Richard Reichbart, JD, PhD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst. For thirty five years, he has maintained a private practice for the treatment of adults, adolescents and children in Northern New Jersey. In addition, he is a short story writer, a parapsychologist, and a poet. He is author of The Paranormal Surrounds Us: Psychic Phenomena in Literature, Culture, and Psychoanalysis. Prior to his career in psychology, he worked as an attorney focusing on civil rights and native American issues.

Here he suggests that great writers portray psychic phenomena in a realistic manner. This fact is generally ignored by both parapsychologists and literary critics. He focuses on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which Hamlet applied parapsychological principles in order to determine whether the ostensible ghost of his father was real and whether the information conveyed by the ghost was accurate. He also describes shared dream experiences in both Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

(Recorded on November 21, 2020)

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Published on December 4, 2020