Legacies of the Occult - Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Unconscious Communication - Marsha Aileen Hewitt
Telepathic 'Presencing' in the Analytic Relationship
Legacies of the Occult - Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Unconscious Communication - Marsha Aileen Hewitt
Marsha Aileen Hewitt [+]
University of Toronto
Description
Presentation of a clinical case of “telepathic” dreaming is explored by drawing upon a variety of contemporary psychoanalytic theories of intersubjectivity postulating the permeability of mental boundaries both between and within individual minds. A detailed discussion of Hans Loewald’s notion of the “psychic matrix” and the consciousness of nature draws upon Freud’s theory of primary narcissism. Several examples of psychoanalytic approaches to telepathic dreaming are discussed. Mircea Eliade’s idea of hierophany and the sacred structure of the psyche provides some theoretical coherence and clarity for identifying the mystical themes that circulate within psychoanalytic ideas about the “unboundaried” mind. Drawing upon Eliade further highlights the strong resonances between religion and non-Freudian psychoanalysis. The influence of selected tropes from quantum physics on psychoanalysis, a critical discussion of James Grotstein’s explicitly mystical psychoanalysis and its unacknowledged but profound debt to James’s idea of the ‘More’ of a cosmic consciousness is also examined.