ESP All Over Again

I was glad to see the article in the August 2 issue on analysts pondering (or perhaps re-pondering) the presence of ESP and how it works. History has a certain circularity.

The first wave of psychoanalytic interest in telepathy started with Freud, Jung, and Stekel. In 1947 a group of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts began to meet monthly under the auspices of the Medical Section of the American Society for Psychical Research. The nuclear members were Jan Ehrenwald, Jule Eisenbud, Joost Meerloo, Geraldine Peterson-Krag, and me. We met monthly for several years, with occasional guests (Hyman Spotnitz, Fritz Wittels) to share reports of presumptively telepathic dreams from our patients on the couch. Out of this group a second wave came into being that lasted up to the 1960s. It began with Jan Ehrenwald’s New Dimensions of Deep Analysis (1955), followed by Joost Meerloo’s Hidden Communion (1964), Jule Eisenbud’s Psi and Psychoanalysis (1970), and the report of my coworkers and me at the Maimonides Medical Center on the application of the REM-monitoring technique to the experimental study of the telepathic dream (Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal ESP, Ullman, Krippner, and Vaughan, 1973).

The mystery of ESP is still with us. I hope the third wave will make a vigorous contribution.