Psychoanalysis did not emerge in a vacuum. With hindsight, we can see that it was - at least in part - a response to a dual crisis in the Northern European world at the end of the nineteenth century: a crisis of religious faith, and a crisis about knowledge and the possibility of meaning. With help from Henry Scott Holland and Robert Browning, this paper seeks to evoke these crises, and then to explore the way in which Freud's psychoanalysis, based on the practice of ‘evenly hovering attention’, introduced a secularized world to the practice of ‘unknowing’ which had previously been the preserve of the mystics. Similarities between the work of analysis and the mystical quest are explored, and it is suggested that both are forms of knowing, in which meaning is able to emerge through a process of mutual participation in being.