18. 1973: Some Notes on Psychoanalytic Ideas About Mysticism

This paper was originally written for a book of papers by her colleagues in honour of Paula Heimann's seventy-fifth birthday.

This paper began when I became aware of a need to look at psychoanalysts' ideas about mysticism, partly because of occasionally having patients who practised some form of meditation. This paper is therefore an account of what I found, beginning in the first part with a look at what my own ideas about it had been, both before and after becoming an analyst, and going on, in the second part, to see what has been written about it by other analysts. While writing both parts I have in fact become aware of a process going on; I can think of no better description for it than Bion's phrase (though it is a formulation that I did not in fact discover till near the end of this study) — ‘an idea in search of a thinker’.1

With this in mind I now remembered that a first hint of such a preoccupation had occurred, in 1916, in a conversation with a schoolfriend, a very intelligent girl who won a Mathematics scholarship to Cambridge, about the nature of thinking. The discussion had ended with us both agreeing that ‘it thinks you’.2 Also, it was partly this same preoccupation which led me, in 1926, to try and record, in diary form, the results of practising different kinds of attention, especially a wide unfocused kind. This was an undertaking which eventually resulted in my first book and its sequel.3 Amongst the great number of letters that I received about the first book were a few that made me realize that some of the