For example, one day when Freud was anticipating with great pleasure a reunion with his old friend Dr. David Forsyth from England, his patient suddenly declared that his own nickname was Mr. Foresight. Freud interpreted this incident as a show of infantile jealousy on the part of the patient, meaning, "You see, I too am a Forsyth: you should be just as glad to see me as him."

The repeated occurrence of incidents like this led Freud to urge psychoanalysts to pay special attention to any cases of apparent ESP on the part of their patients because they seem to reveal important unconscious conflicts which might not otherwise come to light. They might also be useful to the analyst in calling attention to his own unresolved problems.

Dr. Jan Ehrenwald, in his book New Dimensions of Deep Analysis, describes many such cases, a typical one being that of a dream brought to him by a patient called Ronald.

Ronald described in some detail a house beside a stream with a flight of stairs up one side and a sunny little green field on the other. This field, he understood, belonged to the Warner brothers, and he was forbidden to use it. A wall of grayish black rocks surrounded the field and there was a hill in the background. Ronald interpreted the sunny green field as temptation and the Warner brothers as a "warning" not to indulge his homosexual tendencies. The warning, he felt, came from his father--but he had never seen the house before and had no associations to it.

Ehrenwald was angry with himself for giving in so easily and concluded that this was the reason for Ronald's mind reading; feeling decidedly one-down in the analytic relationship, he was catching his analyst out in a (less severe) unresolved problem of exactly the same kind as his own--impotence in the face of an authoritative father figure...

--Ann Faraday

EDITOR'S NOTE

Faraday's point is that you can ignore how ESP works (or if), to ask why; and she argues much ESP (whatever it is) has what Gestalt would call "underdog" motives, serving needs (or fears) we're ashamed of. I have my doubts this is always true, but Ronald's dream is a definite type, one that Faraday had personally experienced--see Hatchet Job, Long Johns, or Artie Shaw.

Regardless of your opinion of ESP, Ronald's dream is a cautionary tale about assuming all dream elements are internal; some may come from others' lives. Jung said a dream is "a private letter to the self." Not always so private!

The neighbor's forbidden field... what a fine symbol for spying on your shrink's private life! For ESP itself. I've had dreams in which people bring up ESP and the next day elements of the dream turn out to be predictive or telepathic; I've dubbed these self-flagging dreams. I suspect this is an early example. (Not the earliest on record! See Avenue of Trees)

--Chris Wayan