my censored offer to Ellis without entailing the slightest actual
risk of losing my money or being charged with bad taste.
But there is one thing that has not yet been accomplished—something
pertaining to the weakest of all my answers to Ellis' attack and an answer
about which I was obviously most defensive. I refer to Ellis' contention
that I might in some way have directly communicated to my patients the
disputed contents of their allegedly telepathic dreams, and my reply
that it would have been extremely difficult for me to have done so be­
cause my records showed that one patient's dream occurred on a Saturday
night and the other on a Sunday night, whereas I had not seen either
patient since the Friday before the week end. This, I repeat, had actually
been the case—but I was nevertheless aware, in writing my reply, that
my eagerness to state these facts now when they had not been stated in
my original communication must look very, very a posteriori and insipid,
to say the least. What the patient accomplishes for me now is a virtual
re-take of the whole scene—only this time with confirmatory facts. In the
present instance, I had not seen the patient since Friday, and she had
her dream on Sunday night. To obviate any similar criticism on this
occasion, I have the patient's signed statement to the effect that: (1) She
knew nothing of any papers of mine on telepathy, including the paper
which Ellis was attacking; (2) she knew nothing of my involvement in a
public debate; (3) she had not seen me for two days preceding her dream;
(4) her dream and her associations as I have given them are, without
additions, omissions or changes of any sort, exactly as she reported them
in her analytic hour. With this, the patient is well entitled to rest from
her labors, “mission completed."
 One of the most monotonous features of a good deal of the literature
of parapsychological research over the past sixty-five years has been the
attempt to plug all loopholes against the possible charge of fraud by the
publication of great numbers of highly detailed authenticating affidavits
by participants in, and witnesses of, the spontaneous or experimental
occurrences described. On the whole I see no point in continuing this
practice where clinical psychoanalytic research in telepathy is con­
cerned—not because the probity of psychoanalysts should be regarded as
in any degree higher than that of any other class of investigators, but
simply because such undue defensiveness puts the burden of demonstra­
tion in the wrong place and tends to emphasize falsely the “miraculous"
character of the hypothesized events. The type of occurrence I have de­
scribed in these pages is nothing that may be expected to happen only
once in a lifetime. It is something/that happens with great frequency,
and I am now convinced, from numerous confirmations that have been
privately reported to me by many of my colleagues who are themselves
still reluctant to publish their findings, that any psychoanalyst who is
willing to come to grips with the irrational nature of his own resistances
against “the occult," and who makes an lionest attempt to entertain and
apply the telepathic hypothesis, can repeatedly observe these events in
his own practice. It is precisely this that to my mind renders the obsessive
preoccupation with the authentication of every individual instance so
superfluous.
The present instance, however, seemed made to order for such a pro­
cedure since the whole tone of Ellis' attack on my previously reported
findings, to which I conceive my current patient's dream to be a purpose­
ful reply, implied the inadequacy of my authenticating data. For this
reason, and with the hope that this will be the last time I shall ever find
myself yielding to anyone's invitation to indulge in the tactics of the
courtroom, I have not stopped with securing the validating statements of
the dreamer herself; I have obtained similar statements from five other
persons involved in the events described, each statement describing in
detail the role played by the individual signer and attesting to the cor­
rectness of the facts to which I have related them in my account. These
statements, which I have submitted for examination to the editors of
this journal, are from the following: the mathematical friend who paid
me an unexpected visit, Mrs. Laura A. Dale of the American Society for
Psychical Research with whom I discussed my idea of a public wager
with Ellis, my former patient whose apologetic letter from Paris I received
on the morning after the dream, the colleague whom I specially consulted
because of my concern over this former patient, and the colleague who
telephoned me on the day of the dream to solicit my presence at a charity
dinner. The only other person from whom I should have liked a state­
ment, by way of rendering the construction of my thesis a little more
foolproof, is the childhood playmate whom I think I must have seduced
at a very tender age and who must in some way have been responsible for
the lifelong tendency to flout the law of parsimony of which both Ellis
and my patient so perspicaciously accuse me. But an authenticating state­
ment from this playmate of long ago is a little more than I can con­
veniently manage. I must beg the reader simply to take my word for the
facts presented.
 Chapter 28

By ALBERT ELLIS, Ph.D.

Not being content with his original reply to my critique (XXVI) of

alleged “telepathic" findings by himself and other analysts, Jule Eisen­
bud has published a strikingly graphic “answer" (XXVII) to my
criticisms. Eisenbud's new article is notable for its clarity, wit, and
intellectual honesty—as well as its complete disregard for the scientific
principles relating to telepathic studies which I attempted to delineate
in my critique.
Briefly, Eisenbud attempts to refute my position—which was that he
and various other analysts are scouting scientific thinking by reading
into their analysands* dreams “telepathic" phenomena which have a very
dubious objective existence—by citing still another “telepathic" dream
of one of his patients. This particular dream, Eisenbud avers, “tele­
pathically" analyzes his controversy with me, and “sees" into his diffi­
culties and embarrassments in replying to my critique when the dreamer,
his analysand, could not possibly have known anything about our then
unpublished differences. Consequently, Eisenbud contends, the mere fact
that his analysand did, through her dream, see into his innermost
thoughts and emotions, and the fact that she did unearth, without any
direct communication from him, his concern (which was then only in
typewritten form) about my critique (which was then only in proofs)—
these facts prove that my critique was written in vain, since telepathy in
analysis in general, and Eisenbud’s analytic patients in particular, in­
dubitably exists.
I could, at this point, merely rehash the criticisms I made in my pre­
vious paper, and show that this new “telepathic" dream presented by
Eisenbud is no more convincing than the previous “telepathic" dreams
* Originally published in The Psychiatric Quarterly, 23:116-126, 1949. Published
here by permission of Dr. Albert Ellis and of the editor of The Psychiatric Quarterly.
presented by him and other analysts. I could point out that: (a) Eisenbud
(as he admits with scrupulous honesty) is completely biased in favor of
the telepathic hypothesis that he presents; that (b) even without directly
informing his patient of his controversy with me, he could easily have
indirectly and unconsciously have done so; that (c) if he ceaselessly
watched all the dreams of all his patients at the time he was concerned
with writing his reply to me, it would be almost inevitable that he
find dream coincidences that seemed of a “telepathic" nature; and that
(d) his analysis of his patient’s dream, while indubitably brilliant and
ingenious, consists merely of a forced dovetailing of the manifest, associa-
tional, and latent aspects of this dream with every conceivable manifest,
associational, and latent aspect of Eisenbud’s personal life—no mean
feat, to be sure, but certainly one not impossible of accomplishment, on
a thoroughly nontelepathic basis, by such a distinguished and subtle
analyst as Eisenbud.
I could, as I say, make these points, with considerable detailed sup­
porting evidence, against the allegedly “telepathic” character of Eisen­
bud’s new dream material. Such a statement on my part, however, could
result in Eisenbud’s coming forth with still another “telepathic” dream
of one of his patients, which would presumably prove that my criticism
of the “telepathic” quality of this third dream was unjustified; where­
upon I would have to publish a rebuttal; whereupon he would have to
publish a fourth “telepathic” dream; whereupon I Well, it is ob­
vious where such tactics would get us and the readers of this journal!
The matter, however, is really a very serious one. For whereas it
seems certain that I shall never convince Eisenbud that his method of
reading “telepathic” occurrences into his analysands’ dreams is unscien­
tific and unjustified, I am very much afraid that he may persuade many
psychiatrists and psychologists to spend considerable time looking^ for,
and perhaps reading into, ordinary dream material “telepathic” occur­
rences which are very dubiously present. This, at a time when there is
so much vitally important psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and psychological
research to be done, and so pitifully few trained personnel to do it,
would seem to me to be something of a catastrophe.
I shall make, therefore, this one final attempt to point out, not to
Eisenbud, but to some of the readers who may possibly have been mis­
led, the serious error of his analysis. I shall do this, not by directly
criticizing his method—since I have nothing to add, in this connection, to
my previous critique of it—but by using it to reduce itself to its own
logically absurd conclusion. That is to say, I shall take the very same
patient’s dream which Eisenbud has used in his last article to show how
it is just as “telepathically” applicable to a number of other situations
as to the one Eisenbud has made it applicable to. I shall show, in other
words, how the very same dream which Eisenbud claims has “telepathi­
cally” foreseen his own thoughts and emotions, applies equally well to the
thoughts and emotions of two other individuals who are hardly intimately
related to Eisenbud or his patient—and apply to a purely fictional char­
acter in the bargain. My purpose in so doing will be to underscore my
basic objection to the kind of “telepathic” analyses which Eisenbud and
several other analysts are unfortunately doing at present: namely, my
objection that they are making obviously forced and circumstantial an­
alyses which could be applied to numerous other instances and individ­
uals than the ones to which they say the dream events “telepathically”
must relate.
I shall now take the dream of Eisenbud's patient, exactly as he records
it in his latest paper and by using just the kind of analytic interpretation
that he uses (though attempting to keep it more manifest than he often
has done) I shall show how it can be made to apply “telepathically” to
three individuals A., B., and C. all of whom have had some contact with
analysts. Individual A. will be myself; and the period of my life I shall
use in relating myself “telepathically” to the dream of Eisenbud's analy­
sand will be the same period he uses for himself: namely, the end of
October 1947, when my critique of his original article had just been set
in proofs, and when his answer to my critique had just been typewritten
but not yet printed. At this period of my life I was undergoing a didactic
analysis.
Individual B., to whom I shall now attempt to relate Eisenbud's
patient's dream, is an Italian girl of twenty, who at the time Eisenbud's
latest article appeared in print (July 1948) was undergoing analysis with
a leading American analyst (who is not personally known to me, and with
whom I have had no direct contact).
Individual C., to whom I shall attempt to link “telepathically” the
dream which Eisenbud contends saw “telepathically” into his own
thoughts and emotions, is the hero of Stuart Engstrand's novel, The
Sling and the Arrow, which was published in 1947, and which was doubt­
less in the hands of its publisher many months before the controversy
between Eisenbud and myself began.
The dream of Eisenbud’s patient to which I shall now “telepathically”
relate individuals A., B., and C. is herewith quoted in full:
"/ had a lady analyst. I drive somewhere with her in the rain. I meet
her family. As we're going wherever we're going, she's talking about her
work with patients and I sense her insecurity because her talk is along
these lines: 7 sometimes wonder how much good I do people. Every now
and then I wonder if I do them any good at all—but then I must do
some good,' and she names some prominent person. *Look at so-and-so.
He has great respect for my work. If he says so, it must be good' and
she keeps on in this monologue. So 1 try to reassure her, but first I tease
her a little. I tease her about giving so much money to charities she likes,
and tell her this is a guilt manifestation. But when I see she's really con­
cerned and doubtful, then I really reassure her and tell her, *Of course
you are doing a good job.' But the more I tell her this, the more I begin
to doubt her myself. I have this double reaction— the external one and
the internal one. Then we get to wherever we are going. We have a car
and bags and so forth. I find that I have to do everything myself as she
is scared and helpless, and I make a note of this fact. I eventually park
the car and take the bags into a department store" (XXVII).
Just as Eisenbud has done, I shall now analyze every segment of this
dream of his patient, and show how it “telepathically" applies to events
in the lives of individuals A., B., and C.
“I had a lady analyst."
A. In October 1947, at the time of Eisenbud’s patient’s dream, I was
undergoing didactic analysis with a male analyst; but I had a series of
dreams in which I was being analyzed by various female analysts.
B. Miss B., who was undergoing analysis in July 1948, had just
started being analyzed by a male analyst; but she had not determined to
continue with him yet, and was considering going to other analysts,
including, possibly, a woman analyst.
C. The hero of The Sling and the Arrow, Herbert Dawes, is a femi­
nized male with distinct homosexual and bisexual tendencies. He goes, a
few times, to see a male analyst, whose treatment he strongly resists,
because he tries to get Herbert to see his own latent homosexuality. Her­
bert is completely confused by his own masculine-feminine tendencies.
“I drive somewhere with her in the rain."
A. In October 1947, I was considering affiliating with a mental hos­
pital, and I arranged to drive out there to see the place. I was concerned
lest it should rain that day, since it was quite warm and I did not know
whether to bring along a topcoat. Also: one of the problems of my
analysis at this time was that I was literally deluged with work, and I had
to decide which tasks I would drop and which I would concentrate upon.
The main question was: Which way should I turn my drive?
B. Miss B., when she started her analysis, had been learning to drive,
and was concerned about passing her driving test. She was also, because
of her driving, and because of her vacation which was soon to start,
concerned about the unusually rainy season experienced in the north­
eastern part of the United States in June and July of 1948.
C. Herbert Dawes is terribly concerned about water, since he almost
kills his wife while they are swimming, and he becomes frightfully dis­
turbed when his latent homosexual tendencies are aroused by his wife’s
saving a neighbor’s little daughter from drowning. Driving plays a con­
siderable part in his life, since he meets, while driving, the man who
most arouses his latent homosexuality, and the woman with whom (for
thoroughly neurotic reasons) he has a peculiar hetero-homosexual affair.
((I meet her family."
A. In my dreams about my analyst, I once met his family, and actu­
ally went on a trip with them. Also: In visiting the mental hospital
where I might affiliate, I met the new “family’’ of people with whom I
would be working if I did join the staff.
B. One of Miss B.’s main reasons for her analysis was her recent
mixed-up affair with a boy whom she had known for a time. Ordinarily,
she never got involved with the families of the fellows with whom she
went, but in this case, to her concern, she had met and got somewhat
involved with his family.
C. Herbert Dawes has a great deal of trouble when he meets his
family again, as his mother and sister come to visit him rather suddenly
and unexpectedly. He also has considerable trouble with his wife since
she wants to get pregnant—that is, in the family way—while he dreads
her bearing a child.
"As we're going wherever we're going, she's talking about her work
with patients and I sense her insecurity because her talk is along these
lines: 7 sometimes wonder how much good I do people. Every now and
then I wonder if I do them any good at all— but then I must do some
good/ and she names some prominent person. ‘Look at so-and-so. He has
great respect for my work. If he says so, it must be good,' and she keeps
on in this monologue
A . One of the things which I was concerned about in October 1947,
was whether I should continue to do as much professional writing as I
had been doing. Even though several prominent colleagues had taken
favorable note of my published work, I sought some reassurance from my
analyst concerning it. Also: I had some doubts, at this time, about the
suitability of my analyst for me, even though he had been highly recom­
mended by prominent persons and had an excellent reputation.
B. Miss B., at the time of her analysis, had some doubts about her
ability to make successful alliances with men, even though she had
recently had some prominent men testify to her amative ability in the
best possible way—namely, by falling in love with her themselves. She
sought reassurance from her friends and from her analyst.
C. Herbert Dawes doubts his masculinity at times, even though a
prominent doctor in his community keeps reassuring him in this con­
nection. He also doubts his ability as a dress designer, and makes arrange­
ments to turn over his flourishing business to his partner, even though
scores of prominent actresses and other women will testify to his design­
ing ability. At times he seeks reassurance from his partner about this
ability.
"So I try to reassure her, but first I tease her a little. I tease her about
giving so much money to charities she likes, and tell her this is a guilt
manifestation”
A . At the time of my didactic analysis, I was being teased about
making contributions, both of time and money, to scientific causes. My
teaser, a girl, kept pointing out that I could do much better for myself
if I thought less about science and society in general (expiation of guilt
feelings) and more about myself and my own pocketbook. My analyst,
too, pointed out that my supposed altruism might involve expiation of
guilt feelings.
B. One of Miss B/s close friends kept teasing her about spending her
money on her favorite charity—herself—rather than saving it, as he
thought she logically should do, to make certain that her analysis could
continue. He thought that she might be unconsciously punishing herself
 by deliberately sabotaging her analysis, and thereby leaving herself in the
clutch of her serious neurotic trends.
C. Herbert Dawes expiates his guilt over his feminine occupation—
the designing of dresses—;by virtually giving his business away to his
partner. Then he teases himself for doing so, and thinks of taking it back
again.
“But when I see she's really concerned and doubtful, then I really
reassure her and tell her, ‘Of course you are doing a good job/ ”
A . My analyst was rather reassuring (or at least I interpreted his atti­
tude as being a reassuring one) about the kind of work I was doing at
the time, and about the kind of work I was planning to do. Even more
so, I kept reassuring myself that I was doing a good job.
B. Miss B. was reassured by both her analyst and her friends that she
had been doing a good job of attracting men, and that she was in general
getting along better in life than she sometimes imagined she was.
C. Herbert Dawes' wife and his best friend (a physician) keep reas­
suring him that he is really quite masculine, and is a good husband. His
partner also reassures him that he is still a good designer when he feels
that he is failing in this respect. His analyst reassures him that his neuro­
tic symptoms will pass away.
“But the more I tell her this, the more I begin to doubt her myself.
I have this double reaction— the external one and the internal one ”
A . The more I reassured myself about the work I was doing, the
more I tended to doubt its value. I got the double reaction—that the
papers I was publishing were externally impressive, but that internally,
as far as my own professional development was concerned, I might be
doing something more worth while.
B. The more Miss B. reassured herself about the external progress
of her analysis, the more she began to doubt herself and to wonder
whether she wasn't holding some vital internal material back.
C. The more Herbert Dawes got reassured, by others and by his own
acts, about his masculinity, the more he came to doubt it. He began to
be caught in a steady double reaction—the external (masculine) and the
internal (feminine) one.
“Then we get to wherever we are going. We have a car and bags and
so forth ”
A. I began to see my way, eventually, toward an analytic synthesis,
and became reconvinced that I had sufficient endowment, drive, and
learning to get to wherever I wanted to go. I also decided to become
affiliated with the mental hospital, and had to start thinking about a car
and bags and so forth to move some of my things out there.
B. In the midst of her troubles, Miss B. begins to get to where she
wants to go with her analyst, and to settle down to steady analytic sessions
with him. She also makes arrangements to take her driving test. She also
packs her bags and so forth and starts to take the short summer vacation
to which she has been looking forward.
C. Herbert Dawes finally gets to where he is (unconsciously) going:
He kills his wife, and gets in his car and drives to his shop to try on a
suit which he had made for a (prominent) woman. This suit (made for
an “old bag”) has all the feminine accouterments and so forth which
he has always unconsciously wanted to wear.
 “I find that I have to do everything myself as she is scared and help­
less, and I make a note of this fact ”
A . I found (of course) that I could not rely on my analyst to make
my decisions, but that I had to make them all myself. I made a mental
note of this fact. Also: In getting my things to the mental hospital, I
found that the friends on whom I had relied to help me actually were
too busy or had excuses for not doing so. Consequently I had to arrange
for all the moving myself.
B. Miss B. found that she had to make her own decisions, rather
than rely on help from her analyst or her friends. She also found, when
she came to take her driving test, that she had not been taught to do
certain things which should have been included in her teaching, and that
she therefore had to overcome her scared and helpless feeling, summon
up her nerve, and arrange, on a thoroughly impromptu basis, to do every­
thing herself.
C. Herbert Dawes found that, being scared and helpless, he had to
summon up his last reserve of strength and do everything himself—
including murdering his wife and daring to start a complete identifica­
tion with his feminine component.
'7 eventually park the car and take the bags into a department store”
A. I eventually got my things packed, moved them to the hospital,
and parked them and myself at this huge institution, which is a veritable
department store in size as compared to other mental hospitals.
B. Miss B., getting set with her analyst, took herself and her bags
for a vacation in a very large resort.
C. Herbert Dawes was eventually forced by the police to park his
car and had to take himself and his woman's clothes off to jail.
Here ends the dream of Eisenbud's analysand. Out of this dream
material, with the help of associational material of the patient (which I
did not even bother to use in my analyses), and with the aid of interpreta­
tions which are frequently far less manifest and far more far-fetched
than those I have just employed, Eisenbud builds what are on the face of
it fairly convincing “telepathic" connections between the elements of the
dream and the emotional and ideational aspects of his own life. But the
point is—and the interested reader may compare for himself our two
sets of interpretations—my interpretations seem to be quite as convinc­
ing, and in some respects more so, than Eisenbud's. Or, in other words,
if the coincidences between Eisenbud’s interpretations and the dream
material of his analysand are brought forth as indisputable proof of the
“telepathic" quality of his patient's dream, then the evidence seems just
as convincing that this same patient, in this very same dream, was able
“telepathically" to see what was happening to Miss B. in July 1948, and
what Stuart Engstrand was inventing for the fictional Herbert Dawes
some time prior to 1947. Since the patient's dream, to judge from Eisen­
bud's account, seems to have occurred during the first week in November
1947, and presumably was relevant to her own life and analysis during
the preceding weeks, as well as (“telepathically") to Eisenbud's emotional
and ideational concerns, two alternative conclusions seem to be justifi­
able here: Either (a) this patient has been a partner to the most stupen­
dous, colossal, miraculous, quadruple-threat telepathic phenomenon of
all time; or (b) very likely no telepathy at all has occurred here, and
none, certainly, has been scientifically established.
Hypothesis “a” is even more unlikely than I have thus far made it
sound for the simple reason that the three “telepathic” sequences which
I deliberately read into the dream of Eisenbud’s patient are but three of
an almost infinite number of other sequences, involving both real and
fictional characters, which I also could have linked “telepathically” with
this dream, had I the time and inclination to do so. The interested
reader, in fact, as a sort of exercise in analytic interpretation, can easily,
I am sure, find several cases within his own ken—and particularly his
own case, since he knows that best—which may be dealt with in the man­
ner I have dealt here with my three illustrative cases; and, using the very
same dream of Eisenbud’s patient, he will have little trouble, I dare say,
making the sought-for “telepathic” connections.
I may say, with Eisenbud, that just as he has corroborating statements
from various associates to show that the coincidences between his affairs
and the dream material of his analysand actually occurred, so do I have
witnesses, including Miss B. and the various people mentioned in my
foregoing analyses, who are willing to attest to the coincidences between
the given dream material and the facts of my life in October 1947 and of
Miss B.’s affairs in July 1948. As for the coincidences relating to Herbert
Dawes, they are available for all to read in Stuart Engstrand’s The Sling
and the Arrow.
Enough is enough; so I shall end right here. Eisenbud, I am certain,
will be entirely unconvinced by my present critique of his methods, just
as he was previously unconvinced of my past analysis of his telepathic
“findings.” He will probably continue to work on the assumption, as he
tells us with amazing frankness in his latest article, that “the problem of
parapsychological research today is in large measure a promotional one;
and, in my corner of the field, I have found it necessary to utilize, within
the bounds of absolute clinical veracity, whatever merchandising tech­
niques I have thought best adapted to get my goods moving. Where I
felt it advisable to shock, I have shocked, and where I thought a little
cajolery would do the trick, I have shamelessly cajoled” (XXVII). Intent
as he is on “proving” at all costs, and with a minimal adherence to sci­
entific methodology, that telepathy exists, Eisenbud’s latest paper on
“telepathy” in psychoanalysis will not, I fear, be his last. But I sincerely
hope, for the sake of the infinitely more important psychological issues
and researches now at stake, that this will be mine.
 Part VI
New Contributions
 Chapter 29
EXTRASENSORY ELEMENTS IN DREAM
INTERPRETATION*
By W. H. GILLESPIE, M.D., M.R.C.P., D. Psych.

On a Wednesday morning recently, as I was traveling by car to the

Maudsley Hospital on my regular route, I found myself in a serious traf­
fic holdup at Vauxhall Bridge, which delayed me some ten minutes. I
decided that next day I would take a different route, over Lambeth
Bridge—a route I knew but abandoned years ago in favor of the better
Vauxhall one. So next morning I made for Lambeth Bridge. As I turned
the corner into Horseferry Road I noticed the street name, and it oc­
curred to me, for the first time, I think, that at one time there must have
been a ferry for horses where the Lambeth Bridge now stands. There was
no obstruction on this route, and I thought no more about the matter. I
knew that one of my patients works near Horseferry Road, and I may
have thought of this, but do not remember doing so.
Next day, that is, on Friday, this patient, a woman whom I shall call
A., began her session with a dream, as follows:
“1 was in the Horseferry Road; there was a hospital on one side of the
road, a church on the other. The church had an awning in front of it,
and there were crowds on both sides of the awning—evidently a wedding
was going on. I crossed the road to the other side to get a better view,
but some women there told me I was wrong to do so, and so I crossed
back again. There was a woman in a long blue dress down to her ankles,
and a hat, all very frilly and old-fashioned ”
• Author’s Note.—The following paper, based on clinical material collected between
1946 and 1948, was read as a ‘‘Short Communication” to the British Psycho-Analytical
Society in the latter year, and no material alterations have been made. I delayed pub­
lication in order to add further relevant observations which I hoped to make; but in
the three years that have elapsed I have had no similar experiences that seemed worth
putting on record. It is true that there have been a few suggestive occurrences, but they
could all be fairly easily dismissed by a skeptic. This negative fact is worth noting,
since it seems to be characteristic of extrasensory phenomena that they come and go
unpredictably. Hence it is rather easy to turn one’s back on them, and it is unlikely
that I should have published this paper had not Dr. Devereux persuaded me. At the
same time, the three years of apparent extrasensory inactivity must not be ignored in
any assessment of the practical importance of the subject for the psychoanalyst.
 She brought numerous associations to the dream, both that day and
the next, Saturday. The first association was to the Horseferry Road—
namely, that she was in it on the day before the dream—in the afternoon,
I discovered later, whereas I was there in the morning—and at some time
during the day, she does not know when, the thought crossed her mind
that there must once have been a horse ferry there. This immediate as­
sociation was what caused me to prick up my ears and begin to wonder
whether there was something more here than mere coincidence.
Further associations had to do with her work, and led to a fantasy of
sailing down the river in a barge, as in olden times.
The wedding led her to think of the silver wedding of the Queen (the
King was not mentioned), and of the fact that on the day of the anniver­
sary (Monday of the same week) she had been held up in a crowd near
Baker Street, and had had a close-up view of the King and Queen. She
made a big point of the fact that all this was involuntary, that is, she
would never have watched the procession deliberately. While waiting in
the crowd, she very much hoped she would not be seen by me doing any­
thing so vulgar—she feared this might happen because of the proximity
of the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
One of the women in the dream who made her recross the road was a
woman she knows who told her recently about an internal, gynecological,
operation she was going to have. This association reminded her that on
the day before the dream she had been thinking about all her illnesses,
including a roughness of the skin in a very awkward place that she can
see only with a mirror, i.e., near the genitals. It will be remembered that
this woman with the gynecological complaint was on the hospital side of
the road.
There were several other associations to crossing the road; one of
these had a slightly occult flavor, and concerned a relative who had died
crossing the road.
Near the end of the hour, when she seemed to have come to the end
of her associations, I asked her whether by any chance she had seen me
in the Horseferry Road on Thursday. She said no, was I there? I then in­
formed her of the relevant facts—namely, that I had driven through it
owing to the previous hold-up at Vauxhall Bridge, and had had just the
same thought about the name as she had. She responded immediately to
this information by recalling that on the evening before the dream, that
is, on the day we had both had the horse ferry thought, while at the
cinema with a friend, for no reason she can think of, she suddenly re­
membered how she had once dreamed of the “title" of a play I had seen.
This is a reference to the other striking extrasensory experience I have
had with this patient, to which I shall refer presently. Note that she had
this apparently quite disconnected thought before she had even dreamed
of the Horseferry Road, let alone had the dream analyzed.
The effect of my communication was dramatic—she seemed over­
whelmed at the sudden way in which the transference situation had be­
come real to her, said she felt very queer and asked if she could go at
once. It was in any case time, and I raised no objection; I doubt whether
she would have stayed if I had. Few things have brought this unusually
sticky and resistant analysis more thoroughly to life. She brings many
dreams, and there have been many transference interpretations, but never
with so marked a reaction.
Another fact that shpuld be noted is that in the earlier part of this
hour A. had felt and expressed resentment against me for my remarks,
which she regarded as interference with her associations.
It is no part of my purpose to present a full analysis of this dream,
.which would involve an extensive discussion of the case as a whole. I
will merely draw attention to the obvious scopophilic and exhibitionistic
components and to the hints at a primal scene, a theme on which we had
been working for a considerable time. I suspect that all this is intimately
related to the phenomenon of extrasensory perception in this particular
patient.
Next day, A. began by bringing another dream, this time about a
small low cupboard, and a dispute between her and a friend as to where
it should be placed—the latter shifted it to the left and A. moved it back
again into the corner. This apparently repeats one of the themes of the
Horseferry Road dream, and it reminded her of various incidents of be­
ing shut up in cupboards. She became silent. I said, “Well?" and this, she
said, led her to think of the previous day's experience. She suggested it
was as if she were prenatally attached to me, that is, inside the cupboard.
This, of course, also links up with the gynecologically affected friend.
Further association to her friend of the new dream led to an incident she
had resented because it involved an interference with her private affairs
and an assumption that members of her family should know her where­
abouts. I interpreted that she felt the apparently telepathic experience
of yesterday was a similar unwarranted interference—there were numer­
ous pointers in this direction, including the idea that it was equivalent
to an exploration of her body and her private parts. She agreed, but
pointed out that it was really she who was interfering with me, namely
by telepathically perceiving that I was in Horseferry Road.
Let us turn now to the earlier apparently telepathic experience which
A. had recalled the evening before the Horseferry Road dream. This oc­
curred in May 1947. One day she brought two dreams. The first was an
anxiety dream about pursuit by a fugitive criminal and hiding from him
behind a lavatory door. The second dream started with a photograph of
a little girl who, she thought, looked like herself as a little girl. She said,
however, in the dream, “That’s not Douglas Home, that’s a little girl."
Someone else said, “No, it isn’t Douglas Home, it is—’’and mentioned
the name of a comedian which A. could not remember. Next day, how­
ever, she remembered it was George Formby, and added that another
comedian is called Douglas Byng; she has never seen him, but her mother
was fond of him; he was vulgar, and A. repeated one of his jokes which
related to urination. The dream continued along different lines, which
are not relevant to the present topic.
A. had no association at all to Douglas Home—she has known only
one Douglas, and told a long and apparently irrelevant story about him.
I pressed for further associations to Douglas Home, and asked her if she
knew who he is. She did not, so I supplied the information that he is the
author of the prison play Now Barabbas, adding that I had seen it the
night before she had her dream—in fact, it had made a considerable im­
pression on me. She had not seen the play, but had several times thought
of going, and recalled reading about it in Picture Post, and in fact re­
membered many details she had read there. She incredulously raised the
possibility of telepathy, adding “That would make things too com-
plicatedr
It will be noted that the first dream of this night also dealt with a
criminal, which is further evidence, I think, of unconscious knowledge
of what had been occupying my thoughts the previous evening. When
she raised the subject again next day, I pointed out that this telepathic
business involved getting to know about me and my private life, so that
it may be significant that Douglas Home’s first name, William, was
omitted in the dream—to me, the man’s name was William Douglas
Home, the last part being regarded as double-barreled. The name Home
also may be significant in this connection.
On the last evening of my Easter holiday in 1946 I was reading Eliza­
beth Bowen’s book of short stories, The Demon Lover. One of these
stories made a particularly strong impression on me, the one entitled “The
Inherited Clock.” The interest in this story focuses upon an old-fashioned
clock in a glass case, to which clock much fear and superstition is at­
tached in the family. The story verges on the occult, but it can also be re­
garded as an essay in psychopathology, for the heroine of the story, to
whom the clock is bequeathed, knows vaguely that her fear of the clock
has to do with some incident in her childhood whose memory she is un­
able to recapture. The story is an eerie one, well calculated to stimulate
a dream, but so far as I know, I did not dream that night.
Next morning, however, a young man, B., in the second month of his
analysis, came for his first session after the eleven-day break. He started
straight away with an involved dream, which was evidently connected
with the frustration of the holiday and consequent feelings of aggression.
At the end of the dream Socrates, or some similar person, appeared.
Someone had sent him a Golden Boy—it appeared that this was a
statuette—and as a result of this, Socrates died of fear. In the next scene,
B. was having a discussion about this with Dr. Ernest Jones (who had
sent him to me for analysis) and myself, and B. put forward the theory
that it was not the Golden Boy that was responsible for Socrates’ death
from fear, but another gift which had accompanied the statuette—
namely a Victorian clock, under a glass case, which produced death
through the idea of the seconds of life ticking away. I should mention
that in Elizabeth Bowen’s story it turns out that the childhood incident
consisted of the little girl having interfered with the works of the clock
by sticking her finger in, thus making it stop.
I asked B. if he had read the story, but he said no, and had few as­
sociations to this part of the dream—mainly the idea of clocking in,
which evidently related to the return of analysis. His other associations
related chiefly to aggression. Golden Boy, as he told me, is the story of a
violinist boxer who is in conflict about hurting his hands boxing, and
who kills a man. I must mention also that homosexuality is the main
theme of B.’s analysis. I had the impression that the part about the clock
did not fit quite naturally into the dream—it was almost like an after­
thought^ and seemed to be a device for taking part in a professional con­
sultation between Jones and myself, in which B. was able to show off
his cleverness. In this way, it shows scopophilic and exhibitionistic ten­
dencies, as in the case of A.
The last example I wish to quote occurred with an unmarried woman
in her thirties, C. This example is more complicated in that it involved a
dream of my own as well as the patient's. From my point of view, the
matter began with my having a dream of a kind calculated to arouse an
analyst's interest and indeed concern. The dream, which followed inter­
course, was as follows:
I had two stumps and two artificial legs. One foot hurt in its shoe,
and I thought in the dream, “Of course, it must be a phantom limb ” As
I was not myself in analysis, there was no opportunity of analyzing the
dream properly, but I had some associations to it. One of my colleagues
has such an artificial leg, and it may be that I had been thinking about
it the previous day. But the most significant associations had to do with
another patient, D. This man is a typical shoe fetishist, in whom the
castration theme is extremely pronounced; from childhood he has had
many fantasies about amputation of limbs associated with the sexually
exciting idea of the female shoe, which has to be very tight as well as
high-heeled. On the day before my dream his thoughts had been quietly
revolving around the subject of the fetish, and in the course of this he
recalled that when he was a boy a schoolmaster friend of the family re­
counted the story of Cinderella, with a great deal of emphasis on the
cruel amputations carried out on the toes and heels of the ugly sisters so
that they could get their feet into the glass slipper. On the next day, the
day after my dream, he talked about kicking his brother, and recalled a
cover memory he has often referred to, about a certain castle with dark
underground tunnels in which a terrifying man lived who had no legs.
This memory, as I have said, had been mentioned before, and could very
well have come to my mind as a result of the material of the previous
day—indeed it is possible D. may have mentioned it the previous day,
though I have no note to that effect.
I think it will be agreed that the material relating to D., together with
my one-legged colleague, goes a long way to account for the details of
my dream, though not for my unconscious motive in dreaming it. The
part about the phantom limb looks like a good piece of rational thinking
in the dream; but in view of what followed, I wonder whether the word
“phantom" did not have another significance.
On the day after my dream, and the hour after D. had been talking
about the legless man in the tunnel, my female patient C. began her ses­
sion by saying that she felt terrible yesterday. She said that I had
passed her in Paddington Street in my car, and she was terrified I would
see her (which I had not, to my knowledge, done). There followed some
discussion of what this meant in terms of her need for a cleavage between
her external and her internal life.
She then told what she described as an extraordinary supernatural
dream, terms she has never used at any other time. In the first part, she
 was in a shaft full of moving staircases, going up and down. Mostly, she
was going down, but every now and then she was suddenly wafted up—a
frightening but exciting feeling which she feels vaguely is related to sex.
There was also a pair of very thin stockings, which were likewise floating
up and down, and she was trying vainly to get hold of them, because they
were hers. Her only association to stockings was that she has a pair witn
ladders, which had concerned her last night.
The second part of the dream was as follows. She was going to analy­
sis, but it was in a place with gardens, trees and shrubs. There was a stall
in the road with vegetables, and she wanted to buy a lettuce. A man was
on a platform selling vegetables and daffodils, talking to a woman who
was buying. At first, she thought he was sitting cross-legged, tailor-fashion,
but [and at this point I had a strong feeling that I knew exactly what
was coming, which proved correct] but then she realized that he had only
two stumps, his legs being cut off above the knee and the stumps showing
through what was left of his trousers. The stumps looked peculiar, as
though they were sewn up with black thread, as material might be. The
man lifted up a cabbage, and she was surprised to see under it two corn
cobs. These were green, like everything else on the stall, including the
daffodils, and the general impression was one of unripeness.
There were few associations to this dream. She felt she must have seen
someone yesterday with stumps, but could not recall doing so (remember
she had seen me and that had upset her). The meaning of greenness was
not clear from the associations, but taking it along with the sexual sym­
bolism of the dream I think we may reasonably guess that it has to do
with her virginity and her conflict about whether she should retain it.
But the dream becomes very much more comprehensible when taken in
conjunction with my own dream of the same night, and the intercourse
which preceded it. It seems as if having seen me in the street had had
the significance of a primal scene, and she reacted in her dream as if she
had seen me that night, not that day. Her dream begins with an elaborate
symbolization of intercourse, followed by a symbolization of castration
(her stockings floating in the air and being unable to get hold of them);
the ladders in the stockings suggest intercourse again; then we have the
quest for the lettuce (i.e., let us have intercourse), followed by a very
unambiguous castration scene, and then a display of the male genitals
(the cabbage and corn cobs). It will be seen that the main underlying
themes here are very similar to those in the case of A.’s Horseferry Road
dream. In C.'s case, I made no mention of my own part in the experience,
and apart from her reference to the dream being supernatural, nothing
was said by either of us about the extrasensory elements. This is a tech­
nical point to which I shall return later.
So much for the clinical material. Since I resumed analytic practice
some two and a half years ago, I have had one or two other less striking
experiences of a similar kind, but I have mentioned all the outstanding
ones. Throughout this period, I have been analyzing four to five patients
at a time. It will therefore be seen that in my experience such incidents
are by no means common; and, like others, I have been tempted to treat
them as a nine-days' wonder and then forget about them. But there are
cogent reasons, I think, why one should not allow this to happen.
Analysts should be the last people to reject unwelcome new facts just be­
cause they are unwelcome. It was Freud's fearless pursuit of the truth, no
matter where this might lead him, which, to me at least, has always
seemed the most essential characteristic of true psychoanalytic research.
In this matter of telepathy, Freud (VII) has set us an example of cautious
open-mindedness which we should do well to follow. I should like to
quote a few sentences he wrote in 1925:
“I have often had an impression, in the course of experiments in my
private circle, that strongly emotionally colored recollections can be suc­
cessfully transferred without much difficulty. If one then proceeds to sub­
mit to an analytical examination the associations of the person to whom
the thoughts have been transferred, correspondences often come to light
which would otherwise have remained undiscovered. On the basis of
much experience I am inclined to draw the conclusion that thought
transference of this kind comes about particularly easily at the moment
at which an idea emerges from the unconscious, or, in theoretical terms,
when it passes over from the 'primary process' to the ‘secondary process.'
“In spite of the caution which is prescribed by the importance, nov­
elty and obscurity of the subject, I feel that I should not be justified in
holding back any longer these considerations upon the problem of te­
lepathy. All of this has only this much to do with dreams: if there are
such things as telepathic messages, the possibility cannot be dismissed of
their reaching someone during sleep and being received by him in a
dream. Indeed, on the analogy of other perceptual and intellectual ma­
terial, the further possibility arises that telepathic messages received in
the course of the day may only be dealt with during a dream of the fol­
lowing night. There would then be nothing contradictory in the material
that had been telepathically communicated being modified and trans­
formed in the dream like any other material. It would be satisfactory if
with the help of psychoanalysis we could obtain further and better au­
thenticated knowledge of telepathy."
But it is particularly the recent extraordinarily detailed and convinc­
ing work of Jule Eisenbud (XXII, XXIII), published in the Psycho­
analytic Quarterly of 1946 and 1947, that has encouraged me to bring
forward my own relatively very modest contribution. Eisenbud has ini­
tiated something quite new in the technique of dream interpretation—
something which can hardly fail to make one shrink from the complica­
tions involved, just as my patient A. did. But it is clear that we are not
entitled to shrink from facts because they are inconvenient. Only if the
alleged facts can be shown not to be facts are we at liberty to disregard
them, and we are far from being able to do this, I think.
At this point I should like to dispose of one possible misapprehension.
I have not brought forward my clinical experiences in order to prove the
existence of telepathy, but merely to show that if one assumes the pos­
sibility of telepathy or allied phenomena transcending the hitherto rec­
ognized laws of physiological and psychological functioning, then certain
dreams can be shown to have a new meaning which would otherwise not
have appeared. Sometimes, perhaps, it is only in this way that a given
dream can be seen to have significance at all. The new meaning is usu­
ally to be found in the sphere of the transference. It follows that valuable
material for analysis is likely to be lost if this aspect of dream interpreta­
tion is neglected.
It is on this account that I have devoted most time to A/s Horseferry
Road dream. It would perhaps be less impressive than the others if it
were my aim to convey conviction of the reality of such experiences; but
I have chosen to concentrate chiefly on this dream because it is the ex­
ample which best demonstrates the point I am really trying to make,
namely, that attention to extrasensory elements may, in certain cases, be
essential to an adequate dream interpretation. It is also the most recent
example, and this led to my taking its analysis along these lines much
more seriously than I had done in the earlier cases.
As regards the proof of the existence of telepathic phenomena, that
must come from quite different sources which are capable of rigid sci­
entific, i.e., statistical control. I think it is fair to say that in the opinion
of practically all competent observers who have really studied the sub­
ject, overwhelming proof has already been provided in such work as that
of Rhine in America, and of Carington, Soal, Tyrrell and others in this
country. In psychoanalysis I doubt whether we shall ever be in the posi­
tion, as these workers are, of being able to say: “The chances against
such-and-such a phenomenon being due to mere chance are a million to
one." Our results are more qualitative than quantitative, and from our
point of view it is the pragmatic test that counts. The question we have
to ask is: does the assumption of a telepathic process in particular cases
lead us to a deeper or more coherent understanding of what is going on
in a particular patient, and more especially, does it lead to a better un­
derstanding of the transference situation? From my own experience, I
would say yes. In the case of Eisenbud's experiences, there can be no
doubt at all that if he dismissed the telepathic hypothesis as impossible, a
great deal of the significance of his clinical material would be lost.
That brings me to a difficult technical point. Should the analyst keep
this better understanding to himself, or should he communicate it to his
patient, and if so, how? It will be observed that I did not do this in the
last case. This was partly because it was the first example I had come
across, and I did not know of Eisenbud's work; but even now I should
be very reluctant to tell a patient of my dream, as opposed to factual in­
formation such as that relating to the Horseferry Road, Douglas Home,
or the Inherited Clock. But this may be another prejudice which one
will have to overcome. The point in favor of making such communica­
tions to the patient is, of course, that without them he cannot be in a
position to understand the full significance of his own dream. The tech­
nical problem is analogous to that of the interpretation of symbols, but
is much complicated by the transference implications. As far as I know,
Freud never retracted from the position that when the patient’s associa­
tions fail to provide the symbolic interpretation, the analyst must pro­
vide it for him. I know that modern practice runs counter to this, but I
cannot help thinking that the reason we can often dispense with provid­
ing such interpretations is that most of our patients nowadays are them­
selves quite conversant with the common meanings of symbols, owing to
the popularization of psychoanalysis.
As this is meant to be a short communication, I must refrain from
expanding many fascinating aspects of this subject. To me, it brings
home remarkably vividly the reality of unconscious mental processes and
the fact that there is a qualitative difference between unconscious and
conscious processes. We are accustomed to the idea that the essential
work of analysis proceeds by the analyst's unconscious making contact
with that of the patient; but this has customarily been taken to involve
the mediation of the ordinary senses and the use of verbal and other
physical means of communication. The facts of telepathy open up quite
new possibilities of a much more direct means of communication between
one unconscious and another. This is surely of the greatest significance
both for our theory and our practice.
Another sphere that should be considered carefully from this point
of view is that of the parent-child relationship. Clinically, one is fre­
quently struck by the way in which a child seems to be influenced by a
parent's fears, preoccupations, neurotic attitudes, and so on. Have we
not perhaps too easily assumed that this occurs always by way of the
parent's actual behavior? Some cases I have come across seem difficult to
explain on this hypothesis. Mrs. Burlingham (18) published some very
interesting observations on this subject in 1935, and remarked: “The
power of unconscious forces is especially marked in the interplay between
parent and child. It is so subtle and uncanny that it seems at times to ap­
proach the supernatural." I think also that the phenomena we are dis­
cussing may be found to have much to do with the state of primary iden­
tification.
The indications seem to be that telepathic communication is a primi­
tive, atavistic affair, which has been largely replaced by the more exact
and refined method of communication by word and gesture. One would
therefore naturally look for it in states of regression such as schizophrenia.
May it not be that the so-called delusions of the schizophrenic—ideas of
passivity and of influence, etc.—are based on a core of actual telepathic
experiences? And could not the uncanny ability of the paranoid patient
to understand the unconscious hostile motives of others have a similar
basis? Since writing this paper, I have found that Ehrenwald (39) has
worked out this hypothesis in some detail.
It may be that telepathic occurrences are infrequent in analysis, or it
may be that we nearly always overlook them. Be that as it may, if they
occur at all, in or out of analysis, the theoretical consequences are im­
mense. From this point of view, their rarity is of no more significance
than the littleness of the proverbial servant-girl's baby. If their occur­
rence be admitted, we are forced to revise one of the most fundamental
points of view of present-day psychiatry, that of psychosomatic unity, and
we are faced again with all the difficulties of body-mind dualism and in-
teractionism. Carington (19) has put forward a theory of mind designed
to cover the known facts of telepathy. It is based on associationism of
the Wundtian variety, and seems to neglect the emotional factor almost
entirely. Essentially, the theory is that of a common subconscious, in
which associations formed in one mind automatically become operative
in all other minds. The theory is attractive in its simplicity and in the
boldness with which it cuts the Gordian knot; but its neglect of all but
the cognitive side of experience will not commend it to psychoanalysts,
who should be in a position to advance a more satisfactory theory, once
they become convinced that the facts are such as to demand a fundamen­
tal revision of some of our present points of view.
 Chapter 30
A POSSIBLE TELEPATHIC EXPERIENCE
DURING ANALYSIS*
By SIDNEY RUBIN, M.D.

During the course of psychoanalytic treatment, a thirty-five-year-old

man reported the following: “I want to talk about telepathy. I am some­
what frightened of it. Some months back, I awoke from my sleep with a
sudden sharp stabbing pain, low in my abdomen. As I became fully
awake I had the sudden idea that my twin sister had had a miscarriage.
After I calmed down, I felt the thought was silly, since she had only been
pregnant for a few months. I planned to call her the following evening,
just to reassure myself. The next morning, while at work, I received a
call that my sister had gone to the hospital the previous night and had
had a miscarriage shortly after arriving there. This had apparently oc­
curred at about the time I awoke from my sleep. It is all very eerie. I
thought about this suddenly the day before yesterday. I don't know why
I didn't report this at that time."
It should be noted that the patient had been convinced that his sister
was pregnant despite her own doubts about it and that he had not heard
any further from her or her husband about this, until he received the
phone call notifying him of the miscarriage. It is also noteworthy that the
patient had spoken only once previously about telepathy and then only
in the form of a passing comment to the effect that telepathy interested
him. This comment arose quite out of context, and was pursued no fur­
ther at that time.
On this second occasion the comment also seemed to occur out of con­
text. While the patient developed it no further in terms of analytic con­
tent, enough had been said so that the analyst really “heard" what the
patient was telling him on this occasion.
It will be the aim of this communication to make the above remarks
more intelligible and, specifically, to describe a possible telepathic expe­
rience between the analyst and his patient. This undertaking will involve
the consideration of a number of details, necessary in order to allow the
• From Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, Topeka, Kansas.
writer to develop carefully these data, which seem quite novel at one
level, and perhaps meaningful in terms of possible telepathic phenomena
on another.
The phenomena to be described are, in general, illustrative of the
conclusion reached by Eisenbud (XXII) in his study of telepathic events,
and can be best summarized in his words, “One outstanding fact which
sooner or later must emerge from the study of telepathy as observed in
analysis, resolves the paradox: the telepathic episode is a function not
only of the repression of emotionally charged material by the patient
but of the repression of similar or related emotionally charged material
by the analyst as well/’
In developing our data in accordance with the point of view ex­
pressed in the above quotation, we must first look at our patient. He
presented himself initially for therapy because of complaints of diarrhea
of some years’ duration, coming on inexplicably, gradually mounting to
a frequency of fifteen to twenty stools a day, and quite unresponsive to
all types of medical management in the hands of capable internists. One
of these ultimately referred him to the writer for an evaluation of the
psychological concomitants and possible therapy.
Early in treatment it became evident that while the patient presented
data, which to him indicated that his diarrhea might have been tied up
with a number of “stressful” situations in the Navy, there was an inter­
esting temporal coincidence that had apparently “escaped” the patient's
notice. The onset of the diarrhea coincided practically to the day with
the birth of the patient’s twin sister’s first child.
When this was pointed out to him, the patient was at first utterly
surprised. After this, the analysis suddenly shifted its direction, and the
patient reported the following material. He had once visited his sister
on a week end and, while there, was alone with her child for a short
period. On that occasion he had the sudden urge to put the child's “pri­
vate parts” in his mouth and suck them in. He had the feeling that if he
had done so he would have had either an erection or a bowel movement.
Instead, he blew on the child’s toes. However, he had the feeling that if
his sister and brother-in-law had not come in at that precise moment, he
wouldn’t have known “what he would have done.”
The patient then went on to describe his closeness to his sister, which
had existed for as long as he could remember, and had lasted until well
into his teens. He described her as the more active of the two, always
defending him when he played with boys (which was not often), and al­
ways seeing that he partook in games when he and his sister played with
girls.
In these relations, as well as in school, the patient remembered him­
self as a passive child, always dependent on his sister and always relying
on her protection “even though she was my kid sister by a few minutes.”
In connection with these circumstances, the patient remembered wonder­
ing often how wonderful it would be to be a girl like his sister.
 As regards the relation of the children to the parents, the patient was
quite obviously the favorite of his mother. She was always protective, and
overwhelming in her protection until the patient started his analysis.
The material also contained many other data, which cannot be pre­
sented here because of the necessity of brevity, and which indicate that
our patient strongly identified himself with this “phallic” female twin.
The birth of her first child meant for the patient a confirmation of his
belief that his sister had a penis, on the basis of the well-known uncon­
scious equation child equals penis. To our patient his diarrhea had the
unconscious significance of an anal birth product, i.e., a penis. This in­
terpretation was “confirmed” by a marked dropping off, and sudden ces­
sation of the diarrhea after this fantasy was worked through.
At this point there emerged full-blown genital castration fears, ex­
pressed symptomatically in many ways, i.e., fear of accidents while driv­
ing his car, fear of injury at his job, etc. These continued until well to­
ward the end of the analysis, at which time the remarks reported at the
beginning of this paper were made. After working through regressive
anal-sadistic material, the patient moved into a period of accentuated
genital-oedipal wishes, with the consequence that genital castration fears
now came to the fore.
At this point we will leave the patient temporarily and consider the
analyst. For purposes of clarification and exposition, certain details of
the analyst's personal activities will have to be presented which he would
obviously much prefer to leave unmentioned. For this reason in what fol­
lows some material will be presented in disguise, and some factually,
without disclosing which is which. It is hoped that this device will pro­
vide a measure of anonymity which would otherwise not be possible, and,
at the same time, not do violence to truth and scientific accuracy.
To proceed, it might be best to describe some of the activities of the
analyst during the period under consideration. On that day, i.e., follow­
ing the night during which the patient had had his telepathic experi­
ence, the analyst had participated in a ritual which had some significance
to him. The depth of this experience was not realized at the time, and
only became apparent when seen in the light of the patient's com­
munication.
Specifically, on that morning the analyst had taken part in the
Hebrew ritual called Pidyon Ha'ben. This ritual (50), which can be
translated as the “Ransom of the First-Born,” stems from the following
biblical passage: “All the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine, and
of the wheat the first fruits of them which they shall offer unto the Lord,
shall be thine . . . .” (I.e., the Cohen's, who is a descendant of the Aaron-
itic Priesthood.) “Everything that openeth the womb in all flesh, which
they bring unto the Lord, whether it be of men or beasts, shall be thine,
nevertheless, the first born of man shalt thou redeem” (Num. 18).
At the present time orthodox Jews still practice the ritual of the
“Ransom of the First-Born.” The father takes his first-born son and pre­
sents him to the Cohen, announcing that this is his first-born son whom
he wants to redeem. He offers the Cohen about $5.00 in lieu of the son.
The Cohen, according to his duty, asks the father whether he wants to
give up the money or the child, and, naturally, the father answers that he
prefers to keep the child and give the money. Accepting the money for
the child, the priest declares that the boy-child is redeemed and blesses
him.
In reading this biblical statement one can see rather clearly the transi­
tion from human sacrifice to the sacrifice of animals and inanimate ob­
jects. The description of the present-day ceremonies shows how strongly
the custom of the Ransom was rooted in Jewry and enables us to under­
stand it as a distorted survival from the custom of the sacrifice of the
first-born.
It is the sin of the first-born son, says Feldman (50), that he passed
at birth the genitals of his mother, that he “opened the womb" of the
mother, that he committed, in one word—incest. The fact that he was the
first male, who after the father-—though going in the opposite direction
and without conscious intention—passed the mother’s genitals, makes
him a sinner. Since this precedent might make him feel that he has pre­
rogatives, he might endanger the sexual and social rights of the father.
He is therefore dangerous, and he has to be eliminated—killed.
From this description it can be seen that the analyst's participation in
this ritual had the conventional meaning of the ransoming of his first­
born from the priest. The more deeply concealed meaning of the ritual,
i.e., the sacrifice of the first-born for the crime of incest, was obviously
also operative symbolically.
At this point, it is perhaps useful to mention that, in common with
many of his co-religionists, the analyst participated in this ceremony with
some ambivalence. He did so partly because of his own deep-rooted iden­
tification with the practices and ceremonials of his forefathers, partly be­
cause of the need to follow the religious practices of his parents, and
partly because he was impelled by forces still perhaps only dimly un­
derstood.
That there was considerable need to participate in, and cause to have
performed, such a ceremony becomes clear when it is stated that the
analyst went to considerable inconvenience to arrange for this ceremony.
Preparations had to be made with the proper ecclesiastical authorities,
appointments had to be shifted, extra mileage had to be traveled, etc.
A short period of time which was available after the ceremony and
before taking up the routine psychotherapeutic duties of the day, gave
the writer a chance for some introspection and self-analysis. During this
activity, an associative train developed which started with the realization
that the analyst himself had, at an earlier time, played an important part
in a Pidyon Ha'ben. The only difference between the two occasions was
that while in the ceremony just described the part he played was that of
the one who did the ransoming, in the previous ceremony his part was
that of the one who had been ransomed.
This associative trend led to the new insight that the analyst's obses­
sive need to have the ceremony performed, and his compulsive interest
in it, related not so much to the analyst's son, as to the analyst himself.
The symbolic crime of incest was not that of the son, but that of the
analyst. The person redeemed from death or castration was not the
analyst's son, but the analyst himself. Then, as is so often the case with
successful interpretations, a sense of closure (26) became apparent and,
along with it, a lifting of the previous feeling of oppression.
Lastly, of course, the meaning of the ritual, as the condensed and dis­
torted representation of the gratification of an instinctual urge and of
the punishment for this gratification, also became clear. From this point
of view, the ritual was performed to protect not the son, but the father,
who, in terms of the data discussed here, was more obviously the one in
need of protection.
To round out the discussion and bring this paper to a close, only a
few more details are needed. Let us return once more to our patient and
to his analysis. As has been already mentioned, the communication re­
ported at the outset came shortly before the date agreed upon for the
termination of the patient's analysis. Some material had been forthcom­
ing which had indicated the patient's termination anxiety. The inter­
pretation of this anxiety was proceeding with some difficulty at the time
of the communication.
In the light of the material presented here it seems clear that not only
were transference problems in need of elucidation, but also probably
countertransference problems. Was the patient not in effect saying:
“How can you help me with my castration anxiety when you are troubled
with yours?" An interpretation using some of this knowledge aided con­
siderably in breaking through this piece of resistance.
While, obviously, much had to be omitted from this brief presenta­
tion, it is hoped that enough has been included to indicate that, in this
set of circumstances, the data become considerably more comprehensible
within the framework of telepathic phenomena. Finally, the possible tele­
pathic phenomenon between the analyst and the analysand could be dis­
covered only by means of psychoanalytic concepts. This emphasizes again
what was initially so well stated by Freud (VI), i.e., that psychoanalysis
can bring to light telepathic events which otherwise would not be so
recognized.
Extrasensory Perception and
Psychoanalytic Technique
 Chapter 31
THE TECHNIQUE OF ANALYZING “OCCULT”
OCCURRENCES IN ANALYSIS
By GEORGE DEVEREUX, Ph.D.*

I n tro d u ctio n
Psychoanalysts have examined the reality or spuriousness of “tele­
pathic" occurrences during analysis, the conditions under which they
“take place" and the psychological mechanisms “responsible for" such
occurrences. Yet, with two exceptions (XXIX, 49) only passing remarks
have been made about the concrete technical problems created by such
occurrences.
(1) Concern with Problems of Occultism. In the course of analysis,
there admittedly occur certain striking incidents which cause one to con­
sider—be it favorably or unfavorably—the possibility of their being
“telepathic" in nature. The investigation of this possibility is a legitimate
one, as long as it does not take place during the analytic hour itself. This
point of view is not a discriminatory one, since, in our opinion, one may
not even use the analytic hour for the purpose of proving, e.g., the reality
of the oedipus complex. As Hann-Kende, who appears to believe in
telepathic phenomena, points out: “The analyst may not consider the
therapeutic process as a means to a selfish end. In other words, he should
not treat the patient for the purpose of substantiating a certain analytic
thesis, nor in order to find proof for some new, and theoretically ap­
parently sound, theory. The sole purpose of psychoanalytic therapy is the
cure of the patient (XIV). This austere attitude is justified also by
Freud’s opinion that concern with the problem of the genuinely or spuri­
ously occult nature of an event diverts the analyst from subjects of
legitimate interest to him as an analyst (V).
In brief, regardless of whether psi phenomena are real or spurious,
the analyst may not concern himself with such problems during the
• From Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, Topeka, Kansas.
analytic hour, though he may do so afterward. This, in turn, implies that
the validity of our technical recommendations is independent of the
question of the reality or spuriousness of telepathic events.
(2) The Lure of the Occult. The temptation to concern oneself with
the occult even during the analytic hour is very great. The occult has a
tremendous appeal for the unconscious, since it reflects the primary
process in an almost simon-pure form, and stimulates powerful infantile
wishes and reluctantly abandoned magical attitudes. The continued sway
of the reality principle is always contingent upon constant self-analysis
and reality testing, because man gives but grudging allegiance to reality
and logic, and goes through life hoping that somehow, some day, reality
will comply with his unconscious needs, and will provide him in the end
with a miraculous “realistic” justification of his conditionally and tenta­
tively abandoned magical attitudes. It is especially tempting to hope that
these temporarily shelved wishes may be confirmed by discovering in re­
ality, and by reality-directed and ego-syntonic experimental and logical
means, that which one wishes to believe. This may explain Holl6sp
strictures upon the validity of experimental safeguards (98), and may
serve as a warning to examine with special care the soundness of experi­
mentally or scientifically presented material.
Data of this type obtained in analysis are especially subject to caution.
The occult is almost an occupational hazard for the analyst, since patients
constantly seek to foist upon him a belief in his own omniscience and
omnipotence, this being a well-known form of resistance. No one is im­
mune to such temptations. That sober skeptic, Dr. Hitschmann,
frankly admits that, in narrating a certain startling experience of his
own, he repeatedly caught himself in the act of unwittingly failing to re­
port also his matter-of-fact interpretation thereof (IX). While working
on this anthology, the editor, who is also a hardboiled skeptic, had dreams
in which the word “telepathy” was part of the manifest content, and
which revealed his desire to experience a well-attested telepathic or pre-
cognitive occurrence. This indicates that skepticism is a sublimation of
an early magical attitude—an origin which must be recognized, the bet­
ter to combat it. In brief, self-analysis is especially needed when one is
analyzing the telepathic claims and “feats" of patients. On one occasion
the writer was unable to discover the analytic, rather than telepathic,
nexus between something that happened both to him and to a patient
until he realized that if something telepathic had, in fact, occurred, it
was he who had been influenced by the patient, and not vice versa. Once
the narcissistic obstacle to the perception of the analytic nexus had been
deflated by this realization, the coincidence became understandable in
analytic, rather than in parapsychological terms.
 As a rule, self-analysis suffices to safeguard the analyst from extra-ana­
lytic interests. However, when the temptation to gratify some need and
the wish to have reality confirm fantasy are too great, one must fall back
upon Moses Maimonides’ maxim: “Teach thy tongue to say: ‘I do not
know/ ” Yet, even this utterance may be ineffective if one is unable to
achieve thereby a psychological catharsis comparable to the one expe­
rienced when one says “Yes" or "No.”1
I. T h e I n flu en ce ESP H ypothesis on A nalytic W ork
of t h e
H o116s (98), Servadio (XXI), Eisenbud (49) and Gillespie (XXIX)
affirm that the telepathy hypothesis can be effectively used in analytic
work. Even if this view should prove to be correct, it does not impair the
validity of the preceding considerations, since it is one thing to use the
telepathy hypothesis for therapeutic purposes, and quite another to use
the therapeutic setting for the purpose of proving or disproving any
theory whatsoever, be it analytic or parapsychological.
(1) Changes in the Meaning of Occurrences. One and the same pair of
events changes its (imputed) significence the moment we assume that
paranormal forces of some kind are involved. For this reason Freud
differentiated between dreams and telepathic occurrences during sleep
(VI), and repeatedly stressed the change in the meaning of an event after
it is subjected to psychoanalysis. This change of meaning is quite real,
regardless of whether it disposes of the possibility that a given incident
may be telepathic, or actually reveals the presence of “telepathic” factors
(V). It is equally plausible to postulate that the parapsychological inter­
pretation of a given incident may obscure the analytic significance
thereof.
(2) The Data. Analysts specify that one may view as possibly tele­
pathic those occurrences in which the patient expresses the emerging
unconscious thought of the analyst, and, specifically, a thought which
does not seem to pertain to the analytic work, and which the analyst
therefore seeks to repudiate. One does not consider as telepathic an
instance in which the patient himself voices the interpretation which the
analyst was about to make, nor an utterance which can be traced back
to the perception of an almost subliminal cue which the patient then
elaborates by means of a preconscious combinatory feat, nor an instance
in which the patient accidentally makes a correct “inference” about the
analyst for subjective reasons. On one occasion one of my patients sensed
the hostility lurking behind my silence and fantasied that I would make
i According to the late L. J. Henderson, this last specification is one of the tests of
emotional maturity.
 a scene. The patient was correct in assuming that I felt hostile just then,
but his inference was due to the fact that his mother habitually mani­
fested her hostility by means of an ostentatious silence.
(3) The Imputation of a Nexus. The starting point of parapsycho-
logical considerations is the observation of a similarity between events
A and B. What matters in this context is not the finding that such a simi­
larity exists, but the imputation that this similarity is not an accidental
one, and the specification that this formal or logical relatedness implies
a functional or causal nexus of a particular kind. What is psychoana­
lytically relevant is that one seeks to establish a functional connection
between A and B. The failure to explore the unconscious motivation of
the attempt to connect two similar phenomena leads one to stress the
startling or “occult" quality of such convergences. Thus, a patient had a
dream which was startlingly duplicated by some genuinely unpredictable
occurrences the nextvmorning. The incident seemed precognitive until
the patient realized that he identified himself with the person in whose
house these events took place. Once he understood this, he recalled
certain events of the preceding day, which duplicated the content of
the dream even more startlingly. Thus, that which seemed at first to be
precognitive material finally had to be recognized as a simple day
residue.
The occurrence of pseudoprophetic dreams shows that we must ana­
lyze the means whereby our unconscious induces us to find functional con­
nections where there are none. We must therefore describe the analytic
technique whereby false imputations of mutual relevancy can be elim­
inated. Such a technique would be important even if telepathic phenom­
ena were absolutely genuine, since it would enable one to sift genuine
psi phenomena from spurious ones.
(a) From the psychoanalytic point of view the problem is, thus, not
whether certain events are prophetic or telepathic, but why they are
deemed to be prophetic or telepathic. In some instances the fulfillment
of a dream is due to mere acting out (XV, 185), causing the dream to
become a “self-fulfilling prophecy" in Merton's sense (137). Specifically,
dreams are often believed to be prophetic, because they are historical,
i.e., because the future (determined by the past) is substituted to the
past (which determines the future) (28). Many seemingly prophetic dreams
can be made to yield up their real meaning by means of this analytic
approach, which is based upon what R6heim (164) and the writer (28)
have said about the magical function of dreams. Be that as it may, certain
dreams—be they genuinely or spuriously prophetic—are believed to be
prophetic because they are internally determined projections, involving
ideas of influence and other paranoid ideas. This point was already
made by Hitschmann (X ).
(4) The Need for the Telepathy Hypothesis. Several analysts suggest
that the telepathy hypothesis may be useful in analytic work (XXI, 49,
98). This statement must be given serious consideration, since, as Freud
pointed out: “It is very remarkable that the Ucs of one human being can
react upon that of another, without the Cs being implicated at all. This
deserves closer investigation, especially with a view to finding out whether
preconscious activity can be excluded as a factor in bringing about this;
but for purposes of description the fact is incontestable*' (78).
From the practical point of view, it is felt that one should first analyze
such occurrences without any reference to the telepathy hypothesis, espe­
cially since one may be sure that, if telepathy is actually involved in
them, this fact will become more, rather than less, apparent after the
material has been analyzed in the classical manner. If, on the other hand,
we start out with the telepathy hypothesis, we will not be able to analyze
the occurrence fully enough in the ordinary sense, because we would
“possess" an explanation of the phenomenon before we fully explored
it. This would be at variance with the rule that no interpretations—
including classical ones—are to be formulated before the material has
acquired an unequivocal Prdgnanz (26). The fact that one is sometimes
unable to refrain from anticipatory speculations about the meaning of
one's patient's current productions implies simply that one must control
such speculations severely, and must prevent them from influencing o r«
“abridging" the analytic inquiry.
(5) Is There a Technical Need for the Telepathy Hypothesis? Holl6s
suggests that the telepathy hypothesis may facilitate therapeutic work
(98). Servadio (XXI) supplements this view with the thesis that the refusal
to envisage the possibility that telepathy may be involved could lead to
overelaborate and overingenious interpretations. Servadio's warning
seems to be technically inaccurate, since the analyst is not supposed to
overinterpret. In less elegant terms, he is supposed to keep quiet until
he has something to say. Not obstinate skepticism, but certain neurotic
needs of the analyst lead to overinterpretations. The analyst who is prone
to overinterpret will do so regardless of whether he believes in or denies
the reality of telepathy. The real cure for the tendency to overinterpret is
not the acceptance of the telepathy hypothesis, but some further analysis
of the analyst's narcissism and omniscience fantasies (183, 184).
By contrast the point made by Eisenbud (49) and Gillespie (XXIX)
is, in many ways, well taken, and could be utilized—in theory at least—
even by a hardboiled Poincare-an conventionalist. These authors feel
that without the telepathy hypothesis many of the patients' productions
remain unintelligible even analytically. In brief, they feel that skepticism
does not lead to overinterpretations but to underinterpretations.
This view has a great logical elegance, since the rightness or wrong­
ness of this technical recommendation is independent of the problem of
the existence or nonexistence of telepathy. In other words, this view
implies that, regardless of the merits of the telepathy controversy, the
telepathy hypothesis leads to analytic results not obtainable otherwise,
and does so without appreciable risks. If this be so, even the complete
skeptic may offer telepathic interpretations for analytic purposes.
(a) It must be stressed that negative demonstrations are logically
almost impossible. As Poincare pointed out: If a phenomenon admits of
one explanation, it will admit also of any number of other, and equally
satisfactory, explanations (148). We may be sure that experts like Eisen­
bud or Gillespie use the telepathy hypothesis with consummate skill to
make the patient’s productions yield up their analytic meaning. Others
may use different hypotheses for the same purpose with equally grati­
fying results.
(b) Both Eisenbud (49) and Gillespie (XXIX) intimate that inter­
pretations based upon the telepathy hypothesis may be communicated
without risk to the patient. This, again, may be a matter of professional
skill. In the hands of a less skillful analyst such an interpretation may
induce the patient to disinhibit his primary process completely and to
wallow in magical thinking and paranoid ideas.
All things considered, the Eisenbud-Gillespie thesis that interpreta­
tions based upon the telepathy hypothesis can bring out into the open
certain otherwise inaccessible, incomprehensible and unsuspected latent
meanings of a dream, etc., is per se a permissible assumption. Indeed, if
one leaves aside the problem of telepathy altogether, it represents, from
the analytic point of view, only a broadening of our current conceptions
regarding the nature of day residues, the process of symbolization, and
the range of dream work. Hence, if the analyst, after examining his own
associations—which, according to Freud, he is permitted to use whenever
they are indispensable for the interpretation of a dream (83,84)—feels
quite certain of the real latent meaning of a dream but cannot con­
vincingly interpret this insight to the patient on the basis of the patient’s
own associations only, he could—in principle at least—present his analytic
inferences in terms of the telepathy hypothesis, even if he, himself, does
not happen to believe in the reality of psi phenomena. However, for
reasons to be given a little further, only time would be saved in this
manner, since the same latent material, if not interpreted at this time,
would be presented again at a later date. And, in this connection, one
may ask in general terms whether it is desirable to interpret any ma­
terial still ego-dystonic enough to have to be presented in a greatly
distorted and highly symbolic form—which increases the risk of misin­
terpretation, overinterpretation and underinterpretation—or whether it
is better to allow such material to “ripen on the vine” just a little longer,
until it comes closer to the threshold of the conscious sphere and be­
comes ego-syntonic enough to be presented in a more transparent dis­
guise.
We may ask, therefore, if it is really necessary to inform the patient
of the telepathic nature of his productions. It may be replied that one
should do so if it is timely. Unfortunately, once the matter is worded
in this manner, we are no longer dealing with the problem of the correct­
ness of the interpretation, but only with the timing thereof. Now, it is
a matter of common experience that, once a patient is ready for an inter­
pretation couched in any language whatsoever, if this interpretation is
not forthcoming, he will constantly reproduce this material in various
forms until it is interpreted to him (28). We may be sure that if it is not
interpreted to him when he presents it in a form which seems to require
a telepathically worded interpretation, he will soon reproduce it in a
form which admits of a nontelepathic interpretation.2 If, now, we do
assume that telepathic interpretations involve certain therapeutic risks,
the postponement of the interpretation seems fully justifiable.
Does the patient lose anything by being given a nontelepathic, rather
than a telepathic interpretation? If the task of analysis is simply the
interpretation of the patient's unconscious, and the confrontation of the
patient with his neurotic behavior, the answer must be “No!"—even in
a training analysis. Eisenbud cites the case of an adulterous woman,
whose self-punitive mechanisms could be made obvious to her by means
of the telepathy hypothesis (49). It is conceivable that the same mech­
anisms could have been made equally obvious to her by stressing the
risks she had taken in committing adultery under her own roof. Thus,
no analytically relevant interpretation would have been withheld from
the patient. Similarly, when Gillespie's patient finally recognized her
transference feelings when they were interpreted to her in connection
with a striking, and seemingly telepathic incident, she was undoubtedly
ready for this insight, regardless of whether it was interpreted to her
telepathically or otherwise, since it is an axiom of analysis that the pa­
tient does not understand premature interpretations (26)?
2It is likewise a common experience that when the patient produces some material
in a form which the analyst finds to be interpretable, the analyst realizes in retrospect
that the same material had already been presented previously in forms which, because
of his personal make-up, were not understandable to him.
3 There is no indication in any of Freud’s writings that he ever offered a tele­
pathically formulated interpretation, except perhaps once (VIII), and then only very
indirectly.
 In brief, regardless of the reality or spuriusness of telepathy, and
regardless of the analyst's undeniable privilege to formulate for himself
an interpretation in telepathic terms, nothing analytically relevant is
lost by waiting until a given production can be interpreted in analytic
terms, which will strengthen, rather than undermine, the patient's tenu­
ous hold on reality.
(6) Telepathy as an Obstacle to Analysis. Schilder seems to have been
the first to point out that telepathic transmission from the analyst to the
patient would increase the difficulties of analysis (XX), presumably be­
cause it would make the analyst's reserve a mockery, and would expose
the patient to the impact of residual infantile wishes emanating from the
analyst. Conversely, telepathic messages emanating from the patient
would constantly seduce the analyst into making premature interpreta­
tions, i.e., he would make interpretations before the material is sufficiently
close to the threshold of consciousness, and before the resistances opposing
the normal emergence of this material had been analyzed. In addition,
the conviction that one is receiving telepathic messages from the patient
would tempt one to confuse one's own fantasies with telepathically re­
ceived messages, and to interpret in terms of one's own projections. In
brief, if telepathic occurrences should prove to be common events in
analysis, classical psychoanalysis would simply become impossible. That,
of course, may indeed be the case. However, in that case we would have
to abandon classical technique altogether, and cast about for some form
of therapy which exploits telepathy systematically, instead of viewing
“occult" incidents as disturbances of the therapeutic process.
The telepathy hypothesis also tends to abort prematurely the complete
analytic exploration of a given production. Once the analyst decides that
an occurrence is telepathic, he may fail to analyze such important ques­
tions as: “Why did this mechanism manifest itself in a telepathic, rather
than in a nontelepathic form? Why am I inclined to view this event as
telepathic? What causes the patient to advance the claim that his feat is
a telepathic one?" etc. Lest it should be felt that these strictures are dis­
criminatory and captious, it might be stressed that, e.g., the death-instinct
theory similarly inhibits the full analysis of aggression and self-aggression.
Indeed, once we feel that we have touched biological-instinctual bedrock,
we are sorely tempted to stop further inquiry. Hence, we may fail to
investigate why the patient's aggression takes one form rather than an­
other, why it is not counterbalanced to a greater extent by other instinc­
tual urges, etc. The fact is that whenever, in the analytic situation, we
silently exclaim: “This is the oedipus complex, or the death instinct,
etc."—i.e., whenever we are ready to apply a theoretical label to a given
cluster of data—we become halfhearted in the further exploration of
that material.4
On closer inspection the choice of the death instinct as an example
of analytic concepts whose use in psychoanalytic therapy may—just like
the use of the telepathy hypothesis—short-circuit a complete analytic in­
quiry of the conventional type appears to have been overdetermined. In
the first place, both concepts pertain to aggression and self-aggression,
i.e., to some of the most basic aspects of neurosis and of psychosis. In ad­
dition, one cannot help being struck by the fact that the introduction of
the death instinct concept into instinct theory coincides with a change in
Freud's own attitude toward problems of extrasensory perception. Up to
the time at which the death instinct was formulated all clinical papers
written by analysts opposed the telepathy hypothesis. After the introduc­
tion of the death instinct concept clinical papers dealing with problems
of telepathy began to favor the ESP hypothesis more than 2 to 1. This
correlation may very well be a causal rather than a fortuitous one in that
the acceptance of, or at least a preoccupation with, the hypothesis of a
death instinct may have led to a compensatory interest in the ESP hy­
pothesis. Needless to say, the postulation of such a causal nexus between
the formulation of the death instinct concept and the increasing ac­
ceptance of the telepathy hypothesis is entirely independent of the prob­
lem of the inherent validity of either or both of these hypotheses or
concepts. The purpose of this paragraph is simply to point out a strik­
ing “coincidence" in the development of psychoanalytic thinking.
(7) The Usefulness of Seemingly Telepathic Occurrences. Precisely
because certain incidents are startling enough to attract special attention,
it may be surmised that their systematic analytic study will be particularly
rewarding. The following aspects of such incidents appear to merit
detailed analytic consideration:
CONTENT ANALYSIS
(1) Psychosexual Development
What type of basic attitude, indicative of fixation on a certain level of
psychosexual development, does a claim or feat of telepathic sensi­
tiveness reveal? What is the diagnostic significance of this finding?
(2) The Meaning of Sensitiveness
What is the unconscious meaning of telepathic sensitiveness—be it
genuine or spurious—for the patient and for the analyst?
4 The belief, current in a small section of the analytic world, that knowledge of
theory is an obstacle to good therapy has nothing in common with the statement made
above.
(3) Sender and Receiver
What is the unconscious significance (both for the analyst and for the
patient) of the ascription of the role of sender to the analyst and of
the role of receiver to the patient—or vice versa? Which imago is the
prototype of the sender, respectively of the receiver?
(4) The Process of Transmission
With what kind of infantile experience is the process or act of tele­
pathic transmission equated in the unconscious?
(5) The “Thought-Stuff”
What infantile-magical substance serves as the prototype for the
" though t-substance" “transmitted" in a telepathic manner? Is it per­
haps equated with milk, semen or enemata?
(6) “Acting Out” and Verification
Psychoanalysis of the acts leading to the discovery that a dream is
“telepathic" or “precognitive."
TRANSFERENCE AND COUNTERTRANSFERENCE
(1) Sensitiveness
(a) The General Problem
(b) The Minus-Function Hypothesis
(2) The Meaning of Telepathic Perceptiveness
(3) Hostile Perceptiveness
(4) The Problem of “Sending’
RESISTANCE AND “ACTING OUT"
(1) Telepathy as Resistance
(2) The Diversionary or “Red Herring9 Resistance
(3) The Interpretation of the Telepathic Transference Resistance
It is permissible to seek answers to these questions and related ones,
even in the course of the analytic hour, because they represent the proper
subject matter of psychoanalytic work, and are in line with the inquiries
one makes in connection with the rest of the patient’s behavior and
productions.
The rest of this study will be devoted to a discussion of these prob­
lems. What we have found up to this point is something both simple and
important: There is no special technique for analyzing occult occur­
rences. We hold, however, that it is a scientifically legitimate undertaking
to show that an unusual set of phenomena may be analyzed in the same
manner as other, less striking, occurrences and modes of behavior which
traditionally belong to the domain of psychoanalysis.
 II. T h e T ech niq ue of C o nten t A nalysis
The technique of analyzing the latent content of seemingly telepathic
occurrences does not differ from the classical technique of content analysis
in general. For that reason the sole purpose of this section is to emphasize
the need of obtaining certain data which are of special importance in
the analysis of the latent content of such occurrences. In other words,
the present section does not describe new techniques. It merely lists cer­
tain criteria for testing the completeness of the latent material obtained
by means of the classical technique.
Lack of space prevents us from discussing the technique of content
analysis of seemingly telepathic material in connection with concrete
case histories.
In principle, the ideal material for this type of content analysis con­
sists of seemingly telepathic dreams and happenings, which did not occur
in the course of analysis, and are therefore not complicated by the pres­
ence of transference and countertransference elements. Unfortunately,
reliable material of this type, complete with associations thereto, is sel­
dom obtainable. Therefore, since for reasons of expository convenience
we propose to discuss transference and countertransference elements in a
separate section, it was decided to discuss problems of content analysis
only in general terms, instead of in connection with concrete case his­
tories.
The basic rules of this type of content analysis are simple. After the
analyst has investigated a seemingly telepathic occurrence in the usual
manner and has discovered most of the latent content thereof, he may
feel inclined to check his findings, in order to discover whether they are
reasonably complete by ordinary criteria. The next step is to ascertain
whether a number of questions which are of special interest in the inves­
tigation of such occurrences have been covered. If not, the material
should be subjected to further analytic study, in order to cover also the
points to be discussed below. Although the purpose of this supplemen­
tary inquiry is to clarify the nature of seemingly telepathic material, the
inquiry itself must proceed in such a manner that the problem of the
genuineness or spuriousness of the nexus between the “message” and the
“reception,” i.e., between the referent and the statement, is entirely
ignored. On the other hand, the possibility of transmission through nor­
mal channels of communication must—needless to say—always be exam­
ined with the greatest care. This point is important not only logically
and technically but also therapeutically, since the finding that normal
transmission has taken place strengthens the patient's reality testing. In
fact, throughout the content analysis phase of the investigation—as
always—inquiry must be subordinated to the therapeutic goal.
(1) Psychosexual Development. Perhaps the first point to be ascer­
tained—since this is a matter which defines the structure and “climate”
of the entire happening—is the “psychological date" (24) of the incident.
An analysis of the data collected by the writer suggests that incidents of
this type generally show the characteristics of the late anal and early
phallic stages of development. Oral and early anal material, when present,
seldom occupies a prominent position, and, in many instances, appears
in the form of regressive defenses against late anal and early phallic con­
flicts. Oedipal, latency period and later material is, in turn, usually
present only in the form of the neurotic defense known as “flight into
health," one common form of this defense being a spurious and purely
intellectualizing skepticism about the experience under consideration.
The statements just made are tentative, but are not disproven by any of
the material published in this volume.
(2) The Meaning of Telepathic Sensitiveness to Patient and Analyst.
I stressed elsewhere the survival value of the infant's extreme sensitive­
ness to all tokens of love, and the infant's consequent epiphenomenal
sensitiveness to slights and injuries as well (27). Certain aspects of the
problem of sensitiveness, though intimately connected also with the prob­
lem of transference and countertransference, may be profitably examined
also under the heading of content analysis. For example, the analyst may
subject to a searching scrutiny the narcissistic gratification which he
obtains from his (professionally fully substantiated) belief that he is unu­
sually sensitive to the voice of the patient's unconscious. Such a self­
scrutiny is always a singularly sobering experience, and often destroys
the impression that one has received a telepathic message from the pa­
tient. Next, one may examine the significance, for the patient, of the fact
that the entire analytic attitude encourages him to react excessively to
the slightest remark or deed of his analyst. A scrutiny of this latter prob­
lem may reveal why a patient thinks he perceived “telepathically" the
fatal illness of a friend, although he never wondered why he had no
premonition of the devastating fire which broke out in his warehouse.
One may also seek to find out why, e.g., silence (77), rather than the
vision of some calamity, served to symbolize the death of the patient's
friend. A study of these questions, which center about the problem of
the patient's “selective permeability" to “stimuli," and about his personal
style of symbolizing and distorting material of various kinds, is often very
rewarding, since such data reveal a great deal about the structure of the
patient's unconscious, and also about the meaning of sensitivity per se.
It is important to stress that sensitiveness implies, by definition, the
postulation of the “heteropsychic” (39) origin of a given thought. This
insight further confirms the view that “occult” incidents cannot belong
to that stage of psychosexual development in which the self and the
world are still perceived as one and indivisible. The strong emotional
response to such incidents also suggests an overvaluation of the thought
“received.” This, in turn, suggests a “kinship” between such thoughts and
certain overvalued and priceless products such as stools, urine and semen
—a kinship which further confirms our speculations about the possible
psychological “date” of such incidents. Further research will have to
clarify many points, including the problem of whether primarily id, ego
or superego material is received “telepathically,” whether “telepathic”
dreams are more or less distorted than other dreams, etc. At present, the
paucity of material does not enable us to characterize not only descrip­
tively, but also systematically, the “differences” between “telepathic” and
nontelepathic dreams.
(3) Sender and Receiver. If the patient defines an inanimate object as
the source of the message, one must look for material reflecting animistic
attitudes, i.e., for material going back to the first stages of the sense of
reality. If a person is viewed as the sender, one must ascertain the imago
which that nominal sender represents. For example, in several of the
incidents analyzed by the writer, the imago which the nominal sender
represented was the phallic mother who gives enemata. Narcissistic in­
volvements, which play a determining role in assigning the role of sender
or receiver to the patient or to another person, such as, the analyst, will
be discussed in the section on transference.
(4) The Infantile Prototype of the Process of Transmission. We just
referred to the fact that the sender is sometimes a representative of the
enema-giving phallic mother. In such cases the transmission “corre­
sponds” to, or is symbolic of, the process of giving an enema. In one
instance the enema, which “transmission” symbolized, was believed to
cause pregnancy. In this manner the telepathic process was linked with
the incorporation of a bad object—or of a good object which becomes
bad through being incorporated.5
(5) The “Thought-Stuff” We define as “thought-stuff” the imaginary
object which corresponds to “thought.” The relationship between
“thought-stuff” and the actual ideational content of a thought may be
imagined as similar to the relationship between “ectoplasm”6 and the
6 There are reasons to suspect that—sometimes at least—good objects are incorpo­
rated orally, and bad objects anally—and also that good objects become bad' objects by
being ejected as vomitus or feces.
6 This simile is used in order to underscore the fact that the writer believes neither
in the existence of a “thought-stuff” nor in “ectoplasma.”
“form assumed by the ectoplasm." Jones discussed one example of such
a “thought-stuff" in his brilliant analysis of the Madonna's conception
through the ear (108). Quite frequently we find that patients who define
words as milk, saliva, stools, urine or semen define the “thought-stuff" in
identical terms. In one dream analyzed by the writer, the stuff was an
enema which was capable of producing pregnancy, and therefore repre­
sented seminally defined urine.
(6) "Acting Out” Leading to “Verification” Sometimes the “tele­
pathic" element in the dream is not consciously recognized by the
dreamer, until he has performed some—possibly inherently reasonable—
action which, to his great “surprise," leads to the discovery that his dream
was a telepathic or precognitive one (XV). One patient dreamed of torn
galoshes. The next day he investigated his wife's diaphragm which—to
his great annoyance—had again been left lying about, and discovered
that the diaphragm had an almost invisible tear. At this point one may
ask one of two questions, the choice of the question asked being deter­
mined by one's attitude toward the “occult." “How many telepathic or
precognitive dreams are verified because one undertook—as though by
posthypnotic command—actions leading to their verification?" “How
many telepathic dreams fail to be verified because of a failure to under­
take actions leading to their verification?" A special form of “verificatory
acting out" is the presentation of such incidents to the analyst, in the
hope of obtaining a “consensual validation" of the experience.
Conclusion. All of the above topics may be inquired into in the course
of the analytic hour, since they are of legitimate analytic interest. This
leaves the analyst free to examine the genuinely or spuriously telepathic
character of such productions after office hours—if he chooses to do so.
In other words, we simply tried to demonstrate that a complete investiga­
tion of a seemingly telepathic occurrence is possible without once exceed­
ing the limits of classical analytic procedure.
III. T ransference and C o untertransference
We now propose to discuss the problem of sensitiveness to “telepathic"
stimuli, and the problem of “sending" telepathic messages, in so far as
these matters have a bearing upon the process of transference and coun­
tertransference obtaining in the therapeutic situation. We intend to
study in particular the significance of activity vs. passivity, and of voy­
eurism vs. exhibitionism, in the ascription of the role of sender to one
member of the analytic pair, and of that of receiver to the other member,
together with the influence of such an ascription of roles upon the thera­
peutic process in general.
 (1) Sensitiveness. Our discussion of the role of transference and
countertransference must attempt, first of all, to elucidate the problem of
sensitiveness, because this matter has always received more attention
than has the complementary problem of “sending." We propose to show,
however, that this partiality for one aspect of the problem has appreciably
skewed our understanding of the problem as a whole.
(a) The General Problem. The theory of psi phenomena is rooted in
the assumption that there exists a quantitatively or qualitatively unique
kind of empathy, or form of sensitiveness, which is responsible for the
occurrence of telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. For this reason
a brief discussion of the meaning of sensitiveness must precede a detailed
analysis of the process as a whole. In ordinary parlance sensitiveness usu-
»ally denotes primarily a tendency to react excessively to trifling slights
and injuries. Only by extension is this term applied also to the tendency
to overreact to other minimal stimuli, and especially to minimal tokens of
love. However, we already expressed the opinion that, genetically at
least, sensitiveness to minimal tokens of love is the more basic of the
two types of sensitiveness, since the ability to respond maximally to
tokens of love is one of the major homeostatic mechanisms of the child
in its struggle for survival. It was felt, therefore, that sensitiveness to
slights and injuries was little more than an epiphenomenal consequence
of sensitiveness to love (27). This epiphenomenal sensitiveness to injuries
eventually gives rise to those paranoid and sadomasochistic attitudes
which are determined by the presence of an extremely cruel superego.
Already Freud stressed (IV) that extrasensory perceptiveness is usually
sadistic and paranoid in nature, thus confirming Saul's view (XVIII) that
telepathic sensitiveness is a neurotic phenomenon. This observation is
not contradicted by the finding that normal persons are better subjects
for the experimental study of extrasensory perception than are neurotic
or psychotic subjects. Indeed, even the most normal person has his “psy­
chotic core." However, he is able to utilize it somewhat better, and a
great deal more purposefully, than the neurotic or psychotic. Since this
“utilization" presupposes considerable ego control, it is to be expected
that, in the waking state, normals would make better experimental sub­
jects than neurotics or psychotics. On the other hand, normals seem to
have fewer “spontaneous" extrasensory experiences than neurotics, at
least in a relaxed state of consciousness, and under conditions in which
the ego is in full control, i.e., outside the analytic situation.
These considerations are important for the proper evaluation of the
transference and counter transference mechanisms involved in the occur­
rence of psi phenomena during analysis. Aggressive elements must be
present, but the aggression must be epiphenomenal to an earlier and
more positive transference.
(b) The Minus-Function Hypothesis. The above considerations are
confirmed by the theory of the “minus function" formally advanced by
Ehrenwald (39), but anticipated by one of Freud's patients, who declared
that she mentioned her abnormal powers of sight and hearing to her
physician with considerable reluctance, “as I was afraid he would tell
me what I regarded as plus qualities were minus qualities" (VI). Freud's
tentative assumption that such “powers" represent a regression to archaic
and obsolete modes of communication also fits the minus-function hypo­
thesis, since—as is implicit in Jackson's theory of the dissolution and
liberation of functions (186)—the archaic functions reappear primarily
when higher and more recent functions are inhibited or impaired.
The point of the argument is that no lower function ever returns in
a discrete and circumscribed form. It invariably brings in its train also
a network of other archaic functions and ideas. If, then, extrasensory
perception is a minus function, i.e., a positive symptom liberated by the
dissolution of higher functions, it must, of necessity, bring with it also
much additional archaic material, carried along by the primary process.
This may explain why accounts of psi phenomena are often so untrust­
worthy. Indeed, just as in ordinary remembering, one can “have" such
“experiences" only by a decathecting and partial repudiation of objec­
tive present reality. Remembering is functionally a goal-directed and
reality-adjusted activity, but structurally and dynamically it represents a
repudiation of present reality, in that intrapsychic reality, rather than
immediate external reality, occupies the center of consciousness.7 Thus,
to the extent to which the theory of minus functions is correct, it in­
creases, rather than decreases, the unreliability of accounts of psi phenom­
ena, since any minus function would correspond closely to the primary
process and other archaic and obsolete functions not subject to the laws
of time, space and causality, and would give preference to intrapsychic
reality over situational external reality.
(2) The Meaning of Telepathic Perceptiveness. Telepathy, clairvoy­
ance and precognition are traditionally defined as passive “acts," compar­
able, according to Deutsch (XII), to the passive receptiveness of a tele­
phone (74). We have already pointed out that the patients themselves
tend to suggest to the analyst that their telepathic sensitiveness to his
thoughts is a manifestation of their passive, feminine and submissive atti­
tude. The analyst, in turn, defines his analytic—and also his “telepathic"
—sensitiveness to the thoughts of the patient as a manifestation of his
7 This may perhaps explain why all remembering is imperfect.
legitimate and professional analytic passivity. This view seems plausible
only until one is reminded by Hann-Kende that even analytic passivity
and permissiveness are highly positive activities (XIV). Nor is that all.
A further scrutiny of the concept of both sensory and extrasensory sensi­
tiveness and perceptiveness reveals that the passive definition of percep­
tiveness is by no means the only possible one. Indeed, it is one thing to
define, e.g., '‘seeing" as a passive-receptive mode of behavior, and quite
another thing to define “looking" in such a manner.8 In analytic terms,
it is one thing to “happen to see" and quite another thing to “look." It
is one thing to be “victimized" by an exhibitionist, and quite another
matter to be a voyeur. It is felt that the nominally passive-receptive atti­
tude of the “telepathically" sensitive patient is a deceptive facade, which
usually conceals strong and active voyeuristic tendencies, such as “look­
ing" or even “spying" (XI). In order to avoid cumbrous modes of expres­
sion, in the following pages “perceiving" will denote the passive expe­
rience of the “victim" of the exhibitionist, “looking" or “spying" will
denote the activity of the voyeur, while “seeing" will be used in a neutral
sense. It is our thesis that the patient who professes to have “perceived"
telepathically something in the analyst, is actually disguising the fact that
he is engaged in “spying upon" the analyst—usually in retaliation for
being “spied upon" by the latter.9
It hardly needs to be pointed out that “spying"—be it real or “tele­
pathic"—is more than just an active mode of behavior. It is quite spe­
cifically an aggressive act (142). This inference is strongly supported by
Freud's remark that most information obtained telepathically or precog-
nitively pertains to calamities of some kind (IV). This is not surprising,
since we are aware of the hostile component of both voyeurism and ex­
hibitionism, which belong to the late anal, early phallic period. This, in
turn, further substantiates our belief that “telepathic" behavior is rooted
in late anal and early phallic attitudes. In fact, this latter inference now
appears as a necessary presupposition for any attempt to connect psi
phenomena occurring in analysis with the transference situation. Indeed,
although magical attitudes are connected with narcissistic omnipotence
fantasies, they are postoral, since they also presuppose at least a minimal
recognition of the existence of the external world, and at least a minimal
8 The Malay language strongly underscores this distinction. The literate Malay
seldom uses the verb “to see” in a form which implies the activity of “looking.” Where
the Malay farmer says “Saya lihat sa-ikor kuda”—I see (look) a horse—the Malay gen­
tleman will say: “Dilihat oleh saya sa-ikor kuda”—is seen (perceived) by me a horse.
®Shortly after these lines were written, the editor received Dr. Gillespie’s manu­
script (XXIX) which reports that a patient responded to the interpretation that the
analyst was exploring her body with the remark that she was interfering with the
analyst, by perceiving his acts telepathically.
object relationship. The presence of some object relationship is confirmed
by the frequency of attempts to validate one’s extrasensory experience
consensually.
In brief, the occurrence of psi phenomena seems to require sufficient
ego development and ego integrity to permit a hallucinatory gratification
of one’s wishes.10
Thus, whenever either the patient or the analyst exhibit “extrasen­
sory” perceptiveness one has to look for aggression, for various attention-
seeking and competitive acts (VIII, XI, XII, XIV, X X, XXIII, etc.) and
even for certain paranoid maneuvers, which seek to disguise the fact that
this nominally passive, feminine and submissive attitude of “perceiving”
actually masks an active, masculine and hostile attitude of “spying.” The
obvious fright of the patient who suddenly realizes that he has had a
“telepathic” insight into the analyst, or into some other person, simply
cannot be explained in terms of passivity and masochism alone. It be­
comes understandable only if it is viewed as anxiety elicited by a sudden
confrontation with his own aggressivity, and with the fact that this aggres-
sivity has been erotized by means of feminine attitudes. This, we feel,
is the dynamic background of the “delightful shivers” and “pleasantly
creepy feeling” which such experiences elicit. In simplest terms, what has
to be analyzed whenever the patient—or, for that matter, the analyst—
feels that he has shown extraordinary sensitiveness, be it “telepathic” or
normal, is the “medium’s” active-voyeuristic attitude, and its aggressive
component, rather than his passive-feminine component.
(3) Hostile Perceptiveness. At this point mention may be made of the
striking frequency wherewith calamitous dreams tend to “come true.”
Most persons harbor severely repressed death wishes toward their ^closest
associates. Hence, one would expect that many ordinary dreams and
everyday hallucinations would express such wishes, though in a highly
disguised form. When, now, these recurrent latent dream wishes are actu­
ally fulfilled by reality, the earlier symbolic dream representations thereof
suddenly becomes understandable, and the veil concealing them becomes
transparent. This sudden, if belated, understanding is probably due to
two related factors. On the one hand, the real fact that the calamity
occurred, without any active and real deed on the part of the dreamer,
tends to exculpate him at least on a superficial “objective” level, and,
at any rate, to a sufficient extent to make his hostile dreams or visions
intelligible in retrospect. In a typically neurotic manner, “the Gods” (51)
rather than the dreamer himself are held responsible for the calamity,
10 The absence of true depression and elation in genuine schizophrenia, which is
characterized by an extreme immaturity and lack of integrity of the ego, confirms this
view.
which now becomes partly ego-syntonic.11 At the same time, but on a far
deeper level, such deaths intensify guilt feelings to a sufficient extent to
permit these wishes and guilt feelings to escape repression, and to discard
their habitual disguises to a sufficient extent to make the dream under­
standable in retrospect, thus causing it to appear as a “prophetic” dream.
(4) The Problem of “Sending ” It is highly characteristic of much of
the analytically oriented literature on parapsychology that the sender is
usually thought to be the analyst. By contrast, the analyst's apparent
ability “to read the patient's mind" is usually attributed to an unusual
professional acumen. In simplest terms, the patient is credited with
telepathic powers, and the analyst with unusual empathy, and with the
ability to listen constructively. In this sense, the analyst's perceptiveness
is felt to be understandable in terms of Schilder's description of the
manner in which thought is determined on the one hand by the rela­
tively limited possibilities of the unconscious mind (XX) and, on the
other hand, by what Marbe defines as the limitations imposed upon the
direction of thought processes by the ethos or culture pattern of a given
society (133, 134).
In brief, the analyst defines himself as a well-analyzed person, who
can perceive the unconscious without running the risk that his ego may
be overwhelmed by it. By contrast, the patient is defined as a person who
can protect his ego only by repressing or distorting the unconscious.
Thus, the analyst's “feat" is viewed as a performance in which the ego
functions are supported by the forces of the unconscious—i.e., the analyst
can analyze the patient consciously. By contrast, the patient's “feat" is
defined as a process in which ego functions are subservient to the uncon­
scious—i.e., the patient unwittingly produces unconscious material by
means of ego functions (speech, etc.) and, thus, shows himself to be
analyzable. These two processes actually characterize also empathy respec­
tively “telepathy."12
A second problem is connected with the analyst's professional status
and with his—often legitimate—pride in his “third ear." He therefore
defines his feats as insight or as intuition, both rating highly in his value
scale which maximizes reason and minimizes impulsiveness.
The third narcissistic factor involved is related to the “value" scale
“active-vs.-passive," which is often—and, according to Hermann, errone­
ously (92)—equated with the “value" scale “masculine vs. feminine." We
believe that the analyst feels the need to stress the active-masculine
11 It is regrettable that we possess no data on possibly distinctive forms of mourn­
ing occurring when calamity dreams are “confirmed" by external events.
12 These views are entirely compatible with Kris' (112a) concepts of regression and
of the primary process in the service of the ego.
aspects of his role in order to “compensate” himself for the passivity
which analytic technique demands from him. For this reason the analyst
is constantly tempted to overvalue his own production, be it a sparing
Olympian utterance, or an impressive silence. To make things worse, his
overvaluation happens to be functionally legitimate, since the patient—
who is still in the throes of the magical attitude—is indeed most respon­
sive to everything the analyst does or does not do, and is constantly listen­
ing for some oracular utterance, all-pervasive insight or magical word
which will effect a sudden and final cure by means of a miracle. Even
in therapeutic terms this overvaluation of the analyst's acts is accurate,
since, as long as the patient's ego is feeble and his ego ideal is vague and
uncertain, the analyst must make himself available to the patient both as
a supplementary ego and as a temporary ego ideal (28).
These realistic considerations notwithstanding, it is a fact that the
analyst must somehow find “compensation" (25) for his (“inferior")
passive role (183), e.g., by defining as much of his analytic behavior as he
possibly can as “activity." One such compensation is the assumption that
he is usually the “active-masculine" sender, and the patient the “passive-
feminine" receiver. I already referred to the case, in which I was unable
to discover the non-ESP analytic significance of a certain puzzling coin­
cidence until I realized that, if telepathic transmission had taken place,
it was the patient who was the “sender" and I the “receiver."
At this point explicit recognition must be given to the exhibitionistic
element implicit in the self-ascription of the role of sender. What has to
be analyzed, once the “sender" is identified, is the exhibitionistic element.
This is particularly necessary whenever the analyst appears to be the
sender, since the entire analytic role requires systematic self-denial in
connection with the basic human urge to exhibit oneself. Indeed, the
need to analyze one's exhibitionistic impulses is never as great as when
one is silent and passive, i.e., when one seems to suppress one's ex­
hibitionistic urges altogether. Thus, “impressive" silence, or a silence
which one feels to be “analytically perfect," can be a singularly hostile
and exhibitionistic activity, especially if it occurs in the analysis of a
patient who is afraid of silence. To a somewhat lesser extent, the passive
erotic element present in the pleasure of being (actively) looked at also
deserves detailed self-analysis, in that the analyst may erotize his passivity
which, without this erotization, he would define as passive-feminine and.
therefore, as “humiliating."
A dream reported by Freud clearly reveals the spuriousness of the
receiver's passivity and of the sender's activity: “More than ten years ago
a highly intelligent man told me a dream which he wanted to look upon
as proof of the telepathic nature of dreams. He saw an absent friend from
whom he had received no news for a very long time, and reproached him
warmly for his silence. The friend made no reply. It then proved that he
had met his death by suicide about the time of the dream. Let us leave
the problem of telepathy on one side: there seems to be no doubt that
here the dumbness in the dream represents death" (77). In this dream
the “receiver," and not the “sender," is the active and hostile one. This
suggests that what should be analyzed in this dream is not the “percep­
tion" of a death message, but the dreamer's death wish, i.e., a positive
and hostile act directed at a nominally active “sender" who in reality is
quite passive, though “provocatively" so.
(5) Conclusions. The patient's receptiveness masquerades as an exalta­
tion of the analyst's masculinity, activity and potency, and as a feminine
degradation of the patient. Actually, on a deeper level, the patient turns
the tables on the “prying" analyst. He penetrates the analyst's reserve,
sets to naught his impersonal facade and makes him the means whereby
infantile voyeuristic impulses can be gratified.13 The very fact that the
patient defines his perceptiveness as a “feat" also shows how active a
significance he ascribes to his “telepathic" performance, and how much
he himself is impressed by the spectacular nature of such a “feat."14 The
assumption that the analyst's own exhibitionism also plays a role in such
occurrences is revealed by the writings of several analysts, who report
that they only “send" at times when they are preoccupied with extra-
analytic personal matters, or otherwise deviate from the analytic rules
(XI, 98).
Nothing said hereinabove enables one to deny a priori the reality of
psi phenomena, or to disprove the reality of such phenomena as a class
of events. In some cases the analyst may reach the—possibly legitimate—
conclusion that certain patients did obtain "telepathic" knowledge about
him, i.e., that they obtained information which they could not have
obtained by means of that type of empathy into the analyst, which was
discussed by Ferenczi (54). Yet, even in such cases it is analytically desir­
able to scrutinize carefully the patient's voyeuristic and one's own ex-
hibitionistic tendencies, lest the latter should find also other, and highly
inappropriate, outlets.
We conclude therefore that the “telepathic" interpretation of a given
occurrence has to be justified only in logical terms. The subjective factors
which have led one to reach this conclusion must, on the other hand, be
subjected to a careful scrutiny, regardless of whether or not the “objec­
tive" conclusion happens to be a correct one. With monotonous repeti­
13 Already R6heim stressed the connection between telepathic experiences and the
primal scene (XIII) .
14 The purpose of this type of “feat” will be discussed in the next section.
tiveness we are once more led to the final conclusion that the analyst's
task is to analyze.
IV. R esistance and “A cting O u t ”
(1) Telepathy as Resistance. Saul (XVIII) indicated that telepathic
claims and “feats" may be viewed as neurotic symptoms, especially when
the patient is unwilling—i.e., unable—to recognize that his feats are due
to overalertness and empathy. One of my patients, who claimed to have
prophetic dreams, was so overalert that she noticed the high heel of the
girl on Thematic Apperception Test Card No. 9GF. Another patient
admittedly listened “with bated breath” to everything I said or did, so
that, time and again, he was able to infer from an almost imperceptible
change in my rate of respiration that I was about to say something.
Helene Deutsch (XII) also reduced a seemingly “telepathic” feat to pre­
conscious combinatory induction, made possible by a special kind of
identification.
Telepathic claims and feats seem to be specific manifestations of the
transference neurosis. Hence, they are in the service of transference resist­
ance and reveal important unconscious components of the patient's atti­
tude toward the cluster of transference problems.
Technically speaking, the analysis of unsubstantiated claims is often
especially rewarding, since such an investigation appears to disclose the
motivation of “psi phenomena” more fully than does the analysis of
“substantiated” claims. This view is fully compatible with Freud’s thesis
that the analysis of unfulfilled prophecies is especially rewarding (V). In
fact, it was precisely the analysis of such “prophecies” which led Freud
to assert that some telepathic occurrences are revealed only by analysis.
At this point the following matter has to be clarified: Assuming, for
the sake of argument, that a given dream or production is genuinely
telepathic or precognitive, why was precisely that material rather than
some other material “perceived” by the subject? It is felt that only psycho­
analysis can answer this important query. Lack of space prevents me
from citing extensive case material indicating that both the choice of the
“perceived material”—if indeed it be telepathically perceived—and the
telepathic claims themselves are, in fact, connected with some of the
patient’s most important problems. This connection is a very specific
one: Telepathic insight—be it genuine or spurious—is almost invariably
a means of escaping or avoiding another, and often far more important,
insight, which is usually connected with the current transference-counter-
transference situation. For this reason we must seek to define the kind
of resistance which such claims and feats represent.
 (2) The Diversionary or “Red Herring9 Resistance. We already cited
Freud's warning that preoccupation with the problem of the possibly
telepathic nature of a given incident diverts the analyst from his proper
objectives (V). It is our thesis that the unconscious purpose of the pa­
tient's telepathic “feats" or claims is precisely what it does accomplish.
Needless to say, this view is compatible both with the theory of symptom­
atology, and with the known fact that one of the major purposes of the
transference resistance is the manipulation of the analyst. The patient
seeks to repeat within the analysis various important events of his early
life. In order to achieve this, he tries to maneuver the analyst into dis­
playing behavior comparable to that of some early imago. According to
Helene Deutsch, the analyst sometimes complies with this demand by
assuming a “complementary attitude" (XII). Hann-Kende (XIV) is,
however, right in stressing that the analyst assumes the complimentary
attitude only because he is motivated by some of his own unconscious and
unresolved problems.
We hold that telepathic “feats" and claims are means whereby the
analyst is maneuvered into a complementary attitude. All papers in this
volume indicate that telepathic “feats" and claims are quite startling.
We feel that precisely that is their chief purpose. Needless to say, the
attempt to startle the analyst is a typically hysterical maneuver, as well
as a sadomasochistic one. In a typically feminine-submissive manner a
deceptively passive-receptive (telepathic) attitude is used as a means of
impressing, overcoming, defeating and castrating the analyst. The patient
seems to proclaim: “I am utterly dependent on you. I am permeable,
penetrable (15), and feminine, I am ready to receive everything that
comes from you: interpretations, milk, semen, enemata, etc." However,
this passive pose is actually an attempt at seduction. It seeks to modify
the “analytic atmosphere" by undermining the analyst's equipoised, dis­
passionate, free-floating attentiveness, partly in order to gain neurotic
gratifications, and partly in order to smuggle unconscious material past
the analyst's watchfulness. The patient's attitude is, thus, patterned upon
that of certain castrative women, who seek to give a man an orgasm only
in order to make him temporarily impotent.15 This defiant overcom­
pliance defeats the purposes of the analysis and, therefore, also the an­
alyst. This, as we pointed out above, is a typically hysterical maneuver,
to which are added also certain ego-syntonic paranoid elements. However,
the most important component of the maneuver is the fact that—like
15 According to R6heim (161), the Somali call the vagina “the place where the
penis goes to die/’ A woman patient told her husband after intercourse: “Now there
are no more babies in your penis. You cannot give babies to other women for a while.
I really fixed your penisl”
Gillespie's patient (XXIX )—the telepathically “receptive" patient only
masquerades as a passive-receptive person. In reality he views his “recep­
tiveness" as a positive and aggressive act: As spying upon the analyst, and
as an invasion of the analyst's privacy, which is comparable to the “inva­
sion" of the patient's privacy by the analyst. It is, thus, a retaliatory
activity, which mockingly parades as extreme passivity. It is voyeurism
disguised as exhibitionism.
In brief, telepathic feats and claims seek to perpetuate the illness, by
confusing the analyst and by changing positions with him. The analyst
must be ever watchful if he is to avoid this trap, which is baited not only
by his “analytic megalomania," but also by the lingering remnants of his
reluctantly abandoned early magical attitudes.
Exactly what happens when the patient performs a telepathic “feat"
or advances a telepathic claim? The analyst is startled. The spectacular
nature of the “feat"—which is comparable to the spectacular “acting out"
so characteristic of hysterics and psychopaths—diverts the analyst's atten­
tion from the latent to the manifest content of the patient's behavior. The
analyst is forced, or at least tempted, to concentrate his attention upon
the event rather than upon the behavior.10 Thus, as regards the progress
of the analysis, such activities have the same effect upon the course of the
analysis as “acting out" outside the analysis has. For this reason we may
view such feats and claims as “acting out" within the analysis. This is not
a contradiction in terms, since the purpose of such activities is to make
their underlying latent content inaccessible to analysis.17 (Related ma­
neuvers can be observed day after day in analysis. For example, the patient
may bombard the analyst with “horrible" plans of rape, arson and mur­
der, in order to conceal that he wishes to be admired for the size of his
stools, or for some other infantile naughtiness.)
In this sense, the telepathic feat or claim is also a “test." Only if the
analyst remains unperturbed by magic and other allurements can the
patient consider him as sufficiently stable to become the recipient of the
infantile “secret." Indeed, the patient's remaining healthy component
“knows" (in a way) that the infantile “secret" is not really punishable by
eternal damnation. Nonetheless, he wants to make sure that the analyst
also knows that! He tempts the analyst to identify himself with the infan­
tile imago who hurls thunderbolts at the masturbating child. If the
analyst resists this temptation, if he proves himself different from the
imago whose attitude the patient seeks to foist on him, then the patient
16 Similarly, when a patient seriously contemplates murder or suicide, the analyst
may have to cope with the manifest plan itself, before he can analyze its latent content.
171 am indebted to Dr. Bertram D. Lewin for a discussion which clarified my ideas
on the subject of “acting out within the analysis,” as well as for the term itself (123).
will reveal to him his “true secret." At that stage the patient “socializes"
his secret, and perfectly healthy, insight that, e.g., infantile masturbation
is not really a mortal sin. This insight, once it is socialized (i.e., shared
with the analyst) becomes therapeutically effective. The patient discovers
that others—i.e., the analyst—are as sane as he is. One always makes a
great mistake when one underestimates the patient's health and strength.
It is more than a technical mistake—it is, above all, a human mistake.
We should not underestimate the intensity of the temptation.to side­
step the interpretation of material lurking beneath the telepathic veneer.
Freud himself confessed that, once at least: “This narrative startled me so
much, and made so disagreeable an impression upon me, that I preferred
not to subject it to an interpretation" (V). This, we assume, is precisely
what the patient had hoped to achieve all along. This supposition is also
supported by Ferenczi's cogent remarks about the patient's empathic
insight into the analyst (54).
In brief, telepathic feats and claims test the analyst's maturity, in
order to ascertain his fitness to be the recipient of the patient's real
“secrets." All “acting out"—both within and outside the analysis—may
well have this purpose. This, in turn, may explain why so many analysts
report (XI, XII, 98) that telepathic episodes occurred while they were
deviating from the classical analytic attitude (VIII).
(3) The Interpretation of the Telepathic Transference Resistance.
The idea that precognitive dreams and telepathic feats are in the service
of resistance has already been intimated by Zulliger (XV). “Telepathic"
occurrences seem to be triggered by transference on the one hand, and
by the analyst's residual transferences and unsuspected countertransfer­
ences on the other hand.18 Hence, telepathic episodes are often almost
a parody of the transference relationship. This may explain why—except
perhaps in the analysis of psychotic patients—telepathic incidents do not
seem to occur before an appreciable amount of transference has been es­
tablished, nor when the transference has been interpreted in a timely and
adequate manner. It therefore seems legitimate to assume that telepathic
phenomena cannot occur when the transference-countertransference sit­
uation is handled absolutely correctly, i.e., classically and conservatively.
Telepathic transference resistance may take many forms, only one of
which will be mentioned: The “purloined letter" type of concealment. A
patient—who professed to have precognitive dreams without being able
to cite a single really convincing example in support of her claim—had
a dream which she did not call precognitive. The unconscious content of
the dream was suitably analyzed, but the analyst ignored the manifest
18 The latter distinction was proposed by Dr. Maxwell Gitelson in a lecture deliv­
ered before the Topeka Psychoanalytic Society, January 1952 (55).
content of the dream, which clearly revealed that the patient expected to
have to go to the closed ward once more. A few days later she had her
fourth psychotic episode and had to be confined to the closed ward.
Thus, precognitive dreams are often simply dreams that are made to
come true, in the sense in which this has been described by Zulliger in
connection with prophetic dreams (XV) and by Sterba in connection with
“acting out" (185). They are “self-fulfilling prophecies" in Merton's sense
_
A special characteristic of all startling acts performed by patients—
including acting out, telepathic feats and claims, and the like—seems to
be the concentration of the truly important material in the manifest con­
tent of the act or dream, as exemplified by the dream mentioned above.
The material is concealed by being made obvious enough to be ignored,
especially by the overingenious analyst, who is reluctant to admit that
the self-evident can ever be important.
The analyst can avoid the trap of the “red herring" resistance only
by the most tenacious adherence to the true purpose of the analysis,
which is concerned with the patient rather than with the act; with be­
havior, rather than with incidents; with the latent rather than with the
manifest material—including especially latent material masquerading as
manifest material. Telepathic feats and claims are, thus, only two of the
many resistances which seek to divert the analyst from the behavioral
analysis of happenings, and from the therapeutically relevant unconscious
and characterological implications thereof.
C onclusion
We examined the technical problem presented by telepathic feats and
claims, without concerning ourselves with their genuineness or spurious­
ness. We neither affirmed nor denied the thesis that even the most ex­
haustive analysis cannot “analyze away" a “genuine" psi phenomenon—
assuming that psi phenomena do, indeed, exist. Even less can the analyst
“analyze out of existence" the general problem of the reality of psi phe­
nomena—nor, for that matter, can he substantiate it. In this latter con­
nection analysis can yield only heuristic results, by demonstrating that if
we do not assume a priori that two events are related in the ESP sense,
they may often be shown to be related in an analytic sense. In doing so,
we made a twofold contribution:
(1) We showed that classical analytic technique is applicable, with­
out modification, also to telepathic “feats" and claims.
(2) We adhered to the principle of parsimony on the broad, the­
oretical level, and offered explanations which do not require a revision
of our concept of natural processes.
In addition, we made the following suggestions:
(1) Psychoanalytic technique represents a sublimation of unconscious
wishes and attitudes.
(2) If psi phenomena do exist, then concordances between the latent
content of two patients' dreams are more important than concordances
between the manifest content of their dreams, even though the process of
symbolization is related to the primary process. However, in such in­
stances, additional difficulties arise from the fact that the analyst's own
unconscious may be at the root of the similarity between the two dreams.
The final, and most important conclusion, which is a platitude that
cannot be repeated often enough is: The task of the analyst in the thera­
peutic setting is exclusively to analyze in order to cure.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Preliminary Note. The following bibliography does not purport to be

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 INDEX
Numbers in parentheses represent contributions. Numbers in brackets represent
discussions of contributions.
Abraham, K., 22, 106 Bowen, E., 376, 381
Ackerknecht, E. H., 17, 22, 339 Boyle, R., 42
Acting out, 14, 40, 49-51, 141, 161, 168­ Brill, A. A., 54-55
187, 183-187, 232-234, 254, 394, 412-415 British Society for Psychical Research,
Active-passive, 124, 150, 156, 282, 404, 406­ 334
411, 413-414 Burlingham, D. T., 11, 109, (188-191),
Aggression, see Sadomasochism 193, 226, 381, see also case m ateria l
Alexander, F., 196, 282
Alexander of Macedon, 169-170, 179 Carington, W., 380, 382
Allendy, R., 171, 177, 187 CASE MATERIAL
Amenhotep IV, 60 Burlingam, D. T .
Amentia, 217-219 Bicycle, 190
American Institute of Mathematical Sta­ Gerti, 188-190
tistics, 236, 322 Gold coin, 109, 190
American Psychological Association, 223 Hot water, 190-191
American Society for Psychical Research, Mother’s pregnancy, 190
71, 350, 361 Deutsch, H .
Amnesia, 207 Engagement, 140-141
Anagogic function of dreams, 83 Wedding anniversary, 141-142
Analytic atmosphere, 166-167, 413 Unfaithful lover, 144-146
Analytic megalomania, 414 Devereux, G.
Andersen, H. C., 210, 213 Bated breath, 412
Anthropology, see Primitives Day residue, not ESP, 394
Anticipatory speculations, 395 Diaphragm, 404
Anti-Semitism, 245-246 Dreams about ESP, 392
Appeal of the occult, 56, 58, 74, 116, 201, Hostile silence, 393-394
207, 226, 277, 392 Impregnating enema, 404
Archaic, see Paleopsychology and Primi­ Incest, 39-40
tives “John Doe,” 25-35
Artemidoros, 169, 172, 179 Orgasm as castration, 413
Associationism, 382 Patient as sender, 393, 410
Autopsychic, 13 “Purloined letter” concealment, 415-416
Autism, 26, 28 TAT card, 412
Autoscopy, 177 Eisenbud, J.
Autosuggestion, 181 Adulterous woman, 397
Atlantic City, 240-242
Bacri, 177 Bankers, 249-251
Bad object, 403 Bessye, 247-249
Baron, S. W., 245 Coronary attack, 243-245
Basic mood, see Analytic atmosphere Father’s watch, 238-240
Baudelaire, C., 169 Help in controversy, 339-362, 363-370
Beaunis, H. E„ 5 Jewishness, 245-246
Bendit, L. J., 13 Miscarriages, 227
Bennett, A., 104 Number experiment, 230-236
Bergler, E„ 276 Rain, 262-276, 297-300, 314-326, 332-337,
Bernfeld, S., 156 339-362
Bibliothfcque Nationale, 352 Refund, 227-228
Bl£riot, L., 115 Sex hormones, 252-255
Body-mind dualism, 382 Ellis, A.
Bohr, N., 31 Ellis, A., 365-370
B61yai, J., 42 “Herbert Dawes,” 365-370
Bonaparte, M., 413 Italian girl, 365-370
 Fodor, N. Rubin, S.
Alice Brand, 286-287, 292-295, 307-308, Redeeming of first-born, 383-387
330-332 Saul, L. J.
Lodge brother, 294-295 Hypersensitive girl, 193-196
Nightmare of fire, 289-295, 310-311, Schilder, P.
330-332 Amnesia patient, 207
Skis, 284-286, 292-295, 306-307, 330-332 Blindness, 207-208
Two toilets, 287-289, 292-295, 308-309, Hanussen, 206
330-332 Letter about legacy, 206-207
“Varieties of Castration,” 291-295, 311­ Servadio, E.
312, 330-332 “The Emperor's new clothes,” 212-213
Freud, S. Zulliger, H.
Brill, 54-55 Broken bowl, 174-175, 181
Crab poisoning, 60-62, 100-101 Corpse in lake, 183-187
Dream of silent friend, 410-411 Delayed menses, 175-177, 180-181
Hallucination of dead brother, 78-85 Engaged girl's death, 172-174, 181
Mr. H's twins, 8-9, 71-78, 84-85, 96-97, Missed streetcar, 178-179, 181
224-225 Mountain climbing, 168-169, 180-181
Mr. P's “foresight,” 11, 103-107, 208, Schoolboy, 178, 180-181
225-226 Cassandra, 115
Mrs. B's dream, 49-51, 53-54 Castration, 174, 179, 377-378, 413
Revenge fantasy, 54 Causality, see also Nexus, 28-35, 43
Scherman’s prophecy, 66-68, 101-102 Chance, see Probability
Sister-in-law's “death,” 70 Charcot, J. M„, 5
Son's “death,” 70 Child, 12, 109, 178, 180, 188-191
Two children prophesied, 9-10, 62-66, Claims, 192-196
89, 98-99, 224-225 Closure, 387
Gillespie, W. H. Cohanites, 384-385
Horseferry Road, 373-376, 397, 407 Coincidence, see Probability
“Inherited clock,” 376-377 Comar, 177
Legless man, 377-378 Complementary attitude (see also Trans­
Hann-Kende, F. ference) , 137-138, 163, 413
Beautiful analyst, 160 Conditions and process of ESP, 7, 10-13,
Ugly analyst, 159 43, 86, 89, 94-95, 116, 126, 132, 135, 200,
Vacation plans, 164-165 210-220, 237-238, 244, 251, 258, 281, 293­
Young analyst, 160 296, 320, 323-325, 379, 384, 391-417
Hitschmann, E. Congenital factors, 126
Letter, 128-132 Congruency, 27, 42
Max Dauthendey, 118, 122-126 Consensual validation, 404
Renner balloon, 114-121 Content analysis, 401-404
Hollds, J. Convenience, 45-46
500 cases, 200 Conventionalism, 395
Huszdr, 208-209 Convergence, 43
Janet, P. Cooper, J. M., 16
L£onie, 4-6 Countertransference, see Transference
Pederson-Krag, G. Crime, 175, 181
Dinner check, 280-281, 304-305 Critique of ESP, 16-46, 49-55, 113-132,
Prisoner of war, 277-278, 300-302, 327­ 192-196, 204-209, 297-314, 332-337, 363­
329 370, 391-417
Professional courtesy, 280, 304 Crystallization, 43
Puppet play, 279, 302-303 Dalai Lama, 19
Secretary in tweeds, 279-280, 303-304, Dale, L. A., 350-351, 361
328 Dauthendey, M., 118-119, 122-126
Silverware, 278-279, 302 Day residue, 10-12, 76-77, 90, 96, 155, 183­
Strange street, 281, 305 187, 201, 215, 228, 241, 256, 345, 351,
Roheim, G. 356-357, 394
Dream about telepathy, 147-157 Death wish, see Sadomasochism
Death instinct and ESP, 399 F£r£, C., 177
D6]h vu, 176 Ferenczi, S., 38, 81, 120, 158, 160, 163,
Delusion, 3 166, 201, 411, 415
“Demon Lover, The," 376 Flammarion, C., 119
Demons, 157 Fodor, N., 12-14, 226, (283-296), 297,
Department of Public Welfare, 355 [306-314], (330-332), [332-337], (337­
Depression, nongenuine, 408 338)
Deutsch, H., 11, 107, (133-146), 162-164, see also case m ateria l
171, 187, 192, 196, 211-213, 406, 408, “Forsyte Saga," 103-104, 106-107
412-413, 415 see also case m a ter ia l Forsythe, D„ 103-104, 106-107, 208
Devereux, G., (7 fn.), (16-46), (84 fn.), Fortuneteller, see Medium
(168-169 fn.), (188), (191), (199-203), Fraud, 18, 32, 119, 321, 333, 344, 361
(209 fn.), 373, 387, (391-417), (419­ Free associations, 201-202
426) Freud, A., 194
see also case m ateria l Freud, S., 3, 5-12, 18, 21, 24, 26, 30, 39,
Dialogue of the unconscious, 38, 40 46, (49-109), 115, 120-123, 125, 127, 131,
Dispersion hypothesis, 348 133-136, 158-159, 161-164, 168, 170-174,
Displacement, 127 181-182, 187, 193-195, 199, 204-205, 208­
Donnan, F. G., 16 212, 215-218, 220, 223-226, 229-230, 236,
Dowsing, 12 259-261, 275, 283, 294, 316, 326-327, 329,
Duke University, 9, 223, 322-323, 334, 332, 379, 381, 387, 391, 393, 395-397,
337-338, 351 399, 402, 405-408, 410-413, 415
Dunne, J. W., 31-32 see also case m ateria l
Dreams, dreaming, 7-13, 26, 29, 37-38, 49­ Freud-Ottorego, 104-105
51, 69-109, 125, 129-130, 133-146, 141, Freund, A. v„ 104-106
145, 147-157, 168-187, 195, 214-217, 223­ Fruitfulness, principle of, 37-44
370, 373-382, 391-417 Galsworthy, J., 103-104, 106-107
Dynamics, see Conditions Gedankenexperiment, 20
Ectoplasm, 404 Gauss, K. F., 39
Eddington, A. S., 16 Gibbs, J. W., 16
Ego ideal, 410 Gibert, Dr., 4-5
Ego, synthetic functions of, 35 Gillespie, W. H., (373-382), 391, 393, 395­
Ehrenwald, J., 13-15, 30, 33, 43, 226, 382, 397, 407, 414
403, 406 see also case m ateria l
Einstein, A., 57, 332 Gitelson, M., 415
Gley, E., 5
Eisenbud, J., (3-15), (223-276), 277, 283, Goal
[297-300], 301, 303, [312-314], (314­ God, see of psychoanalysis, 166, 391-417
326), 328, 332, [333-337], (337-338), Gods, Religion
(339-362), [363-370], 379-381, 384, 391, “Golden156,Boy,”
408
376
393, 395, 408 Goldney, K. M., 322, 380
see also case m a teria l Good object, 403
Elation, nongenuine, 408
Ellis, A., 14, (297-314), [314-332], (332­ Graphology, 66-68, 101-102
Greenwood, J. A., 226, 338
337), [337-362], (363-370) Grillparzer, F„ 81
see also case m ateria l Guggenheim, E. A., 16
Empathy, 39, 43-44, 136-137, 139, 165-166, Gulliksen,
211, 228, 242, 405, 409, 411-412, 415 Gurney, E.,H.226O., 334
Engstrand, S., 365-370
Epistemology, 16-46, 91-96, 264 Hallucinations, 12, 36, 42-44, 53, 79, 118,
ESP hypothesis, status of, 23-35 120-121, 123-125, 143-144, 151, 181, 211­
Ethos, 39, 209, 409 212, 217-220, 408
Exhibitionism, see Scoptophilia Hann-Kende, F„ (158-167), 391, 407-408,
Experiments, 18, 199, 230, 313-314, 322, 413
329-337, 353, 392, 405 see also case m a teria l
Hanussen, 206
Feldman, S. S., 385-386 Heisenberg, W., 31
Fenichel, O., 408 Henderson, L. J., 33, 393
Herbertz, 175 Lemaitre, 177
H£ricourt, J., 5 Lenzen, V. F., 21
Hermann, I., 166, 409 Levi-Bianchini, M., 171, 187
Herz, H., 20 Lewin, B. D., 152, 414
Heteropsychic, 13, 20, 43, 403 Lietaert Peerbolte, M., 12
History of psychoanalytic parapsychology, Lobatchevsky, N. I., 42
3-15, 223-226, 399 Lorand, S., 21
History of science, 16-18 Lorenz, E., 169, 187
Hitschmann, E., 30, (113-132), 171, 187, Lynd, R. S., 17, 20, 34
216, 226, 392, 395, 407-408, 411, 415
see also case m ateria l Mach, E., 28, 37
Holl6s, I., 12-13, 18-19, 39, 154, 164, 193, MacNeil of Barra, 42
[199-203], [204-209], 212-214, 220, 226, Maeder, A., 77, 173
230, 237-238, 247, 251, 258, 277, 283­ Magic, 153, 155-158
284, 294, 328, 392-393, 395-397, 411, 415 Magical function of dreams, 394
see also case m at er ia l Maimonides, M., 32, 393
Holmes, Sherlock, 39 Maine de Biran, F. P. G., 16
Holy Ghost, 155 Malay language, 407
Home, W. D., 375-376, 381 Marbe, K., 39, 209, 409
Homeostasis, 405 Mariotte, E., 42
Humphrey, B. M-., 14 Maxwell, J. C., 20
Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society, 154 Mathematics, see Probability
Hunter College, 322 Medium, 9-12, 14, 59, 60-68, 88-89, 94, 98­
Huxley, A., 29 101, 119, 144, 177, 182, 205-206, 224­
Hypnosis, 4-5, 152, 158, 207, 230-236, 284, 225, 231, 260, 294, 353, 359
353, 404 “Medium, The," 341, 344
Hypotheses, outrageous, 17, 20, 34 Memory, 406
Hyslop, J. H., 15, 119 Memory, falsification of, 49-51, 84, 88,
115, 125, 170, 180-181
Identification, 133-146, 148, 150, 153, 155­ Menninger, K. A., 36
156, 162-163, 165, 192, 194, 196, 211, Merton, R. K., 394, 416
275, 280, 284-285, 291-292, 294, 341, 382 Metagnomy, 10
Identification with aggressor, 194 Methodology, see Epistemology, Experi­
Incest, 147-157, 385 ments
Indeterminacy principle, 31 Minus function, 13, 33, 406
Infantile prototype of ESP, 403 Morgan, L., 300, 315
International Institute for Psychical Re­ Murphy, G., 261
search, 12 Myers, F. W. H., 226
Jackson, J. H., 406 Nature vs. nurture, 45
James, W., 125 Negative data, see Negative nexus
Janet, P., 4-7 Negative nexus, 32, 41, 66, 70
see also case m a teria l Negative proof, see Negative nexus
Jealousy, see Sadomasochism Neurological hypothesis, 201, 282
Jeans, J., 16 Neurosis, 6, 21
Jdkay, M., 290 Newton, I., 42
Jones, E., 105-106, 376-377, 404 New York Times, 334
Jordan, P., 31, 33 Nexus, logical properties of, 23-24, 27­
Kellogg, W. N., 334 35, 43-45
Kennedy, J., 333-334, 337 Noema-noesis, 18-23
Kipling, R., 208 “Now Barrabas,” 375
Kock, 6 Numbers, 201, 205, 230-236, 353
Kotik, 117 Numerologist, see Medium
Kris, E.. 409 Nydes, J., 407
Kronecker, L., 16
Object relation, 408
Leibnitz, G. W., 42 Od, 113
Odets, C., 376 “Purloined Letter, The,” 415-416
Oedipus, 85, 168, 175 Pythagoras, 16
Omnipotence, 3, 18, 22, 121, 124, 126,
177, 196, 199, 229, 407 Rad6, S., 252
Omniscience, 109, 392, 395 Reality principle, 217
Osty, E., 10 Reality testing, 125-126
Overcompliance, 413 Red herring, 412-415
Overdetermination, 40 Registering, 177, 183-187, 192
Reik, T., 173, 212
Paleopsychology, 14, 108, 158, 196, 220, Relevancy, 27-32
282, 382, 406 Religion, 57, 93, 107-108, 125, 259-260
Paranoia, see Psychosis Remote orientation, 34
Parsimony, principle of, 28, 35-37, 300, Repetition compulsion, 162, 176, 180-181,
31j5, 324, 416 184
Passiv^see Active Repression, 184
Pederson-Krag, G., 14, (277-282), 297, Resistance, 6, 66, 180-181, 412-415
[300-306], [312-314], (326-330), [332­ Return of repressed, 201
337], (337-338) Reuter, W. L., 334
see also case m ateria l Reve-^-deux, 233, 255, 262-276, 346, 359,
Phlogiston, 41 417
Pidyon Ha’ben, 383-387 Rhine, J. B., 6, 9, 226, 236, 322, 334, 337­
Plato, 19, 44, 325 338, 380
Pleasure principle, 28 Richet, C., 5
Podmore, F., 226 Riddance reflex, 252
Poe, E. A., 415-416 Riess, B. F., 322
Poincare, H., 20, 38, 320, 395-396 Rivalry, see Sadomasochism
Poltergeist, 12 R6heim, G., 12, (147-157), 193, 216, 226,
Potzl, O., 143, 180, 186 257, 276, 394, 411, 413
Pragnanz, 395 see also case m aterial
Pratt, J. G.. 226, 338 Rosen, J. N., 295
Predestination, 36 Rubin, S., (383-387)
Price, M. M., 6 see also case m ateria l
Primal scene, 12, 147-157, 228, 257, 280, Russell, B., 16
375, 378, 411
Primitives, 16, 18, 57, 94, 126, 152, 156, Sadomasochism, 84, 120-121, 123-124, 126,
180, 196 147, 152, 171, 177-178, 180, 182, 194,
Prince, W. F., 210-211 206, 228, 230-236, 243, 246-248, 257, 273,
Probability, 9, 13-17, 20, 22, 32, 36, 40, 282, 393-394, 405-408, 411, 413
52-55, 178, 181, 204-209, 223, 236-237, Saul, L. J., (192-196), 226, 282, 405, 412
244, 246-247, 259, 315-318, 320-325, 333­ see also case m ateria l
335, 341, 346-348 Scatter theory, 13
Process, see Condition Scherman, R., 66-68, 101
Professions, psychology of, 18-23, 92 Schilder, P., 21, 38, 193, 199, (204-209),
Projection, 126-127, 133, 144, 152, 156, 226, 398, 408-409
171, 180, 192, 194, 196, 267, 343, 345­ see also case m ater ia l
346, 351, 394, 398 Schizophrenia, see Psychosis
Prospective tendency, 170, 181 Schmeidler, G. R., 14
Prototypes, 19, 43 Schreber, D. P., 87
Psychic presence, 218-219 Scoptophilia, active and passive, 130, 213,
Psychic unity of mankind, 38 233-234, 243, 350, 355, 359, 375-377, 398­
Psychobiology, 15 399, 404, 407-408, 410-411, 414
Psychological “date,” 402-403 Secret, 414-415
Psychological tests, 14 Selective permeability, 402
Psychopathy, 414 Self-abolishing hypothesis, 31, 41
Psychosexual development, 402-403 Self-analysis, 14, 19, 58, 163, 166, 199,
Psychosis, 3, 6, 12-13, 19, 38, 122, 124-125, 241, 247, 251, 277-282, 359
144, 180, 195, 217, 345, 355, 408, 413,415 Self-fulfilling prophecy (see also Acting
Psychotic core, 405 out), 394, 416
Sellier, 177 15, 31, 201-202, 204-205, 214, 216, 223­
Sensitiveness, 166, 192-196, 402-403, 405 276, 280, 314-326, 332, 339-362, 373-382,
Serial universe, 31-32 391-417
Servadio, E., 12-13, 44, 199, (210-220), Thought, direction of, 209
226, 237, 277, 283, 294, 328, 393, 395 Thought stuff, 403-404
see also case m ateria l Thouless, R. H., 282
Shaw, G. B., 355 Time, 200, 276
Shulman, R., 6 Timeliness, 395-397
Sidgwick, H., 331 Tischner, R., 117
Silberer, H., 83, 125 Transference and countertransference, 11,
Silence, 393 14, 133-167, 176, 180, 200, 211-212, 214,
Sinclair, U., 210 223-296, 314-326, 331, 339-362, 373-387,
Skinner, B. F., 334 391-417
Slips, 201, 214 Transference neurosis, 412
Smith, B. M., 226, 338 Transference resistance, 415
Soal, S. G., 322, 380 Tyre, 170, 179
Socrates, 376 Tyrrell, G. N. M., 380
Somali, 413
Spirits, see Supernatural Ullman, M., 13
St. Augustine, 358 Urban, H. J., 6, 14
St. Denis, 68, 261
St. Thomas Aquinas, 30 Validation, consensual, 408
Stanford University, 333 Van Wiemokly, 6
Statistics, see Probability Vendry£s, J., 16
Stekel, W., 7, 9, 70-71, 316, 332, 348-349 Verificatory acts, 404
Sterba, R., 21, 394, 410, 416 Virginity, taboo of, 174-175
Stuart, C. E„ 226, 338 Vision, see Hallucination
Sublimation, 18, 22, 41-42, 166, 417 Voyeurism, see Scoptophilia
Suicide, 173-174, 181, 206, 243
Supernatural, 30-31, 35, 41, 52-55, 57, 59, Waggital, 175
87, 124, 126-127, 133, 152, 156, 169, 188,Warcollier, R., 226
226, 255, 381 Wasielewski, W. v.f 117
Superstition, 22, 35, 41, 52, 119, 126-127, Weiss, E., 44, 218-219
168, 170 West, D. J., 13
Survival, 260-261 Wiesner, B. P., 282
Technique of psychoanalysis, 13-14, 43, Wit, 115, 120, 126
61, 134, 143, 158-167, 180, 206, 211, 233, Wolf, L., 245
333, 391-417 Wolfe, 334
Technique of psychoanalysis, unconven­ Wundt, W., 382
tional, 103-107, 128, 130-131, 139-142,
166, 200-201, 247, 249, 257, 320, 336­ Yoga, 12
337, 340, 391-417
Testing the psychoanalyst, 414-415 Zulliger, H., (168-187), 394, 404, 415-416
Therapeutic use of ESP hypothesis, 13- see also case m ater ia l