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by sensory communication. In 1924 he wrote to Ernest Jones regarding his intention “to lend the support of psychoanalysis to the matter of telepathy.” Apparently Jones, fearing the disparagement of psychoanalysis, dissuaded him from public declaration. Jones had also deterred Freud from presenting a paper titled “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” at the International Psychoanalytic Congress in 1922. The essay at last appeared after Freud’s death.10
Stanley R. Dean, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Universities of Miami and Florida, founder of the Research in Schizophrenia Endowment and the American Metapsychiatric Association, and author of nearly 100 papers, advocates the extension of medical horizons by exploring psychic phenomena. Metapsychiatry, a term first proposed by him in 1971, is now included in the official glossary of the American Psychiatric Association and The International Encyclopedia of ‘Neurology, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psycology. He states in an article in the professional journal M.D., December, 1978, entitled “Metapsychiatry and Psychosocial Futurology”:11 Metapsychiatry is a semantically congruent term born of necessity to designate the important, but hitherto unclassified interface between psychiatry and mysticism . . . . I t i s not synonymous with parapsychology, for it includes the entire alphabet of psychic phenomena from aura to zen . . . . I t may be conceptualized as the base of a pyramid whose other sides are psychiatry, technology, parapsychology, and mysticism.” (Mysticism may be defined as “any belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension, but central to being and accessible to consciousness.”)
“In my opinion,” Dr. Dean writes, “psychic research is a legitimate concern of psychiatry, the medical specialty best qualified to investigate phenomena, assess validity, and expose fallacy in matters of the mind. There can be little doubt that a high degree of reciprocal enlightenment would result if psychiatry would lend its academic and taxonomic expertise to the religious and philosophical speculations that have preempted the field.”
Dr. Dean implies that psychiatry comes naturally to this field, reminding us that “a psychiatrist, Dr. Maurice Bucke, in a remarkable book Cosmic Consciousness, published in 1898, developed a theory that a seemingly miraculous higher consciousness, appearing sporadically throughout the ages, was a