Morphic Echoes: Dream Telepathy in Psychoanalysis. An Explanatory Hypothesis
Keywords:
interpenetrative world view, biosemiotic hierarchy of interactive modes, emotional resonance, pattern-matching, morphic sentienceAbstract
Emerging out of an era in which the ‘paranormal’ was viewed with skepticism by most and asquackery by the scientific community, Freud steered psycho-analysis clear of any association with telepathy or thought transference - phenomena which, however, were reported with some frequency within its domain of inquiry.Although he began by rejecting the whole subject, over the years and through personal experiences, he wrote several papers advocating that psychoanalysts embark on a serious inquiry of this phenomenon, approaching it as a normal rather than paranormal aspect of unconscious functioning.Yet despite the legitimization of psi phenomena through government sponsored research and the Princeton (PEAR) studies, psychoanalysis remained at odds with a phenomenon that appears most commonly and quite dramatically in Dreams. Insecurities about the “scientific” merits of our ‘talking cure’ pushed the subject underground, with only occasional papers emerging every few years which present evidence of telepathic material, but without offering major new theoretical insights.This paper, instigated by personal experience in my practice, searches for the operative roots of dream telepathy as a normal, deeply non-conscious resonance phenomenon, through broad interdisciplinary readings in quantum physics; the Holographic Paradigm; current neuroscience and paleoneurology; Prehistoric Art; developmental studies; psychoanalytic dream theory and group processes; literature on psi from the early 20’s, and our own psychoanalytic literature. From within the framework of a revision of Freud’s first topographical model viewed as a continuum from biological to semiotically mediated organizations of experience and modes of communication (Aragno 1997, 2008), the inquiry takes us to our distant evolutionary past when evidence of ‘representation’ first appeared, leaving traces of early hominid mental capacities. With support from contemporary neurobiology and a broad interdisciplinary base, relevant data is selected and synthesized, like pieces of a puzzle, drawing from this a comprehensive hypothesis for the roots of dream telepathy. The subject is approached from the perspective of a biosemiotic model of human interactions (Aragno, 2008) in which all unconscious communicative processes are viewed as natural rather than supernatural phenomena.References
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