ABSTRACT
Nicholas Royle has outlined the question of telepathy and psychoanalysis for us.2 For Royle telepathy is a remainder within psychoanalysis, a stubborn
stain which can be neither explained by the scientifi c categories of psychoanalysis (and so be accommodated within the bounds of psychoanalysis as a suitable object of study) nor excluded absolutely as belonging merely to the unscientifi c world of the occult. Telepathy is something of an embarrassment to Freud who, over a series of unpublished papers, comes to accept the possibility of ‘thought-transference’ while equivocating over this belief in front of his colleagues and disciples. Telepathy then destabilises the boundaries of psychoanalysis: inside-outside, public-private, reason-occultism, sciencereligion and so on. Thus, telepathy thwarts and contaminates the scientifi c ambitions of the Freudian project, refusing it closure and pressuring it into an ‘analysis interminable’, while sending back messages to psychoanalysis telling it what it has known all along.3 This is a persuasive deconstruction.4 However, what interests me about Freud’s ‘secret lectures’5 on telepathy is the way in which telepathy is linked in his writing to the experience of war. It has become commonplace to suggest that the elaboration of the economy of thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (and all that this means for a resituation of the Freudian topography) is closely linked with the experience of mechanised warfare in western Europe. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is not just any book for Freud, nor is it just any book by Freud for deconstruction. Just as telepathy leaves a stain on psychoanalysis, so does the question of war, and as we will see, by extension the issue of telepathy is marked by the experience of war.
