ABSTRACT
The term “thought-transference” was first used in Phantasms of the Living, a two-volume work of paranormal investigation compiled by three of the prominent scholars who founded the London Society for Psychical Research in 1882: Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore. In creative contexts, such as art, poetry, and literature, the reality of such experiences is more or less taken for granted. As Nabokov puts it, “the monogrammatic interconnection of two individual brain-patterns is not unknown in so-called real life”. According to psychiatrists, these are internal projections experienced as external stimuli. Ehrenwald explains how, during the paranoid phase of schizophrenia, the personality disintegrates, self-boundaries collapse, and the distinction between ego and environment is suspended. The continued embarrassment around Freud’s work on thought-transference and precognitive dreams led to the development of a new vocabulary for anomalous experiences—a vocabulary more redolent of the clinic than the tilting table.
