Many authors quote Freud as saying “If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis.” However, Freud did not exactly say this, and was not as ardent a supporter of the occult as some would like to believe. And do we really need him to be? Do we even want colonial, materialist science to incorporate the occult?
To be able to work with dreams, whether psychologically or magically, requires building a relationship with them. Many people are alienated from their dream life. Their dreams are like wild animals that bolt and disappear into the recesses of the wilderness of their psyche almost as soon as they are spotted. Some people even go so far as to say that they do not dream. I doubt very much whether this claim is ever accurate, since I tend toward the position that dream is the default state of waking matter. More likely, various factors conspire to keep dreams hidden in the liminal, underworld places that incubate and animate them. So, in this post, as a preliminary to future posts on dreams, I would like to spell out eight practical suggestions for how to improve your dream recall.
Psychoanalysis emerged during a high tide of interest among scientists and laypeople alike in psychical research and spiritualism. Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts held conflicting, ambivalent attitudes toward the occult. In this post, I explore some of the historical attitudes held toward the occult and divination within the field of psychoanalysis.
A recent New York Times article claimed that “most psychologists agree that astrology’s appeal rests largely on ‘confirmation bias’—the human tendency to seek out, recall and favor information that confirms what we already believe.” This claim reflects a long history within psychology of reducing belief or interest in astrology to error or psychopathology. In doing so, my fellow psychologists fail to do justice to the empirical data and miss an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the meanings and purposes of astrology in people’s lives.