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Being a West African who grew up observing the interaction of the numinous along with palpable reality, and avowedly jaded by what humans do to each other, with each other, and for each other with fateful ironies and occasional indices of hope, I shuddered at having to review these two books by Michael Eigen and Eric Rhode. I shudder when I feel invited to see the mystical when the vicissitudes of instinctual trends continue to show themselves as subtle or hard, undeniable facts and actual realities. Nevertheless, these two well-read psychoanalysts ultimately managed to expand my horizons.
In The Psychoanalytic Mystic, Eigen's hope is that, if he speaks psychoanalytically “around the subject of mysticism, or from it, well enough, something of value will get communicated to the reader” (p. 31) and himself. In his view, “discussions of mystical awareness tend to undo themselves because of the paradoxical nature of the experiencing involved” (p. 31; italics added).
Since Eigen wants his readers to read around and think around the subject, I read The Psychoanalytic Mystic twice; first to get a sense of the whole and second to find a way to articulate his contribution. I sensed that Bion's (1988) paper “Notes on Memory and Desire” might be a suitable pivot to return to. In that paper, Bion wrote as follows: “Every session attended by the psychoanalyst must have no history and no future” (p. 17). Why?
What is “known” about the patient is of no further consequence: it is either false or irrelevant. If it is “known” by the patient and analyst, it is obsolete. If it is “known” by the one and not the other, a defense is operating.
Page 308The only point of importance in any session is the unknown. Nothing must be allowed to distract from intuiting that. (p. 17)
Bion called the unknowable truth “O” when both analyst and analysand feel the experience of it to be catastrophic. His answer to the catastrophic dread of experiencing “O” is faith (“F”). By “F,” Bion meant the analyst's willing