Thought transference in psychoanalysis

Abstract

Thought transference in psychoanalysisMy "Waking up dead" and "Let her die" dreams reflect forms of thought transference, what appear to be communications directly between me, Frank and Lily across a span of sixty miles, without employing any recognizable channel of communication. Since the 1880s this kind of communication has been called telepathic, but fearing censure, psychoanalysts rarely use that word (Brottman, 2011). For the past century psychoanalysts have described many forms of thought transference, but employ phrases like "induced feelings," "objective countertransference," "projective identification," "narcissistic transference," and "therapeutic symbiosis" to describe this phenomenon. Using these expressions, they disguise the fact they're really talking about telepathy. Under the term "countertransference," since 1950 the emergence of the patient's thoughts and feelings in the mind of the analyst has been one of the most commonly discussed clinical phenomena in psychoanalysis.In 1919, in a lecture delivered to the British Society of Psychical Research, Carl Jung acknowledges having "repeatedly observed the telepathic effects of unconscious complexes" in his patients (Main, 1997, p.6). Jung considered the receptivity of the unconscious mind far exceeded consciousness. He believed telepathy and precognition were commonplace and derivative of his broader concept of synchronicity. Chafing at popular rejections of telepathy, in a letter to a Protestant pastor in 1933 Jung writes, "the existence of telepathy in time and space is still denied only by positive ignoramuses" (Luckhurst, 2002, p.230).In 1926, in an essay entitled "Occult Processes occurring during psychoanalysis," Freudian disciple Helene Deutsch (1953) describes the telepathic experience where