ArticlePDF Available

Lacan, Psi and the Trickster: A Psychoanalysis of Parapsychology

December 2016

Authors:

University of West Georgia

The privileging of physicalist ontologies and rigid experimentalism within parapsychology helps to expose a 'hole' in the praxis of the discipline proper; what psychoanalysis generally refers to as a " lack ". Certain not to fill this hole, using the psychoanalytic approach pioneered by Jacques Lacan (i.e., Lacanian psychoanalysis), the following reading aims to develop theoretically a scene by which parapsychology can come, more self-reflectively, to better take in its scientific practice—the unconscious of its subject, how the discipline has chosen to carve itself out within, what Lacan calls the chaotic, polysemic pool of lalangue, that place where meaning slides around. Indeed, such a return to the unconscious actually opens up the field to more counter-hegemonic phenomena that are typically viewed as fringe. To illustrate this point, I deploy the Lacanian après-coup, otherwise known as retroaction (a causality not from the present time), in conjunction with extrasensory perception research to stage just such an encounter, between the subject of parapsychology and its lack. This not only thwarts the so-called 'source of psi' problem by showing how parapsychology is running from itself, but also reveals a homology between psi and the objet petit a—the little object of desire that must always be tamed. As such, the disciplinary contouring of parapsychological science evokes the wily qualities of the trickster. It follows that, in the future, a further psychoanalysis of parapsychology could work to develop the theoretical insights of this article with some of Lacan's other concepts, such as the jouissance of the body (i.e., the anxious pleasure that animates the subject), and the relationship between drive and desire.

Content uploaded by Jacob Glazier

Content may be subject to copyright.

ISSN: 1445-2308 Volume 16, Number 2, pp. 163-193

163

Lacan, Psi and the Trickster:

A Psychoanalysis of Parapsychology

JACOB W. GLAZIER

Abstract: The privileging of physicalist ontologies and rigid

experimentalism within parapsychology helps to expose a ‘hole’ in the

praxis of the discipline proper; what psychoanalysis generally refers to

as a “lack”. Certain not to fill this hole, using the psychoanalytic

approach pioneered by Jacques Lacan (i.e., Lacanian psychoanalysis),

the following reading aims to develop theoretically a scene by which

parapsychology can come, more self-reflectively, to better take in its

scientific practice—the unconscious of its subject, how the discipline

has chosen to carve itself out within, what Lacan calls the chaotic,

polysemic pool of lalangue, that place where meaning slides around.

Indeed, such a return to the unconscious actually opens up the field to

more counter-hegemonic phenomena that are typically viewed as

fringe. To illustrate this point, I deploy the Lacanian après-coup,

otherwise known as retroaction (a causality not from the present time),

in conjunction with extrasensory perception research to stage just such

an encounter, between the subject of parapsychology and its lack. This

not only thwarts the so-called ‘source of psi’ problem by showing how

parapsychology is running from itself, but also reveals a homology

between psi and the objet petit a—the little object of desire that must

always be tamed. As such, the disciplinary contouring of

parapsychological science evokes the wily qualities of the trickster. It

follows that, in the future, a further psychoanalysis of parapsychology

could work to develop the theoretical insights of this article with some

of Lacan’s other concepts, such as the jouissance of the body (i.e., the

anxious pleasure that animates the subject), and the relationship

between drive and desire.

Keywords: extrasensory perception, Jacques Lacan, physicalism,

psychoanalysis, retroaction, trickster theory.

What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one’s cards

face up on the table? So much so that we are momentarily persuaded that the

magician has in fact demonstrated, as he promised, how his trick was performed,

whereas he has only performed it in still purer form: at which point we fathom the

measure of the supremacy of the signifier in the subject. (Lacan, 1988, p. 36)

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

164

INTRODUCTION

The paradoxical gesture, opening this article, is given by Jacques

Lacan who was a French, twentieth-century psychoanalyst. Most notably,

Lacan is famous for taking traditional Freudian psychoanalytic theory and

applying Saussurean1 structuralist concepts to it. This created a kind of

psychoanalytic practice that took speech, or language more generally, as

most important, over and above some of the other approaches to

psychoanalysis that, in contradistinction to Lacan, preferred conceptualizing

the subject through biology, object-relations, archetypes or the well

adjustment of the ego.

The term subject, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, refers to any being

that possesses an unconscious. In the clinic, during the practice of

psychoanalysis, this being is referred to as the analysand or the one who

desires treatment. More broadly, however, the subject may additionally

refer to a set of practices, rituals and implicit rules that are bundled together

forming, for the purposes of this paper, the discipline called

parapsychology.

Returning to the importance of language for Lacan, the notion of the

subject brings up his theory of the signifier, alluded to in the inaugural

epigraph, which perhaps most clearly elucidates this approach’s emphasis

on language. The signifier, not unlike psi for parapsychology, represents a

privileged category or term. The signifier is the pure, physical and empty

form that carries information allowing for communication and the process

of meaning-making—or, what is also called in semiotics, signification.

Contrast this to the signified, which is the intelligible meaning itself, or the

sense made out of the world by the subject. The import this has for the

sciences applies to how knowledge is produced, or the question of what is

knowable. In other words, the epistemology of the discipline is always

subservient to, or at least dictated by, the logic of the signifier, its stubborn

encasement within the subject, whether that happens to be an analysand or a

scientific discipline.

1 By way of a brief introduction, Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose main contribution was

the scientific formalization of the field, which relied on reducing the sign to its constitutive

parts called the signifier and the signified. A sign is the combination of a concept (mental

processes) and a sound-image (what is heard). Saussure’s (1959) claim is thus “… to retain the

word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively

by signified [signifié] and signifier [signifiant]” (p. 67, emphasis in original). Importantly for

Lacanian theory, this dual nature ascribed to the sign allows the further positing that “the bond

between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary” (Saussure, 1959, p. 67). Such an

arbitrariness is another name for the lack or void of every speaking subject.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

165

Such a ‘problematic of meaning’ may nowhere be clearer than in the

parapsychological literature and, precisely put, in regard to how the

discipline understands its scientific practice; for a reasonable spread of

opinion on the matter cf. Alcock, (1981), Braude, (1986), and Glazier,

(2014). In fact, some of these researchers claim that the study of psi

phenomena may actually be a challenge to the hegemony of legendary

science—i.e., the positivist and rigidly quantitative approaches to doing

science. For the purposes of analyzing parapsychology, I want to predicate

this term on assumptions derived from physicalist ontology and their

consequent experimentalist methodologies. Returning to the ‘problematic of

meaning’ hinted at earlier, is psi, by its very definition, an anomaly that

threatens to unravel or reconfigure the project of science as such? Again, is

it the case that psi is perhaps trying to say something, somewhat

mischievously, about its very constitution therein entailing certain

ramifications for the praxis of its study?

Kennedy (2016) puts forth just such a suggestion saying that “the

failure to produce convincingly reliable psi effects after 80 years of

experimental research indicates that fundamental factors are not yet

understood for the operation of psi” (p. 53). The researcher further goes on

to propose George Hansen’s (2001) conception of psi as an iteration on the

trickster as helpful in showing how “psi effects can be striking and reliable

for a period of time, but then seem to actively avoid sustained or useful

effects” (Kennedy, 2016, p. 53).

Trickster theory, as it is known in parapsychology, generally takes its

lead from Hansen’s (2001) book The Trickster and the Paranormal,

wherein the author suggests that paranormal phenomena, or psi specifically,

bear a remarkable resemblance to the trickster anecdotes and mythologies

from around the world. In fact, one of the implications of the theory entails

that the wily characteristics of the trickster may be to blame for the

historical difficulty parapsychology has had rendering its object of study,

psi, as legitimate, valid and scientific. That is to say in more technical

parlance that perhaps due to its ontological composition—the very

beinghood it possesses—psi constitutes an ever-present and unassimilable

threat through its ability to thwart any totalized interpellation into an a

priori model. In earlier terms employed, the epistemological relation

parapsychology has to psi, the bridge between the signifier and the

signified, necessarily invokes the qualities of the trickster. Some of these

qualities Hansen (2016) names as “binary oppositions, liminality, anti-

structure, communitas, betwixt and between, [and] interstitiality” (p. 52).

These are thematic concepts that Hansen uses to talk about the traits that

paranormality and psi share with the figure of the trickster—most seminally

in his book, and more recently during the trickster panel at the 59th Annual

Convention of the Parapsychological Association.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

166

The trickster, for Hansen, is ultimately literary such that his theory

relies on the contextualization of a trope. A trope in this sense is the

development of a literary figure or special motif that aids in helping to

explain the way psi behaves. The former understanding of trope, as a

literary figure, is preferred because it gets at the fleshly materiality and

embodiment of the trickster—even though these are written or verbal

stories, this specific literary figure, in a certain paradoxical manner, has a

peculiar taste for the opposite of language: the sensual and animal aspects of

experience as opposed to the headiness of instrumental rationality. Read as

a figure that cuts across cultural boundaries, then, it does not matter whether

the trope of the trickster is located within a formal theory (the archetypal,

collective unconscious and analytic theory of Jung), communal anecdotes

and mythologies (the coyote stories of the Native Americans or Lucifer of

Paradise Lost), or societal persons or institutions (the shaman of indigenous

cultures or parapsychology proper). As such, Hansen is able to precipitate

or reduce certain commonalities that he finds between the

parapsychological literature and the figural or literary instantiations of the

trickster; as stated previously, these are binary oppositions, liminality, anti-

structure, communitas, betwixt and between, and interstitiality.

On this account, the trickster has a taste for the inversion of

opposites—for example, the sacred and profane, food and excrement,

intelligence and foolishness—that undergird communal relations. Such

reversals allow the trickster to maintain a state of liminality or interstitiality,

a certain desire not to get caught, thereby situating it in the betwixt and

between or middle ground. Its intention is always obscure, as Hansen notes,

in the sense that intentionality depends on the type of trickster, some are

more mischievous while others may be trying to help the established order

through a reciprocal playfulness. In relation to textual playfulness and

imposture, Tiffany (2013) formalizes this quality as a “Luciferian drama of

inversion . . . man becomes woman, living art becomes dead kitsch, good

becomes evil, true becomes false. And no one can tell the difference” (p. 80,

emphasis in original). This is inherently a form of anti-structure, the

creation of an antagonism within the authoritarian edifice. Communitas

often then follows as a result of the trickster’s mischief, a term along with

anti-structure that Hansen takes from Victor Turner, which is the creation of

a more unmediated, raw or egalitarian relation among the participants of the

social hierarchy.2

While I accept Hansen’s premise that posits a fruitful analogizing of

psi and the trickster, in contradistinction, however, I am proposing a more

2 My intention is not to provide an exhaustive account of the foregoing ideas but, rather,

merely to highlight them, cursorily, with the hope that the reader will delve further into the

literature.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

167

technical and theoretical conceptualization of the trickster nature of psi

thereby not necessarily aligning with the literary character of ‘trickster

theory’ per se —how it may look or appear within a situated context. As a

result, my hope is that the conceptual tools I put forth, via Lacan, will be

applicable regardless of the social, historical or even theoretical context. In

other words, it could be said that I am universalizing trickster theory using

Lacanian psychoanalysis.

To pivot to psychoanalysis as opposed to scientific models that

parapsychology has generally preferred requires some justification. Indeed,

the debate between philosophers of science and psychoanalysts reaches

back to the latter discipline’s infantile years. Charges of pseudoscience, that

the logic of psychoanalysis resembles a conspiracy theory, or that it merely

works to replicate itself, have all been levelled. Perhaps one of the best

known of these critiques, within the philosophy of science, was given by

Karl Popper. To state the idea briefly, the claim is that psychoanalysis is not

falsifiable in a strictly scientific sense. This means, for Popper, that the

principle of induction, proceeding from a state of affairs to a general law,

runs amok, so to speak, such that it would automatically fulfil all the criteria

that would make it sufficient. Grünbaum (1977) articulates this point in the

following way, “claiming that psychoanalysis has much more in common

with astrology than with the genuine sciences, Popper considers his own

criterion of demarcation to be far superior to that of inductivism” (p. 336).

This widely circulated notion that psychoanalysis is not falsifiable is

countered by Grant and Harari (2005) on both logical and empirical

grounds, through the abundance of clinical data and recent research that has

subjected analytic treatment to quantitative measures.

Furthermore, given that some of these critiques reach back before the

final formation of Lacanian theory (Lacan died in 1981) says something

about their datedness. Indeed, contextualizing French psychoanalysis with

some of its critical theory relatives, such as deconstruction, Foucauldian

genealogy and Deleuze and Guattari’s immanentism, sheds light on how

notions of ‘what counts as science’ is fundamentally problematic, how it

may contain secret assumptions or unconscious alliances. One does not

even need to go outside of the discipline of parapsychology to find a certain

affinity for tracing these historical and entrenched discursive chains of

power. Case in point, Rhea White (1994) suggested incorporating more of a

feminist approach to studying psi, which would no doubt shift the

coordinates of science for the discipline. In a similar critical spirit, Lacanian

psychoanalysis offers its unique take on scientificity and what it means to

actually study or analyze a being.

The thesis of this article is that parapsychology can be read as a

science of ‘lack’ insofar as it takes as its object of inquiry the forever

elusive being that sheds and escapes meaning in an indefinite play of

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

168

difference, that being which parapsychology calls psi. The argument is

presented through Lacanian theory that works to undergird, using Lacan’s

own concepts, how the science of parapsychology, and psi specifically,

interlink with the qualities of the trickster as outlined by Hansen (2001).

The end result, it is hoped, will add to the limited work that has been done

on a precisely theoretical psychoanalysis of parapsychology; cf. Evrard

(2014).

It should be noted that lack, here, is not employed pejoratively such

that there is something ‘deficient’ with the parapsychological discipline or

even its traditionally experimental methodology; rather, the term is taken

from Lacan himself and is used as a descriptor of the relation the subject

has, in this case parapsychology, to the object it seeks to analyze. This is an

important line of thought to pursue because, if it is the case that

parapsychology is aligned in such a way, then this could account for various

experimental and theoretical short-falls inherent within its literature and

history. For example, the discipline has focused on defining what psi is,

explicitly in terms of a preordained relation to its lack; that is to say, a

faithfulness to an ontology that premises itself on neat experimental

frameworks and the very elucidation of signification, the providing of ‘clear

meaning’ which is principally different in kind to rigor.

THE ‘HOLE’ IN PHYSICALIST MODELS

As a case in point, some researchers in parapsychology (e.g., Radin,

2006) believe that advances in the natural sciences—most notably, quantum

theory—offer the best hope of giving paranormal events the same reality

status as other psychological phenomena; or, in a stronger sense following

the logic of Radin, becoming a function of physics and quantum ontology

generally. That is to say, the ability of ‘how’ information can be known at a

distance via unconventionally conceived means can be explained, according

to these proponents, through concepts like quantum entanglement, non-

locality, etc. It is therefore, in this sense, that many parapsychologists,

following Radin’s lead, still pursue such a physics-based path with the hope

that an eventual experimental finding vis-à-vis quantum theory and

parapsychology in general will come to prove, scientifically, once and for

all the so-called empirical truth of psi.

Such a finding would be invaluably helpful for parapsychology, it is

claimed, partially because the discipline remains deficient with regard to

any such agreed upon guiding agenda (Felser, 2001). Quantum theory

would, therefore, not only render clear how physical processes through the

body and brain are connected, non-locally in ways that have hitherto been

viewed as paranormal, perhaps providing a coherent predictive,

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

169

explanatory, and physicalist model, but it would also help sediment

parapsychology’s ontology, thereby guiding research practices, theoretical

debates, and other disciplinary structures.

What this strain of reasoning fails to account for, however, is how

any such sedimentation can occur to begin with in that it presupposes the

very nature of meaning-making—what Lacan called, through his theory of

the signifier, signification. In this way, to adjourn to quantum theory is, in

the very gesture, to create two kinds of antagonisms. First, it further

confuses the category of parapsychology as a science: is it psychological,

physical, eclectic, etc., thereby entailing that Radin et al. are actually doing

physics? Or, put in other words, where are the disciplinary boundaries that

contour and mark out ‘parapsychology’ as a separate field of empirical

research? Incorporating the phenomenological sense by which psi displays

its trickster qualities would help ground parapsychology within its

disciplinary parameters as opposed to marking it out as a purely physicalist

science, which represents a certain impossibility and limit. In other words,

the ‘slipperiness’ of psi that the trope (or literary figure) of the trickster

signifies is the surplus by which pure experimentalism strictly cannot

signify. It is therefore not a matter of choosing between two false choices

(e.g., a physical science or social science approach), nor even trying to

synthesize the two (e.g., pluralistic qualitative and quantitative research),

but of trying to hold the aporic (dichotomous) nature of psi together.

Second, the move toward quantum theory, still remains decidedly

scientific, in the sense that it relies, at least methodologically, on notions

from legendary science such as statistical analyses, control and the

adjudication of findings against some pre-established set of practices. This

is not necessarily ‘bad’ insofar as it contributes to the growing literature

(Tressoldi, Storm & Radin, 2010) that supports “spooky” action at a

distance; what used to be considered the paranormal. It is, however,

anathema to the central premise of my argument, which understands psi

through its originary ‘trickster’ manifestations making it therefore not

amenable to such an easy kind of agreement—i.e., quantum theory as a

paragon explanatory model.

I am using the term trickster here in the sense that Hansen develops it

because his thematic analysis produces variables that, I will later claim,

parallel the process of signification. In other words, it is not the case that

‘trickster’ is used somehow to describe all of the aberrant or non-

experimentally conducive aspects of psi—the scraps leftover by the

application of physical models or experiments. On the contrary, as Lacan’s

concepts will go to show, trickster theory can be developed to cover the

entire ontology of psi, pointing out the way it behaves globally and not just

within the confines of the laboratory.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

170

An important step in achieving this is accounting for the

directionality of psi processes or how they, by their very nature, seem to be

guided either by the claimant or by some unknown force. Rhine, Pratt,

Stuart, Smith and Greenwood (1940) put the issue this way, “it has been

established that the ESP process … is, first, voluntary in its dirigibility. In

fact, if this were not the case, it is difficult to see how an experimental

demonstration of ESP would be possible at all” (p. 319, emphasis in

original). The term dirigibility is well-selected in that it keeps the teleology

of psi an open question, neither relegating it to past, present or future

determinisms. The very fact that psi is tied to a subject in some way—that it

is ‘directed’—can be explained, I will argue, through the Lacanian concept

of temporality known as après-coup (cf. the section “Extrasensory

Perception and the Après-Coup of Lalangue”). The kind of dirigibility this

requires is not so much ‘conscious’ in the sense of intentionality, since

Lacan’s temporality is structured by an afterwardness that is retrocausal but

not necessarily in a serially diachronic or future-to-present sense; but,

nevertheless, it does unequivocally arise from the subject itself.

Broadly stated now, psi rooted in the process of meaning-making or

signification, in the strictest sense, bucks any attempt to reduce it down to

the logics of the domain of the natural sciences, the psychological,

biological or physical.3 Lacan sometimes generally refers to such an

impossibility as lack or the empty ‘hole’ by which all meaning comes into

being. This can be more specifically put by appealing to precise concepts

within Lacanian theory as, for example, through lalangue,4 the pool of

signifiers held within the unconscious that gives rise to systems, processes

and practices of signification and, as alluded to earlier, Lacan’s

understanding of temporality.

3 The argument I am making is not a transcendental one in the traditional philosophical sense.

That is, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the theoretical milieu it grew out of, mid twentieth-

century French thought, take aim at precisely such universalizing gestures and discursive

postures, often seeing them imbued with unfair and unjustified power dynamics (e.g.,

phallogocentrism, heteronormativity, etc.). In fact, the turn to literary theory, genealogical

analyses and certain forms of historicism may be seen as working toward particularizing the

subject matter as opposed to describing a ‘beyond’ that somehow intercedes in the situated and

contextualized state of affairs. The history of science and metaphysical philosophy is rife with

such a beyond, and it is because of this that much of twentieth-century Continental philosophy

can be seen as a reaction to anything that lies outside of the system.

4 On a stylistic note, the technical terms Lacan developed will retain their original French

designations as opposed to trying to translate them, somewhat haphazardly and impiously, to

English. Along with consistently displaying them in italics, it is hoped this will aid the reader

in tracking their progression and use.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

171

THE ERUPTION OF LALANGUE

What is unique to any psychoanalytic intervention, or any

articulation of the discipline proper, theoretical, practical or otherwise, is

the privileged place the unconscious plays. As a result, it should be no

surprise then, when it comes to putting parapsychology on the couch, that

which remains implicit within scientific inquiry is of the most interest to the

analyst. Lacan makes this clear by using the readily accessible example of

communication; that is to say, to put in terms of general semiotics and our

earlier discussion of the theory of the signifier, the possibility of a signifier

to return to its signified. Lacan articulates this in the following way,

Communication implies reference. But one thing is clear—language is

merely what scientific discourse elaborates to account for what I call

llanguage [lalangue]. Llanguage serves purposes that are altogether

different from that of communication. That is what the experience of the

unconscious has shown us, insofar as it is made of llanguage, which, as

you know, I write with two l’s to designate what each of us deals with, our

so-called mother tongue (lalangue dite maternelle), which isn’t called that

by accident. (Lacan, 1998, p. 138, emphasis in original)

Why the emphasis on the mother tongue, Lacan non-rhetorically asks

us? In one sense, Lacan’s point is that science presupposes an incomplete,

non-rigorous or at least correspondence theory of communication, which, as

per the logics of the unconscious, holds something of a secondary character;

namely, that the ‘superficial’ character of language in the everyday sense of

the term falls within the realm of the sciences as opposed to the more

primary and underlying stratum of lalangue. This is the analogous ‘like’

structure that Lacan (1998) refers to in saying that “the unconscious is

structured like a language” (p. 48, emphasis in original). In other words,

lalangue is that which precipitates (but does not casually determine) various

meanings through the relationship the subject has to the signifier—to put it

somewhat illustratively, it is the primordial pool we are swimming around

in. Indeed, this Lacanian technical term lalangue speaks to the polysemic

(single words with multiple meanings) and homophonic (the sliding of the

sound of the signifier in relation to meaning) substrate of the unconscious

upon which ‘communication’ or the discourse of the sciences rests.

This is important for two reasons: first, lalangue creates space to

polemicize the hegemony of scientific knowledge, its essentially

epistemological character since lalangue gives rise to the latticework of

connections that frame any kind of epistemology or discourse. One way to

understand this is through Lacan’s emphasis on the literality of the idiom

lalangue dite maternelle (the language of the mother tongue). Of course, the

mother tongue refers to not only the subject’s so-called native language

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

172

handed down through early life, social and cultural development (e.g.,

English or French as a first language), but also the special connection the

child has to its real life mother and how this comes to be diagnostically

resolved or not. Lacanian theory sometimes collapses these two aspects of

language formation into the term (m)Other. In slightly more technical terms,

the (m)Other in the Lacanian clinic provides a certain mediatory bridge,

sine qua non, for the development of the divided subject; both in its Oedipal

(familial) configurations, typically, and more generally in relation to the

larger social or symbolic order into which the subject is hailed into being

through naming (Žižek, 1989). The family of origin of the analysand during

therapy and the larger social and cultural institutions necessarily determine

the development of the subject—not just one or the other.

The idea here, in relation to the sciences, is even simpler than a

clinical case: the language of the mother tongue covers over, obfuscates and

muddles the ‘purity’ of lalangue, even if this purity has a seditious and

destructive quality to its power. Lacan adjudicates this process through the

developmental trajectory of the subject such that this ‘covering over’ occurs

at the precise moment when the subject starts using language, acquiring this

ability from its social context. This is necessary in a certain sense since the

subject must come, eventually, to relate socially with other subjects,

communicate and engage in discourses of knowledge, participate in the

everydayness of the world and do other like things. Put differently, when

language is in use, there is always a split between the signifier and the

signified—the subject is estranged from its original relation to lalangue.

The parapsychological literature provides an excellent example of

this. That is, the phenomenon of xenoglossia or, more generally, glossolalia

indicate, I suggest, the ‘underlying’ (or overlaid but still typically

unconscious) stratum of lalangue. The former term, xenoglossia, is usually

taken in a stricter sense such that the speaker is allegedly able to speak in a

semantically intelligible foreign (alien) language that, at least according to

legendary empirical science, would be impossible for the speaker to have

learned. On the other hand, the latter term, glossolalia, is non-intelligible

babble (i.e., speaking in tongues, gibberish), even though the speech may

have a syntactic structure that resembles normal human languages. In an

anecdotal sense, the work of Ian Stevenson (1984) regarding reincarnation

cases and claimants of a past lives is interesting in not only stretching-out

the Lacanian Oedipal structures to reach through longer spacetimes than is

typically accepted, but also in helping to demonstrate Lacan’s concept of

lalangue. Following this logic, the split between the signifier and the

signified, I referred to earlier, would be a certain lostness in the world of

meanings going in the opposite direction of the xenoglossic, at least in

terms of the singular subject, pool of signifiers found in lalangue.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

173

In this way, such a scattering of the chaotic sliding around of

meaning and interconnectedness of lalangue with worldliness leaves the

subject alienated from its ownmost being or, in the terms of Lacanian

theory, the subject is, almost always, a divided subject. The forgoing

emphasis on alienation may be said to be a hallmark of Lacan’s

conceptualization of subjecthood and language development in the sense

that it is precisely because of this lack, the sheer fact that the subject is cut

through the incisiveness of the signifier, that paves the way for how

lalangue may become structured—i.e., the creation of special categories,5

epistemologies, discourses, etc. Since, for Lacan, the subject of analysis is

necessarily a speaking subject, predicated on its ability or failure to signify

its desire, the meaning of lalangue, then it is a matter of enticing the

subject, through various technologies of intervention, to speak as closely as

possible to the real of its territory held within lalangue. Simply,

epistemological coverings—for example, science, religion, idle talk, etc.—

inhabit the domain of this analytic work.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, insofar as there is a

more originary substance—namely, lalangue—from which knowledge as

such is derived, analysis has as its task not the mere suturing of the subject’s

lack, its alienation of its unconscious desire, but a radical exposure to

precisely this lack—a certain reacquaintance with lalangue. This has the

benefit of opening up the field of ‘communication’ or more broadly,

intersubjectivity, to different epistemological modes of expression and

enunciation; for example, non-local, retroactive, etc. This is not to say that

Lacan, intentionally or not, envisioned the application of analytic practice to

induce such fringe, counter-hegemonic or post-epistemological means of

making sense. I am arguing that, on principle, the confrontation with the

real of the object cause of desire necessarily induces a signification that is

‘beyond’, or at least post-scientific, insofar as the unconscious does not

preclude such a reality.

Just such a point, albeit not in terms of parapsychology, is made by

Lacan, “it is in the sense that the effects of lalangue, already there qua

knowledge, go well beyond anything the being who speaks is capable of

enunciating” (Lacan, 1998, p. 139). This beyond, it would appear, is

everything such that it not only grounds the desire of the subject’s

unconscious, in an idiographic and singular way, but also forms the very

5 While not explicitly referenced in this article, it may be prescient to invoke the concept of the

master-signifier familiar to Lacanians and many readers of Lacan. In brief, the master-signifier

is the stopgap in the chain of signifiers that can only have a tautological or self-referential

meaning binding the chain it holds together to a certain empty symbol. Every subject has these,

but there exists, certainly, a difference between various master-signifiers: for example, the

fascist nationalism of national socialism or the commodity fetish of capitalism.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

174

basis by which any form of communication, scientific or otherwise, can

become articulated—when as flush with lalangue as possible, the signifier

becomes truly ‘golden’, carried over the abyss of reference by newly

formed associations streaking across the unconscious. In other words, this

represents a certain synchronistic instance, in the most austere Jungian

sense, whereby the subject and its unconscious meet-up resulting in a kind

of de-alienation, no matter however brief this may be. It may be helpful to

return to the earlier example of the xenoglossic relation the subject has to its

lalangue. Put in this way, the golden signifier I referred to earlier would be

a random syncing together of the subject with its lack that still retains

otherness—not the obliteration of the subject or its aphanisis

(disappearance), but a sublimation—engendering a ‘moment of psi’; one

that gives access to processes that usually remain hidden.

Mentioning, specifically, the emphasis Lacan places on the signifier,

it follows that knowledge practices, and legendary science by extension,

suffers by way of the agency of the signifier. Put into the concept of

lalangue I have been defining, Lacan moves ‘one step out’ explicitly calling

forth the signifier now:

That [scientific] knowledge, insofar as it resides in the shelter of llanguage,

means the unconscious … my hypothesis is that the individual who is affected

by the unconscious is the same individual who constitutes what I call the

subject of a signifier. That is what I enunciate in the minimal formulation that a

signifier represents a subject to another signifier. The signifier in itself is

nothing but what can be defined as a difference from another signifier. It is the

introduction of difference as such into the field, which allows one to extract

from llanguage the nature of the signifier (ce qu’il en est du signifiant). (Lacan,

1998, p. 142, emphasis in original)

Difference, especially in relation to the last clause of the quotation,

foregrounds, through its being marked out by the signifier, the relation

between lalangue and knowledge as such. It is, therefore, in this sense, that

the subject of science can only be defined precisely in terms through its

deferral, the very fact that the signifier represents nothing (i.e., the subject

of science) other than another signifier. This adage articulates the way in

which Lacan understands meaning creation and connection, through the

stringing together of signifiers into relational chains. It is precisely because

the signifier is a certain absence that allows for it to be filled eventually by

meaning. The creation of difference and deferral, the perpetuated filling-in

of meaning, in this way, generates other categories that we are accustomed

to seeing used in the scientific and philosophical literature—e.g., space,

time, identity, otherness, etc.

The precise point is that these categories, and others, are ancillary

insofar as they rely on an iteration, or play, on the lalangue of the

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

175

unconscious; what Lacan calls the “[extraction] from llanguage the nature

of the signifier” (1998, p. 142). This is by no means easy or even

exhaustible such that the infinite productivity of the unconscious ultimately

forecloses its own mastery, any kind of meta-language; hence the famous

Lacanian formula “there is no Other of the Other” (Lacan, 2006, p. 668)—

cf. a master narrative or, very generally, in science studies, a theory of

everything. This is perhaps why Lacan, eventually, comes to situate,

formally, the semiotic structure of science within the aptly named hysteric’s

discourse (Glynos & Stavrakakis, 2002). That is, now within relation to the

other three structures—the discourse of the university, master, and

analyst—the hysteric’s discourse incites, questions, and interrogates the

real, leading to further knowledge production, novelty, scientificity and

ultimately meaning.

To further explain this, the aim of a scientific discourse is the

suturing of the subject as opposed to exposing or forcing the subject to

confront its lack. The suturing gesture of science is inexhaustible and

infinite, which produces a teleology that is structured precisely by trying to

signify further and further meaning. Science is this way because every time

it tries to use a signifier to bridge or suture the gap between the subject and

its lack, science ‘forgets’ and carries the subject’s original lack, via the

signifier, repetitiously into the next signifier. It is in this sense that

Verhaeghe (2002) notes that “the subject of science believes that nature will

reveal to him the final meaning” (p. 137). So, when Lacan calls the

discourse of the science ‘hysteric’, he is not trying to pathologize the

scientist but is drawing out an analogy between how the hysteric in the

clinic incessantly questions the master (e.g., psychiatrist, psychologist,

therapist, etc.) by forcing it to legitimate itself and produce meaning.

Ultimately, however, it is impossible for the master to produce the final

signifier that gives its authority or even being self-consistency, just like

nature cannot produce a final knowledge that will totally encapsulate and

enframe it. The scientist is, therefore, in the position of the hysteric relative

to the natural world—posing questions, interrogating and looking for a

signifier to suture its subject.

In contradistinction, the discourse of the analyst, and psychoanalysis

by extension, tries to do the exact opposite. That is, as opposed to the

gesture of suturing, the analyst uses various interventions, techniques and

strategies to try to first ‘hystericize’ the analysand and then to subvert the

role of the master that the analysand has then placed the analyst in—as the

sujet supposé savoir or the subject supposed to know. To put this into

broader disciplinary terms, a psychoanalytic reading of science

demonstrates how science’s discourse is by its very nature inexhaustible,

how the discipline is hysteric in relation to its object, and then how the

actual analysis ‘turns’ the discourse of the science back on itself to show

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

176

how it presupposes a certain lack. What is unique to parapsychological

science, I suggest, is that psi engages in a kind of auto-analysis of its

discipline, unlike any other scientific discourse. This auto-analysis is

demonstrated by psi’s alikeness to the trickster and as I have tried to

envision it, more technically, in relation to Lacanian theory. As such,

parapsychology is in a unique position to offer commentary on all

methodological forms—what it means to be a science—including not only

legendary empirical science but also formal qualitative measures.

We can now see how this is a very different structural relation

between the analyst and the scientist; namely, whereas science, by its

relation to knowledge, ‘forces’ the real to produce more meaning through

acts of interrogative questioning, pushing toward the suture of the real with

the symbolic, the analyst, on the other hand, stages a confrontation with the

lack of the subject. This, as we have seen, also results in a form of

knowledge production, yet one that is radically less normative, symbolically

mediated and, to put it somewhat bluntly, practical. As such, the analytic

encounter is able to crack open, and give a signifier to, the usually

concealed homogeneity of the signified, which is to say more eruditely, the

lalangue of the unconscious.

In a specific way, this would fulfill, most completely at the end of

treatment, the Lacanian ethical maxim that “the only thing one can be guilty

of is giving ground relative to one’s desire” (Lacan, 1992, p. 321). Yet,

parsed now with figures from parapsychology, it also engenders the subject

to reconnect with its web of significations, the primordiality of lalangue, in

a way that remains truer, less structured by social, scientific, religious, etc.,

knowledges, to its ontological character thereby opening up the

‘possibilities of psi’—its fluid temporal-spatial meaning. The point is that

Lacanian psychoanalysis is an anti-normative intervention that does not aim

for the subject’s functioning, adaptiveness, happiness, coherence or even

wellbeing. Extending this form of psychoanalysis into parapsychological

research, on principle, can re-subjectivize the subject onto modes of

knowing and even being that align more closely to what is normatively

called paranormal or anomalous.

In a contradistinctive sense, the so-called physicalists fail to account

for the antagonism of studying a subject that takes itself as its object, e.g.,

psychology, psychoanalysis, parapsychology or the humanities more

generally, ultimately viewing the findings of the human sciences as

supervening on a more fundamental, mathematical reality. In a counter-

critique, Lacan (2006) writes that “psychical phenomena are thus granted no

reality of their own: those that do not belong to "true" reality have only an

illusory reality. This true reality is constituted by the system of references

that are valid in already established Sciences” (p. 63). This presupposed

‘system of references’ may be likened to what I have, in clinical terms,

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

177

described as the suture of the subject from its lack. Put differently, the

human sciences are subordinate in the sense that the scientific

characteristics that mark them out, such as precision, explanation,

prediction, etc., ultimately defer themselves toward further and further

refinement; i.e., to physics. Lacan says just as much,

The role of psychology is merely to reduce psychical phenomena to this

system and to verify the system by determining through it the very

phenomena that constitute our knowledge of it. It is insofar as this

psychology is a function of this truth that it is not a science. (Lacan, 2006,

p. 63)

At this point, it is certainly old hat to call into question the

scientificity of psychology or the humanities in general. Yet, to be less

polemical and more conceptual, the point, for Lacan, is that the above logic

is misguided precisely because of the relation the sciences have to the

unconscious. Or, putting it differently, theorists in parapsychology that

partake of this exact logic are falling into a trap, leaving themselves

exposed to not only analytic interventions, but also to a kind of symbolic

obliteration of their very object of inquiry, what I have proposed in stark

theoretical terms, following Lacan, to be lalangue.

An excellent example within parapsychology, I suggest, for

illustrating a particular closeness to lalangue would be the semi-literary

character of Louisa Rhine’s extensive case study collection at the Rhine

Research Center (J. Kruth, personal communication, June 14, 2013). These

were not collected under the strictures of a formal research methodology

but, instead, were unsolicitedly delivered over to her, typically with the full

force of the subject behind the narrative—in a kind of abundant, organic

and phenomenological spirit containing all the surplus meaning that this

entails. In similar but more structured sense, as another example, the history

of parapsychology is also ripe with case studies, a form of descriptive data,

which have been used, as Alvarado (1998) has pointed out, to look at the

signification of psi in relation to individual lives.

In a more formal sense, within the qualitative framework proper,

parapsychology has slowly begun to embrace systemic approaches to the

investigation of lifeworld phenomena through the use of pre-established

qualitative methodologies. Some examples of this qualitative and systematic

scholarship include descriptive phenomenological analysis (Glazier, Beck,

& Simmonds-Moore, 2015; Heath, 2000), grounded theory (Simmonds-

Moore, Rhine-Feather, & Hamilton, 2008), and discourse analysis (Wooffitt

& Allistone, 2005). These findings go to show not only the expanded

experimental sense of psi as a legitimate being, the reality of the empiricism

of qualitative data in general, but also the breadth of meaning or territory psi

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

178

covers. The latter point is indicative of, I have suggested, the psychoanalytic

emphasis on the unconscious: more specifically, the way in which lalangue

may become dressed-up in various epistemological garments.

EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION AND THE APRÈS-COUP OF LALANGUE

Yet, are not these very coverings necessary in order to code the

meaning the subject gives to them—the opposite of the nakedness of

lalangue? Indeed, I suggest that a specific parapsychological concept,

namely extrasensory perception (ESP), exposes a certain ‘sham(e)’ in

regard to the concept of psi in general. This is evident, in one respect, with

regard to the fact that there has been very little formal qualitative work done

on ESP as opposed to its relative psychokinesis (PK)6 (for methodological

qualitative work on PK, cf. Glazier, Beck, & Simmonds-Moore, 2015;

Heath, 2000, and on ESP cf., Matschuck, 2011 even this latter study on ESP

employs a methodology that is more idiosyncratic than the qualitative work

that is standardized within the social sciences). In a paradoxical fashion, this

is odd because it would seem that experimentalism or physicalism, of any

approach, would have trouble rendering ESP amenable to its

methodological analysis—i.e., to measurable observation; conversely, with

PK or mind-matter interaction there are clear, observable effects that can be

operationalized and subjected to scientific and statistical analysis.

The paradox of ESP is, therefore, that it contains ipso facto an

ephemeral variable that remains beyond the explicit and overt analysis

demanded by legendary empiricism. Could it be that ESP makes the

unconscious conscious, the implicit explicit, by demonstrating the difficulty

parapsychology has with its own object of study? ESP introduces, in this

way, what has historically troubled parapsychological practices into the

equation: the very fact that psi is dependent, to a degree, upon the care,

concern or meaning it has with regard to its effects. In words that Lacan

would use, giving a signifier to lalangue not only structures the unconscious

thereby allowing for the formation of meaning, but also creates a relation

(or discourse) between the signifying subject and its presupposed signified.

This, of course, does not preclude ESP from experimental

interrogation while making it more agreeable to qualitative analysis, with

6 At the time of this writing, the formal qualitative work available through various academic

databases decidedly favors the analysis of PK. I am counting established and systematized

methods that have been deployed in other disciplines besides parapsychology. These include

descriptive phenomenological analysis, grounded theory and discourse analysis. I am not

considering, however, less systemized and more anecdotal accounts such as personal

narratives, letters or interviews.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

179

the former needing to appropriate signification in terms closer to

mathematics and the latter being able to explore, perhaps more

metaphorically, the process of meaning-making. This is just to say that ESP

seems, prima facie, amenable to qualitative measures in that it presupposes,

at least to a more explicit degree, a subject of signification.

My point is to highlight the antagonism inherent within the trajectory

of parapsychology’s philosophy of science, which has caused it to overlook

one of its own concepts, i.e., ESP, that may help make it more adaptable to

psychoanalytic inquiry; and, even perhaps, given the growth of qualitative

measures in recent years within the American Psychological Association

(Lyons, 2009), provide it more legitimacy in the eyes of the mainstream

scientific community. It is as if, as Braude (1986) points out,

parapsychology research has proceeded along two distinct paths, which, in a

sense, have remained parallel to each other, without any kind of adequate

meeting or convergence.

Precisely here, within this break, I want to introduce the Lacanian

theoretical concept of après-coup, sometimes translated as deferred-action

or retroaction, but more literally meaning afterwardness. Lacan explains this

concept in the following way,

The retroactive effect of meaning in sentences, meaning requiring the last

word of a sentence to be sealed [se boucler]. Nachträglichkeit (remember

that I was the first to extract it from Freud’s texts) or deferred action [après-

coup], by which trauma becomes involved in symptoms, reveals a temporal

structure of a higher order. (Lacan, 2006, p. 711, emphasis in original)

To interpret Lacan, this ‘temporal structure of a higher order’ that he

spoke about above acts as a quasi-mechanism in assuring the consistency

and flow of temporal possibilities. For example, when I think about what I

want to do next, when I develop an intention, I am first swimming in the

pool of signifiers held by lalangue where all possibilities for my next move

exist. However, it is only when I actually select a signifier, when my next

possibility becomes an actuality, that I engage in temporality. The move

from possibility to actuality is always, according to Lacan, a matter of

retroaction or afterwardness since I have to apply the signifier to my action

after it has already passed and since my ‘original’ experience is swimming

around in the chaotic meaning pool of lalangue.

Lacan meant this in a diachronic sense, which means that après-coup

may intercede either from the future or the past. At the same time, the

trauma, or more abstractly, the lack of the subject, refers to the ontological

void in the present that permits the après-coup to take place at all—put into

terms discussed earlier, the lack of the subject is precisely its participation

in temporality, which shows how it is already ahead of itself, so to speak.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

180

This demonstrates, synchronically, to the subject its own cut or emptiness—

the very place that allows for the generation of acts of sublimation,

creativity and signification. The après-coup in this way is the ‘blank’ time

the subject takes to apply meaning to its experience or produce new forms

of knowledge. In the strictest possible sense, the afterwardness of

temporality can never formally coincide with the subject that experiences it

since such a reunion would mark the end of its existence—i.e., another

name for this is death. This is why we have the experience of temporality,

according to Lacan; precisely because such an alignment can only occur

secondarily through the signifier.

The second point, what Lacan calls clinical trauma, or, for the

purposes of this article, the general lack intrinsic to scientific

epistemologies, is articulated by Ruti (2012) in the following way, “it is

because the subject cannot fill its inner void, undo its alienation, in any

definitive manner that it persists as a creature of continued creative

capacity” (p. 128). The issue at stake for the sciences is that this is always

an a priori with respect to any signifying process; that is, on a

psychoanalytic account, the very formation of subjecthood belies such a

kernel of emptiness, a subject of lack, in order to produce something

substantive and meaningful at all. Again, returning to the notion of deferral

or the blank time of après-coup, this gives the subject space, so to speak, in

order to bring into being certain signifiers as opposed to others. Hence, the

notion of science for Lacanian theory is strictly relative insofar as it is one

discursive practice among others, albeit one with a lot of social, financial

and technological power.

Returning to the first point and, specifically, its applicability to

parapsychology, the après-coup of the subject, the afterwardness of

meaning, offers a theoretical device for the phenomenon of ESP,

specifically with regard to its retroactive effects and the parallel this has to

certain ESP research. Stated plainly, since ESP generally deals with the

acquisition of anomalous meaning and Lacanian psychoanalysis provides

structures in which to understand how meaning is generated from the

unconscious, then it follows that Lacan’s theory of the signifier may apply

to the anomalous production of meaning categorized by ESP. In this way,

the afterwardness of meaning explains how a space can be generated—the

wait the subject has between retroactively selecting signifiers (the

experience of temporarily, in general)—that allows for the intrusion of non-

normative or paranormally retrieved signifiers, which is what happens with

ESP. The point is that this possibility is not foreclosed, according to Lacan,

as it may be with other theories that rely on more normative structures or

‘scientific’ metaphors. In fact, it may even be that, given the staunchly anti-

normative nature of Lacanian theory, such paranormal ways of making

meaning are more originary insofar as they challenge everyday notions of

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

181

experience and get the subject back to the interconnectedness of the

signifiers called lalangue.

In other words, when the subject comes to know itself in relation to

the world, or its discursive positioning, it retroactively ‘steals’ signifiers,

carrying information, data, affects, etc., from the ‘temporal structure of a

higher order’ (après-coup) which is to say the space it has marked out in the

unconscious, its singular appropriation of lalangue. The subject may be

either an individual subjectivity or a bundle of practices and knowledges

found in various scientific disciplines. To suggest a methodological protocol

for researchers given the forgoing analysis, perhaps the incorporation of the

burgeoning field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis (Parker, 2005) might aid

in demonstrating this theoretical work in the laboratory or during

methodological inquiry. To offer a more precise tip, the experience of a

subject or individual, when under study, should be kept as pristine as

possible and the researcher must be sure not to add any signifiers to the

subject’s experience. This would be keeping in line with the previous

discussion of Lacan’s four-discourse schema thereby shifting the scientist

away from the hysteric’s discourse and more towards the discourse of the

analyst.

Returning to the theoretical analysis of temporality, it is no surprise

to parapsychologists in the field that retroactive effects, in regard to ESP,

have been demonstrated experimentally, perhaps most notably by Bem

(2011). Bem’s study undertook nine experiments with over 1000

participants that time-reversed traditional psychological experiments such

that the participants’ data were collected prior to the introduction of the

causal stimulus. Across all nine experiments, Bem found statistically

significant results for this retroactive influence. As if to buttress the

malleability of the Lacanian signifier, it is not the case that retroactivity is

exclusively cognitive; as Bem (2011) argues, it doesn’t matter “whether

those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective” (p.

408) just so long as they are meaningful.

The findings of Bem’s paper, however, have come under scrutiny

and even rejection from his colleagues in the psychological and

parapsychological community. Most notably, Alcock (2011) claims that the

Bem study contained lax experimental methodology and, as a result,

concludes the results to be dubious at best. Furthermore, Ritchie, Wiseman,

and French (2012) attempted to replicate three of Bem’s original nine

experiments and discovered no statistical significance in their findings and,

as a result, the researcher’s concluded that they did not find evidence for

psychic abilities or ESP.

If we leave the experimentalists to debate methodological polemics,

then what is so enthralling about the findings of Bem is that they seem to

bring into view a long-standing issue within the parapsychological

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

182

literature: the need for a theoretical structure to elucidate how such

retroaction occurs. As a helpful interlocutor to further illustrate this,

VanOver also relates just such a matter, in a note by Jung:

How could an event remote in space and time produce a corresponding

psychic image when the transmission of energy necessary for this is not even

thinkable? However incomprehensible it may appear, we are finally

compelled to assume that there is in the unconscious something like an a

priori knowledge or an “immediacy” of events which lacks any casual basis.

(Jung, 2014, p. 3403; cited in VanOver, 1972, p. xxv, emphasis in original)

In the above quotation, the a priori knowledge of the unconscious

goes to show the mechanism of après-coup that delivers over its retroactive

discursive placement. In the sense of temporality taken from Lacan, this a

priori knowledge is not knowledge in the substantive or formative sense

such that it contains ‘positive’ meaning. Rather, it is the negativity of

afterwardness that creates a ‘blank’ space into which anything like an

immediacy of events, a synchronistic sense of meaning, can take place in

the first place—it is the funneling of the pool of signifiers found in lalangue

into the signifying chain created by the subject. Taking this away from the

clinic and applying it to science studies, the degree of the subject’s

particularity, that is to say, using the two key examples from this article,

either subjectivity or the psychoanalysis of parapsychology, is

fundamentally irrelevant because the same temporal structure is presumed

by any being with an unconscious. To put this into stricter Lacanian terms,

the symbolic order, or the social-historical culture that divides the subject

through the incision of the signifier, also has as its temporality the very

same mode of retroaction.

As though to accord with Lacan on this point, Nelson and Bancel

(2006) conducted an eight-year study of archive data from random number

generators (RNG) and looked at the data from around the time of large scale

disasters and events such as earthquakes. The analysis revealed statistical

significance in regard to a shift toward orderliness in the RNG necessarily

prior to the actual event occurrence. The researchers concluded that this was

evidence of not only a form of ESP, but also a kind of retroaction or

retrocausation.

What is so interesting with regard to the work of Nelson and Bancel

(2006) is that their findings seem to be hinting at the existence of a large

scale ‘structure’ that interlinks the thought patterns, emotions and

embodiments on a planetary level—what has been called, most consistently

within the literature, a global consciousness. The main finding of the Global

Consciousness Project (GCP) is the correlation between the meaningfulness

of the disaster or event and the degree of orderliness in the RNGs (Nelson &

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

183

Bancel, 2006). What this suggests is that the generation of signification as

such is structurally primary in any discussion of ESP insofar as it seems the

researchers are lending support for this; retroaction occurs necessarily in

relation to that which is most communally meaningful.

From the perspective of Lacanian theory, this is called the symbolic

order, the symbio-historical field of meaning, allowing for the transmission

of knowledges, relationality and historicity and also arbitrating the

formation of societal institutions such as the law, government, and other

juridical functions of the state (Žižek, 1989). Such a stance is decidedly

non-anthropocentric insofar as meaning is not the sole domain of the human

species. In other words, this is not to suggest some kind of naïve animism or

panpsychism whereby even the inorganic or machinic ‘contributes’ meaning

in some way. Rather, the Lacanian point is one of structure and relation

such that meaning is created precisely in this in-between space; almost

similar to Hansen’s notion of interstitiality.

Furthermore, with regard to the production of subjectivity, it is

precisely the signifiers that are most desirous to the subject, having the

greatest bearing on its being, therein coming to mean the most, which puts

into play the higher order temporality of après-coup. It is in this way,

therefore, that when a natural disaster interferes with human daily life (e.g.,

seeing pictures on the news, feeling sorry for the victims, etc.) then meaning

is going to be given over to the symbolic order most retroactively. While

not getting into the particulars of his theory or findings, Ed May (cf.

Decision Augmentation Theory; May, Utts, & Spottiswoode, 1995)

similarly places an emphasis on the retroactive nature of psi, even going so

far as to suggest that PK can be explained in such a way.

As an interesting case in point to DAT theory, one of the researchers

from the original GCP just mentioned (namely, Bancel) has changed his

position. He now suggests that the data collected supports the notion of a

goal-oriented (GO) mechanism that better explains the fluctuations during

world events. He writes that “while there may be something like GC [global

consciousness] somewhere, there is no evidence for it in GCP data. But

there is good evidence for GO [goal-oriented psi]” (Bancel, n.d., p. 1). Such

a conclusion does not, however, settle the debate since, as Kennedy (2001)

says, “shifting goal-oriented psi may possibly contribute to decline effects

for certain experimenters, but this hypothesis does not appear to be the

major cause of elusive psi” (p. 229). Sticking to the parallelism with DAT

theory hinted at earlier, the pressure that Lacanian theory places on this

problematic is through the very retroactive nature of meaning, its après-

coup, which I have argued helps explain why psi seems so elusive to the

researchers in parapsychology.

Parsing this now as succinctly as possible, I suggest that such

retroactive effects are the sine qua non of what constitutes ESP as

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

184

structurally ‘psychoanalytic’ in the first place, as demonstrating the lack not

only at the centre of identity, but also at the very philosophy of science of

parapsychology.

THE SOURCE OF PSI, OR WHO’S DOING THAT?

The shift in Bancel’s premise, from a global consciousness (GC) to

goal-oriented psi (GO), opens up a larger and unsettling topic within the

parapsychological literature in that the source of psi can never, it seems, be

etiologically mapped out. Consequently, researchers question if it is even

possible methodologically to control for this problematic in experiments. As

a case in point, Beischel (2012) phrases the issue in the following terms,

Given the non-local, non-temporal nature of psi, it remains difficult to truly

disentangle the experimenter from the experiment even if the same studies

are conducted by different experimenters or by disinterested researchers. It

seems that no experimental protocol will be able to discern between these

possibilities. (p. 10)

This sentiment is well taken in that, certainly from a purely

physicalist or experimentalist model, the disentanglement that Beischel

alludes to can never be resolved precisely because such an account

presupposes how it becomes meaningful in the first place.

To state openly that belief, in some way, determines the presence of

psi is not saying anything new. Indeed, this phenomenon is known as the

sheep-goat effect in ESP research (Brugger, Landis, & Regard, 1990). The

sheep-goat effect holds that individuals who express a reasonably strong

belief in the existence of psi tend to reliably produce above-chance results

on psi tests. The exact opposite holds true for ‘goats’—namely, those

subjects that are skeptical of psi tend to actually induce psi missing, or psi

below chance, which is still indicative of something anomalous going on

insofar as experimental results should not be predicated on belief,

experimenter or participant, of any kind.

The above line of questioning, however, misses the point by trying to

ascertain a ‘positive’ etiological source for psi; in strictly psychoanalytic

terms, a phantasy structure—what I have referred to earlier as the

epistemological ‘garments’ veiling the primordial lack or cut of the subject.

It is, therefore, not the so-called ‘source of psi’ that is the problem; but,

rather, the very fact that researchers have failed to push this phenomenon,

unique to parapsychological science, to its paroxysm. That is, for

researchers to take serious a Lacanian reading of psi would mean,

simultaneously, to avow psi’s radical negativity—how its ‘meaning’

naturally slides around, as we have seen through lalangue, escaping any

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

185

kind of static and totalizing interpretation that would halt this very sliding.

It does this whether we want it to our not, whether we apply quantitative or

qualitative measures to it.

Hansen (2001) points to the trickster as helping to illustrate such a

point. In slight contrast, as I will argue in the following section, pushing the

source of psi to its most extreme conclusion results in the incarnation of the

Lacanian objet petit a, which “designates nothing but the absence, the lack

of the object, the void around which desire turns” (Zupančič, 2000, p. 18).

The interface between Hansen’s more literary theory and Lacan’s abstract

structures helps demonstrate how psi can now be understood as the objet

petit a of parapsychology—its little object of desire.

OBJET PETIT A AS ABSTRACTION OF THE TRICKSTER

Specifically in relation to Lacanian theory, I have attempted to

thematize the technical concept of lalangue within the rubric of

parapsychology; that is to say, the failure or ‘lack’ of its scientific practices

results precisely in not taking seriously the unconscious of the subject, or

what it means to speak. As a consequence, I have suggested, the singular

and free-roaming meaning tentacles of lalangue become encased within

certain pre-determined parameters of symbolic meaning—i.e., a system of

references that are valid. Moving, now, toward a more specific theorization

within this exact same logic, I suggest that there exists a homology between

what Lacan calls the objet petit a and parapsychology’s object of study, psi.

In the following quotation, Lacan articulates a general sense by

which the axiom, a signifier represents a subject to another signifier,

operates by way of not only the self-analyzing subject within the human

sciences, but also encompasses the whole realm of the production of

epistemologies as such.

Let me reiterate that there is something in the status of science’s object that

seems to me to have remained unelucidated since the birth of science . . . the

question probably cannot be answered without the object’s status in science

as such being thereby modified. The object of psychoanalysis [and the

psychoanalysis of science] . . . is no other than what I have already proposed

about the function played in analysis by object a [objet petit a]. (Lacan,

2006, p. 733)

Let me, first, speak to my specificity assertion earlier; namely, that

what Lacan calls objet petit a has more ‘precision’ than the broad

thematization of lalangue. One way to say this is that objet petit a is the

asignificant manifestation of the unconscious of the speaking subject such

that it ‘holds the place for’ the sliding of signifiers across the surface of

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

186

lalangue. Or, as Zupančič (2000) says “the objet petit a can be understood

as a void that has acquired a form” (p. 18, emphasis in original). In this

way, objet petit a is the very remainder of the signifier as such: the

emptiness at the heart of the subject but which is still perceptible. In other

words, it is not pure negativity because its form still shows up in the

semantic field. Applying this to the study of science, the objet petit a can be

said to simultaneously mark out a regional ontology, the beings that the

science purports to study, while generating meaning that such a contouring

brings about. Put in more simple terms, if the study of parapsychology is the

study of psi, then psi is the objet petit a of its scientificity.

Claims, here, of over-simplification are warranted on the grounds of,

say, not vertically making distinctions among its particulars—

“parapsychology does not just study psi.” This seems clear and is not just a

problem of semantics, which is precisely why Lacanian theory is so helpful

here. Objet petit a shows up contextually as a difference, as Lacan (2006)

told us earlier, whereby “the object’s status in sciences as such being

thereby modified” (p. 733). So, it is not so much psi as such that is

problematic but the very nature of a psychoanalysis of parapsychology,

which precipitates the objet petit a from the ‘unconscious’ taken for granted

by parapsychology, its lack or non-fidelity to lalangue.

Lacan (2006) head nods to just such a suggestion when insinuating,

“one senses that this is a tortuously circuitous process akin to taming.

Object a is not peaceful, or rather one should say, could it be that it does not

leave you in peace?” (p. 733). It would appear that, given the unruly and

somewhat jarring sense by which a subject is forced to position itself in

relation to an objet petit a, as Lacan equates to taming, then its very

investigatory processes not only ought to respect this fact, take into account

its disruptiveness, but also self-reflect on its more general status as a subject

of lack. In other words, a precisely analytic confrontation with an objet petit

a has the power to reconfigure the entire approach, both through

knowledges and values, by which it considers itself a subject.

Given, now, that for Lacanian theory, the object of study for

parapsychology, what has traditionally in the literature been referred to as

psi, is equivalent to the objet petit a of psychoanalysis, then it begs the

question of what kind of investigatory strategies, whether methodological,

metaphoric, institutional, etc., can best elicit a ‘favorable’ response from the

objet petit a—a response that generates, of course, what the

experimentalists call reliable or valid results. This is difficult, if the history

of parapsychology is any indication, but does not preclude, in a strict

philosophical sense, the conceptualization of psi.

In this way, to give objet petit a, within the strict limits of

parapsychology, a literary spin, what better rebellious and unruly character

than what Hansen (2001) suggests by the trickster? Indeed, to say this in

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

187

Lacanian terms: psi is a necessary remainder of the process of signification

that is retroactively posited yet internal to the field of meaning as a

placeholder for the real, the objet petit a of parapsychology’s stakes within

lalangue. Flavored by some of the motifs that Hansen presents to us from

trickster stories and their relation to the paranormal, psi invoked as the

trickster inverts binary oppositions allowing for a certain devotion to a state

of liminality. Such qualities imbue the trickster, and psi on this account,

with the position of anti-structure.

As Hansen (2001) says in his own words, “the term anti-structure has

distinct advantages. It evokes the idea of disruption, of the border between

chaos and order [emphasis added], of being anti-establishment, as well as

suggesting a connection with French structuralism and deconstructionism”

(p. 59). It is precisely this ‘border between chaos and order’ that I was

developing earlier in regard to the place carved out in lalangue by the

politics of parapsychology’s scientific practice—put very simply, how does

the discipline make meaning? The ‘how’ can be answered by referring to its

object of analysis, psi, and the effects that it evokes; what Hansen has

proffered in more literary and archetypal terms as the trickster and what I

have suggested in more abstract and theoretical terms as the objet petit a.

I have submitted Lacanian theory as a more abstract, as opposed to

literary, explication of trickster theory. In turn, it follows that some of the

concepts that have been developed may be able to cover a larger domain of

psi research allowing for linkages between various formal methodologies—

e.g., experimental, qualitative, anecdotal, etc. Again, the point is not the

privileging of one method over another but of trying to ‘traverse’ the

different approaches in order to create something new. Such a reading

brings parapsychology closer to the genre of psychoanalysis as opposed to

the mathematical rubric of the so-called hard sciences. It follows that the

hard sciences are not really ‘hard’ at all, on a Lacanian account, since if psi

ontologically comprises a specific kind of lack, then by relegating it to

physicalism, the hole they wish to plug has already been filled with the anti-

signifiers of lalangue, making the failings of privileging a methodological

protocol over another all the more perilous.

IN THE FUTURE

The forgoing analysis worked to develop a theoretically grounded

Lacanian reading of parapsychology and its scientificity that created, in

turn, an additional intervention via the very object of parapsychological

study, psi, challenging the hegemony of physicalism and, by extension, the

privileging of legendary experimentalism. This was initiated by a ‘return to

the unconscious’ of parapsychology and, in particular, the hypostatized

meaning the discipline filters out of Lacan’s concept of lalangue. The use of

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

188

certain ESP research to demonstrate the strategy of après-coup helped to

show how the temporality of meaning may allow for ‘anomalous’ signifiers

to be selected as opposed to those that are more normatively circulated.

Finally, it follows that, given the uncanny correspondences between the

trickster nature of psi phenomena and the objet petit a of the Lacanian

clinic, it may be that psi as such is actually ‘analyzing’ the very discipline

that seeks to study it—playfully eluding, frustrating and even deceiving the

practitioners of parapsychology.

To continue to pursue this line of reasoning, I suggest the

incorporation of other Lacanian concepts vis-à-vis parapsychology or,

perhaps more accurately at this point, the broad study of psi in general—

what has fashionably been referred to as exceptional experiences,

exceptional psychology or anomalous psychology. Just one such concept,

the jouissance7 of the body, may aid in theorizing the relationship between

the production of meaning and the historically and developmentally

determined embodiment of the claimant thereby informing formal

methodological or experimental research. That is, to gloss this briefly, the

agitation (jouissance) of the body through its reaction to the signifier

unlocks, psychoanalytically, non-normative modes of signifying the

unconscious, bringing the subject closer to the truth of its desire. Or, as Ruti

(2012) puts it, “bodily jouissance [is] inherently unrepresentable through

language; jouissance [is] the basic stumbling block of signification, the

riddle in the face of which the signifier falter[s]” (p. 119). On account of the

preceding analysis, using Lacan’s diagnostic schema could help inform psi

researchers by providing a map of the ideographic relationships the

claimants have to their desire and jouissance: typically, these structures are

neurosis, perversion and psychosis. These are not pathological labels but

ways in which subjects, in the laboratory or elsewhere, could be

categorized. This would help researchers understand how psi may function

differently for each of these subjectivities—for example, the pervert’s

jouissance is much less structured by the slippage from signifier to signifier,

the desire for more knowledge, and more by its instrumental position,

7 Lacan’s concept of jouissance is central to understanding how the signifier is tied to or

relates with the body. The majority of Lacanians leave the term untranslated since its precise

meaning depends upon the theoretical context in which it is employed. For my purposes,

jouissance may be rendered as surplus or agitated pleasure. More generally, however, as Bailly

(2009) points out, the “most commonplace meaning has the sexual connotation of ‘orgasm’ . . .

jouissance is also a legal term denoting the right of someone to enjoy the legitimate use of a

property” (p. 118). My motivation for invoking this term in the “In The Future” section has to

do with its elaborate relationship to the body requiring additional work by researchers to situate

how different drive-desire forms of particular or individual claimants, the way they carry their

jouissance, may reveal affinities for psi-like abilities.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

189

becoming an object for the signifier. Understanding these differences may

help reveal ways of coming to knowledge that are decidedly counter-

hegemonic and, what may be more apropos to psi phenomena, that are

fringe, exceptional or anomalous.

To be even more precise, on the level of the body, the way in which

the drive (trieb) is converted into the desire of the signifier, its

alchemicalization, could illustrate how the scientific practice of

parapsychology, or the idiographic productions of subjectivity, correspond

or not to the “pulse of the bodily real” (Ruti, 2012, p. 18)—the Lacanian

ethical injunction that the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground

relative to one’s desire. Perhaps such a liberation of desire from its normal

place within various kinds of policing frameworks, which work to foreclose

or suture the open-endedness of meaning inherent to the polyvalence of

lalangue, could produce effects that are considered more paranormal. This

would have the benefit of exposing ‘the containment of psi’—that is to say

the normative structures that have kept these modes of meaning at bay—

while, simultaneously, unleashing this fixity held within the body of the

subject. Consequently, developing a proper parapsychological theory of the

relationship between drive and desire, in the psychoanalytic sense, would

take into account embodiment itself thereby helping laboratory or

qualitative researchers better contextualize the subject in front of them.

In the final analysis, then, perhaps it really is psi as such that should

take the lead in teaching us about the nature of paranormal experiences and

scientific methodologies in general. By resisting the urge to contain neatly

the wily filiation psi has to meaning, something profoundly unexpected has

the potential to arise therein recursively informing the technologies of

research, writing or speaking that we bring to bear upon it—thus, the

property of auto-analysis unique to psi and parapsychological inquiry. As

Lacan (1998) intimated to us at the onset, such a fidelity to the fecundity of

psi allows for the repetitious purification of the signifier, in this case the

magician, to perform his trick “in still purer form” (p. 36). By following

suit, we may not be able to uncover the magician’s illusion or subvert the

trickster’s ploy, but we can learn from the reciprocal logic they employ—to

develop a strategy, theory or practice that must be just as cunning, if not

more, than the one used to dupe.

THE AUTHOR

Jacob W. Glazier, PhD ABD is pursuing a degree in Psychology in

Consciousness and Society at the University of West Georgia. Dr. Glazier’s

research tends towards a transdisciplinary approach via theoretical and

philosophical models and includes subjects like critical theory, embodiment,

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

190

and desire as well as their relation to praxis and clinical practice. He is

working on his dissertation, which deploys Lacanian psychoanalysis and

schizoanalysis.

REFERENCES

Alcock, J. E. (1981). Parapsychology, science or magic?: a psychological

perspective. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Alcock, J. E. (2011). Back from the future: Parapsychology and the Bem

affair. Skeptical Inquirer, 35(2), 31-39.

Alvarado, C. S. (1998). ESP and altered states of consciousness: An

overview of conceptual and research trends. The Journal of

Parapsychology, 62(1), 27-63.

Bailly, L. (2009). Lacan: A beginner’s guide. Oxford, England: Oneworld

Publications.

Beischel, J. (2012). A quarter century of applied research. Journal of

Parapsychology, 76(supplement), 9-10.

Bancel, P. (n.d.). Determining that the GCP is a goal-oriented effect: A

short history. Unpublished manuscript.

Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous

retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 100, 407-425.

Braude, S. E. (1986). The limits of influence: Psychokinesis and the

philosophy of science. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc.

Brugger, P., Landis, T., & Regard, M. (1990). A ‘sheep-goat effect’ in

repetition avoidance: Extra-sensory perception as an effect of

subjective probability? British Journal of Psychology, 81(4), 455-468.

Evrard, R. (2014). Heterodoxies’ merging: Lacanian approaches to

exceptional experiences. Journal of Exceptional Experiences and

Psychology, 2(1), 5-13.

Felser, J. M. (2001). Philosophical sensitives and sensitive philosophers:

Gazing into the future of parapsychology. International Journal of

Parapsychology, 12(1), 53-82.

Glazier, J. W. (2014). A phenomenological evolution of parapsychology’s

philosophy of science. Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological

Approaches to the Paranormal, 5(1), 32-43.

Glazier, J. W., Beck, T., & Simmonds-Moore, C. (2015). A

phenomenological analysis of the relationship between grief, emotional

stress and anomalous experiences. Mortality, 20(3), 248-262.

Glynos, J. & Stavrakakis, Y. (Eds.). (2002). Lacan & science. New York:

Karnac Books, Other Press LLC.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

191

Grant, D. C. & Harari, E. (2005). Psychoanalysis, science and the seductive

theory of Karl Popper. Australian and the New Zealand Journal of

Psychiatry, 39, 446-452.

Grünbaum, A. (1977). Is psychoanalysis a pseudo-science? Karl Popper and

Sigmund Freud. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, 31(3), 333-

353.

Hansen, G. P. (2001). The trickster and the paranormal. United States of

America: Xlibris Corporation.

Hansen, G. P. (2016). The paranormal, the trickster, and structuralist

concepts. In R. Nelson (Chair), Accessing the exceptional, experiencing

the extraordinary. Convention conducted at the first combined

convention of the Parapsychological Association (59th) and the Society

for Scientific Exploration (35th), Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Heath, P.R. (2000). The PK zone: A phenomenological study. The Journal

of Parapsychology, 64, 53-72.

Jung, C. G. (2014). C. G. Jung: The collected works. Volume I-XX (H.

Read, Ed.). New York: Routledge.

Kennedy, J. E. (2001). Why is psi so elusive? A review and proposed

model. The Journal of Parapsychology, 65, 219-246.

Kennedy, J. E. (2016). Coming to terms with the trickster. In R. Nelson

(Chair), Accessing the exceptional, experiencing the extraordinary.

Convention conducted at the first combined convention of the

parapsychological association (59th) and the society for scientific

exploration (35th), Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Lacan, J. (1988). Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”. In J. P. Muller & W.

J. Richardson (Eds.), J. Mehlman (Trans.), The purloined Poe: Lacan,

Derrida & psychoanalytic reading (pp. 28-54). Baltimore, MD: The

John Hopkins University Press.

Lacan, J. (1992). The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. The seminar of

Jacques Lacan, Book VII (D. Porter, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, Ed.). New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Lacan, J. (1998). On feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge,

1972-1973. Encore, the seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (B. Fink,

Trans & J.-A. Miller, Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.

Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink,

Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.

Lyons, A. (2009). Is the American Psychological Association ready to

accept a division for qualitative inquiry? The Humanistic Psychologist,

37(1), 101-107.

Matschuck, A. (2011). Non-local correlations in therapeutic settings? A

qualitative study on the basis of weak quantum theory and the model of

pragmatic information. Axiomathes: An International Journal in

Ontology & Cognitive Systems, 21(2), 249-261.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

192

May, E. C., Utts, J. M, & Spottiswoode, S. J. P. (1995). Decision

augmentation theory: Toward a model of anomalous mental

phenomena. The Journal of Parapsychology, 59, 195-220.

Nelson, R. D. & Bancel, P. A. (2006). Anomalous anticipatory responses in

networked random data. In D. P. Sheehan (Ed.), Frontiers of time:

Retrocausation – experiment and theory (pp. 260-272). American

Institute of Physics Conference Proceedings #863 for the 87th Meeting

of the AAAS Pacific Division, Melville, NY: American Institute of

Physics.

Parker, I. (2005). Lacanian discourse analysis in psychology: Seven

theoretical elements. Theory & Psychology, 15(2), 163-182.

Radin, D. (2006). Entangled minds: Extrasensory experiences in a quantum

reality. New York: Paraview Pocket Books.

Rhine, J. B., Pratt, J. G., Stuart, C. E., Smith, B. M., & Greenwood, J. A.

(1940). Extra-sensory perception after sixty years. New York: Henry

Holt and Company.

Ritchie, S. J., Wiseman, R., & French, C. C. (2012). Failing the future:

Three unsuccessful attempts to replicate Bem’s ‘retroactive facilitation

of recall’ effect. PLoS ONE, 7(3), 1-5.

Ruti, M. (2012) The singularity of being: Lacan and the immortal within.

New York: Fordham University Press.

Saussure, F. (1959). Course in general linguistics (C. Bally & Sechehaye,

A., Eds. & W. Baskin, Trans.). New York: The Philosophical Library,

Inc.

Simmonds-Moore, C., Rhine-Feather, S., & Hamilton, J. (2008). A

qualitative exploration of spontaneous psychokinetic phenomena. In S.

Sherwood & B. Carr (Eds.), The Parapsychological Association, Inc.

51st Annual Convention & The Incorporated Society for Psychical

Research 32nd Annual Convention: Proceedings of presented papers

(pp. 360-363). Winchester, England: The Parapsychological

Association and The Society for Psychical Research.

Stevenson, I. (1984). Unlearned language: New studies in xenoglossy.

Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.

Tiffany, D. (2013). In the poisonous candy factory. London: Capsule

Editions.

Tressoldi, P. E., Storm, L., & Radin, D. (2010). Extrasensory perception

and quantum models of cognition. NeuroQuantology, 8(4), 581-587.

VanOver, R. (1972). Introduction. In R. VanOver (Ed.), Psychology and

extrasensory perception (pp. viii-xxxii). New York: The New

American Library, Inc.

Verhaeghe, P. (2002). Causality in science and psychoanalysis. In J. Glynos

& Y. Stavrakakis (Eds.), Lacan & science (pp. 119-146). New York:

Karnac Books, Other Press LLC.

Australian Journal of Parapsychology

193

White, R. A. (1994). The need for double vision in parapsychology: The

feminist standpoint. In L. Coly & R. A. White (Eds.), Women and

parapsychology (pp. 241-252). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.

Wooffitt, R. & Allistone, S. (2005). Towards a discursive parapsychology:

Language and the laboratory study of anomalous communication.

Theory Psychology, 15(3), 325-355.

Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.

Zupančič, A. (2000). Ethics of the real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso.

Department of Psychology

University of West Georgia

1601 Maple Street

Carrollton, GA 30118

USA

Email: jacob.w.glazier@gmail.com

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

Determining that the GCP is a Goal-oriented Effect: A Short History

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2017

Peter Amalric Bancel

I've worked on the Global Consciousness Project since 2001. After years of analysis, I have concluded that the GCP effect is a goal-oriented experimenter effect, and that it does not provide evidence of the hypothesized Global Consciousness. Since there was some discussion (apparently) at the recent Convention of the Parapsychological Association, I thought I'd write a summary to explain how I've come to my conclusions, and why, after looking at both sides, this is the only view consistent with the data.

Causality in science and psychoanalysis

Chapter

Mar 2018

Paul Verhaeghe

Heterodoxies’ merging: Lacanian approaches to exceptional experiences

Article

Jan 2014

Renaud Evrard

A quarter century of applied research

Article

Jan 2012

Julie Beischel

ESP and altered states of consciousness: An overview of conceptual and research trends

Article

Mar 1998

C.S. Alvarado

This article is a review of conceptual and research trends regarding the relationship between altered states of consciousness and ESP, and its connection to cultural developments from the middle of the 1800s to the 1990s, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. It is argued that interest in these topics has been shaped in part by their social context, such as the movements of mesmerism, spiritualism and dynamic psychiatry during the nineteenth century. Similarly, in later periods, developments in the relationship between altered states of consciousness and ESP were affected by popular culture's interest in the exploration of consciousness and was shared, to some extent, by psychology, as seen in studies of hypnosis, dreams, the psychedelic state, and other topics. During the modern periods, researchers have conducted systematic research on the subject more than ever before, as is dear from dream, hypnosis, relaxation, and ganzfeld studies. Although it is sometimes assumed that techniques such as the ganzfeld induce alterations of consciousness that affect ESP performance, it is argued that this is not necessarily the case, and that recent research has abandoned the exploration of the interaction between altered states and ESP. The current trend is towards the exploration of multivariate factors affecting ESP performance in the ganzfeld, and this emphasis neglects the study of altered states per se.

Decision augmentation theory: Toward a model of anomalous mental phenomena

Article

Jan 1995

The PK zone: A phenomenological study

Article

Mar 2000

P.R. Heath

There has been a recent increase in qualitative research to help uncover process oriented aspects of performing psi. Informal reports (Isaacs, 1992; Stanford, 1977/1986) and descriptive analyses (Gissurarson, 1997) have revealed a number of factors that seem to correlate with PK performance. This study used the phenomenological method to analyze the spontaneous and intentional experiences of eight participants to try to better understand its meaning and nature. There appears to be one core PK experience, which is far more fluid than normal experience. Rather than discrete elements, there are constituents that form a fluid pattern, organic in quality. Fifteen constituents were found for all PK experiences (with 2 more that appear in intentional PK). They are: 1) the presence of an altered state of consciousness; 2) a sense of connection to the target or other people that involves a transcendent level of interconnectedness; 3) a feeling of dissociation from the individual ego identity; 4) suspension of the intellect; 5) the presence of playfulness and/or peak levels of emotion; 6) a sense of energy, that may have a transcendent quality; 7) the physical state may contribute to, and reflect, PK energy; 8) awareness is focused; 9) release of effort/attention; 10) an altered sense of time; 11) investment; 12) openness to the experience; 13) impact on feelings and/or worldview; 14) a sense of "knowing"; and 15) overlap with ESP. With intentional PK there are also: 16) guiding the process; and 17) trusting the process. This paper briefly reviews some of the more important aspects of these constituents, and how it might impact on our understanding of PK and future research.

A phenomenological analysis of the relationship between grief, emotional stress and anomalous experiences

Article

Jun 2015

Mind-matter interaction (MMI) is understood in most existing literature relevant to the topic as a subjective experience of physical matter being affected by one’s own mind or the mind of another person in an anomalous manner. Much of the scholarship found on this phenomenon was written from a parapsychological perspective and, as such, has primarily utilised methods of research more or less in line with the natural sciences (i.e. statistical analyses). In studying MMI from a qualitative perspective, instead of more traditional types of psychological experimentation, this article suggests that researchers can better understand the contextual, relational and subjective nature of such phenomena. For this study, several written descriptions were analysed using a descriptive, phenomenological method, with the objective of learning more about some ways that MMI is experienced from a psychological perspective, particularly in relation to issues of personal crisis, the significance of death and/or traumatic encounter. Overall, six descriptions of MMI were analysed, with six constituents of MMI presenting themselves as especially salient. These constituents are: (1) overwhelming emotionality; (2) feeling initial surprise or disbelief; (3) meaning-making centred around the metaphor of physical energy; (4) issues centred around personal control and/or agency; (5) meaning around the event is constructed in primarily communal ways; and (6) accompaniment and openness to other anomalous experiences.

Course in General Linguistics

Article

Mar 1961

Seminar on "The Purloined Letter"

Article

Jan 1972
Yale Fr Stud

Lacan, Psi and the Trickster: A Psychoanalysis of Parapsychology

Abstract

Recommended publications

Lacan's Life, the Universe, and Vincenzo Natali's Cube

The analytical immanence

Beyond the limits of descriptive introspection: The organizational unconscious and the laws of assoc...

Psychanalyse et normativité : la question cisgenre