The divining rod: Pioneering explorations of the psychoanalytic field

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, curiosity about paranormal events, in particular clairvoyance and telepathy through the state of hypnotic trance, spread widely throughout the Old World and the United States. The investigative interest in this field infected many psychoanalysts, including Freud. This paper intends to examine the pioneering articles which the creators of the psychoanalytical movement in Italy dedicated to this topic. A special place though rightly belongs to Emilio Servadio and to the founding father of Italian psychoanalysis, Edoardo Weiss. Weiss' experiences within the paranormal world are documented in a series of letters, some completely unpublished, which he exchanged with Paul Federn. The A. evaluates this correspondence, with the aim of transposing the discourse onto a theoretical level. Weiss' interpretations of his mediumistic experiences and Servadio's writings on telepathy and on paranormal dreams contains incredibly suggestive observations, which seemed to herald an expansion into the analytic field of the area of ⁣⁣exchange between analyst and patient. They sensed some axioms which would only much later be theorised within the inter-subjective psychoanalysis and the field model.

Key words:

• pioneering explorations of field theory
• psychical research
• Emilio Servadio
• Edoardo Weiss

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882 and its first president was the famous philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Figures such as Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Lord Tennyson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were among its first supporters. Even today it is an international reference point for research on the paranormal .

2 In 2018, Pierri’s rich and documented monograph Un enigma per il dottor Freud. La sfida della telepatia (An enigma for Doctor Freud. The challenge of telepathy) was published in Italy. The book thoroughly examines the matter of telepathy and the occult in the life and thought of Freud and in the circle of his closest followers.

3 Lombrosian themes, images, and ideas were embraced by famous writers in heterogeneous literary contexts: from Émile Zola to Guy de Maupassant, from Bram Stoker to Conan Doyle.

4 On the subject, see the documented research by Gyimesi (2016).

5 Although Freud later denied this assertion, the photocopy of the original letter, proving the genuineness of those words, was found by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Nándor Fodor (Fodor, 1959).

6 Servadio reported that Jones, while preparing the Freudian biography, told him that Freud’s interests in parapsychology were “rubbish” (Speziale Bagliacca, 1977, p. 259n.).

7 This was Il metodo psicoanalitico freudiano (1903) (Freud’s psycho-analytic procedure, 1904 [1903]), which was published with the approval of Sigmund Freud in Psiche, Rivista di Studi Psicologici (Psyche, review of psychological studies) in 1912. This journal was created by Assagioli in 1912, with the aim of giving ample space to psychoanalytic writings, but it was short-lived and had to close its doors after a couple of years.

8 Born in Naples in 1895 into a poor family, the medium Erto became well known in the 1920s in Italy and in European capitals for his spectacular physical mediumistic performances, above all for lightning, powerful beams of light, the appearance of luminescent globes, but also cold winds, the movement of objects, and voices. Erto agreed to take part in the sessions subjecting himself to strict controls, such as being handcuffed, having his limbs tied to his body, and wearing boxing gloves and specially designed suits that were then tightened around his neck.

9 The letters cited here are part of the correspondence exchanged in German between Edoardo Weiss and Paul Federn, deposited in the Freud Archives of the Library of Congress in Washington – Edoardo Weiss Papers, 1919–1970. They can also be consulted in the Weiss Archive of the Archivio Storico della Psicologia Italiana, Università Bicocca di Milano.

10 I have recently discovered a letter in which Weiss asked Federn about his position on Servadio’s German article on telepathy and which psychoanalytic journal he wanted to publish it in. It was Weiss who suggested printing it in Imago (Weiss to Federn; Rome, February 22, 1935).

11 In a paper of the 1980s on the phenomenon of extrasensory perception, published in the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, the Ligurian psychoanalyst explained that “recent developments in psychoanalysis … have thrown much light on the analyst’s ‘involvement’ in the analytic relationship, and on the importance and usefulness of the so-called ‘countertransference’. Furthermore, if the analyst generally acknowledges such involvement, why should he not accept it when it involves his participation in extrasensory processes? Moreover, all analysts who have described and published episodes of their work, revealing extra-sensory phenomena that occurred to their students or patients, have acknowledged that such experiences invariably involved the analyst’s own behaviour, situations or psychic contents, and that the analyst was therefore somehow ‘involved’, even if he did not consciously recognize it” (Servadio, 1980, p. 208).

12 The concept of chimera, introduced by de M’Uzan (1978, 2005, 2008), defines an effect that manifests itself in the analyst’s mind, but which is the result of the interpenetration of the unconscious of the analytic couple. In this peculiar intersubjective situation, the analyst’s mind experiences a condition of depersonalization, in which a type of psychic hallucination can develop: the intrusion into the analyst’s psychic apparatus, through projective identification, of very archaic elements of the patient would produce a state of loss of the analyst’s identity boundaries, from which the chimera would emerge, a fabulous child, a monster. The chimera is one – or more than one – mental image, “almost a hallucination,” which settles briefly but forcefully in the analyst’s mind. The analyst then finds themself having to tolerate a situation that implies the transit at the borders of identity and a pause in a wavering sense of identity, where the perception of identity is temporarily altered (de M’Uzan, 2005).

13 In broad terms, Servadio first gives an explanation according to Freudian sexual symbolism: the wand would be “a substitute for the male member,” “its movement corresponds to an erection,” and, consequently, “at the moment in which the diviner exercises his faculty, his physiological state [is] equivalent to sexual excitement” (1935b; 1984, p. 515). Under the influence of particular environmental conditions, specifically the presence in the subsoil of expanses of water and metallic veins, some individuals, endowed with special sensitivity, present reactions very similar to sexual excitement. Servadio then reads the phenomenon in Oedipal terms, symbolically comparing the earth, which holds water and minerals, to the mother: one could therefore “suppose that the attitude of the dowser renews an infantile situation of attachment to one’s mother, which began in the anal phase and was prolonged in the phallic phase. The arousal – whatever its expressive channels – would derive from the call of the maternal body symbolised by the earth and its contents” (p. 519).

14 Federn’s first studies on the phenomenology of the ego date back to the 1920s. In the decades that followed, he constructed an articulate metapsychology devoted to the functioning of the ego, which was thoroughly discussed and shared by Edoardo Weiss – documented in their rich correspondence. Federn’s writings, many of them unpublished, were edited by Weiss after his death in 1950 and published posthumously in 1952 (Federn, 1952). During his lifetime the Viennese physician and psychoanalyst Paul Federn, one of Freud’s earliest and most faithful followers, found it difficult to freely express his concepts on the ego and the psychosis, because they clashed with Freud’s at several crucial points. His way of proceeding in the psychotherapy of psychotic individuals developed almost in opposition to those espoused by Freud with neurotic individuals. Federn bequeathed to his most brilliant disciple, Edoardo Weiss, the task of disseminating his work.

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Rita Corsa

Rita Corsa, MD, is a psychiatrist, a training analyst at the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana and International Psychoanalytical Association, and former adjunt professor at the Psychiatric Clinic at Statale University and Bicocca University in Milan, Italy. She is an expert in the history of Italian psychoanalysis.