Reply to Janine de Peyer’s “Traversing the Ineffable: Commentary on Sharon Farber’s ‘Becoming a Telepathic Tuning Fork’”

Abstract

Janine de Peyer’s thoughtful and stimulating response to my paper evoked a good deal of thinking about playfulness and creativity in doing psychotherapy, what part intuition and empathy play in promoting telepathic communication, the distinction between thoughts and feelings unconsciously transmitted between people within close proximity and those transmitted across geographical distance, where there is no reliance on sensory clues involving sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. De Peyer’s summary of research on telepathy tells us that most of the research tries to rule out the variable of unconscious sensory exchange by physically separating the “sender” from the “receiver.”

In her discussion of my paper, Janine de Peyer raises some very interesting questions about how telepathy is to be defined. I recall reading years ago about someone who had gone to a medium and heard some startling information about herself and those in her circle. As I wondered how the medium could know so much about someone she had never before met, it occurred to me that there was a lot of knowledge about a person conveyed by the brain-to-brain sensory cues, and this was not telepathic but more a function of intuition and empathy. I think that was true about the relationship I had with my patient. but as with the medium there was a lot of other information I received about her that did not depend on sensory cues, and that information was, I believe, conveyed telepathically. So yes, I say, to de Peyer’s (this issue) question, “Is it not worth differentiating between in-session heightened intuitive receptiveness, and unexplainable transmissions of affect/thoughts/information that traverse time and geographical space?” (p. 736, italics in the original). In considering the time spent in my patient’s physical presence, much of my empathic attunement originated from the intuitive response that was induced in me by her physical presence. I think the increasing empathic attunement laid the foundation for subsequent telepathic communication.

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Notes on contributors

Sharon K. Farber

Sharon K. Farber, Ph.D., is a Board Certified Diplomate in Clinical Social Work in private practice in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, treating children, adolescents, and adults and specializing in trauma, eating disorders, and self-mutilation. She has been trained in EMDR. Other special interests are creativity, Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococccus (PANDAS), cult involvement, and the occult. She has taught at medical schools, schools of social work, training institutes, and the Cape Cod Institute, and she has been an invited speaker in North America and abroad. She is the author of a number of journal articles and three books, When the Body Is the Target: Self-Harm, Pain, and Traumatic Attachments; Hungry for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties; and Celebrating the Wounded Healer Psychotherapist: Pain, Post-Traumatic Growth and Self-Disclosure.