Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny

Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny

What does a therapist do when the uncanny shows up in the consulting room?

            Josh is trembling with rage.  He tells me about an incident from his childhood when his father failed to congratulate him on a merit badge that he had just proudly brought home from the Boy Scouts. “He never listened to me or praised me for anything,” Josh says.  “He always made me feel like I was worthless and a failure. He tortured me constantly. I hate him!”

            Josh is 42 years old. He is a respected surgeon but has trouble controlling his anger, especially towards his 3-year-old son who has been “acting up.”  Recently, Josh had been trying to get the stubborn toddler to go to bed and pulled him roughly by the arm, dislocating the child’s shoulder and necessitating a trip to the emergency room.  He had been cleared of abuse charges, but his wife thought he should enter therapy. Josh is an extremely rational man doesn’t really believe in the “mumbo-jumbo” of psychotherapy but was frightened enough to begin treatment.

            I ask Josh about his family history. He tells me that his grandfather is a Jewish holocaust survivor who came to the U.S. from Poland when he was a young man.  He met and married another survivor, got a job in the garment industry, and the couple had two children, the oldest of whom is Josh’s father. 

            “Neither my father nor my grandfather would ever talk to me about the holocaust,” Josh says. “They were both pretty shut down and it’s a topic that has fascinated me ever since I was a little kid.  I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about the subject and even went to Poland to visit Auschwitz. I had the eeriest feeling that I had been there before.”

            Josh tells me he’s been furious with his father for refusing to acknowledge him ever since he was a boy, and now he can’t stand it when his two-year-old son doesn’t listen to him. He can’t abide being unheard.  It makes him feel annihilated and that makes him very, very angry.

            We soon discover that Josh’s generalized anger is rooted in an abusive relationship with his own authoritarian father.  I am already considering the transgenerational transmission of trauma.  Yes, the obvious transfer from grandfather to father to son, but also about the larger picture.  Because, one day, as I am listening to Josh in an open state of reverie, I suddenly “know” that he had been in a concentration camp near the end of World War II.

            One day, five or six weeks later, Josh reports, “For the last month or so I can’t stop thinking about the Holocaust, like maybe I was killed in a death camp or something.”

            It is not my place to say anything, so I don’t.

            Then a few sessions later, Josh brings up the holocaust again.  “I often wonder what happened to the six million souls who were killed in the camps. I wonder where they went.  Do you believe in reincarnation?” he asks, knowing nothing about my Buddhist background.

            I rarely make suggestions to patients, but I think it is irresponsible to withhold information that may be helpful when asked a direct question, especially when it is as “coincidental” as this one. A friend had recently sent me a book about this exact subject.

            “There’s a book you might find interesting,” I answer.  “It’s by an American rabbi named Yonassan Gershom. The title of the book is Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust.   The rabbi’s basic tenet is that millions of Jewish children born in the west after World War II, particularly in the U.S., are reincarnations of people who died in the camps.  He presents many examples of people who can recall the awful details.”

            My friend had sent me the book precisely because I was born as a Jewish child in the United States in 1949, and she thought it might be relevant to me.  I read the book, but it didn’t strike a chord with me.  I don’t think I am one of those reincarnated children.

            But what about Josh?   He read the book and was profoundly affected. 

            “The more I think about it,” he reported later, “the more I feel like I was I was reincarnated here from Poland. But I have a confession to make. I actually think I was a German officer, not a Jew. That would explain so much, especially about why my father felt the need to torture me.”           

            So, Josh had come to believe that, as I saw, he was in the camps – but not as a prisoner, as one of the jailers!

            His insight began from the uncanny transmission between us - from my sense of Josh’s past lifetime to his subsequent questions about reincarnation, something he had never thought about before. Whether the story is objectively true or not is beside the point. 

            Though, frankly, I believe it is.

            In any event, thinking about possible permutations of the past helped through Josh work through his rage towards his father. He became better able to control his behavior towards his son.  I see this as a positive result of therapy.           

            I have no idea whether Josh will be able to gain access to unexamined pieces of his past scattered across lifetimes. Still, I believe that opening his mind to the knowledge that he may have lived before was inherently transformative because it challenged his relationship to the individual ego. And the expanded consciousness that came from realizing his role within a larger historical framework engendered a more compassionate attitude towards himself and his father.

            Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, the field has been reluctant to explore uncanny and telepathic experiences because they are considered “unscientific.” Yet, like me, most therapists readily report instances of unconscious communication between themselves and their patients, moments of “extraordinary knowing” that often defy sensory involvement.

            In my clinical practice, I frequently experience moments of mind-to-mind transmission that prove to be therapeutically useful.  With Josh, and sometimes with others, I feel what I am doing is something we might best call “reincarnation karma therapy.”

Rande Brown, LCSW, writes on Buddhism and psychoanalysis and is in private practice in Manhattan. I was the Executive Director of the Tricycle Foundation, publisher of Tricycle, America’s leading Buddhist magazine, from 2002 – 2006 and am currently president of the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society.  Read my blog When Mindfulness is not Enough in Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/contemporary-psychoanalysis-in-action/201903/when-mindfulness-is-not-enough and check out my website: www.randebrown.com