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Karl Rahner is a hero of mine, and has been since my days as a graduate student in theology during the 60s in Paderborn, Germany. In the winter of 1966, he visited our small Philosophe-Theologische Fakultaet to debate the ecumenical aspects of their two theological approaches with an eminent Lutheran theologian. Rahner had worked to craft the document on ecumenism at the Vatican II Council, and his interest and discussion with us students was lively and inspiring.
Thus, I was surprised and gratified to see that Susan Parlow used Karl Rahner to help bridge another gap, the one between mystical theology and the mystical aspects of psychoanalysis. Jung had tried to build this bridge but ran into the earlier prejudice against such an approach, which was described at the time as ‘religion’ and thus rejected. Such thinking seems over the decades to have come of age and to be further developed by Ghent, Bion, Eigen and others, all of whom are cited by Parlow.
The core of the similarity between mystical theology and mystical psychoanalysis is the potential for a person to ‘come alive’, aware, awake, as if infused in some mysterious way with the ‘Spirit of life’ so that, in Parlow's words, ‘my thoughts shifted … to an acute awareness that I was alive, life was precious and tragic and there was a joy in that even as I walked the gum-stained sidewalks of Manhattan on a hot day’ (p. 571).
This coming alive can be found in various psychoanalytic writings. For example, Emmanuel Ghent quotes Michael Eigen,
Certainly, some patients seemed to be aware, dimly or increasingly, of a force in them to do with growth, growth towards their own shape, also as something that seemed to be sensed as driving them to break down false inner organizations which do not really belong to them … patients felt they were being drawn down out of the world as though by a magnet towards a sense of self they knew they had at bottom …