What Are the Chances?: Psychoanalysis and Telepathy (Foreign Bodies II)

To set us on our way, I would like to begin with two lines by George Eliot that describe to a T Freud’s attitude toward occultism (so T is for Telepathy; T is for Thought Transference). Here are the lines: In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle.¹ Who supposes that it is an impossible contradiction to be superstitious and rationalizing at the same time?² The first quotation is from Middlemarch (1871–1872), and I quote it not only because it resonates with what, in the “Occultism” chapter of his three-volume biography, Ernest