Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  The super-abilities of memory are another problematic, even paradoxical inheritance of Victorian psychology. In 1900, the French psychiatrist Theodore Flournoy coined the term cryptomnesia to describe the ability of the mind to retain intact, and in detail, information that a person may have even briefly encountered earlier in life. 23 A medium Flournoy worked with named Hélène Smith claimed to travel to Mars during her trances and even wrote in the Martian language; it became clear to Flournoy that much of what Smith said about the Red Planet came from material she had read in popular books about Mars when she was a child (and that “Martian” was strangely similar to French). It was central to Freud’s theory too that everything we experience in our lives, even in our early childhoods, remains preserved whole and intact in our memory. He wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, for instance, that “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish.” 24

  Even if the unconscious is no longer scientific no-man’s land, the idea of a memory that preserves all our experiences has been firmly and roundly debunked by a century of solid research. Memory is extremely fragmentary, and it is constantly morphing and shifting. Little or nothing from the first few years of life is preserved, and even later “memories” are mostly constructs or fictions. Yet strangely, scientist-skeptics like Martin Gardner will nevertheless unhesitatingly invoke something like cryptomnesia when it suits them to debunk ostensible psychic claims—a paradoxical and untenable, “bad faith” position. Since any notion of precognition or presentiment is scientifically heretical, though, such a mechanism is seldom proposed to help resolve questions of how people know things they shouldn’t be able to, even on the stigmatized fringes (“para-“) of psychology. But reconceiving the unconscious as the way behavior and experience are perturbed or shaped by future conscious experience has greater parsimony than the orthodox Freudian picture, or even the picture painted by some mainstream neuroscience and psychology. For one thing, it would unburden the unconscious of needing to be so “super.” Much of the extraordinary sensitivity and inferential ability of the unconscious (or the sleeping brain), as described by Victorian psychiatry and as assumed in today’s behavior and brain sciences, would simply be an illusion produced by our nonawareness of the brain’s ability to be influenced by its future states and to draw on its processing power over larger swathes of time.

  For instance, in the “father can’t you see I’m burning” example, we could simply say that the grieving patient was awakened by a Dunne dream—one that fulfilled a wish, to be sure, that his son was still alive—but that also alerted him to a situation he was about to discover in the next room: that his child’s sleeve had caught fire. Although the occasion was far sadder, this dream is in other respects very similar to Dunne’s dream of his stopped watch. The very common experience of elaborately plotted dreams that culminate in an event corresponding to some sudden noise or shock that wakes the dreamer—and thus seem “temporally impossible” (because the whole “plot” of the dream is built around that terminal event)—would be examples of the same “presponding” to imminent shocks. 25 We would no longer need to posit some kind of retroactive memory distortion, as has always been assumed to be operative, along with all the other convolutions Freud invoked. The dreaming brain would simply be feeling its future.

  Although it can only be a hypothesis until it is tested, some of the knee-jerk inhibitions against taking such an idea seriously are easily dispensed with. One is that it remains hard not to think of precognition as somehow difficult or strenuous—perhaps like climbing up some impossibly steep temporal or thermodynamic hill. To someone trying to grapple with the mind-bending implications of retrocausation, “computing over the brain’s timeline” will seem vaguely like a big “ask” of an already overwhelmingly busy organ. But if precognition is based on anything like the quantum biological mechanisms proposed in the last chapter, it should not be thought of as something added to our cognitive load but as something basic to its functioning. In fact, precognition, as something like James Carpenter’s “first sight,” 26 would really make things easier on the brain than the effortful picture painted by Newtonian cognitive psychology, with its superpowers of implicit processing and the like. Rapid, instinctive predictive processing, for instance, would seemingly be hugely resource-demanding if that processing is limited to the present moment; drawing on wider temporal swathes of brain activity, and post-selecting on optimal outcomes ahead, would simplify things. Similarly, how much of our resource-intensive memory “storage” might instead be the ongoing ability to orient toward needed information our experience is soon to supply? It would enhance our picture of ecological cognition, the offloading of cognitive tasks onto our physical, social, and cultural environment. At this point, there is no telling where mundane memory, inference, and other basic psychological processes end and precognition begins—again, it remains for future researchers to examine the question with an open mind and design experiments to test this hypothesis. But precognition would allow the mind to be “flatter,” not deeper, than in most other psychological frameworks. 27

  The bottom line is: Let us not confuse how difficult precognition is to wrap our heads around with how difficult the brain actually finds accomplishing it. If it is at all within the nervous system’s capabilities, there’s no reason not to think that it might be the easiest thing in the world, and maybe even the very basis for our spontaneous, improvisational, yet amazingly successful (most of the time) engagement with reality.

  Mister Foresight

  Freud is sometimes simplistically contrasted with Carl Jung as a resolute skeptic on matters psychical. This was not the case. Although he was cautious of writing publicly about these topics lest it taint the reputation of psychoanalysis in its early years, he privately was curious and open-minded about occult phenomena his whole life. He was aware of superstitions of his own and was even fond of quoting Shakespeare’s “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (from Hamlet ) to his more skeptical friends. In the 1910s, Freud attended séances with a somewhat open mind. Much to the horror of his skeptical friend Ernest Jones, Freud engaged in telepathy experiments with his daughter Anna and the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, the results of which persuaded him that there was a “kernel of truth” to the phenomenon described three decades earlier by Frederic Myers, the ability of people to transmit and receive thoughts. 28 And throughout his career, he also could not fail to observe coincidences in his patients’ dreams and symptoms that were unexplainable even through the super-functioning of the unconscious as he had described it in his earlier writings.

  In the 1920s, when Freud felt more secure about the status of his new psychiatric approach, he felt safer to reflect on these topics in public than he had earlier, and did so in a handful of papers and lectures. 29 In a 1932 piece called “Dreams and Occultism,” he described several cases of apparent telepathy—or what he called “thought transference”—in his patients. 30 One concerns an “obviously intelligent man … not in the least ‘inclined toward occultism’” 31 who wrote to him that he dreamed on the night of November 16-17 that his wife had given birth to twins. In reality, his wife (his second) was not pregnant and the patient had no intention or desire of having children with her, finding her unsuitable for raising children; the couple no longer had sexual relations, in fact. But a day later, on the 18th , the man received a telegram informing him that his daughter, who lived in another city, had given birth to twins on the same night he had had his dream. He had known she was pregnant but also knew she was not due to give birth for another month. So it seemed to Freud a case of possible dream telepathy. What clinched it was the man’s feelings for the two women who seem conflated in the dream:

  I feel sure, ladies and gentlemen, that you have been able to explain this dream already and understand too why I have told it to you. Here was a man who was dissatisfied with his second wife and who would prefer his wife to be like the daughter of his fir
st marriage. The ‘like’ dropped out, of course, so far as the unconscious was concerned. And now the telepathic message arrived during the night to say that his daughter had given birth to twins. The dream-work took control of the news, allowed the unconscious wish to operate on it—the wish that he could put his daughter in the place of his second wife—and thus arose the puzzling manifest dream, which disguised the wish and distorted the message. We must admit that it is only the interpretation of the dream that has shown us that it was a telepathic one; psychoanalysis has revealed a telepathic event which we should not otherwise have discovered. 32

  Freud notes that his patient merely thought his dream’s correspondence to the news of his daughter’s delivery was coincidental—he did not suspect that it was a telepathic dream. But Freud says this man would not have been surprised to find it was telepathic. He was devoted to this daughter, and he even felt certain she “would have thought particularly of him during her labour.” 33 We have no evidence of how Freud’s patient reacted to the news of his daughter’s delivery, but there is no reason not to think this was in fact a precognitive dream of getting the telegram announcing the birth, rather than a telepathic message sent across space by his daughter—a daughter who her father liked to think was thinking only of her dad during the pains of giving birth. (The man clearly needed Freud’s help.)

  Another, even more striking case described in the same piece concerns a male patient in his forties, identified as “Herr P,” who had been seeing Freud on a temporary basis in the summer of 1919 to address unspecified sexual difficulties. 34 The men shared a mutual interest in things English, including English literature, and this served as a touchstone in their conversations. Late in the summer, P. lent Freud a copy of a new book in John Galsworthy’s series of stories collectively known as The Forsyte Saga , which Freud enjoyed and they discussed. A few days later, Freud was visited in the morning for the first time by an eminent London psychiatrist, Dr. David Forsyth, freshly arrived from England to begin a period of training in psychoanalytic technique. P. did not yet know anything about Forsyth or his visit, but it was a high priority for Freud, who was eager to spread his technique to England. In fact, it was partly Dr. Forsyth’s training that would require Freud to terminate his analysis of P. soon thereafter. His patient then arrived at 10:45 for his session, during which he discussed his inhibitions about sex with a woman he was courting, who was a virgin. Freud writes,

  He had often talked of her before but that day he told me for the first time that, though of course she had no notion of the true grounds of his impediment, she used to call him ‘Herr von Vorsicht’ [Mr. Foresight]. 35 I was struck by this information; Dr. Forsyth’s visiting card lay beside me, and I showed it to him. 36

  Freud then provides background on his and his patient’s shared literary interests and the Galsworthy novel P. had just shared with him. Then Freud explains:

  Now the name ‘Forsyte’ in these novels differs little from that of my visitor ‘Forsyth’ and, as pronounced by a German, the two can scarcely be distinguished; and there is an English word with a meaning—‘foresight’—which we should also pronounce in the same way and which would be translated ‘Voraussicht’ or ‘Vorsicht’. Thus P. had in fact selected from his personal concerns the very name with which I was occupied at the same time as a result of an occurrence of which he was unaware. 37

  Freud then adds two other previous coincidences in P.’s therapy, which also centered on visiting Englishpersons, and proceeds to unpack the psychoanalytic meaning of his patient’s uncannily timed disclosure. Freud had warned P. at the outset that the analysis would have to terminate when his regular patients returned to Vienna in the aftermath of the First World War and foreign students (like Dr. Forsyth) arrived, but P. naturally felt jealous, owing to the transference , the powerful and possessive attachment a patient may develop toward the doctor (the latter having been put in the role of a parent or other important figure in the patient’s life). Freud interprets P.’s coincidental mention of being called “Mr. Foresight” by his girlfriend as a message addressed to him by P.’s unconscious:

  The remarkable fact was that he brought the name into the analysis unheralded, only the briefest time after it had become significant to me in another sense owing to a new event—the London doctor’s arrival. But the manner in which the name emerged in his analytic session is perhaps not less interesting than the fact itself. He did not say, for instance: ‘The name “Forsyte”, out of the novels you are familiar with, has just occurred to me.’ He was able, without any conscious relation to that source, to weave the name into his own experiences and to produce it thence—a thing that might have happened long before but had not happened till then. What he did say now was: ‘I’m a Forsyth too: that’s what the girl calls me.’ It is hard to mistake the mixture of jealous demand and melancholy self-deprecation which finds its expression in this remark. We shall not be going astray if we complete it in some such way as this: ‘It’s mortifying to me that your thoughts should be so intensely occupied with this new arrival. Do come back to me; after all I’m a Forsyth too—though it’s true I’m only a Herr von Vorsicht [gentleman of foresight], as the girl says.’ And thereupon his train of thought, passing along the associative threads of the element ‘English’ went back to two earlier events, which were able to stir up the same feelings of jealousy. 38

  Here, the unwillingness and/or inability to countenance real prophetic foresight prevented Freud from seeing what might have been obvious to J. W. Dunne: the fact that just after P. made his utterance, Freud expressed surprise and showed him Dr. Forsyth’s calling card. In other words, rather than telepathically mucking about in his doctor’s Forsyth-obsessed brain, P. could just as easily have been “pre-sponding” to that imminent rewarding (but also unsettling) disclosure and reaction by his doctor. 39 Dunne’s friend J. B. Priestley would have called this a clear instance of the future-influencing-present effect. Had Freud omitted this little, crucial detail, it might have been hard to deconstruct his thought-transference argument, and indeed most case descriptions of ostensible telepathy (or clairvoyance for that matter) leave such details out. Writers on these topics think it is enough to state whether or not a psychic subject correctly produced veridical information without clarifying how the psychic found out he or she was correct. I am arguing that the latter element of feedback is the crucial piece of the story.

  Interpreting P.’s case in terms of precognition has the advantage of making sense of his whole prior history of book-lending to Freud, which preceded Dr. Forsyth’s visit and Dr. Freud’s preoccupation with the Englishman. 40 We might indeed call all of P.’s behavior leading up to the divulgence of Dr. Forsyth’s calling card a kind of precognitive symptom taking the form of a time loop. Freud would not have shown P. Dr. Forsyth’s card (or expressed gratifying amazement at the coincidence) had P. not spoken of being called “Mr. Foresight.”

  One wonders whether P.’s girlfriend gave him the nickname “Mr. Foresight” because he had some kind of natural precognitive habit. There is no way of knowing, as Freud provides no other information about this patient. But Freud’s omission of any mention of the meaning of the nickname is telling. The girl did not call him “Herr von Telepathie,” after all. Herr P.—or at least, his unconscious—was announcing quite loudly the psychical modality that was operative, but Freud ignored this, reframing the events to better suit his theory.

  The “No” of Father Time

  Like the Theban King he so identified with, Freud was blind to prophecy—even tragically so, as we will see in the next chapter. But the clinical setting has also provided other, more open-minded psychotherapists with ample evidence of psychic functioning on the part of their patients, including ample evidence of precognition. 41

  No Freudian psychoanalyst has considered the question of precognition and its role in psychotherapy more fully than Jule Eisenbud, who keenly noted in his 1982 book Paranormal Foreknowledge that the two issues Freud was so intent
to keep segregated—the precognitive habit and Oedipal sexual issues—actually go hand in hand. Eisenbud argued that whatever else they do, episodes of precognition, such as a precognitive dream, fulfill a wish to transgress time; for some of his patients, this need to defeat time was distinctly related to a wish to cross the generation gap. Securing some vision of the future provided, by implication, an ability to surmount that generational barrier—which constitutes, he wrote, a “symbol of all that is cruel and unalterable about fate.” 42

  Note that the man “untainted by the occult” who dreamed of his wife giving birth to twins a day before his beloved daughter did that very thing precisely fits such a template. There is also an interesting Oedipal dimension to the “Mr. Foresight” story, not explicitly elaborated by Freud but readily inferred from the details he gives us. A classic symptom of unresolved Oedipal issues is falling in love with or marrying partners very different in age—in either direction. 43 From the fact of Herr P.’s age (“between forty and fifty”) and the fact that the “pretty, piquant, penniless girl” he wanted to sleep with but couldn’t was a virgin, there was most likely a sizeable age gap between them. And we can infer that P.’s problem (since the girl was a virgin) was his own impotence. Reluctance to deflower a virgin was a common sexual inhibition back then, and it was no doubt coupled in this case with guilt, some fear of being punished for “robbing the cradle.” Did his precognitive behavior represent a gambit to transgress time but also circumvent the inhibition wrought by his guilt?