You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At the start of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud famously confesses, or perhaps boasts, that he has never experienced the “oceanic,” what his friend, Romain Rolland, describes as “a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded” (1930, p. 64). The topic has come up since Rolland posits that such a feeling is the fons et origo of religion. Rolland believes that various churches and religious systems have tapped this source for their energy, directing it into specific channels, even exhausting it. Not only does Freud jettison Rolland's notion that the oceanic feeling is the wellspring of religion, but he resists also the idea that it is “primary”: “From my own experience I could not convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling.” He regards it, instead, as “strange,” as failing badly to fit in “with the fabric of our psychology” (p. 65)—to the point that it provokes in Freud the urge to find a psychoanalytic explanation for such an anomalous feeling.
Although Freud acknowledges a porous internal boundary between the ego and the id, he believes that in general the ego “maintain[s] clear and sharp lines of demarcation” (p. 66) from the external world, with a few exceptions. Love, for example, tends to melt the boundary between the beloved and the ego of the lover. Some pathologies too threaten the border between ego and world, when aspects of one's body and even mental life appear alien, beyond the ego, or when one locates a piece of the ego in the world. Such blurring of the boundary between ego and world is irregular, if not a sign of illness.