Ramakrishna and the Mystical Experience

The psychoanalytic understanding of any phenomenon begins with the narrative, with the echoes and reverberations of individual history. The individual I have selected for my own explorations in mysticism is the 19th-century Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna. He is a particularly apt choice for a psychoanalytic study of ecstatic mysticism since Freud's observations on the mystical experience, on what he called the “oceanic feeling,” an omnibus label for all forms of extreme mystical experience, were indirectly occasioned by Ramakrishna's ecstasies.

It was the biography of Ramakrishna that Romain Rolland was working on when he wrote to Freud in 1927 to tell him that though he found his analysis of religion (in “The Future of an Illusion”) “justé,” he would ideally have liked Freud to “make an analysis of spontaneous religious feelings, or more exactly, religious sensations which are entirely different from religion proper and much more enduring” (Harrison, 1979, p. 409) Rolland went on to call this sensation “oceanic,” without perceptible limits, and mentioned two Indians who had such feelings and “who have manifested a genius for thought and action powerfully regenerative for their country and for the world.” Rolland added that he himself had all his life found the oceanic feeling to be a source of vital revival. Freud's response to Rolland, his analysis of the “oceanic feeling,” was then spelled out in “Civilization and its Discontents” (1930). It is highly probable that the term oceanic feeling itself is taken from Ramakrishna's imagery to describe the ineffable. For instance, one of