Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2004, 49, 313–336

Psychic phenomena and early

emotional states
Annie Reiner, Los Angeles

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between severe early trauma and the
development of psychic intuition. A case presentation with extensive dream work helps
to illustrate this connection by exploring the psychological meaning of one patient’s
acute receptivity to unconscious communications. The paper includes a historical over-
view of Freud’s attitudes toward occultism, as distinct from later psychoanalytic views,
including those of Wilfred Bion. Many of Bion’s views have more in common with
Jung’s perspective than with Freud’s, with particular reference made to spiritual and
religious differences. Bion clearly states that Freud and psychoanalysts have focused on
phenomena, not on noumena, which Bion considers to be the essence of the psychoan-
alytic point of view.

Key words: Bion, early trauma, primitive emotional states, psychic intuition, relationship
to the transcendent self.

Psychic phenomena—telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.—once a domain most com-

monly addressed by Jungian analysts, is increasingly coming under investigation
from a psychoanalytic perspective as well. This aspect of mental functioning,
however, is not only represented in Jung’s theories of synchronicity, archetypes
and the collective unconscious, but also in less direct fashion in Melanie Klein’s
theory of projective-identification and Wilfred Bion’s theories of reverie, O
and thoughts without a thinker, all of which describe communications outside
the usual means of verbal interchange or visual signs. Only a handful of
psychoanalysts since the 1950’s on have addressed the matter of occultism
directly, but for a growing number of psychoanalysts (Mayer, Morgan, Matte-
Blanco, Toton, for instance) it is no longer a question of whether or not these
phenomena beyond sensual experience exist. An abundance of clinical questions
continues to arise, however, concerning the meaning and function of extra-
sensory capabilities and how these intuitions figure into the individual’s
psychological make up. My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship I
have observed clinically between early trauma and the development of the
capacity for unconscious communication, and the ways in which it may at
times reflect a breakdown in the mind’s ability to form attachments and to

0021–8774/2004/4903/313 © 2004, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
314 Annie Reiner

contain emotion. Despite these traumatic beginnings, however, like most gifts
or talents, psychic intuitions are of complex origin and meaning, and at times
seem to grow like a pearl, from an irritant, in this case an irritant of psycho-
logical origin.
It may be useful to clarify my own theoretical orientation. Having long
admired Jung’s ideas, I am familiar with his work on the paranormal and the
occult, but as my own training was along the post-Freudian lineage of Klein,
Object Relations and Wilfred Bion I am by no means an authority on Jungian
thought, in addition to which, at least overtly, I speak a different language.
‘Each analyst must find his own language’, Bion once said (Bion 1977),
addressing the difficult challenge of finding an effective language to describe
the life of the mind and communicate to the patient one’s understanding of
that ineffable inner life. In such a vast unfathomable realm, it would seem to
our advantage to pool our understanding, and it was this ultimately unknowable
nature of the psyche which prompted Jung to consider ‘the intellectualistic
hubbub not only ridiculous, but also deplorably dull’ (1960, para. 815). The
difficulty inherent in communication exists not only between groups of differing
ideologies but also within groups who apparently speak the same theoretical
language. In her paper concerning the growing rapprochement between Jungians
and post-Freudians, as well as the sometimes scarring schisms based on theo-
retical differences, Stephens suggests that in order to facilitate a dialogue, we
‘shift the locus of theoretical discussion into the arena of our dialogue about
our actual clinical work, the “sacred texts” of analysis’ (2001, p. 487). In this
spirit, the detailed clinical work presented below provides a ‘text’, a basis for
discussion, offering a possibility for bridging a gap between two languages
which, given a common interest in the ineffable and a common belief in a tran-
scendent aspect of the mind, may not at times be as wide as it seems.

Historical overview
In 1921 Freud wrote:
There is little doubt that if attention is directed to occult phenomena the outcome
will very soon be that the occurrence of a number of them will be confirmed; and it
will probably be a very long time before an acceptable theory covering these new
facts can be arrived at.

(1921, p. 179)

While often making it clear that he believed in the occult, Freud insisted dog-
matically to Jung that his theory of sexuality stood ‘as a bulwark against the
black tide of mud of occultism’ (Jung 1961, p. 150). Freud’s ambivalence was
reflected in his first paper on the subject, where he was rather apologetic about
discussing the matter at all, concerned that if occultism proved to exist it might
endanger the perception of psychoanalysis as a scientific endeavour (Freud
1921, p. 176, ed. note). In Dreams And Occultism he outlined his doubts, seeing
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 315

the belief in the occult as hostility toward reason and resistance against ‘ . . . the
demands of reality-testing’ (Freud 1932, p. 33). Jung, on the other hand,
viewed intuitive knowledge as ‘an irrational function of perception’, defining
‘irrational’, however, ‘not as denoting something contrary to reason but some-
thing beyond reason’ (Jung 1921, para. 774). With Spinoza, he upholds ‘the
scientia intuitiva as the highest form of knowledge’ (ibid., para. 770).
Freud’s dismissal of occultism as ‘religious’ is again on the grounds of its
resistance to scientific thought (Freud 1932, p. 34). This view of religion as
essentially at odds with science differs significantly from many scientists, Einstein
for one, who placed his belief in God at the centre of his scientific work, stating,
‘The cosmic religious experience is . . . the sower of all true science’ (Barnett
1952, p. 117). Einstein’s view is consistent with Bion’s theory of O, denoting
ultimate reality, absolute truth or the godhead. According to Bion, being at
one with O is the essence of the psychoanalytic point of view on which the
success of psychoanalysis depends (1970, p. 27). This spiritual perspective ‘is
as essential to science as to religion’ (p. 30).
. . . The term ‘science’, as it has been commonly used hitherto to describe an attitude
to objects of sense, is not adequate to represent an approach to those realities with
which ‘psychoanalytical science’ has to deal. Nor . . . [is it adequate to deal with] that
aspect of the human personality that is concerned with the unknown and ultimately
unknowable—with O.

(p. 88)

His perspective here is closer to Jung’s, for Bion makes it clear that Freud and
psychoanalysts are dealing with phenomena, and not with noumena—the
thing-in-itself (Bion 1973, p. 41). Jung’s idea of psychoid processes ‘pertain[s]
to the sphere of the unconscious as elements incapable of consciousness’ (Jung
1947, para 380). The archetype is described as ‘spirit’ which manifests itself
psychically but is ‘located beyond the psychic sphere’ (1947, para. 420). ‘The
psychic’, he points out, ‘lies embedded in something that appears to be of a
non-psychic nature’ (1947, para. 437). This ‘irrepresentable’, transcendental
nature of the archetypes also fits Bion’s description of O, the unknown and
unknowable thing-in-itself, which ‘does not fall in the domain of knowledge
. . . it can be “become”, but it cannot be known’ (Bion 1970, pp. 9–26). Bion’s
theory, like Jung’s differentiation between the archetype-per-se and the arche-
typal image, has its basis in Kant’s numinous ‘thing-in-itself’.
Freud’s view of religious feeling, identifying God with the father and denying
its transcendental nature, is more an aspect of Jung’s personal unconscious, while
Bion’s view could be said to reflect the collective unconscious. In essence Freud
sees religious feeling as neurosis (1927, pp. 17–19). He was therefore disturbed
by the opinion of his much admired friend, the writer, Romain Rolland,
who described religious feeling as ‘ . . . a sensation of “eternity” . . . limitless,
unbounded – as it were, “oceanic” . . . ’ (Freud 1930, p. 64), for Freud admitted
to finding no such ‘oceanic’ feeling in himself (Freud 1930, p. 33). Rolland’s
316 Annie Reiner

description, however, approximates to Bion’s description of O—the infinite

mind, incomprehensible to reason. According to Rolland, this feeling is not an
article of faith but a ‘purely subjective fact’, a psychic fact, as Jung called it.
Similarly, Bion points out that to view faith as supernatural may simply reflect
‘a lack of experience of the “natural” to which it relates’ (Bion 1970, p. 48).
Freud’s unfamiliarity with religious feeling indicates a lack of experience of
this infinite mind which Bion, like Jung, recognized as the essence of psycho-
analytic work (Bion 1970, p. 27).
Mogenson proposes that Freud’s more Aristotelian perspective provides a
necessary balance to Jung’s more Platonic vision (Mogenson 2003, p. xii). À
propos of this, I am finding in my work with patients with psychic ability that
despite Freud’s limited views on religion and occultism his caution may have
validity. In a discussion of idealization Cocks presents similar warning of the
‘perils of fascination’ with the mysterious and transcendent, and the necessity
for ‘maintaining a rational and ethical distance from destructive enthusiasms’
(Cocks 2002, pp. 19–20). There is danger, Speicher also says, of ‘fascination
with archetypal energies’ and of falling into the shadow (Speicher 2002, pp.
151–2). As we will see in the clinical material, this fascination may serve as a
defence against disturbing unconscious emotions, and the exercise of extra
sensory perceptions of clairvoyance, telepathy, clairaudience, etc., may in this
way compromise reality testing and interfere with emotional development if
not integrated within the broader context of other mental functions.

Case material—‘Laura’
I began seeing Laura, a gifted painter, eight years ago, at which time she was
suicidal, and her creative work had stalled. After almost five years of treat-
ment, repressed memories began slowly to emerge of years of sexual molesta-
tion by her father from earliest childhood, continuing until her parents’
divorce when she was ten years old. He has since died. Her memories grew to
include reminiscences of abuse by her two brothers as well, instigated by her
father, and most disturbing of all, Laura began to get images of her mother in
the room telling her, ‘Just do what Daddy says’. Her mother’s involvement
seemed to Laura to be more of an acquiescence to her husband’s will than an
active taste for these perverse acts, which included the mother’s intercourse
with the father while the children were made to watch.
These revelations were dreadfully painful for Laura to endure, often chal-
lenging her sanity, and at times my own. It seems a miracle that Laura avoided
becoming overtly psychotic, although as with every patient we had to deal with
psychotic mechanisms—paranoid, depressive and manic anxieties—reflecting
primitive modes of thinking, considered by Klein to be part of normal develop-
ment (Klein 1948, p. 299). In Laura’s case these primitive psychotic anxieties
were exacerbated by the relationship with her mother, a histrionic woman
unable to contain her own, much less Laura’s, feelings, but still did not
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 317

develop into psychosis. One explanation for this may reflect Laura’s precocious
creative capacities. Schore describes the role of ‘interactive repair’ in the
mother/infant dyad in ameliorating anxiety and establishing the capacity for
affect regulation (Schore 1994, p. 31). In the absence of this kind of maternal
relationship to absorb the infant’s projections and process emotions, Laura’s
prodigious early paintings and poems provided a container into which to
project overwhelming feelings and to a certain extent process some of what
could not be digested in that relationship. In addition to her creative gifts, ego
defences such as repression, splitting, idealization, etc., also protected Laura,
for at the beginning of treatment her father was revered as a man of superior
intelligence and sensitivity, an idealization which had already been slowly and
painfully stripped away in the course of our earlier work, leaving the image of
a man who, while intellectually gifted, had mentally abused her in many ways.
Laura had always felt her psychic gift was ‘crazy’ and that others, myself
included, would think it was crazy as well. Archetypally, her gift of prophecy
was, like Cassandra’s, destined never to be believed in a world lacking her
vision, but on an emotional level her doubts also reflected an inherent intui-
tion of the dangers of this capacity when not properly balanced by a capacity
for reason, which is based first of all on the ability to contain one’s emotional
reality.
This feeling that her intuitive gifts were crazy came to a head about two
years ago, one year after her repressed memories emerged, when she began
sensing the presence of deceased loved ones, of friends and acquaintances. In
one such experience, while having coffee with Nancy, a woman she had just
met, Nancy mentioned in passing that her brother had died. Immediately
Laura saw a brilliant ball of white light and heard the brother’s voice saying,
‘Tell my sister I’m alright’. Never having had such a vision of ‘the beyond’ she
naturally felt it was very strange, and hesitated to say anything for fear that
Nancy would think she was crazy. However, the brother repeated his plea,
with the additional request to, ‘Tell Nancy I found my song’. Laura reluctantly
repeated the arcane message, which Nancy immediately understood, inform-
ing Laura that her brother was an aspiring musician who had been crushed by
terrible stage fright. At his memorial, Nancy had eulogized him as ‘a singer
without a song’.
Although these kinds of incidents challenge common logic, Laura none the
less seemed to have experienced Nancy’s brother, whose metaphysical energy
was inexplicably present in our physical dimension, with someone able to
apprehend it. One could certainly argue against this impression for as far as
we know there can be no physical proof of this kind of non-sensual reality, nor
can there be proof against it. As Jung points out, ‘Of what lies beyond the phe-
nomenal world we can have absolutely no idea, for there is no idea that could
have any other source than the phenomenal world’ (1960, para. 437). Still, he
points to evidence for unconscious communication in Rhine’s experiments in
parapsychological phenomena and found inspiration for his theory of
318 Annie Reiner

synchronicity and meaningful coincidences in Einstein’s special theory of

relativity, where ‘the absolute character of time was destroyed’ (Einstein 1950,
p. 79). ‘It was Einstein’, Jung said, ‘who first started me off thinking about a
possible relativity of time as well as space’ (Meier 2001, p. lix.).
Laura experienced more visions of this sort. During this period there was a
hypo-manic quality to her sessions and an unconscious resistance to the
emotional work we were doing. I was eventually given enough information to
link these visions to her need to contact her father psychically, not in physical
death, but in the mental ‘death’ of perversion in which he lived his life. No secure
emotional bond can be made with someone as mentally divided as he, and in
such a situation the intuitive child attempts to create her own kind of bond with
the parent, a bond, however, based on an idealized unconscious phantasy.
I found it necessary to make the following distinction—that what looks like
an expanded mind may at times reflect a split or fragmented mind. Healthy
mental expansion can occur only in a mind capable of emotional containment.
Linking Laura’s despair and need for a connection to her father with her
capacity to contact the dead brought her back to her emotional self, and enabled
her to keep at bay these communications from ‘the other side’. There were fewer
such occurrences until, as we’ll see, two years later. As she so aptly put it, ‘It’s
like getting a new telephone; just because it rings doesn’t mean you have to
answer it’. On the other hand, not answering this ‘phone’ doesn’t mean one
gets rid of the phone, for such a powerful force is not amenable to a simple act
of will. Jung points out, ‘The will cannot coerce the instincts, nor has it power
over the spirit. Spirit and instinct are by nature autonomous’ (Jung 1960, para.
379). He distinguishes these psychoid processes of the unconscious, where will
has no power, from an unconscious which contains ‘ideas and volitional acts,
hence something akin to conscious processes’ (Jung 1960, para. 380).
The force impelling Laura’s mind to telepathic communications seemed to
originate in the autonomous psychoid realm, so it was of interest that an exer-
cise of will did at times allow Laura temporary ‘control’ over the otherwise
insistent demands of her psychic visions. It became clear, however, that access
to this spiritual realm was never gone, merely temporarily suspended or super-
ceded at times, as powerful memories became ascendent in her consciousness.
Setting aside, even for the moment, her psyche’s ‘elastic’ relationship to space
and time (Jung 1960, para. 840), allowed previously split off emotions to
become contained in thought. Laura could then also experience the aspect of
these visions which related to her traumatic memories of her father. Breaking
through temporal and mental boundaries as she had in the visions of her
friends’ deceased loved ones carried with it a sort of awe and excitement—
reflecting the perils of fascination with archetypal energies described earlier by
Cocks and Speicher—which addressing Laura’s own memories of course did
not. As her attention was directed to this emotional relationship, a boundary
was established between her and her father. This incipient separateness gave
rise to a highly creative period as her previously unbounded intuitive energy
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 319

became mentally contained and available for use in her work. There was a
price, however, as this courageous separation was followed by fearsome visita-
tions by her father in dreams and waking images, his face grinning at her ‘like
an eerie Cheshire cat’. Associations revealed this to be a memory of her
father’s excited face as he molested her.
We will now look at more detailed accounts of some of Laura’s sessions.1

Session no. 1
Laura began this Monday session by telling me that upon leaving last session,
‘I found myself going to your house’ [i.e., psychically, as she does not know
where I live]. ‘I saw the house, but then I thought – No, don’t do this! And I
stopped’. I asked what she’d seen and she accurately described my house in some
detail. Her restraint in using this capacity was corroborated by her dream.

Dream
I was in your car—a Black Volvo station wagon—crawling around on the floor like
a baby. I couldn’t control my movements so I couldn’t get out. Finally I somehow
got out and came to your office. You and Jason [her boyfriend] and I were sitting on
the floor in the waiting room, Jason made an interpretation to me. I was angry and
said, ‘That’s Ms. Reiner’s job!’ And I said to you, ‘Right?’ You said, ‘Right’. Jason
said, ‘Right’. Then he left. You and I got up and went to your office for my session.
Then I dreamt that Hank [an old love] was hopping around the room with a red face
as if he were on cocaine. He kept saying things like ‘Now that Jason’s here!’ and
‘With Jason around.’ . . He must have said Jason’s name twenty times.

Associations
Laura said that she was her current age in the dream but her head and body
were flopping around ‘like an infant’s’, making it hard to press the pedals. Her
mother, she said, has a different coloured Volvo station wagon [I do not]. Laura
mentioned that Jason had been depressed last evening, then felt she was being
pushy and trying to ‘fix’ him. She noted that she has been doing this less, making
for more peace at home. He sometimes tries to analyse her as well. I asked Laura
how she managed to get out of the car. ‘With a tremendous act of will’, she said.
Hank is a man with whom she had a relationship. Having discovered how
confused and angry he is, she felt angry and devalued by him. Hank’s behav-
iour in the dream—jumping around red-faced and repeating Jason’s name—
felt to her like his jealousy of her new relationship.

1
For purposes of clarity I have tried to bracket certain thoughts or sentences directed to the reader
to distinguish them from those directed to the patient, which would be conveyed in less technical
language.
320 Annie Reiner

Discussion and interpretation

The long weekend break (the waiting room) aroused Laura’s feelings of panic and
helplessness, which she seeks to allay by going psychically to my house. The fact
that she was ‘like an infant’ in this dream led me to think that on a primitive level
her mother’s ‘Volvo’ in which she is trapped stands for her mother’s ‘vulva’,
mine in the transference. Unable to make contact with her absent unfeeling
mother, Laura tried to establish a bond through an unconscious phantasy of
magically going into her mother’s vagina, perhaps the womb, as a means of
protection and closeness, but also as a way of trying psychically to control her.
In this material, it seemed that the psychic gift may derive from a breach in
the emotional bond to the parent, which is also a breach in the emotional
connection to the self. The infant has a need to be ‘sheltered in the “womb” of
the mother’s mind’ in order to maintain the illusion of unity (Tustin 1981,
p. 183). Lacking this, the child is ‘aware of too much too soon . . . [resulting in]
an agony of consciousness beyond their capacity to tolerate or to pattern’
(Tustin 1981, p. 192). In extreme cases, Tustin writes, in order to avoid suffer-
ing children may lose touch with reality and become psychotic. Alternatively, I
believe, they may become psychic, open to a realm where space and time lose
their meaning and the barrier between conscious and unconscious is permeable,
yet not ‘under the direct influence of the unconscious’ (Jung 1960, para. 134).
Neurobiologically, Schore describes the effects on brain development of
early problems in attachment. The infant may dissociate or become disorgan-
ized, he may develop a resistant or avoidant attachment (Schore 1994, p. 375).
As we see in Laura’s case, when the bond with the parents is thwarted, a new
bond may be sought, one which is forged in an abstract relationship to love, to
God or absolute truth. It is a precocious spiritual connection, however, a
substitute for the necessary physical and emotional relationship to the parent,
and born of that troubled attachment. This would reflect the kind of primitive
relationship to God conceived by Freud.
As Laura gets stuck in my ‘Volvo’ the boundaries between us become
blurred. She had already transcended space and time by going to my house
psychically, and in trying to analyse Jason she becomes me, while I/mother am
turned into a baby, on the floor with no distinction between us.
Of course, it is not necessary to say all of this to the patient. I did tell Laura
that because she felt panicked and helpless over the weekend she felt herself go
inside of me, into my ‘Volvo’, vulva or womb, to try to feel safe. My absence
made me appear to her like her emotionally unavailable mother, confusing this
entry into my vagina or womb with being emotionally held or remembered by
me over our break [confusion certainly coloured by the early sexual abuse].
She then feels she has become me, transcending the boundaries between us,
going inside me, and my house, psychically. I pointed out, however, that she
seemed to have managed ‘by a tremendous act of will’ to get out of my ‘Volvo’
and the [primitive] identification with this mother/me.
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 321

This reflects Laura’s conscious choice to frustrate her psychic visit to my house
and feel her helplessness, allowing her to reassert her emotional boundaries. In
my absence she makes Jason into the analyst/mother to avoid primitive feel-
ings of helplessness and rage, but her awareness of boundaries is further
reflected in the dream when she ousts Jason from the room so that she can
come to my office and begin our session.
Concerning the dream about Hank, I also told Laura I thought he repre-
sented her father; hopping around with a red face reflects the way her father
looked to her in the heat of the sexual abuse. Hank’s jealousy in the dream
would also reflect her father’s jealousy, for his orgies would have created in
the family a hornet’s nest of jealous feelings, projections of his own primitive
feelings. In addition, as Laura reveals to me things she’d promised never to
repeat, her internal father becomes jealous of her relationship with me as well.
As a child, forced to watch her parents’ intercourse, the confusion between
Laura’s jealousy and her father’s projections would have been insurmountable,
leading her mentally to crawl back inside her mother’s womb, erasing all bound-
aries and any feelings of jealousy, while also providing the illusion of closeness.
The need for this womb-like oneness seems to have activated an archetypal
Mother on whom she could rely, but according to Neumann, activating the
Mother archetype to compensate for the loss of the real mother may result in
psychosis if the child has no outlet for expressing these mythological creations
(Neumann 1949/1973, p. 81). As we have seen, Laura clearly did have such an
outlet and was spared that fate. While this traumatized infant’s phantasy of
returning to the oneness of the mother’s womb was in part a way of stopping
the parent’s intercourse by making her mother’s ‘Volvo’ a ‘black’ one, incapable
of life or sexuality, it is more complicated than simple jealousy of the parental
intercourse. The healthy part of her, aligned with what I view as the instinctual
wisdom of the child, and which might be seen in Jungian terms as the positive
aspect of a nurturing archetypal Mother, would also have intuited the wisdom
of stopping the perverse acts to which she was subjected. As this primitive
confusion was sorted out I had to have faith that I wasn’t closing off her
relationship to her higher self but rather trying to cleanse these personal aspects
of her unconscious to further facilitate her relationship to that knowing self.

Spiritual flight from the self

Ferenczi points out that traumatic abuse may cause the child to leave his
earthly self and seek contact with an all-knowing, omniscient part which he
called ‘astra’ or ‘astral’ (Ferenzci 1988, p. 206–7). In the process, however, the
emotional bond, already damaged by the parent’s behaviour, is now further
severed by the child. The bond to his or her own feelings is severed as well,
and the child, essentially, is in flight from his self.
A distinction needs to be made between a true spiritual perspective and infantile
fusion with the mother. If oneness with the universe is based on that primitive
322 Annie Reiner

fusion, it has as its essence ambivalent feelings of love and hate and confusion
between the two. Without a containing mother, the child’s split or fragmented
psyche ascends to an illusion of oneness with an idealized mother, so that what
seems like mental expansion is really the self, bleeding out into an unbounded
mental universe in a manic identification with a primitive and concretized God.
Neurobiological studies show that problems in attachment between infant
and caregiver cause damage to the infant’s pre-frontal cortex of the brain’s
right hemisphere, resulting in damage to the child’s capacity for affect regula-
tion. Ensuing states of fear, despair and rage, when unmodified by the mother,
can give rise to states of dissociation. The escape to the ‘astra’ may be viewed
as a form of dissociation which disengages the infant from the painful feelings.
As Schore points out, this is accompanied by psychobiological and neurobio-
logical effects, including metabolic shutdown ‘to conserve energies . . . feigning
death to allow healing of wounds, and elevated heart rates in unfamiliar situa-
tions (Schore 2003, p. 9). Laura has often experienced this kind of frozen
state, which gave way, as emotional thawing began, to symptoms of frantic
heart racing, especially during breaks in the treatment. Our knowledge of early
socio-emotional interchanges and the effects of trauma on neurophysiology
still does not explain, however, why the sequelae of rage, shame and dissocia-
tion accompanying trauma results in murder or suicide or psychosis in some,
and in others in a love of ‘God’ or higher truth.

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center

We will skip to the session of Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, the day of the
attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. The next four sessions
take place on consecutive days following September 11th.

Session no. 2—September 11th, 2001

Laura came in sobbing. She described visions she’d had while watching the
towers collapse.
‘I saw the souls of the people in the buildings as they died’, she said, ‘they were
terrified . . . but there were millions of angels surrounding them, helping them’. I
asked how these angels looked to her and she replied, ‘In a way they were people
with wings but in a way they were just loving presences . . . I don’t know how to
describe it’. Still crying, she said she thought she’d dreamt it and recounted a terrible
nightmare she’d had the day before (Monday morning’s dream), which so disturbed
her that she almost called to tell it to me.

Dream
I was on a plane flying very low in New York City on its way to L.A. It was going to
crash—everyone was panicking, but I was calm. I said, ‘We’re going to crash, some
will survive, some won’t’. We crashed and hit the city. Then I was in another plane
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 323

and it was going to crash too. Again, I wasn’t panicked. I went into the cockpit and
there were four pilots—two were American Airlines pilots because I saw those pins
with the little wings. I didn’t see the other two pilots but I kept saying, ‘Why are
there four pilots? Did the other two kill the American pilots? Did they have heart
attacks? Why are there four pilots? Again it crashed into the city.
In the next part Jason and I were going to get on a plane that was going to crash. I
thought, that’s just the way it is these days when you get on a plane—it crashes.
This plane was also going to LA but it was in Pennsylvania or Washington DC. We
were waiting in a little French restaurant—the waitresses were speaking French.
The plane was leaving at 4 or 5 and I said, ‘Come on, we have to leave!’ We ran out
but we didn’t make it and we saw the plane crash into a field. I wanted to talk to
you about it.

This uncanny dream presaged the events of September 11. As she had dreamt,
two planes had crashed in New York and ‘hit the city’, one had crashed ‘in a
field in Pennsylvania’, which she seemed to have condensed with the fourth
crash in Washington DC. It was certainly possible that the two American Air-
lines pilots were killed by the other two ‘pilots’ (the hijackers). I asked Laura
how she knew it was a psychic dream. ‘It was quieter’, she said, ‘it doesn’t feel
like it comes out of the confusion of my mind. Although I’m totally there, it
just doesn’t totally seem like mine, it has a listening quality’. She compared it
to ‘the feeling in the city today . . . it’s quiet but it’s not peaceful’.

Associations
Laura cried inconsolably through much of the session. Though convinced this was
a prophetic dream, there were personal elements as well. I took the discrepan-
cies between the content of the dream and the actual facts of the disaster to be
unconscious productions which needed to be interpreted. For instance, why
four or five o’clock, I asked her, when in fact the planes had crashed in the
morning? Laura’s association to five o’clock was that at that time on Sunday
there had been an earthquake. And why, I asked, wasn’t she panicked as these
planes crashed? She related this to Jason’s terror during the earthquake, while
she was calm. The French waitress was also clearly a personal element relating
to her family (of French ancestry). She said she wanted to talk to me in the
dream because she knew I would be able to help her think about all of this.

Interpretation
I told Laura that although she seemed to have intuited these terrible events
before they occurred, and that her feelings about this tragedy were certainly
understandable on that realistic level, I also wanted to draw her attention to
another aspect of the dream which reflected her own internal struggle. Seeing
the insanity, chaos and violence stimulated for her the insanity and violence of
her family. For a sensitive child it was like watching their destruction over and
324 Annie Reiner

over again. Her ability to intuit telepathically the suffering of others derives
from a deep capacity for love, which could not develop properly in the face of
such traumatic early, becoming rather an idealized spiritual love. Her primi-
tive efforts to rescue her parents by identifying with them meant that she too
was felt to be going down with the two crashed planes. However, in leaving
the French restaurant and French waitress she is leaving her mother, indicating
some boundaries for her self, and her desire to talk to me in the dream under-
lines her wish for further consciousness to help her escape the family madness.
I also told Laura that her desire to get on the third plane may have shown
her ambivalence and lingering confusion about her responsibility to her fam-
ily, and the question arises for her here in a profound way—what is her
responsibility to the larger family of humanity to whose suffering she is so
attuned that she has dreamt it before it happened? I pointed out that her desire
to help her family in this way became a tremendous burden to her, for having
identified with them she feels psychically bound to help them [as internal
objects] indistinguishable from herself.
Laura’s association links her lack of panic during the crashes in the dream
to her lack of fear during the earthquake. Her first comments about the angels
and the souls of the victims reveal the spiritual perspective of this dream, from
which vertex her lack of fear refers to her awareness that her higher self could
remain intact despite the fact that ‘the earth was quaking’ or her family ‘crash-
ing’ around her, or within her. I interpreted her feeling of having removed her-
self to a place of pure angelic love where she could survive her terror, but
while this escape [to the ‘astra’] appears to make her safe it also divides her, as
part of her stays with her family emotionally and part of her leaves.
In this defensive dissociation to the archetypal level she is felt to escape her
feelings and so does not have to panic, for that part of her feels safe. ‘Some
will survive, some will not’, she says philosophically, and by all the accounts
I’ve heard of her troubled family, she seems to be, mentally and spiritually, the
only survivor.
The next dreams follow closely after September 11th.

Session no. 3
Laura’s psychic intuition was greatly intensified by the terrorist attack and
continued to pose a dire emotional threat to her. Feeling fragile and broken,
more visions came while watching the rescue efforts on television.
The souls are gone but the angels are still there, like a dome over the city. They’re
surrounding the people below because if the souls of the living had felt the panic of
their loved ones who died, it would have added to their confusion and panic as they
tried to hang on to the dead, to go to them to help.

Laura felt overwhelmed by this vision. She said that she had been trying not to
go to those dead souls but that the pull was very strong to go and help. ‘After
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 325

what we talked about yesterday I knew that if I’d gone there to take care of all
those souls, I would have died . . . I know it, I would have literally died, had a
heart attack or something . . . Four or five thousand souls [the estimated dead
at the time] is just too much’.

Dream
Throughout this dream I saw images of bulldozers clearing debris. Jason and I were
at Jill’s house. A woman was going to photograph me and Jill said I should make my
old blue dress into a skirt to wear for the picture. I thought it was too old but she
said, ‘The material’s still good’. I agreed to try it.
Then I was making a short video about my work. Jill’s brother, Danny, was doing a
love scene and fell in love with his co-star. It was his first kiss and it was really sweet,
but I didn’t know how much of his personal life I should put in the video since it
wasn’t part of my work in the scene.

Associations
They had in fact had dinner at Jill’s the night before and had been able to help
each other with good food and emotional nourishment. Danny is a shy, sensi-
tive young boy, she said, who’s never had a girlfriend, but is interested in
someone now. Laura associated this with Jason, in whom she’d sensed a feel-
ing of love and relaxation yesterday after his session with his therapist. She felt
hopeful that he was getting help. ‘Maybe’, she said, ‘his therapist was the girl
he was kissing in the dream’.
‘My old blue dress was my favourite dress’, she said, ‘I wore it for years but
it was worn out and out of date so I threw it out’. She associated having her
picture taken with publicity for an upcoming exhibit in Europe which was
being advertised as an important cultural event. She was excited but nervous,
and added, ‘If I’m going to move forward in my work I need to start advertis-
ing in L.A. as well’.

Interpretation
I felt a shift in this session, starting with the images of debris being cleared
away and the positive feelings toward her friends, her self and her work. I told
Laura that in her dream her effort not to use her mind in the old way by com-
municating psychically with the dying victims (or her family) reflected her
awareness that if she wants to ‘move forward’ she has to ‘advertise’ for herself,
i.e., be herself, staying within her own mind and emotions rather than being a
container for everyone else’s. [This struggle with boundaries included resisting
the pull to invade Jason’s mind and his therapy, which we had seen in recent
sessions as her jealousy]. I pointed out her awareness in this dream that keep-
ing her ‘camera’—her mind’s eye—trained on Jason’s mind as she does at first
326 Annie Reiner

with ‘Danny’s first kiss’, is not part of her ‘work’, which includes her profes-
sional work as well as our analytic work of discovering her emotional and
mental boundaries. In a sense she is faced with the choice of what internal
video she wants to make—hers or everyone else’s.
We discussed the old blue dress as a symbol for this dilemma, for it repre-
sents the past; it may have fit once but its day is done. I wondered then how to
understand Laura’s agreeing with Jill’s suggestion to salvage the material from
the old dress. I realized that this represented the notion that even though the
old way of using her gifts is destructive to her, it doesn’t mean that those gifts
are to be thrown out, rather, like the dress, they need to be refashioned for use
in another way. It was important to show Laura that the ‘fabric’ of these gifts
was good, for it is made of her own intuition and quest for higher truth, even
though the primitive way she had first learned to use it was destructive, born
of defences against her helplessness, jealousy, rage and confusion. Using them
as before would lead to further confusion, splitting and fragmentation, even,
as she says, death, but she can still use those same valuable intuitive gifts in her
creative work.
Laura’s fear of being overwhelmed by the souls of the dead reflects a threat
to her mental survival. About the soul’s relationship to the unconscious, Jung
wrote, ‘In a sense this is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead’
(Jung 1961, p. 191). There is awareness both of Laura’s capacity to connect
intuitively with the archetypal realm but also of the threat this ‘fascination
with archetypal energies’ poses to the soul (Speicher 2002, p. 151) as long as it
remains disconnected, unbalanced by her visceral existence.

Session no. 4
Laura spoke at length of her intense rage at the terrorists. She’d dreamt of an
icy ocean that was melting, which I’d interpreted as her long frozen rage and
terror at her mother and family beginning to thaw. She dreamt too of search-
ing for ‘the best restaurant in town . . . very expensive’, but upon arriving found
‘nothing there . . . a ghost town’. She was later satisfied with a ‘plain but
healthy meal somewhere else’.
Her associations placed the expensive restaurant in her home town, and I
interpreted that finding ‘nothing there’ reflected her dawning awareness that
her ideal mother/self who can help everyone is an illusion, with nothing really
there but a fearsome ghost of her old rage and fear. The expensive ‘best restau-
rant’ is emotionally expensive, for it leads her to abandon her feelings. I went
on to describe her feeling that her ‘meal’ with me, while healthy, is felt to
make her into a ‘plain’ girl with ordinary feelings, depriving her of that
inflated state.
The shock of 9/11 has stimulated Laura’s early trauma, which so damaged
her mind, her hope, that she was forced to an idealized reality, split off from
emotional experience. I could now see her compelling pull to help all the victims
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 327

in NY in a new light, for while in part an admirable intention, it is bound up

with that inflated, idealized self which served as protection from terror and rage.

Session no. 5
Dream
I was with a four year old girl—I felt such deep love for her. She was setting the table
and instead of ‘stainless steel’ she kept saying ‘stained steel’. I kept trying to explain
to her that it was stainless, that you could clean it and wipe off the spots.

Associations
Laura said that she and Jason had just bought new flatware, and discarded the
broken, mismatched flatware her mother had given her years ago. The pretty
new ones gave her pleasure . . . The little girl in the dream was confused, she
kept trying to understand but couldn’t. Setting the table was Laura’s job as a
child, so she felt she was the little girl. ‘Despite the broken horrible silverware
I always tried to make it pretty’ . . . Laura started to cry as a visual memory
emerged, and she remembered feeling stained because of the incest.
I’m sitting there in my bed after they’d all gone . . . I was really little, about 3 or 4. I
didn’t know where they all went or what had happened, I was so confused . . . like if
they did this to me didn’t that mean we were supposed to be together? To play or
something? But I was all alone . . . I felt dirty . . . I always felt dirty and that I could
never be fixed, that no one could ever love me. I don’t feel that now. It’s unbelievable
that I’m in a loving relationship.

Interpretation
Although seemingly less inflated here, more in touch with her little girl feel-
ings, the dream revealed the split between the ideal mother and Laura’s painful
primitive feelings. In the transference, I felt that the little girl’s confusion also
reflected Laura’s difficulty accepting what I had said yesterday, and so I told
her that it felt like a big leap for her to give up her sense of herself as the ideal
mother who can save the world, which had for so long protected her against
unthinkable pain. In the dream she becomes a loving mother/me explaining
patiently that it’s stainless steel, though she still feels like that stained child
who cannot understand that these feelings can be washed off. In view of the
rage she’s been feeling, I went on to say that this stain seemed to represent her
rage at parents who terrorized her as a child. Her fear of having damaged
them with her rage helps us understand that the need to help all the victims
reflects her guilt for the war she unconsciously waged against her family. It is
this old rage she can’t wipe away, and which needs to be cleaned up. She was
also feeling angry at me, not only [in the transference] as her inept mother who
could not help her, but also for challenging her ideal self.
328 Annie Reiner

As Laura’s ocean of frozen emotions melts, so do her manic and omnipotent

defences, and she becomes terrified of the increasing guilt, shame, terror and
rage she will have to feel. However, her ability to begin feeling that rage is a
first step in the developmental movement from Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position
to the depressive position, which makes reparation and resolution of her guilt
possible (Klein 1975, p. 14–15).

Session no. 6
Laura said ominously, ‘I had another vision. I saw the terrorists all over
America . . . sitting calmly, planning their next attack’. She felt that she could
have seen more specifically who and where they were, but was terrified she
couldn’t handle it. People on the streets looked angry and their cars appeared
to her like sharks.

Dream
I was with Jason in a beautiful new house. He was sitting at the table surrounded by
a dome—like the dome of angels I saw over the World Trade Center—and there
were shafts of light pouring down on him. I was covered with light too and I heard
God’s voice—I heard God’s voice! It said, ‘What this house needs is meditation’.
Then I was at my apartment. A terrorist was lurking in the bushes and I went inside.
A new neighbour, Otis, wanted to see my apartment, he asked if I liked it. ‘Yes’, I
said, ‘it’s light and airy’. I didn’t like his energy though so I went inside and locked
the door. I was holding the door closed because the lock wasn’t good, but then I
thought, ‘It’s better to see who he is’. I let him in and . . . he was manic, I wanted him
to leave. Jason wasn’t there and I felt terrified. Finally, I shouted, OUT! He left.

Associations
Laura described the new house as reminiscent of one she and Jason had rented
on vacation when both felt happy and relaxed. She described Otis much as he
appeared in the dream, then spoke at length about the terrible situation the
country was in. Almost as an afterthought she mentioned that she and Jason
had an argument last night. She’d felt attacked when he became moody and
withdrawn after she’d shared good news about her work. He eventually
admitted feeling envious of her success.

Interpretation
I found myself feeling confused in this session. When I understood Laura’s
dream I realized that I had absorbed an early level of her massive confusion
concerning the blurring of boundaries between inner and outer, between self
and other. This was a pivotal dream regarding the central dilemma of someone
with this kind of visionary gift. I felt cautious in interpreting it, however, for
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 329

while trying to amplify the primitive unconscious feelings, I did not want her
to feel her capacity for transcendent vision inhibited or judged. I made it clear
that in ‘hearing the voice of God’ she seemed to have made contact with her
wise higher self, but that in this case it was impelled by her anger and terror at
seeing Jason’s jealousy turn him into a hard and manic ‘Otis’.
Essentially, this had fuelled her leap into the ‘astra’, where she could com-
mune with Jason’s pure soul beyond the disturbed emotional self seen in his
envious withdrawal. I therefore considered the ‘beautiful house’, bathing him
in brilliant light and recalling a happier time of love, as a symbol with dual
aspects. While it reflects the archetypal realm of transcendent truth, on a per-
sonal level it also reflects her idealization of Jason, meant to quell her fear and
anger. Her reluctance to mention their argument to me revealed her resistance
to challenging that idealization, but then confusion arises, for the cost of mak-
ing contact with Jason in that pure realm is the denial of her feelings about
who he is on an earthly level. She then projects her rage (the shark-like cars
and the ‘terrorist in the bushes’), afraid of what it would do to her feelings of
love. I pointed out this fear of what Jason’s unconscious feelings could do to
that love and her need to split him too [like Klein’s good and bad mother],
into a Jason bathed in light and an Otis/Jason whose energy is manic and crazy
(Klein 1975, p. 34). [From this perspective, the flight to the ‘astra’ can be seen
as a function of the paranoid schizoid position, a function then, not of psycho-
sis but of primitive psychotic defences.]
Concerning the locks on the door, Laura has often mentioned that her
brothers, overwhelmed by jealousy of her as the only girl, a gifted girl at that,
with a ‘special’ place in their father’s life, would often violently intrude into her
bedroom, which had no lock on the door. In the context of her associations,
the jealous Jason/Otis becomes her father and brothers invading her sexually
and mentally. In her ‘hallucinations’ of sharks we see her unconscious projec-
tions of rage at this constant abuse.
No boundaries were permitted in her household, and this becomes a central
dilemma for someone with this kind of visionary gift related to early trauma. I
pointed out Laura’s struggle in this dream between her desire to lock out her
awareness and her desire to know the truth, and so I too become a terrorist, a
brother or father who wants to get in to rape her with that awareness. How-
ever, though she’d prefer to lock Otis/Jason out of consciousness, she does let
him in, and her statement, ‘It is better to see’, demonstrates her faith in me and
our work. We discussed the daunting confusion represented here between her
fear of her brothers’ violent jealousy and rage and her fear of her own rage
secondary to their abuse. Whose rage is it? She cannot know what to lock out
and if fuelled by this emotional confusion Laura’s visions create an unstable
situation in her mind. Without knowing whose rage it is and what to claim as
hers, she cannot close the door against the hatred of others and ends up con-
taining their hatred as well as her own. Her boundaries continue to be flooded
as the attacks and the confusion cause her boundaries to become porous.
330 Annie Reiner

Creating containment for her emotions allows openness to her higher know-
ledge without her mental boundaries being compromised and overwhelmed.
The dualities described above reflect what is important about this session,
for we are dealing here with good and evil. As we see, these can so easily
become confused, especially in the face of frequently fluid boundaries between
the two. However, it is a confusion which lies at the heart of all mental illness,
for no mental balance can be found if one cannot distinguish the source of love or
goodness from that of hatred or evil, the source of light from that of darkness.
One is then at odds with the only light that can restore balance in the mind—
one’s own consciousness. Laura turns her hatred of the attacking Jason into love
of the idealized Jason, but without consciousness of her hatred she cannot sort
out the two. Her apprehension of God’s light, and of a loving Jason, would
seem to have a basis in reality at an archetypal level, but when split from her
consciousness of his ‘bad’ aspects, and from her love of herself, it becomes a
function of darkness, or evil. This corresponds to Fordham’s idea of splitting of
light and dark as an archetypal defence against the self (Fordham 1985, p. 196).

Session no. 7 (a week later)

I will end the clinical material with brief descriptions of two more dreams.
Laura dreamt of her maternal grandmother, a devout Catholic who had
wanted to be a nun but instead was married off to a violent man. In her dream
Laura had to carry her infirm grandmother across a river. She felt this as an
overwhelming burden, yet when a man came by and offered to help, she
refused, then got her grandmother across by walking on the water.
Laura spoke at length about her childhood, the mental illness in her
extended family and her ‘difficult, cold’ grandmother. She described the man
in the dream as ‘bald with innocent wide eyes’. At first I thought this fit the
description of a baby, that she was rejecting help from her own baby self—
both her feelings of need as well as the baby’s instinctual wisdom—and
becoming identified with an idealized or ‘grand’ mother. Her unbearable
disappointment in her actual mother, someone who, as we see here, could not
emotionally carry her, but had to be carried by her, causes her to idealize her.
I interpreted to Laura that her grandmother represented this exalted or ‘grand’
mother, the nun, married to Christ, and Laura, is felt to be like her, or like
Christ, walking on water. I was aware of the dual aspect in this, for her ideal-
ized self is also the knowing child—the divine child—just as the ‘grand’
mother is also the Madonna, the nurturing pole of the Mother archetype.
However, in this context what I felt most strongly was the presence of the
damaged child, compelled to deny her awareness of her ‘mentally ill parents
and ancestors’, and refuse help and her own emotional needs.
Laura became very angry with me for ‘speaking so strongly’ to her about
her identification with Christ and the Madonna, angry, I thought, that I had
exposed the heart of her idealization. This anger was crucial to the process of
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 331

our work, for it allowed her to challenge her need to see me as this idealized
mother, now infirm as its power was challenged in her internal world.
Although one always feels the energy of such violent projections, I had a
strong intuitive conviction that this was the source of her anger. I had long
been aware of Laura’s need to keep me as an ideal figure, and so I welcomed
this wearing away of that rigid defence. This understanding made it easier to
differentiate myself from the harshness of the negative transference and keep
from absorbing too deeply the negative aspects of the ‘grand’ mother being
projected into me.
There are, after the fact, any number of plausible interpretations, although
ultimately one can rely only on one’s intuition in the moment. From a Jungian
perspective Laura might also be seen as putting herself in an inflated, messianic
position, refusing help from the man who may represent the animus, her
masculine aspect of logic or reason. This does not seem incompatible with my
view of the dream, for my idea of the infant self includes the divine child who
carries the ancient wisdom, profound intuition of the union of opposites—
good/evil, male/female—which characterizes the mind or self. Bion’s theory of
container and contained reflects the mind’s duality, using male and female
symbols to represent its dual functions (Bion 1970, p. 106). À propos of this,
my later association to the bald man whose help Laura refuses was to Bion,
whose bald head and wide innocent eyes were defining attributes. Since we
carry the imagoes of our teachers, I thought that Laura might have intuited
this male figure within me, so that the man might represent Bion, a wise ana-
lyst/me whose help she refuses, preferring instead to ‘walk on water’ and
remain in that inflated position.
I felt this session as a turning point in the treatment for Laura was soon sur-
prised to feel that not only did she not have to save her mother, and the world,
she didn’t want to. Guilt, her need to make amends for her unconscious rage,
and the shame of denying her self, had kept her imprisoned in this role all her
life, compensated by the inflation and omnipotence of the idealized self.
The challenges to her omnipotence allowed Laura to challenge her internal
idealized mother, which was accompanied by more anger at me in the transfer-
ence. This led to a dream of a baby, ‘a sick baby with poison in all its cells,
surrounded by chaotic movement [the ‘orgies’]’, but having created some dis-
tance from her mother, and her ideal mother/self, finally allowed Laura a vis-
ceral experience of this sick baby filled, as she bitterly sobbed, ‘with all that
sperm’. She became increasingly able to depend on me as a loving object,
instead of activating her ideal mother, in me or in herself, on which she had so
long depended.

Concluding remarks
While more questions may have been raised than answered about this inef-
fable realm, hopefully some aspects of its mystery have been brought to
332 Annie Reiner

light for further examination. While I have observed a relationship between

early trauma and openness to unconscious communications, it does not
answer the question as to why one individual becomes capable of this
extra-sensory travel through space-time while another victim of abuse
become mired in psychotic process. We are dealing with the limits of our
knowledge and as Jung humbly reminded us, ‘The nature of the psyche
reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding’ (Jung
1960, para. 815). There is no satisfactory answer to the question of why
certain people develop psychic intuition, or indeed any other kind of crea-
tive gift, for music, poetry or the visual arts, as there is no recipe for the
mixture of environmental, psychological and genetic components which
contribute to creative talents. In Laura’s case we can, however, point to
certain factors. Early encouragement for her potent imagination—ironically
from the father by whom she was so tormented—may have helped prevent
the more serious illness to which Neumann refers when the Mother
archetype is activated in cases of trauma without an outlet to express it
(Neumann 1949/1973, p. 81). While a permeable threshold between con-
scious and unconscious often makes psychotic patients capable of psychic
intuitions as well, the psychotic ‘is under the direct influence of the uncon-
scious’ (Jung 1960, para. 134), which Laura, who remains firmly rooted in
reality, clearly is not. Cambray explains that an ego weakened by chronic
stress gives rise to an archetypal field that is not well mediated, and so,
‘ . . . the more dramatic forms of synchronicity often occur in the treatment
of psychotic and borderline patients . . . synchronicities also tend to come
into play in highly traumatized states’ (Cambray 2002, p. 422). Like Jung,
however, he makes it clear that the synchronistic effect is a normal rather
than a psychotic phenomenon (ibid., p. 421), and this too is evident in
Laura’s case. However, I have tried to show that in the presence of trauma
destructive elements may attach themselves to this normal mental pheno-
menon. Also, although we can see similarities in the minds of the analyst
and the psychic in that both exercise deep intuitive capacities which can be
brought to bear on a transcendent realm, the analytic state of mind is
achieved through discipline and thought rather than the primitive action of
a mind in flight from itself.
Bion commented on the fact that madness is often seen to be akin to genius:
‘It would be more true to say that psychotic mechanisms require a genius to
manipulate them in a manner adequate to promote growth or life (which is
synonymous with growth)’ (Bion 1970, p. 63). I suggest that, like artistic or
scientific inspiration, the capacity for psychic intuition may represent a flash
of genius which lifts the child out of emotional trauma to a new state informed
by a higher self, a state, however, imposed upon an undeveloped mind not yet
capable of integrating it emotionally. Without a nurturing caretaker to contain
the emotional aspects of thought, the thought will remain extraneous to the
mind—a split off part of the psyche.
Psychic phenomena and early emotional states 333

Summary
In the case presented of severe early trauma, ‘Laura’ is someone with great
openness to the transcendent realm, someone already conversant with ‘angels’,
and my work often necessitated helping her to experience contact with a less
developed, split off emotional self which had begun strangling her innate tal-
ents. Paradoxically, the gift for psychic intuition may serve both as protection
from more serious illness pursuant to trauma, while creating certain weak-
nesses in emotional development. The capacity for unconscious communica-
tion reflects access to that transcendent self, but too early access to this
awareness as a response to trauma or lack of emotional containment can
obstruct mental development, fragmenting the mind’s capacity to contain or
regulate emotion.
There are significant similarities between Jung’s and Bion’s views of the
unconscious, in particular that it is not only, like Freud’s unconscious, a
receptacle for repressed feelings, but also has a transcendent aspect beyond
psychical reckoning. Like Jung, Bion views the unknown and unknowable as
the appropriate focus of the analyst’s attention (Bion 1970, p. 27). Bion
suggests that for the analyst the preferable state of mind is faith, ‘faith that
there is an ultimate reality and truth’ (ibid., p. 31). He makes the critical point
that this faith must be untainted by memory or desire (ibid., p. 32), and this is
precisely the problem we’ve seen in the case discussed—the stain of primitive
memories on the traumatized child’s faith in knowledge and higher truth
leads to a faith that is really the fragmentation or erosion of the boundaries
of the ego.
I have tried to shed light on how the relationship to the transcendent self
may be facilitated by early trauma, but later, paradoxically, also obstructed,
and how emotional awareness can ameliorate the obstacles, facilitating access
to that transcendent self. Awareness of unconscious emotional states can help
to repair boundaries separating spiritual from emotional knowledge, integrating
split off emotional states so that transcendent intuitive gifts may be used in the
service of evolution toward higher states of knowledge and wisdom.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article étudie la relation qu’il peut y avoir entre un traumatisme précoce sévère et le
développement d’une intuition psychique. Une présentation de cas clinique incluant de
façon extensive le travail des rêves illustre cette connexion avec une exploration de la
signification psychologique chez un patient de sa réceptivité aiguë aux communications
inconscientes. L’article inclut aussi une revue historique des attitudes de Freud envers
l’occultisme, attitudes qui sont différentes des points de vue psychanalytiques dévelop-
pés par la suite, y compris ceux de Bion. De nombreuses conceptions ont plus de points
communs avec la perspective de Jung qu’avec celle de Freud, en particulier avec les
références relatives aux différences spirituelles et religieuses. Bion a clairement dit que
334 Annie Reiner

Freud et les psychanalystes se sont concentrés sur le phénomène et pas sur le numen,
que Bion considère comme étant l’essence du point de vue psychanalytique.

Dieser Artikel untersucht die Beziehung zwischen schwerem Fruehtrauma und der Ent-
wicklung uebersinnlicher Intuition. Ein Behandlungsfall mit ausfuehrlicher Traumar-
beit, in dem die psychologische Bedeutung akuter Empfaenglichkeit des Patienten fuer
unbewusste Kommunikationen erforscht wird, veranschaulicht diese Beziehung. Der
Artikel enthaelt einen historischen Ueberblick von Freuds Einstellung zum Okkulten,
im Gegensatz zu spaeteren psychoanalytischen Ansichten, einschliesslich derer von Wil-
fred Bion. Etliche von Bions Ansichten haben mehr mit der Jungs als mit Freuds Per-
spektiven gemeinsam, insbesondere mit Bezug auf geistige und religioese
Unterschiedlichkeiten. Bion sagt klar aus, dass Freud und Psychoanalytiker sich auf
Phenomena, und nicht auf Noumena, konzentriert haben, welche Bion als den wesentli-
chen Kern psychoanalytischen Denkens betrachtet.

In questo lavoro si esamina il rapporto che sussiste tra gravi traumi precoci e lo sviluppo
della capacità intuitiva. La presentazione di un caso con un ampio lavoro sui sogni ci
aiuta ad illustrare tale connessione esplorando il significato psicologico dell’intensa
ricettività di un paziente a comunicazioni inconsce. Questo lavoro include una panoram-
ica storica sull’atteggiamento di Freud nei confronti dell’occultismo, come distinto dai
punti di vista di psicoanalisti più tardi, inclusi quelli di Wilfred Bion. Molti dei punti di
vista bioniani hanno più elementi in comune con quelli junghiani che non con quelli di
Freud, con particolare riferimento a differenze spirituali e religiose. Bion dichiara chiara-
mente che Freud e gli psicoanalisti hanno focalizzato la loro attenzione sul fenomeno e
non sul noumeno, che Bion considera l’essenza del punto di vista psicoanalitico.

Este trabajo examina la relación entre los traumas tempranos y el desarrollo de la intui-
ción psíquica. La presentación de un caso acompañado de extenso trabajo onírico
ayuda a ilustrar esta conexión mediante la exploración el significado psicológico de la
aguda receptividad de un paciente de las comunicaciones inconscientes. Este trabajo
incluye una revisión histórica de la actitud de Freud hacia el ocultismo, como diferente
a las opiniones psicoanalíticas posteriores, incluyendo aquellas de Wilfred Bion.
Muchas de los conceptos de Bion tienen mas en común con los enfoques de Jung que
con los de Freud en particular en lo referente a las diferencias de lo espiritual y lo reli-
gioso. Bion establece claramente que Freud y los psicoanalistas se han enfocado pri-
mordialmente en los fenómenos y no en lo noumenal (esencial), lo cual Bion considera
la esencia del punto de vista psicoanalítico.

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[MS first received February 2003, final version January 2004]