by Mikita Brottman
In a world that increasingly rewards narrow specialization, Richard Reichbart is a cultural polymath. This collection contains essays on psychoanalysis, western law, anthropology and magic, as well as the work of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, James Joyce, G.K. Chester-ton, E.M. Forster, and Ingmar Bergman. In addition, all the essays consider such issues as connections between the minds of people who are emotionally bonded; mysterious associations between the dreams of strangers; shared associations and memories; intuitive and uncanny insights, and the way patients in psychoanalysis communicate with one other, unknown to themselves, through the medium of the analyst.
These are brave, heady subjects, and it is striking to find a Freudian psychoanalyst with such an open mind and so many different fields of interest (and is striking to find a psychoanalyst of any kind who uses such lucid and satisfying prose). Reichbart’s unusually broad array of knowledge may have been facilitated by his early experiences.
After training as a lawyer, he lived and worked on a Najavo reservation as a legal services attorney, an experience he recounts in his essay “The Navajo Hand Trember:
Multiple Roles of the Psychic in Navajo Society.” During this time, he became fascinated by the Navajos’ uncannily accurate use of shamanic divination to find lost objects and diagnose problems.
Although Reichbart found that belief in the work of the Navajo shamans was not taken seriously outside the reservation, many people in the west today are happy to believe in the healing spiritual action of prayer, mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and any aboriginal or native ceremonial practice (especially those that involve circles, chanting, and the worship of nature). Yet when it comes to what Reichbart refers to as “the psi hypothesis”—“the idea that our thoughts, even if unconscious, can have the equivalent of a sensorimotor impact on the world”—then, as Reichbart observes, “otherwise sensible, even sensitive observers of human nature” are regularly overtaken by a “strange
resist9ance.”
This reluctance to discuss these odd and often inexplicable phenomena is a recurrent theme in this book. Reichbart explains how, in the psychoanalytic world, Freud’s intriguing parapsychological writings have been ignored, denied, and swept under the proverbial rug. Beyond this, Reichbart saw first hand what happened to the greatest of all modern parapsychologically informed psychoanalysts, his friend and mentor Jule Eisenbud. As Reichbart explains in his poignant and illuminating essay, “Jule Eisenbud: Explorer,” he was led to Eisenbud as a patient, knowing nothing about the man.
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2 His analysis continued for over two and a half years, beginning at six days a week, with an eight-month hiatus. Reichbart was, as he recounts, transformed by the process, and by Eisenbud, who, when they first met, had recently published the account of his experiments with Ted Serios, the Chicago elevator operator with the “thoughtographic” mind.
Reichbart held dearly to intellectual honesty. Later, Reichbart and Eisenbud became friends and colleagues, and Reichbart witnessed first-hand how Eisenbud was ostracized and abandoned by the psychoanalytic establishment for his work on parapsychology, and finally, after his work with Serios, was said to have “fallen off the deep end.”