Discussion of Roderic Gorney's Article, Of Divers Things: Preliminary Note on the Dynamics of Scuba Diving

In the mushrooming literature on man's adaptation to “unusual environments”—be it above or below the earth's surface, simulated or “for real”—only slight attention has been paid to the psychodynamic implications, let alone to the evocation of fantasies. The first order of business generally has been the determination of man's physiological adaptive capacity, secondly his performance efficiency and, only as a kind of afterthought, has there been concern with the psychological meaning, the affective and motivational impact of the situation on a given person. In his timely contribution Dr. Gorney provides us with a psychoanalytic hypothesis concerning the impact of one class of unusual environments—the ocean as experienced by the scuba diver.

Starting with the observation that, despite a host of reality dangers, the diver typically experiences a state of “peaceful complacent euphoria,” Dr. Gorney posits a synergic relationship between the physiological changes that occur in a hypodynamic environment and the wishful fantasies it triggers, the wishful fantasies presumably being mediated by the symbolic ocean-mother equation. In other words, the substantial similarities between the scuba diving experience and the mother-infant experience (both physiologically and symbolically) revive impulses and fantasies pertaining to the latter. Essentially, then, the mother-infant experience is viewed as standing in a kind of prototypic relationship to the subsequent diving experience. The specific psychosexual contents of these fantasies would of course be determined by the individual diver's unique history and character structure. Also they conceivably might involve revival of imagined constructions pertaining to intrauterine existence without invoking the dubious assumption of prenatal memory traces.

This sort of hypothesis is consistent with analytic theory as applied to other phenomena, in which we speak of revival or reactivation of earlier fantasies as a function of some similari