Relational psychoanalysis and anomalous communication

Introduction

Since the 1970s, a new approach has emerged in psychoanalytic psychotherapy that emphasizes the importance of relationality and intersubjectivity for our understanding of mind, the aetiology of psychological and behavioural disorders, and, crucially, the dynamics of the therapeutic encounter between analyst and patient. My interest in relational psychoanalysis centres on its stance towards ostensibly paranormal communication between patient and analyst: interactions that seem to operate outside of communicative channels known to mainstream science. In contemporary language, these phenomena would be described as telepathic experiences. In the language of academic parapsychology, they are often referred to as forms of anomalous mental phenomena (May, Utts and Spottiswoode, 1995) or anomalous cognition (Palmer, 2015), and are taken as pointing to the operation of psi: the capacity that is hypothesized to underpin all forms of anomalous communication and information transfer.

Intersubjective and relational psychoanalysis became more prominent as a distinctive approach to psychotherapy from the 1980s, when postgraduate training in relational approaches was introduced at New York University, and with the establishment of the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives (Aron, 1996). Therapists and academics working in the relational/intersubjective paradigm reject the traditional position that the prime therapeutic responsibility falls on the analyst’s interpretations of the patient’s discourse. Instead, psychoanalytic therapy is viewed as the ‘science of the intersubjective’ (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984: 41). The interplay and relationality of the patient’s and analyst’s subjective worlds are taken to be central in understanding what happens in therapy. Although intersubjective and relational approaches are not the same, they have much in common, and I will use the term ‘relational psychoanalysis’ to capture the commonalities in their approaches to psychoanalytic theory and practice.

There has been a sporadic but consistent interest in telepathy within psychoanalysis from its start. Relational psychoanalysis, however, seems more receptive to experiences between patient and analyst that suggest ostensibly anomalous communicative capacities. To establish this openness to telepathic phenomena with relational approaches, I examine a selection of papers recently published in leading academic journals in relational psychoanalysis. This demonstrates the extent to which telepathy-like experiences are openly presented and seriously considered in the relational community. I then discuss those characteristics of the relational approach that may facilitate greater openness to telepathic experience. However, it is important to locate the relational stance toward telepathy in respect of the longer history of psychoanalytic writings on these (and related) topics. This broader historical narrative forms the first, substantive part of the article.

While there are of course continuities between the relational approach and earlier perspectives within psychoanalysis, it is important to recognize that it marks a distinctive departure. So, for example, relational psychoanalysis should not be interpreted as a development from the British Object Relations school, despite the common appearance of the word ‘relation’. In the latter, relationality is conceived in relation to classical Freudian drive theory and objectified ideas of other people, whereas the relational approach both rejects the drive theory of mind, and is entirely focused on the interactions of two real individuals in the therapeutic setting. Consequently, the conception of relations in Object Relations theory is wholly different from the way relationality is conceived in relational psychoanalysis. Indeed, one of the leading scholars of the relational perspective has argued that it is only from the abandonment of Object Relations theory that psychoanalysis began to take account of the lived, dual subjectivities involved in the therapeutic context (Aron, 1991). It is important to stress that it is not my intention to support (or challenge) the argument that relational psychoanalysis does actually constitute a distinct break from earlier psychoanalytic theory or practice. It is significant, however, that for the relational psychoanalysts themselves, there are clear departures from psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Later in this article there will be further discussion of the extent by which relational ideas constitute – for practitioners themselves – a radical break from classical psychoanalytic theory.

But first, terminology: this is a minefield, as right from the start in Freud’s writings, there is ambiguity. Terms like ‘telepathy’ and ‘occult’ are sometime used interchangeably; and discussion of telepathy can bleed into discussion of spiritualism and other supernatural beliefs. It is clearly the case that Freud’s writings reflected the intellectual context of the day, in which the idea of telepathy was more closely associated with supernatural or occult phenomena than it is today. This is largely a consequence of the efforts of J. B. Rhine, the founder of academic parapsychology, who set out to distance the discipline from its association with Victorian spiritualism and the occult, and to establish it as an experimental, laboratory-based science (Mauskopf and McVaugh, 1980). Moreover, different scholars have a range of investments in particular terms; some colleagues, for example, may object to the use of the term ‘anomalous’ in a previous paragraph, because that contradicts the view that for Freud, telepathy (or ‘thought transference’, or ‘transference’, or ‘unconscious communication’) was normal in psychoanalysis. Similarly, there will be many psychoanalysts who accept that unconscious communication occurs during therapy, but who do not subscribe to the kind of parapsychological explanation implicit in the idea of anomalous cognition. At the risk of upsetting lots of people, I will use ‘telepathy’ in its parapsychological sense, that is, to refer to experiences that suggest parapsychological (and scientifically controversial) channels of communication. I will also use the term ‘anomalous’ to refer to these experiences, partly for variety, but also because, from the perspective of mainstream physics, they are: they suggest mechanisms of interaction between humans that are neither accounted for by Newtonian mechanics, nor accepted by mainstream science.

Freud, psychoanalysis and telepathy

There is a well-established link between anomalous communication and the earliest attempts to study the unconscious mind, and what today would be called disassociative states, such as the exhibition of multiple personalities (Crabtree, 1993; Ellenberger, 1970). For example: in his writings on hypnotism and animal magnetism, Mesmer (and his followers) used the term ‘rapport’ to capture the mysterious relationship he tried to engender in therapeutic consultations between therapist, patient and the baquet (a tool designed to harness animal magnetic energies). Later, Freud developed the concept of transference to identify what appeared to be experience of affective relationships between patient and therapist that seemed to occur beyond known channels of communication; yet in his account of the development of dynamic psychiatry, Ellenberger describes transference as merely the ‘reincarnation of what had been known for a century as rapport’ (ibid.: 490). Later still it has been argued by many that the idea of transference depends upon telepathic or anomalous communication. Luckhurst observed that the idea of transference made no sense without the concept of telepathy (Luckhurst, 2002). And the first line of the blurb on the back cover of Totton’s (2003a) edited collection on psychoanalysis and the paranormal asks: ‘What is the medium through which counter-transference, projective identification, unconscious communication all happen – if not telepathy?’ Despite this acknowledged connection, the relationship between anomalous forms of communication and the development of psychoanalysis has been relatively unexamined – relative to, for example, the now extensive evidence that the academic disciplines of psychology and psychiatry were, in the 1800s and early 1900s, shaped by contemporaneous investigation of ostensibly anomalous phenomena that would now be called paranormal or parapsychological (Brenninkmeijer, 2015: 117–18; Crabtree, 1993; Sommer, 2012; Shamdasani, 1993; but also see Gyimesi, 2015).

The (relatively) under-examined relationship between psychoanalysis and forms of anomalous communication seems to echo the ambiguity Freud had about telepathy (Campbell and Pile, 2010; Massicotte, 2014; Thurschwell, 1999). But perhaps this ambiguity expressed in Freud’s formal writings had a strategic import. It is undoubtedly the case that Freud was trying to establish psychoanalysis’ claims for recognition as a legitimate psychological science. It was important for Freud ‘to reaffirm the scientific status of psychoanalysis and the objectivity of his discoveries…and to systematize…his flashes of intuition…by making his metapsychological systems consistent with biology and physics’ (Mitchell, 2000: 31). And association with the carnivalesque spirit activities of the kind reported in Victorian mediumship (for example, Oppenheim, 1985: 8) was not going to help achieve scientific credibility. One can understand why Freud exhorted Jung to adhere to classical psychoanalytic theory as a bulwark against the ‘black tide of occultism’ (cited in Gyimesi, 2012: 135).

There is another reason why Freud was ambiguous about anomalous communication. The idea of the repressed unconscious was the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory and practice; it stood as psychoanalysis’ distinctive intellectual contribution to an understanding of the human mind, and the primary warrant for the distinctive techniques of psychoanalytic therapy. Campbell and Pile (2010) have argued that the idea of telepathy threatened Freud’s vision for psychoanalysis because it undermined the core concept underpinning psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic practice: the extent to which the unconscious was indeed repressed. Telepathic experiences suggested that the repressed unconscious could still communicate, which means it is not altogether repressed. They argue that Freud addressed this problem by including within the concept of transference precisely those unconscious transmissions of affect from mind to mind that might otherwise be cited as forms of telepathy. Anomalous forms of communication between patient and analyst were thereby incorporated into a psychoanalytic concept that is still central to the vast majority of contemporary psychoanalytic traditions. Campbell and Pile’s argument echoes earlier claims by psychoanalysts that the more mysterious features of the patient–analyst relationship are sanitized in ostensibly scientific-sounding concepts. Brottman makes this point with respect to the Kleinian notion of projective identification (Brottman, 2011).

There are, then, strong arguments that telepathy was central to psychoanalysis from its start. Despite this, there was no sustained investigation of telepathy in psychoanalysis in the first half of the 20th century. The majority of psychoanalytic scholarship in this area was collated in an edited collection in 1953, which also included all of Freud’s writings on telepathy and occult phenomena (Devereux, 1953). In the latter half of the century there were sporadic investigations of anomalous events in psychoanalytic therapy. Perhaps the most famous is Jung’s argument that synchronistic coincidence formalized one kind of anomalous relationship between mind and aspects of the external environment. But there were other more modest, and certainly less well-known, contributions. In 1956, Michael Balint published observations on the operation of telepathy in therapy, based on his own clinical experiences (Balint, 1956). Strean and Coleman-Nelson (1962) published an analysis of telepathic events in clinical practice that supported Freud’s argument that telepathic phenomena could be observed to obey the same psychodynamic laws as unconscious mental activity. Weiler’s (1967) reflections on telepathy in psychotherapy begin by acknowledging that most analysts have experienced psi-like phenomena; his analysis of his own data leads him to conclude that it is possible for the unconsciouses of two separate people to become aligned in some as yet unexplained way. Meerloo (1968) argued that telepathy in therapy was a form of direct unconscious communication, which was both instinctual and currently ‘unexplored as yet by physical sciences’ (ibid.: 60).

In 1976, Dieckmann published the results of a study of transference and counter-transference undertaken by a group of German psychoanalysts. This research was not motivated by an interest in extrasensory perception (ESP) or telepathy; rather, it was exploring a more affective and relational role of the therapist in the analytic process. To this end, the group decided to observe not only their patients’ associations and experiences during the therapeutic hour, but also their own. However, all psychoanalysts participating in this study began to notice synchronistic or ESP-like experiences with their patients. It was as if the introspective focus on their own inner experiences during therapy revealed hitherto undetected anomalous phenomena. They also noted that, as they became better at keeping records of their own subliminal associations during therapy, so the ESP events increased. This obviously had a profound effect on Dieckmann; he writes about how these experiences provided ‘deep insight into aspects of our world’s unity and the background of our social communication’ (Dieckmann, 1976: 30).

Major and Miller (1981) claimed that the Freudian notion of thought transference and telepathy are so similar as to be one and the same thing. They drew from parapsychological research, which suggests that, unlike other natural physical phenomena, the agency of ESP and telepathy does not seem to be diminished by distance. Consequently they argued that if telepathy can occur across vast distances,

…it is not surprising that it should occur in the analytic situation with persons who are involved in [a] significant relationship in which they have surrendered to their unconscious mental activity. (Major and Miller, 1981: 454)

Arlow’s (1993) methodological reflection provided another example of how debates about uncontroversial topics might be – quite surprisingly – illustrated by casual reference to telepathic experience. In discussing the emergence of the analyst’s appreciation of the patient’s problems, he alluded quite openly to the role of parapsychological mechanisms, arguing that:

At times the process occurs with a surprising suddenness and spontaneity that suggests magical insight. This is especially true when the patient’s next productions correspond exactly to what the analyst has been thinking but has not yet said. (Arlow, 1993: 1150)

Relational psychoanalysis and telepathy

Since the emergence of relational psychoanalysis, however, there seems to be a more sustained consideration of parapsychological experiences that arise from interactions with patients. It is noticeable that many of these papers are published in journals sympathetic to relational psychoanalysis, although not exclusively so (for example, Allik, 2003; Cameron, 2013; Georgescu, 2013; Hogenson, 2009; Marlo and Kline, 1998; Massicotte, 2014; Rosenbaum, 2011; Schneider and Grady, 2014). But the case that relational approaches are more sympathetic to parapsychological experiences does not rest on the number of papers addressing this topic, but on the way that they are addressed in those publications. We will consider in more detail three key examples.

The first is Altman’s (2007) paper ‘Integrating the Transpersonal with the Intersubjective’, published in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, another journal with an explicit editorial policy to publish work in relational psychoanalysis. Altman’s argument is that the transpersonal psychological processes occur in the therapeutic relationship. By ‘transpersonal’ he means

…in the sense that persons seem to recede in significance in favor of larger, more inclusive, processes…These processes result in patterns of influence between people, indeed between people and nonhuman animals and perhaps inanimate objects, that defy explanation in conventional scientific terms. (Altman, 2007: 526)

The second plank of Altman’s anti-materialist position is to argue that we perceive the separateness of objects (including persons) simply because of an unwarranted reliance on Newtonian mechanics. Instead, he draws on the mysteries of quantum mechanics, which seem to show that at the very smallest levels, physical particles are entangled to each other in ways that seem to contradict the Newtonian materialist view of the world, as well as common-sense, everyday experience. He is not alone in appropriating the sheer mind-boggling weirdness of quantum physics to offer a metaphor for the intense intersubjectivity that can emerge from psychotherapy. The same line of argument has been developed by Ehrenwald (1956), Weiler (1967), Field (1991), Wilner (1996), Rosenbaum (2011) and de Peyer (2014). More to the point, it is very common for parapsychologists and scientists sympathetic to the existence of psi to use concepts from quantum mechanics to offer explanations for parapsychological phenomena (for example, Jahn and Dunne, 2011; Radin, 2006). Even quantum physicists who are sceptical of the existence of psi will occasionally acknowledge that, if it exists, it is likely to be explicable in terms of sub-atomic processes and relationships identified by quantum physics (Rosenblum and Kuttner, 2007: 254–5). Altman’s paper, then, not only accepts the legitimacy of ostensibly parapsychological processes, but also seeks explanations grounded in the same area of natural sciences that inform explicitly parapsychological theorizing on the underlying properties of anomalous communication.

The second example of explicit acknowledgement of parapsychological processes in relational psychoanalysis is Burton’s (2012) article, ‘Getting Personal: Thoughts on Therapeutic Action through the Interplay of Intimacy, Affect and Consciousness’, published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives. In this paper, Burton explores how her own affective response to, and intimacy with, a patient afforded the opportunity for therapeutic change – both for the patient and the analyst/author. What is significant here is that she reports how her reflections on this topic stemmed from her patient’s paranormal experiences in early life and, more relevantly, a seemingly telepathic dream, which conspicuously reflected aspects of the author’s private life, of which the patient had no knowledge. (This kind of paranormal experience is very common in the psychoanalytic literature, both traditional and relational.) This is reported in a matter-of-fact style, and is not modulated by circumspection, hedging, implied scepticism, and so on. She states: ‘I felt a meaningful coincidence had occurred and that one possible meaning of the dream was her perception that I was struggling with infertility’ (ibid.: 670). In other places she reports how, in therapy, ‘internal experiences within ourselves move back and forth between the analytic partners’ (ibid.: 663); how ‘intense affective states may be contagious or boundaryless’ (ibid.: 664); and she concludes that

…when therapy is going well, consciousness increasingly becomes transpersonal…where states of consciousness flow across boundaries of patient and therapist, resulting in powerful affective experiences, including merger with the other, boundarylessness, and ambiguity with regard to identity. (Burton, 2012: 675)

Burton’s paper was published at the same time as two commentaries from senior figures in the field of relational psychoanalysis. Their responses can be read as a barometer of professional academic opinion on the paranormal in the discipline, and suggest a degree of acknowledgement that these phenomena occur, and deserve more serious investigation. The most striking feature is that neither takes issue with Burton’s uncritical report of the patient’s psychic experiences in her earlier life, nor the patient’s telepathic dream that seemed to connect to highly sensitive events in Burton’s life. Neither do they question Burton’s explicit acceptance of a transpersonal – that is, essentially paranormal – position. They focus primarily on technical matters regarding therapeutic practice or the cogency of Burton’s theoretical concepts. So, Slavin (2012) commends Burton for deciding to share with her patient the revelation that the patient’s dream captured emotionally painful events in Burton’s life; but this commendation reflects Slavin’s view that therapeutic change can be achieved through the sharing of such intimacies. Stern (2012) merely questions Burton’s perspective on the notion of the self. The paranormal elements of the relationship between patient and analyst/author reported in the paper are quietly accepted. And it is certainly not the case that the commentators are reflecting wider anxieties about intellectual legitimacy or professional propriety by discreetly declining to discuss those aspects of Burton’s paper that touch on the paranormal. The only time that such anxieties are raised in the commentaries is when her willingness to accept transpersonal communication is endorsed. Stern writes:

I find in both her theorizing and her clinical examples experiences and topics that have been occupying my own attention: questions concerning the permeability of psychic boundaries; the nature of the mutual influence between self and other and between self and intersubjective system…Burton uses the word ‘alchemy’ to capture the qualities of interpenetration, co-evolution, and transformation that define this kind of analytic work. The same word has occurred to me, as I suspect it has to many of this journal’s readers. Burton clearly has her finger on the pulse. (Stern, 2012: 687–8; emphases added)

Third: in 2014 the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues published an article on Freud and general occult matters. In this paper, Massicotte (2014) argues that Freud was more sympathetic to paranormal experiences than has been acknowledged in the literature on psychoanalytic history. She identifies Jones’ biography as central here, arguing that he cast Freud’s interest in the supernatural as a sign that even great men can be hindered by irrational beliefs – and he did so primarily to preserve the scientific credentials of Freudian psychoanalysis. What makes this publication relevant to this argument is that the author is not a psychoanalyst (as most authors in the journal are) but an historian with interests in the relationship between early psychoanalysis and paranormal phenomena. It is a sign of openness to this topic in this journal that it would publish work by an author from another discipline, which, in content, says very little about relational perspectives. As in the case with the article by Burton, the journal published two commentaries (a common practice in this journal); both commentaries are written by authors with professional as well as scholarly interests in psychoanalysis. The first commentary, by Hewitt, takes Massicotte to task for referring to telepathy or the occult interchangeably. She makes it clear that while Freud was not particularly interested in occult matters more generally, he was very interested in telepathy. She argues that for Freud, telepathic experiences, unlike other occult or supernatural phenomena, were psychoanalytic phenomena that would yield to psychoanalytic investigation (Hewitt, 2014). The second commentary, by de Peyer, could not be more explicit in its acceptance of parapsychological components of psychoanalysis. The first line of her article is ‘Psi experiences have been reported since the dawn of human storytelling’ (de Peyer, 2014: 109), thereby adopting (without the need for qualification or warrant) the term from experimental parapsychology to refer to the capacity that is said to underpin extra-sensory phenomena. In her subsequent discussion, she situates the psychoanalytic interest in parapsychological phenomena in terms of findings from experimental parapsychological research, as well as drawing on interpretations of quantum physics that suggest mechanisms by which telepathic communication could occur. She argues that the evidence for psi is sufficiently robust to suggest that psychoanalysts should adapt their clinical practices to recognize unconscious communication in the therapeutic encounter.

Characteristics of relational psychoanalysis favourable to telepathy

Relational psychoanalysis seems to foster a greater openness towards the idea of telepathy than has been generally exhibited in psychoanalyses. Why is this? What is it about relational theory of the mind that more easily accommodates ideas of telepathic communication? And what is it about the practice of relationally informed therapy that predisposes analysts to infer telepathic processes between them and their patients? I think the following 4 characteristics of relational psychoanalysis will be central to answers to these questions: the emphasis on the social nature of mind (and the corresponding rejection of traditional Freudian concepts); the focus on interaction in the therapeutic encounter; the idea of emergent realities, and the subsequent rethinking of the solidity of personal boundaries; and a greater introspective sensitivity by analysts to changes in their own affective conscious experience. These are complex (and occasionally overlapping) issues, and I can only sketch the broad outlines here.

Conclusions, continuities and discontinuities

In the psychoanalytic literature there is long-standing recognition that telepathic-like communications occur between therapist and patient. There have been scholars who have tried to examine these phenomena in a systematic way; but psychoanalytic investigation of telepathy did not cohere into a sustained research programme with a common set of approaches, ideas, theories and empirical findings. However, since the emergence of relational psychoanalysis, and its institutional grounding in doctoral training programmes established during the 1980s, there seems to be a more sympathetic stance towards ostensibly paranormal experiences in therapy. The basis for this argument is not numerical, as in a comparative count of the increase of articles openly discussing the legitimacy of anomalous phenomena over the years (though such a study would be interesting, notwithstanding the way that some relational psychoanalysts do not explicitly refer to telepathy but clearly allude to parapsychological processes in a rhetorically artful way). Instead, the argument has been made, first, through examination of some significant publications in flagship academic journals that have appeared mainly since the 2000s. The second strategy has been to examine key assumptions that inform relational approaches. It has been argued that in a broadly Kuhnian sense, relational psychoanalysis provides a coherent framework in which otherwise anomalous phenomena of patient–analyst interaction can be understood, and a rationale – indeed, a mandate – for serious consideration.

There are, of course, continuities between early reflections on telepathy and the work in more contemporary relational approaches. In this concluding section, I want to outline briefly some points of continuity and discontinuity in the wider psychoanalytic interest in telepathy.

For Freud, the key question was: What is the psychoanalytic significance of telepathy? He was not primarily interested in it as a phenomenon in itself, as, say, a parapsychologist might approach the phenomenon. Rather the issue was how this form of human activity reflected broader psychoanalytic ideas about the unconscious mind, and could be incorporated into psychoanalytic clinical practices. Within relational psychoanalysis, too, the emphasis is on the way in which ostensibly telepathic phenomena arise from psychoanalytic significant interactions in the therapeutic encounter, and offer resources for the achievement of therapeutic aims. And from Freud onwards, psychoanalysts who have concerned themselves with telepathy report that emotionally charged materials are more likely to be subject to telepathic processes (Ehrenwald, 1956; Fodor, 1947; Hollós, 1933; Schwartz-Salant, 1988; Silverman, 1988).

All scholarly developments reflect their historical and intellectual context. Freud’s writings on anomalous communication resonate with the prevailing rationalism and materialism of the day, and his aspiration to ensure that psychoanalysis was consistent with biology and physics reflected the status of the natural sciences. This influence is seen in such statements from Freud as that the ‘analyst must bend his own consciousness like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient’ (quoted in Bass, 2004: 307), a characterization of interaction in therapy which invokes imagery of early 20th-century communication technologies. It also resonates with the idea that telepathy is a form of psychic signal, illustrated, for example, in the title of Sinclair’s 1930 book on psychic communication, Mental Radio. (See also Campbell and Pile, 2015.) Relational psychoanalysis reflects a very different intellectual landscape. It emerged during a time in which established epistemologies and scientific methods were being challenged by ideas from constructivism, postmodernism and feminist scholarship (Mitchell and Aron, 1999). The implications of quantum physics suggested that common-sense or Newtonian understanding of the material world was at best incomplete; and theoretical accounts of particle entanglement, disseminated through numerous popular science books for lay audiences, have provided a metaphor by which to understand human relations suggested by telepathic phenomena.

The emphasis on interaction within the relational literature is occasionally supported by references to ideas and figures that might more normally be associated with social sciences. For example, in his account of the relational approach, Aron emphasizes that communication between patient and therapist is a form of social action, citing Wittgenstein’s arguments about language games as key influence (Aron, 1996: 192). Along with Austin’s theory of speech acts (Austin, 1962), Garfinkel and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), and Sacks and conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992), Wittgenstein’s later work has been one of the cornerstones of the ‘turn to language’ in the social sciences in the last 4 decades. In this tradition, the idea of communication as a form of information transfer between individuals has been rejected in favour of the analysis of the socially organized properties of talk-in-interaction as the site of, and vehicle for, social action (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wooffitt, 2005). Although space does not permit it here, it would be possible to trace the ways in which influences such as constructivism, the emphasis on communication as social action, and the investigation of the organized procedures of everyday social interaction have informed relational ideas about emergence of supra-individual agencies within therapy, and recognition of the importance of interaction between therapist and patient.

Outside of academic parapsychology and psychical research, it is arguable that psychoanalysis is the only scholarly discipline that has – albeit sporadically – taken telepathic experience seriously. Anthropology documented the social role of shamanistic rituals with supernatural components, but has only recently started to discuss the ostensibly paranormal experiences of the anthropologists themselves (Young and Goulet, 1994). Anomalistic psychology is a minor research area within psychology, and is primarily concerned to explain away reports of paranormal experience by reference to fallibilities of human reasoning and inference (for example, Zusne and Jones, 1982). But throughout the history of psychoanalysis, there is recognition that mysterious and baffling communicative experiences occur in the therapeutic hour. In this, psychoanalysis is an example of the way that unusual mental experiences are fundamentally woven into the emergence and fabric of psy disciplines, such as psychiatry and psychology (Crabtree, 2003; Ellenberger, 1970). It is perhaps, then, no surprise that new traditions within psychoanalysis, such as relational psychoanalysis, would also observe odd moments of interpersonal engagement, and reflect on their relevance for therapeutic goals, and their implications for our understanding of the human condition. What is distinctive about the relational perspective is that many of its theoretical assumptions and therapeutic practices may provide a degree of traction for telepathic experiences hitherto unavailable in psychoanalysis.