Equinox Legacies of the Occult: Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Unconscious Communication

Early psychological theorists such as William James, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Sigmund Freud all agreed that telepathy (aka thought transference, or unconscious communication) exists. Yet the phenomenon was largely ignored by subsequent generations of psychoanalysts, persisting only as a subterranean, quasi-spiritual presence, and has only regained significant interest recently. In Legacies of the Occult, Marsha Aileen Hewitt reviews the differing theories of James, Myers, and Freud, and extends their ideas to the field of religious psychology. The result is an insightful and highly original work that will be of interest to scholars of psychology, philosophy, and theology, as well as to the general reader. Review I found this book profound, brave, fair, and often genuinely moving. I felt myself in confident and sure hands with Hewitt s intellect, prose, and analysis. One of the book's and the author's great virtues, or acts of courage and humanity, is that the conversation opens out onto a new field of inquiry that is really quite old (the paranormal, the occult, the magical) and, as such, attempts to make some better sense of an entire spectrum of human experience that has been ignored, or just mocked, in the modern academic world. A number of us have been intuiting or orbiting around these strange phenomena for some time (and I detect a real quiet renaissance here, in which Hewitt s book will certainly participate), but in a way that generally lacks the broader history of psychology and therapeutic frameworks that Hewitt provides with such precision and richness. --Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University About the Author Marsha Aileen Hewitt is Professor of Religion at Trinity College and the Department for the Study of Religion in the University of Toronto. Professor Hewitt's books include From Theology to Social Theory: Juan Luis Segundo and the Theology of Liberation (1990), Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis (1995) and Freud on Religion (2014). She is a psychoanalyst in private practice.