This was a presentation given in July 2019 at the University of York, UK, at the Standing Conference of Organisational Symbolism (SCOS). Key discussion points included:
- Haunted by the spectres, the traumas, of our past which psychologically intrude and shape and meld our characters, our Selfhood, our very beingness, our ontological sense of security.
- The shattered self on a continuum of haunting.
- The defences recruited in to survive traumatic intrusion maketh the man.
- The ‘ghosts’ live on as the personality shapes and organises itself around the past.
- That which has been defended against, repressed or dissociated in order to survive, must be symbolised and metabolised.
- The therapeutic intersect.
- Intersect phenomena.
- Implicit awareness.
- Strange ‘knowing’ and ‘access’.
- Shared processing of the client’s spectres of the past.
- A resurfacing of one’s own ‘hauntings’.
- An uncanny working through.
- Dreamer or dreamt upon? Extraordinary knowing. Psychotherapy and the Paranormal. How do we language, conceptualise and understand the “Extraordinary knowing” (Mayer, 2007), the telepathic and psychic exchanges that occur within the therapeutic intersect?
- Who’s there?
- Forever denied from the clinical textbooks are the possibilities of telekinesis, poltergeist activity or spirit possession – true haunting of the mind and body of clients.
- Spirit Intrusion. Alongside various other psychotherapists, psychologists and psychiatrists (Including Adam Crabtree, 1985; Edith Fiore, 1987; Tom Zinser, 2010); William Baldwin, 2003 & 2010; Shakuntala Modi, 1997; and Alan Sanderson, 2003) I have found that not all ghosts are psychological imprints organized around an individual’s past.
- Discernment of energies present in a location & spirit attachments and possession.
- The therapeutic process of spirit release.
- Challenging resistance to the anomalous.