ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytical approach to the problem of parapsychology was held up and hindered, firstly, by a lack of strict methodology in many past researches and works dealing with ‘metapsychic’ or ‘paranormal’ phenomena (a subject open for many years to a whole crowd of amateurs and enthusiasts, ‘spiritualists’, and so on), and secondly, by the fact that nearly all psychoanalysts and the great majority of scientists feared a ‘return to magical thinking’. The conclusion that parapsychological investigations can be carried out in strict compliance with the most exacting scientific tenets and have nothing to do either with superstition or occultism was only reached fairly recently.
