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After 20 years as an academic student of religion who was interested in applied psychoanalysis, the author of this book trained as a clinician and experienced, as he says, a radical reorientation to psychoanalytic literature: he found himself appreciating the relevance to mysticism of the psychoanalytic writings of Otto Rank, Eric Fromm, Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Hans W. Loewald, Wilfred Bion, James Grotstein, Neville Symington, and Michael Egan.
Because most psychoanalysts scorn and ignore mysticism, the mystical character of the writings of clinical psychoanalysts who were or are mystics has rarely been recognized … I have examined both their explicit remarks about mysticism and whatever in their thinking is implicitly informed by their psychoanalytic orientations to mysticism. What emerges is a sea change in the understanding and practice of both psychoanalysis and mysticism. (p. v)
Merkur makes his case carefully for the mysticism of these authors— sometimes against their own refutation—and his detailed arguments must be followed to be appreciated. I can highlight only some of them, and hope that the quotes will do Merkur justice. The definitions of mysticism (William James and Evelyn Underhill: union with the Absolute, with a sense of illumination), that were taken for granted by Freud and almost all other psychoanalytic writers, assuming that mystical experiences were one and the same, are mistaken, for “[t]he experiences are as individual as the dreams of sleep” (p. 1).
He starts with Freud and “the psychoanalytic orthodoxy that treated Freud's theory of the oceanic feeling as a definitive formulation, [and among other mistakes] ignored all else that he had written of mysticism”