For several decades following the death of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic writers tended not to reveal publicly their experiences of what he called ‘thought-transference’ or ‘telepathy.’ These analysts shared Freud’s concern that psychoanalysis would be trivialized and dismissed if they wrote about thought-transference experiences in the consulting room. In several of his papers, Freud wrestled with his own ambivalence concerning telepathy, as he was torn between what he knew to be the case and what he feared the public reaction would be. Freud developed psychoanalytic theory during a time when psychology itself was emerging as a discipline eager to distinguish itself from all forms of spiritualism, including psychic research, that were popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 19th century. Like some of  the pioneers in the emerging psychology of his day, Freud too worried that discussions of thought-transference in psychoanalysis would be either misunderstood or seized upon as ‘proof’ that psychoanalysis was on the same level as séances and other forms of chicanery and fraud that was associated with the popular interest in the ‘occult.’ Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, lamented the fact that a mind as brilliant and rational as that of Sigmund Freud could be vulnerable to what he regarded as blatant superstition. In the end, Freud’s commitment to inconvenient truths won out; he knew telepathy, or thought transference occurred, and he said so. However, Freud always approached it as a psychoanalytic phenomenon, not a religious or spiritual one.

The case was somewhat different with some of Freud’s contemporaries, like William James, Frederic Myers, and Carl Jung. For these thinkers the phenomenon of thought transference was more than a psychological reality. For them, it suggested the existence of a transcendent, cosmic mind or spirit that James called the “More”. Unlike Freud, these thinkers located thought transference within the Subliminal Self, or the subconscious. Freud, on the other hand, located it in the unconscious, which he made very clear was quite different than what James, Myers and Jung had in mind.

Today, psychoanalysis is far more open about and willing to discuss thought transference, now known as ‘unconscious communication’.  The way many  contemporary analytic thinkers approach unconscious communication stands in the tradition of James, Myers, and Jung, not Freud. These treatments of unconscious communication in contemporary psychoanalysis illustrate the deep intersections between religion (spirituality) and psychoanalysis that Freud did not accept. These different approaches to unconscious communication derive from very different understandings of the unconscious. As psychoanalysis intersects with and absorbs spiritual perspectives and commitments, Freud becomes the rejected other of psychoanalysis.