Psychical Transmissions: Freud, Spiritualism, and the Occult

Abstract

This paper explores Freud’s reflection on telepathy, a reflection generally dismissed as a marginal or even slightly embarrassing aspect of his writings. Ernst Jones’s influential Life and Work of Sigmund Freud exemplifies best this marginalization as it rigorously examines Freud’s consideration of telepathy but frames it as a paradoxical feature of the latter’s character or as proof of the difficulty, even for men of genius, to overcome irrational superstitions. The paper offers a historical perspective on the conflict between Freud’s intellectual engagement with telepathy and the scientific community’s rejection of occult beliefs generally associated with the spiritualist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author argues that the treatment of Freud’s reflection on telepathy as a result of superstition not only fails to recognize the caution he undertook within his inquiry into the occult but also omits the important questions that motivated his investigations. Ultimately, Freud’s probes into the possibilities of certain occult phenomena such as telepathy had less to do with superstitions than with a critical examination of the limits of communication as they demonstrated the need within psychoanalysis to reevaluate certain unexplained transmissions of meaning.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Janine de Peyer and Marsha Aileen Hewitt for their respective responses to this paper. Both authors bring important and insightful contributions, and I can only hope that the contrast and originality of their views will reflect forthcoming discussions. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Psychoanalytic Dialogues for their comments on this paper.

Notes

¹ It is worth noting here that Freud had himself been a corresponding member of the Society for Psychical Research in 1911 and an honorary fellow of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1915. In 1921, he had been invited by Hereward Carrington, founder of the American Psychical Institute, to act as coeditor of different journals on occultism. Freud declined the offer, but wrote to the latter: “If I were at the beginning rather than at the end of a scientific career, as I am today, I might possibly choose just this field of research, in spite of all difficulties” (E. L. Freud, 1961, p. 334). When asked by colleague George Lawton, eight years later, if he had indeed written such things, Freud denied unequivocally. However, the letter to Carrington was retrieved by Nandor Fodor, who shared it with Jones before reproducing it (Fodor, 1971; Jones, 1957; Lawton, 1932).

² This lecture is of particular interest for its symptomatic illustration of Freud’s (as well as of psychoanalysis’) resistance towards the acceptance of telepathy. Freud here admitted to have forgotten his notes on what he judged to be his most compelling case of possible telepathic occurrence—commonly known as the “Forsyth case.” He stated, “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 resistance” (Freud, 1921/1953c, p. 66). In the following years, when Freud asked Eitingon for the manuscript of this lecture, according to Jones (1957): “Eitingon assured him he had brought it back personally, but apparently it got mislaid. It was found among Freud’s papers after his death” (p. 396). The lecture was thus published posthumously in 1941, but the forgotten notes on the Forsyth case were not included, since a revised account had by then been published by Freud (1933/1973) in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. After having been retrieved, these forgotten notes quickly disappeared again. In the 1964 edition of The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Strachey indeed wrote, “Since that volume [18] of the Standard Edition was published, in 1955, the manuscript has once again unaccountably disappeared” (pp. 47–48). When Pierri (2010) rediscovered the notes, they had been given up for lost after having been misplaced in the Sigmund Freud Archives.

³ In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud (1933/1973) defined telepathy as “the alleged fact that an event which occurs at a particular time comes at about the same moment to the consciousness of someone distant in space, without the paths of communication that are familiar to us coming into question” (p. 65). Evoking spiritualists’ use of the lexical field of communicative technologies, he added that it was “a kind of psychical counterpart to wireless telegraphy” (p. 66). In contrast, the definition of telepathy reported in The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Gregory, 1987a) more precisely renders the notion as “the transmission of information from one mind to another, without the use of language, body movements, or any of the known senses. Because of the difficulty of ruling out normal sensory cues when humans are within sight or earshot of each other, most scientists are impressed by telepathic evidence only when it involves two people separated by a considerable distance” (p. 245). In Freud, it is unclear whether telepathy can result from mysterious new workings of the known senses, since many of the possible cases of telepathy he mentioned throughout his writings occurred in the presence of all telepathic subjects. From this general definition, it thus appears that Freud’s understanding of telepathy was mostly concerned with interrogating the known limits of communication for which scientific terminology could not account.

⁴ Derrida (1988) and Gay (1988) interpret Freud’s conclusion as a complete rejection of “Dreams and Telepathy” as an intellectual inquiry. Derrida wrote, “So, not a step further in the course of 25 closely-written pages” (p. 23). Gay similarly noted, “One wonders why Freud published the paper at all” (p. 444). (Both arguments are also quoted in Eshel, 2006, p. 1609.) With regards to the intellectual context in which Freud was writing, I believe, for my part, that his approach to telepathy as a possible phenomenon that deserved scientific attention was in itself an important statement that justified his enterprise.

⁵ Jones’ (1961) anecdotic treatment of Freud’s study of the occult was reiterated in the publication of the one-volume version of his Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, edited and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus. This version entirely omitted the chapter on “Occultism,” and its index mentioned neither “occultism” nor “telepathy.”

⁶ The resistance of today’s psychoanalysis towards occult beliefs is certainly deserving of exploration in its own right. Such exploration is, however, outside the scope of the present article. For further study on the matter, I will briefly refer to Eisenbud (1982), Lloyd Mayer (2007), and Eshel (2006). Eisenbud presented the reluctance of Janet and Richet towards the study of telepathy. Both authors had indeed abandoned their experiments on hypnosis from a distance after finding what they judged to be convincing evidences of its reality. Eisenbud then added that he himself asked one of his patients to perform certain tasks while allegedly hypnotising him at a distance through telepathy. He wrote, “My results, as far as they went in a brief and informal fling, were beyond anything I had anticipated. … I succeeded in getting a well-trained hypnotic subject, a truck driver, to phone me at odd hours (well after midnight) even when such acts were at considerable variance with his normal behaviour. … Instead of following up with more systematic studies, however, I made a few skimpy notes on what had taken place and, like Janet and Richet, promptly found other interests to occupy me, as if what I had been doing were no more significant than getting a few subjects in hypnosis to perform one or another of usual stock of motor or sensory feats characteristic of that state” (p. 148). Lloyd Mayer also explored the resistance of psychoanalysts towards the study of the occult. She mentioned that she started a popular APA discussion group gathering credentialed analysts who were eager to share unexplainable or occult stories. In collecting these stories, she noticed that they were always prefaced by the confession that they had never been shared with anyone, for fear of discredit or other negative repercussions. Of these stories, Lloyd Mayer (2007) wrote, “Each was about deeply personal, deeply subjective moments of intuitive knowing, and about a sense that it isn’t always acceptable or safe to reveal that knowing” (p. 34). Eshel also noted that telepathy “did not become a subject of mainstream psychoanalytic inquiry.” In trying to interpret the reasons for psychoanalysis’ reticence to study telepathy despite Freud’s interest on the topic, she claimed, “In the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the decade after World War II, there was a resurgence of interest in the subject … [but as] of the 1970s, the subject of telepathy in the psychoanalytic context largely disappeared.” For Eshel, a major reason to explain this disappearance “was the shift in psychoanalytic thinking towards feeling-transfer and emotional influence between patient and analyst in the analytic process” (p. 1611). Another important reason to explain psychoanalysis’ resistance to explore the occult is certainly due to the generally accepted idea that such exploration will only express the researcher’s naiveté. As I have tried to demonstrate in this paper, this idea itself can be retraced to the failure of nineteenth-century psychical researchers’ attempt to scientifically demonstrate spiritualist claims and the subsequent constriction of scientific exploration to materialistic boundaries (on the materialist delimitations of psychology, see also Coon, 1992).

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Notes on contributors

Claudie Massicotte

Claudie Massicotte completed her Ph.D. at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario (Canada). She is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she researches the historical role of spiritual mediumship in the formulation of early psychoanalytic understandings of subjectivity.