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about this!) However, let me suggest that at this time, April 28, 1885, as the memory of his pact was revived and as the first severe criticisms of his cocaine work were starting to surface, Freud burned his own written pact along with his other notes and writings. Of course, the memory remained to serve later as the motive for his denial of such a pact in the Haitzmann paper. One other piece of possibly relevant evidence for Freud’s making two pacts is that he destroyed his letters and personal writings two times in his life—the first in April 1885, the second in 1907.144 This latter date would have been about nine years after his proposed second pact—a “pact” that others suggest took place near the end of his self-analysis (i.e., circa 1898).
For my part, I find it hard to choose between these two hypotheses. But let us now leave the pact issue to focus on a related issue: Freud’s involvement with the occult. It is clear that Freud was far from being a consistent scientific rationalist. Freud and the OccultThroughout his life, Freud was strongly attracted to the occult in various forms. Ernest Jones gives a great deal of evidence for Freud’s involvement in such phenomena.145 As to the reality of spirits, telepathy, and the like, Freud vacillated rather sharply between a very skeptical “no” and a believing “yes.” His relationship with the occult had certain important similarities to his relationship with religion. In both, there was a tendency to public denial and private acceptance, no doubt expressing Freud’s great ambivalence. For example, all of Freud’s publications relating to psychical or occult forces provided rationalistic interpretations in terms of psychological processes, mainly unconscious. But in private conversations and in his letters, Freud voiced very different sentiments. And Jones admits that Freud’s favorite quotation, when such questions arose, was “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”146 Freud was often quite superstitious—a fact that he admitted on several occasions. He was, in particular, almost obsessed with numbers, especially with those that he thought foretold the year of his death. (Two of Freud’s psychoanalytic colleagues, Jung and Ferenczi, were very involved in the occult and at times had a strong influence on him.147) There were moments when Freud expressed great enthusiasm for psychical research, and he once wrote that perhaps if he had his life to live over again he would “devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis.”148 Later, he denied that he had in fact written this, thus revealing his ambivalence and repression of the issue.149 Freud was partic- |