The Relationship of Mental Telepathy to Trauma and Dissociation

When we regard telepathy as a weird new-age concept, we can easily lose sight of how psychoanalysis seems to so many patients to be a form of mind-reading. The paranormal has always been controversial in psychoanalysis, and Freud’s deep interest in it has been marginalized. Several studies have found that a person with a history of trauma and dissociation will be more likely to report a high frequency of psychic or paranormal experience than a person who does not have such a history (Carpenter, 2015). The reasons for this will be explored, and a case demonstrating telepathic communication between a very dissociated, traumatized patient and her therapist will be presented. Using an information-processing model, I will illustrate how the patient’s subsymbolic information became converted to the verbal symbolic by means of my use of evoked images.