Roots of Unitive Experience

“The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology, that one is justified in attempting to discover a psychoanalytic — that is, genetic — explanation of such a feeling.” Freud's opening chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents , from which this statement comes, remains a necessary introduction to our consideration of mysticism within a psychoanalytic frame of reference. What's more, I find no reason to contest the truth of the cited sentence if it permits the meaning that the “oceanic feeling,” about which Freud wrote here, may in fact convey the experience of the totality of being. If that does not fit our psychology, then perhaps our psychology needs to be revised or investigated to see whether it does not itself preclude a priori the possibility of mystical knowledge. I use the phrase “unitive experience” as being synonymous with “mysticism” but also as a phenomenological description of it.

Freud's reply here to Romain Rolland was mainly intended to further his contention that religion is not founded on the mystical experience, but rather on the helplessness of the infant, and the need to preserve the fantasy of an all-powerful father. Again, Freud might be on the right track here in recognizing that religion is not always mystical and mysticism is not always religious. The distinction demands clarification: mystical experience includes something like what Rolland had in mind, a feeling of immediate relationship with the totality of being, or at least with whatever of the totality one seems to grasp. Freud's incredulity lay in his refusal to admit of a nonsensory, nonintellectual hold of reality. Religion, on the other hand, refers to a supernatural order, appreciated through revelation