In Search of the Absent Analyst: Commentary on Janine de Peyer’s “Uncanny Communication”

Abstract

The subject of telepathic phenomena in psychoanalysis has been highly controversial ever since it was introduced into psychoanalysis by Freud in 1921. Following a theoretical-clinical introduction, my explanation for these profoundly mysterious phenomena combines contributory factors involving patient, archaic communication, and analyst, regarding massive primary traumatic absence that was imprinted in the patient’s nascent self and inchoate relating to others. The telepathic occurrence in treatment bursts forth as a search engine when the analyst is suddenly emotionally absent in order to seek and find the analyst and to halt the process of abandonment and collapse into the despair of the early traumatization. This is discussed here with regard to de Peyer’s clinical examples. Thus, the telepathic phenomena embody the enigmatic “impossible” extreme of patient–analyst deep-level interconnectedness and unconscious communication in the analytic process.

ACKNOWLEDGeMENTS

I am grateful to Donnel Stern, Ph.D., and Bruce Reis, Ph.D., for their thoughtful reading of this commentary, and to Ilan Amir, M.D., for his contribution to the development of these ideas.

Notes

¹ For simplicity’s sake, throughout this paper I use “analyst” to refer both to analyst and therapist.

² The term subjective object is used in Winnicott’s writing “in describing the first object, the object not yet repudiate as a not-me phenomenon” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 93).

³ This seems also related to Reis’s (2009) broaden conception of witnessing as “an intersubjective experience at the limits of understanding” (p. 1370).

⁴ I intend actualize in its two meanings: “In the present and in the process of actualization, that is, trying to bring into existence what didn’t happen” (Pontalis, 2003, p. 45).

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Notes on contributors

Ofra Eshel

Ofra Eshel, Psy.D., is faculty, training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association; cofounder, former coordinator and faculty of the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Advanced Psychotherapists at the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute, and of the Israel Winnicott Center; on the Advisory Board of the International Winnicott Association. Founder of the track “Independent Psychoanalysis – Radical Breakthroughs” at the advanced studies of the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University. She was the recipient of the Leonard J. Comess Fund grant at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, in 2011; awarded the Frances Tustin Memorial Prize for 2013, and was featured in 2012 in Globes (Israel’s financial newspaper and magazine) as the 16th of the 50 most influential women in Israel. She is in private practice in Tel-Aviv, Israel.