ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way in which unconscious processes such as projective identification and the denial of magical consciousness by therapists can exacerbate feelings of powerlessness that are inherent to the curse position. I reference paradigms from both psychoanalysis and the occult, with particular regard to Melanie Klein’s ‘projective identification’ and Dion Fortune’s ‘psychic attack’. I have chosen these particular writers as – despite their apparent epistemological differences – each offer innovative perspectives on the aetiology of unconscious attack and its effects on the subject. Psychotherapy has hitherto tended to draw an arbitrary and defensive boundary between itself and esoteric theories of unconscious communication, but as this chapter illustrates, much of the clinical data we draw upon through ‘projective identification’, ‘reverie’, and ‘countertransference’ may also at times include forms of unconscious communication such as telepathy and other uncanny communications more typically associated with magical consciousness. I argue, therefore, that this border has now become essentially untenable, particularly as embracing clearly esoteric concepts such as projective identification whilst also making claims to its scientific legitimacy creates a ‘professional hypocrisy’ that Ferenczi astutely warned against. This hypocrisy also sadly accords with an existing hubris of the mask of ‘analytic neutrality’, where projective identification may be attributed to the psychopathology of clients rather than their therapists. Each of these hypocritical aspects results in a potential scapegoating of clients who may share belief systems which differ from the therapist’s. It is therefore no longer possible for psychotherapists to hide behind what Mikita Brottman calls the ‘clinical cloak’ (2011). Through a clinical example which draws upon the work of Thomas Ogden, I highlight the way in which ‘reverie’ provides essential data to make sense of enactments and what Grotstein calls ‘countertransference complexes’ (1994). The clinical example also describes a client’s striking ability to ‘read’ his therapist’s mind in such a way that may be considered telepathic.
