'The coping stone on psycho-analysis': Freud, psychoanalysis, and the Society for Psychical Research (Sigmund Freud)

“The Coping Stone on Psycho-Analysis” undertakes the first comprehensive examination of Freud's thirty-year involvement with psychical research—the scientific investigation of occult claims and practices. It subjects the Freudian corpus to the tools of literary scholarship: archival research, close reading, and historical contextualization. By doing so it reclaims forgotten historical relations between psychical research and psychology, and it establishes direct connections between Freud's involvement with psychical research and crucial moments in Freud's theorization of psychoanalysis.; This study produces new knowledge: that Freud held a lifelong, abiding interest in psychical research, and that Freud valued psychical research for the materials it offered him for psychological study. This new knowledge clarifies the current scholarly confusion regarding Freud's relations to the occult, and presents grounds for a reconsideration of the genesis of psychoanalysis.; This inquiry then uncovers previously unrecognized connections between the work of the Society for Psychical Research, or the SPR, in human psychology and in telepathy, and Freud's theorization of psychoanalysis. First it shows that Freud perceived the SPR's psychology of the human personality as representative of late-nineteenth-century psychology and as a rival psychology to psychoanalysis. Through close textual analysis it demonstrates that Freud wrote his first systematic presentation of his theory of the unconscious, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis,” in response to the SPR's work in psychology. Second, through close reading of Freud's several essays on telepathy it argues that Freud found in the SPR's theory of telepathic communication a means to the eventual completion of psychoanalytic theory.; The final chapter directly takes up the issue of the SPR's influence on modern British literature. It considers Modernist representations of the self in Lawrences's Kangaroo and in Woolf's To the Lighthouse. It argues that these Modernists were in fact engaged in the same project as the SPR—seeking to represent a non-materialist, spiritual self that resides in a secular, scientific world—and that these Modernists found models for their representations of this self in the work of the Society for Psychical Research.