* a gnostic tendency lay at the very heart of analytic work as the mature Freud conceived it. In drawing on a privately determined symbology to assign thematic meanings to dreams, associations, errors, and symptoms (productions that can easily be taken to signify anything whatsoever), and then in leaping inferentially from those arbitrary interpretations to putative childhood “scenes” that had to be “recalled” or at least acknowledged if a cure was to occur, classical analysis didn’t just resemble divination; it was the very thing itself. And in this light, Freud’s lifelong paranormal sympathies—almost always treated as a minor biographical curiosity—deserve to be considered an integral part of the record.
As Ernest Jones’s otherwise flattering biography concedes in its startling chapter entitled “Occultism,” Freud displayed “an exquisite oscillation between skepticism and credulity” where occult topics were concerned (Jones, 3:375). The expressions of doubt, however, were partly diplomatic and partly aimed at holding in check an embarrassing affinity for “the uncanny” and “the omnipotence of thoughts.” Freud engaged in magical propitiatory acts and tested the power of soothsayers; he confided to Jones his belief in “clairvoyant visions of episodes at a distance” and “visitations from departed spirits” (Jones, 3:381); and he even arranged a séance of his own with his family members and three other analysts. He also practiced another hermetic art, numerology, attaching fated meaning to certain room, telephone, and ticket numbers and uncritically accepting such bizarre fancies as Wilhelm Fliess’s assertion that the day of a woman’s death ought to coincide with the onset of her daughter’s menstrual period. Nor, though he and Fliess fell out at the turn of our century, did he ever renounce his allegiance to such notions.
Perhaps most significantly, Freud was strongly attracted to mental telepathy, an unconfirmed paranormal phenomenon which, though it needn’t be linked to manifestly occult beliefs and practices, nevertheless entails the very power that Madame Blavatsky and others touted as their pipeline to Theosophical wisdom. Jones himself was barely able to dissuade Freud from publishing a credulous paper of 1921 entitled “Psycho-analysis and Telepathy” (SE, 18:177-193). But Freud, who plainly told his inner circle of his “conversion to telepathy” (Jones, 3:394), could not be altogether hushed.
* Jung drew several of his vitalistic and race-conscious notions from leading exponents of those movements, and he taunted the Jewish Freud by making pointed references to them in his letters. Though Anglo-American Jungians continue to deny it, Jung’s thought, in Noll’s words, “arose from the same Central European cauldron of neopagan, Nietzschean, mystical, hereditarian, völ-kisch utopianism out of which National Socialism arose” (p. 135). Thus it is surely no coincidence that Jung initially welcomed Hitler’s ascension and, at least for a while, cheerfully accepted the challenge of hewing to “Aryan science” in matters of psychology, declaring that Jewish notions were incapable of answering to the creative Germanic soul.
* an awareness of the gnostic strain in Freud and Jung does cast a suggestive light on the central issue that now confronts, and radically polarizes, the therapeutic community throughout the West: whether caregivers should address themselves to helping clients cope with their current dilemmas as they perceive them or, rather, send those clients on a regressive search for a hypothetical early past and initiate them into “knowledge” of repressed traumas and introjected personages. There is all the difference in the world between “taking a history”—investigating the relationships and vicissitudes that have predisposed the patient to act in self-defeating ways—and producing a previously unsuspected, artifactual history that is dictated by boilerplate diagnostic expectations. The cabalistic penchant lingers precisely insofar as therapists insist that true healing must entail a confrontation with some predetermined class of memories, powers, insights, buried selves, or former incarnations. And it is no coincidence that the dangers of drastic harm are all clustered at that end of the therapeutic spectrum.
