Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Occultism in the Freud-Ferenczi Correspondence

The correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi sheds light on their common interest about thought transference and the way they shared in the intimacy of these letters, their experiences and their personal thinking about this topic. While Ferenczi was the main investigator of these writings about thought transference, Freud also proposed in this correspondence his first reflections concerning his two major cases about telepathy: the oyster poisoning and the twins prophecy. We propose in this paper an historical and detailed analysis of this correspondence in order to show its current relevance, especially in the understanding of some psychological processes concerning contemporary clinical aspects of exceptional experiences.