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Meissner's Ignatius may be of particular interest to those of us who ponder about formulations of mystical religious experiences which might be compatible with our understanding of psychodynamic processes. His previous work suggests that Meissner, who is both a Jesuit and a (North American) psychoanalyst, may long have been reflecting on these issues.
If we share this concern, we might do best to start with the book's final chapter, ‘The spiritual ascent’, which turns on Meissner's understanding of Winnicott's concept of illusion. This, he points out, is very different from Freud's. For Freud, mystical experiences were regressions to states of infantile dependence; Winnicott conceived of transitional experiences and potential spaces. The hallucinated breast of Winnicott's theory can coincide with a breast presented by the mother at the very moment at which the infant desires and imagines it. At that moment infant and breast are at one both subjectively and objectively. Meissner here considers mystical religious experience as an experience in potential space, the religious object as an object to be met there. An interesting possibility.
The book is best taken as a commentary on this idea. Hence, after ‘The spiritual ascent’, I recommend Chapters 16, 17 and 19, ‘The mystic’, ‘The ascetic’ and ‘Mysticism’, before starting more conventionally at Chapter one. Readers particularly interested in the problems of epistemology and phenomenology may likewise prefer to pick and choose to start with. The introductory section on historiography, psychohistory and psychobiography was very instructive.