Psychoanalysis, Magic, & the Occult: An Uneasy Shared History

“Have I given you the impression that I am secretly inclined to support the reality of telepathy in the occult sense? If so, I should very much regret that it is so difficult to avoid giving such an impression. In reality, however, I was anxious to be strictly impartial. I have every reason to be so, for I have no opinion; I know nothing about it” (Freud, 1922, p. 220)

“If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis” (Sigmund Freud, quoted in Jones, 1957, p. 392)

As this pair of quotations suggests, Sigmund Freud held conflicting, ambivalent attitudes toward magic and paranormal phenomena. Early in his career, Freud expressed openness to the possibility of extraordinary phenomena, stating: “we must…at least touch upon the question…whether there are really no omens, prophetic dreams, telepathic experiences, manifestations of supernatural forces and the like” (Freud, 1901, p. 227). Later, however, he would portray beliefs in such phenomena neurotic, childlike, and “primitive” (Freud, 1913/1919). In his published works, Freud’s attitude toward magic and the occult generally tended toward skepticism. As the first epigraph indicates, Freud disavowed belief in telepathy “in the occult sense” (Freud, 1922, p. 220), and he judged that “cooperation between analysts and occultists offers small prospect of gain” (Freud, 1921, p. 179). With respect to Ferenczi’s and Jung’s interest in occult and mystical phenomena, Freud urged caution and refused to follow their “dangerous expeditions” (Falzeder & Brabant, 2000, p. 216). Nevertheless, he maintained a private fascination with occult phenomena (and thought-transference—i.e., telepathy—in particular): he carried out experiments in mediumship with Anna Freud and Ferenczi (Massicotte, 2014) and espoused deep fascination with psychical research in a letter to Hereward Carrington (quoted in the epigraph above), a prominent researcher of paranormal and psychical phenomena. Jones (1957) ultimately described Freud’s beliefs as “an exquisite oscillation between scepticism (sic) and credulity” (p. 375) in part because he maintained an open mind and expressed sympathetic views in private.

Beyond Freud’s personal views, historical and conceptual connections link psychoanalysis with divination, magic, and the paranormal. Divination echoes through the beginnings of psychoanalysis. The suffix of the German title of Freud’s landmark Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams), ‘deutung,’ in addition to meaning ‘interpretation’ also means ‘to forebode’ and occurs in the German word for astrology, ‘die Sterndeutung’ (Hyde, 2013); moreover, the noun ‘die Traumdeutung’ also refers to the dream divination practice carried forward from medieval times by the Romani people of Europe (Yasuo, 2009). Freud also wrote about the relationship between dreams and telepathy (Freud, 1922) and the occult (Freud, 1933), although some such writings appeared only posthumously (Freud, 1921/1941).

Psychoanalysis emerged during a high tide of interest among scientists and laypeople alike in psychical research and spiritualism, the belief in spirits existing apart from matter and the practice of attempting to communicate with them, as through a medium (Oppenheim, 1985). L. Frank Baum published The Wizard of Oz in 1900, the same year that Freud published Interpretation of Dreams, at a time when eminent researchers had been vigorously engaging scientifically with the claims of spiritualism (e.g., Charcot, 1889/2010; James, 1869-1909/1986; Maudsley, 1886; Sidgwick, 1885). The subject matter of psychoanalysis placed it adjacent to if not within this field of research: manifestations of unconscious processes can seem uncanny and magical (as suggested by Goldwater, 2013), and Gyimesi (2009) notes that psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious carry an enigmatic quality, leading many to associate unconscious processes with supernatural and occult phenomena. As psychoanalysis matured, it offered a paradigm for investigating and explaining such uncanny and enigmatic experiences.

Over time, psychoanalytic investigations shifted away from occult and paranormal phenomena per se to the traits of people who experience such phenomena (Gyimesi, 2009; Massicotte, 2014), or, as Freud (1933) put it, “what sort of person this must be who can arrive at such…notions[s]” (p. 62). Although this shift allowed analysts to preserve an interest in the occult while avoiding charges of supernaturalism, it may have also contributed to portrayals of believers in “the black tide of mud…of occultism” (Jung, 1961, p. 150) as pathological or defective. Freud, for example, dismissed “knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination” as “illusions, the fulfillments of wishful impulses” (Freud, 1933, p. 159), and a number of mainstream analysts followed Freud’s public-facing negative attitudes, tending (as we saw in the previous chapter; see Serban, 1982; Wilder, 1975) to see magical and occult beliefs and practices as “regressively omnipotent phenomen[a] in the presence of an ego defect” (Wilson, 1972, p. 14) or to dismiss magic as illusion: “magic works only through accomplices and not with witnesses and recalcitrant participants” (Khan, 1975, p. xii). Nelson (1969) also noted that psychoanalysts tended to ostracize other analysts who believed in the paranormal.

In the main, however, psychoanalysts mostly met occult and paranormal phenomena with silence rather than critique, perhaps in part out of an eagerness to demarcate, as Gyimesi (2009) puts it, “superstitious belief[s]” (Jones, 1957, p. 379) in the occult from scientific psychoanalysis. To cite one indication of this silence, Farrell (1983) surveyed the psychoanalytic literature on telepathy and drily noted that it was “a rather minor undertaking” (p. 76); moreover, numerous psychoanalytic scholars (e.g., Brottman, 2009; Eisenbud, 1946; Massicotte, 2014; Totton, 2003b) have noted how psychoanalytic scholars have by and large passed over Freud’s writings on telepathy. Jung (1934/1972) drily observed that occult phenomena “are much easier to ignore than to explain” (para. 813), and psychoanalysts appear implicitly to have agreed. Three exceptions merit attention, however: (1) Freud and others have drawn parallels between magic and psychoanalysis; (2) some analysts have offered psychoanalytic explanations of paranormal phenomena; and (3) one analyst has explored the meanings and uses of Tarot cards from a psychoanalytic perspective (Davidson, 2001).

Freud drew explicit parallels between magic spells and interpretation, stating that “there is hardly anything quite like it in medicine; in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits whose power is broken when you can tell them their name, which they have kept secret” (Freud, 1910, p. 148) and identified connections between magic and treatment through spoken words in his earliest writings (Freud, 1890). Along similar lines, other psychoanalytic commentators have noted similarities between psychoanalysis and paranormal and magical phenomena. Bernstein (2002) and Goldwater (2013) echo Freud’s (1890) observation that “the words we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered down magic” (p. 285), and both note that the effects of psychoanalytic discourse on a patient’s conscious and unconscious mental life are in important ways akin to magic and can foster magical thinking. Wilson (1972) saw in the psychoanalytic setting an analogue of the sociological theorist Malinowski’s (1925/1948) description of magical rites, noting that the “ritual of the appointment” and “the spell of the exact interpretation” work together with the patient’s endowment of conviction and belief in the powers of the analyst “to reinforce the patient’s…expectation of magic” (p. 16). Totton (2003a, 2003b) and de Peyer (2014) likewise note how analyst’s experience and knowledge of (often nonverbal) transference and countertransference represents “communication of material outside the normally recognized channels” (Totton, 2003b, p. 12) not so unlike telepathy; Totten (2003a) goes so far as to claim that phenomena such as projective identification “are essentially ‘paranormal’ concepts (and none the worse for it)” (Totton, 2003a, p. 191). Most scholars writing about such parallels appear to treat these connections as metaphorical or symbolic, electing by and large not to address metaphysical questions about the existence of real magic.

Beyond observing broad similarities between psychoanalytic technique and magic, a small but significant number of psychoanalysts have examined paranormal phenomena directly and attempted to explain them using psychoanalytic theory. Interest in paranormal phenomena peaked in the 1940s and ‘50s, culminating in an volume edited by Devereux (1953) on psychoanalysis and the occult that focused mostly on thought-transference; a more recent edited volume by Totten (2003c) rekindled interest in psychoanalysis and the paranormal. Analysts who have taken up the topic tend to view occult phenomena as uncanny unconscious processes. Deutsch (1926/1953), for example, stated that “analytic experiences confirm that ‘occult’ powers are to be sought in the depth of psychic life” (p. 146). The scare-quotes around the word ‘occult’ seem to signify a belief that the occult powers in question are only so-called, and ultimately reduce to unconscious phenomena. Unconscious processes offered by psychoanalysts to account for paranormal phenomena include empathic communication (a literal reading of the Greek words pathos and tele: feeling at a distance; Milner, 1988), enhanced intuition stemming from affective identification between people (Deutsch, 1926/1953), perceptions of primary process happenings stemming from quasi-psychosis (Totton, 2003b), and fragile reality testing (Ullman, 2003). Freud (1922), too, was inclined to view apparent instances of thought-transference as unconscious emotional emanations deriving from the Oedipus complex. Notably, psychoanalytic accounts of the paranormal emphasize how such phenomena appear to arise almost without exception in the context of intense emotions within close relationships.

Regarding Tarot in particular, the psychoanalytic literature remains mostly silent with the exception of a paper by Davidson (2001), in which she draws upon case material and personal experience to examine Tarot from a psychoanalytic perspective. Reflecting upon her visits to Hispanic Tarot readers, Davidson remarks that the readers “saw mainly people in crisis, people who were anxious or overwhelmed” (p. 491) and focused on “universal issues such as love, money, birth, death, and the like” (p. 492). Davidson noted a number of similarities between Tarot and psychotherapy/psychoanalysis, including seeking comfort from an authority figure, reliance on an emotionally calm space, coming to new ways of thinking to control one’s fate, and the use of symbols to provide narrative structure to life; she also noted crucial differences, most notably that Tarot symbolism includes moral, philosophical, and religious views about the meaning of an individual’s life, and that the symbolism of Tarot “seems to provide an additional vehicle for hope, even if the predictions do not always materialize” (p. 499).

Davidson ultimately concludes that Tarot represents a “psychological bridge between ‘dream,’ ‘wish,’ and ‘omen’ for the human psyche” (p. 492) functioning like “an anxiety-allaying transitional phenomenon between reader and client” (p. 493) that, like “Winnicott’s transitional object… loses significance” after “more working through and attainment of autonomy in therapy” (p. 499). The author correspondingly notes how her own Tarot explorations ebbed as she “became more certain of [her] own integrity and identity as an individuated person” (p. 499). This reflects a bias, in my view, to reduce Tarot and divination to magical thinking and assume that people will “grow out of it.” This perspective downplays or ignores the spiritual, cultural, and playful/creative horizons of the practices, in keeping with how much of the field of psychology views magical thinking.

To summarize, in order to keep up an appearance of scientific reputability, mainstream psychoanalysis has, following Freud, remained at best ambivalent about magic and the paranormal. Many analysts have ignored or denigrated magic (including divination) and the paranormal, while others have drawn symbolic parallels between psychoanalytic technique and magic spells and rituals. Other analysts have taken up paranormal phenomena directly (especially telepathy), offering psychoanalytic accounts of these phenomena. Psychoanalytic approaches to magic and the paranormal have been criticized for two reasons. First, the philosopher of psychoanalysis Cherry (2003) suggests that psychoanalytic accounts of the paranormal are better viewed as using psychoanalysis to eliminate rather than illuminate the paranormal: “finding an acceptable explanation—a psychoanalytic one, perhaps—for a paranormal event, such as a telepathic exchange or a poltergeist display, is tantamount to declaring that the event in question isn’t paranormal after all” (Cherry, 2003, p. 74). Second, Ullman (2003) notes that a “lost battalion of people” who have had paranormal experiences avoid mental health professionals who equate such experiences with psychopathology and instead “ultimately gravitate toward fringe groups in search of the support they need” (Ullman, 2003, pp. 43-44).

These criticisms seem on the mark. By denigrating magic and effectively avoiding the connections between the unconscious and the occult, psychoanalysis has given up on certain patients and withdrawn a potentially effective research tool from an intriguing area of human experience. In doing so, psychoanalysis has failed to secure its status within clinical science, where it remains still fairly marginal as a subfield within the broader sphere of training, research, and clinical practice. Perhaps psychoanalysis could use a dose of the medicine prescribed by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

“That is basically the only case of courage required of us: to be courageous in the face of the strangest, the most whimsical and unexplainable thing that we could encounter.  The fact that people have been cowards in that regard has caused infinite harm to life.  The experience that one calls ‘ghosts,’ the entire spirit world, death, all these related things have been forced out of life.”

One final note: Davidson (2001) observed that the symbolism of Tarot cards provides a transformational focus and potential “vehicle of hope” (p. 499) and cites C.G. Jung’s interest in the Tarot as “examples of the archetypes of the collective unconscious” (p. 493). Indeed, if we consider the term ‘psychoanalysis’ in its broadest sense as labeling theories that take unconscious processes seriously, then C.G. Jung and those following in his tradition of analytical psychology also represent a major exception to mainstream psychoanalytic views on magic, the occult, and divination. In a future post, I will expand more on how divination can be conceptualized from the perspective of analytical psychology.

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