Stones in a Stream

Most psychoanalysts tend to be antimystical, at least nonmystical. Psychoanalysis is allied with science. If allied with the humanities and the arts, it is thought too ironical and too aware of multiplicity, ambiguity, and complexity to be mystical. If anything, psychoanalysis is capable of deconstructing mystical experience (indeed, psychoanalysis can deconstruct itself). Psychoanalysis is too sophisticated to be mystical.

Yet some psychoanalysts tend to be mystical, or are receptive to mysticism, or make use of mystical experience as intuitive models for psychoanalytic experience. Foremost among these are Bion (1970) and Milner (1957, 1987). The greatest split in the depth psychology movement, between Freud and Jung, partly hinged on the way mystical experience was to be understood.

Most analysts relate mysticism to the ego's perception of deeper psychic structures or processes or relatively boundless states associated with early infant-mother fusion. Freud expressed both viewpoints. In the last note (and next to last writing) published in the Standard Edition (1941, vol. 23, p. 300), Freud wrote, “Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.” He also relates religious feeling to a state in which nothing is excluded from the ego: “… originally the ego includes everything; later it separates off an external world from itself.” (1930, SE 21, p. 68) He gives the mother's breast as a privileged example of external reality once (forever?) included in ego-feeling.

Freud depicts early states in which “primary ego-feeling” (all is ego) goes along with “primary identification” (all is object). Or, rather, boundaries are open, so that I am part of you and you are part of me are indistinguishable (I am you ↔ You are me). In part, Freud's work is a meditation on what happens when the ego separates the external and, to an extent, the internal world from itself: