Telepathy

Abstract

Psychoanalysis and telepathy are unexpected yet obvious twins. Alongside the undoubted rationalism of psychoanalysis, or perhaps as an underside to it, there is a different set of origins, associations and practices. Psychoanalysis would always be marked by its contact with the irrational because it could never contest and try to control it without being influenced by it, any more than it could speak about sexuality without being sexualised. But some of the sense of non-rational strangeness that characterises psychoanalysis arises from the specific historical circumstances in which it was formed. In this respect, the nineteenth-century interest in the occult that was also part of the heritage of psychoanalysis has continued to resonate, carrying something through to the twenty-first century as a hidden contagion from the apparently ‘unseemly’ elements of modernity itself. In Britain, for example, the Society for Psychical Research, in which the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s uncle, Arthur Verall, was a significant figure, created interest in Freud’s work in the early years of the twentieth century. This was partly because of the apparent similarity between the Society’s concern with trance states and spiritualism and the Freudian account of hysteria. Frederic Myers, one of the founders of the Society, reviewed Breuer and Freud’s (1895) Studies on Hysteria for its Proceedings in 1897 and Freud himself became a corresponding member in 1912 (Hinshelwood, 1995), publishing his paper ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis’ in the Society’s Proceedings of that year (Freud, 1912a).KeywordsEthical ViolenceIntroductory LectureTrance StatePsychical ResearchOccult PhenomenonThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.