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We can't know whether Sigmund Freud would have said anything at all about the psychology of mysticism had the novelist Romain Rolland not written him a letter in which he asked Freud's opinion about what he called the “oceanic feeling.” Freud's comments suggest that the subject was not unknown to him, but that it was an uneasy one for him. To feel in immediate touch with the external world, identify subjectively with it, the screen between perception and perceiver absent, or to report periods in time without awareness of transience—these carried a note of the uncanny, which Freud attributed to defensive incursions of the unconscious on present consciousness, with a return to the undifferentiated unity of mother and infant. Nor was the frequent alliance of such experiences with religious claims likely to make them welcome to analysis other than as symptoms to be diagnosed. The atmosphere of radical positivism that psychoanalysis breathed from its beginnings did not encourage recognition of unitive experience as part of the wealth of what it means to be human—as art, for example, was treated. Ana-Maria Rizzuto (1998), in her illuminating study of Freud's atheism, quotes his revealing and typically honest words to Rolland: “To me mysticism is just as closed a book as music” (citing Freud's letter to Rolland [Freud 1960]).
Dan Merkur, a Toronto psychoanalyst and noted scholar in the psychology of mysticism, in effect illustrates in this book some of the ways that analysts more sympathetic than Freud to unitive experience have accounted for it. Merkur's painstaking summaries of the theoretical developments on which these analysts rely show in each instance the structures, some innovative, some not, on which they severally understand mystical experience. If not an exhaustive review of their overall theoretical contributions, the book is a good introduction to them. What is most noteworthy, however, is that these analysts knew at first hand one