Résumé de l’article de Claudie Massicotte : Psychical Transmissions : Freud, Spiritualism, and the Occult

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.

Résumé du commentaire de Marsha Aileen Hewitt : Freud and the Psychoanalysis of Telepathy : Commentary on Claudie Massicotte’s “Psychical Transmissions”

Freud was interested in and eventually accepted the diverse forms of telepathic communication as psychoanalytic rather than occult phenomena, particularly as manifested in dreams. Massicotte revisits the topic of Freud and his interest in the occult in a manner that invites serious reconsideration of this aspect of his work, long the subject of intense controversy in the history of psychoanalysis. In my response to Massicotte’s paper I argue that Freud’s interest in telepathy or thought transference belongs to his psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious and transference. His approach to telepathy parallels his approach to religious beliefs : He accounts for both as creations of the human mind as individuals attempt to make sense and meaning of their real experiences. What Freud meant by telepathy is what contemporary psychoanalysis refers to as unconscious communication, and the strange, often inexplicable forms it takes in clinical contexts. For Freud, instances of telepathy or unconscious communication are to be understood contextually and relationally, revealing important data about the nature of affectively charged human relationships.

Résumé du commentaire de Janine de Peyer Telepathic Entanglements : Where are we Today ? Commentary on Paper by Claudie Massicotte

In this commentary, stemming from Freud’s conflictual interest in psychic phenomena, I examine current views of telepathy as reflected in controversial parapsychological research and theories of nonlocal mind. I hope to inspire readers’ curiosity about the possible existence of telepathic communication by proposing clinical examples and raising the feasibility of the impact of the therapist’s own predisposition and belief system. Finally I speculate about how findings from parapsychology research in combination with findings from neuroscience and quantum theory might influence the evolution of psychoanalytically based practice methods in the future.