From Freud to Eternity: Psychoanalysis and the “Oceanic Feeling”

Romain Rolland’s reaction to the carnage of World War I, and his perception of the hypocrisy of the established church, inspired him to search for a universal religion that would unite all mankind. His mystical experiences in late childhood had prompted him to study mysticism both in the East and the West, and led to his belief that the “oceanic feeling” common to many mystics was the source of a true religious feeling. In 1927 he wrote to Sigmund Freud asking him to analyze it. Freud, while admitting that the phenomenon posed a difficult problem, labeled it a universal regressive tendency towards the pre-Oedipal stage when the baby felt at one with its environment while being breast-fed. His atheism and his reliance on the traditions of western culture, philosophy and history did not allow him a different explanation. The fact that his estranged disciple, Carl Jung considered mysticism important may also have played a role in Freud’s response. Unfortunately this characterization led to generations of Freudians denigrating the role of spiritual or mystical feelings in their patients and considering them to be a part of the patient’s psycho-pathology. In order to rehabilitate these important parts of our mental life, new schools of psychoanalytic thought have recently developed, overturning this part of Freud’s legacy and successfully treating patients to whom mysticism, spirituality and meditation form an integral part of their life experiences.

Introduction

Rolland was born into a Catholic family, but by the time he went to secondary school he had established a personal credo based on a Nature God, influenced by Spinoza. He also had several experiences that he later recognized as being mystical, leading to his conception of an “ocean of being”, and the term “oceanic feeling”. Rolland wrote to his mother, after a mystical experience in the Swiss Alps, that “it is there where I felt most of myself … mixed into the infinite soul of Divine Nature …(it is that Divinity) who I am, who in spite of yourself you are, and in whose bosom we will all be united”[i]. He studied the mysticism of the East and the West, and his own intuitive ideas resonated with the concept of individual souls united in a universal Being, as expressed in Vedanta. Rolland later quoted Vivekananda: “He is present in every being! Thus we are all manifold forms of Him. There is no other God to seek for! He alone is worshipping God, who serves all beings!”[ii].

Mysticism has a wide range of meanings, so we will try to restrict it to what Rolland would have meant. Zaehner said that mysticism is an experience of unity in the mind “with someone or something other than oneself”. Rolland studied William James who was more specific: “In mystic states we both become one with the absolute and we become aware of our oneness” and gain “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect” [iii]. Religion is rarely mentioned, except in Christian mysticism where the experience is through “the felt presence of God”. James’s description is similar to the Hindu concept of samadhi, which is an alternate state of consciousness achieved through meditation when your individual soul, the atma, connects to the universal soul, the paramatma, or Being. Rolland noted that James, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, has “a collection of mystic witness coming from his Western contemporaries…All unknowing as they were, they realized states identical with the characteristic samadhi of India”[iv]. Mystical experiences can be triggered in different ways: by visual experiences such as looking at mountains or historical ruins, by using drugs or practicing Yoga. The Sanskrit root of yoga means unity, signifying physical and mental practices that bring the individual into unity with the universal Being.

According to Parsons, the period from 1880 to 1930 was the earliest period of the interaction between religion and psychological studies: “Freud, William James and Carl Jung are the psychologists most readily associated with this period … several noted scholars of their generation – Delacroix… Marechal … Flournoy … Morel … Bucke… Hocking … Leuba…- placed the psychological study of mysticism at the forefront of their research”[v]. It is in this context that the Rolland-Freud correspondence on the “oceanic feeling” takes place.
In response to Freud’s book analyzing religion, The Future of an Illusion, Rolland wrote in December 1927 asking him to do “an analysis of spontaneous religious sentiment or, more exactly, of religious feeling…the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the ‘eternal’ (which can very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and like oceanic as it were)”. He thought that Freud would classify it under Zwangsneurosen[vi], but he often “had occasion to observe its rich and beneficent power” on “great souls of the West” and “great minds of Asia”, and that he was about to write a book on two of them “who revealed an aptitude for thought and action which proved strongly regenerating for their country and for the world”. He also said that he was familiar with this sensation, and “found in it a source of vital renewal… without this constant state… affecting in any way my critical faculties”[vii].

The two great minds that Rolland referred to are Ramakrishna Parahamsa and Swami Vivekananda. Ramakrishna, an unlettered village priest from Bengal, became well-known in the latter half of the nineteenth century for his simple teachings of the Vedanta and ecstatic visions of the Mother Kali. Moving to the temples on the banks of the Ganges at Dakshineswar, a suburb of Calcutta, he taught Hindu philosophy through parables. A seventeen year-old Narendranath Dutta came to visit him, had a mystical experience in his presence and stayed on, eventually becoming his chief disciple. After the death of the master, and several years of a walking pilgrimage in India, Swami Vivekananda, as Narendranath became known, founded the Ramakrishna Mission which now has many branches all over the world.

Rolland’s deeper understanding of the “oceanic feeling” came from his knowledge of Hindu spiritual practices such as yoga, and the teachings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. He seems to be the friend who has told Freud that “through the practices of Yoga, …and by peculiar methods of breathing, one can in fact evoke new sensations and co-anesthesia’s in oneself, which he regards as regressions to primordial states of mind that have long ago been overlaid”[viii]. As Rolland wrote in his letter to Freud, he is constantly in this connected state, yet able to maintain his critical faculties, presumably through these practices. Rolland distinguished between the mystical experience that occurs rarely, and that too due to a trigger, and the mystical state in which one always feels connected. The former he associated with his youth when he had “transient experiences of unity”. The latter is “a mature mysticism that was the result of an existential process”[ix].

It is this mature mysticism that Gupta recounted many times about Ramakrishna: “Suddenly the Master went into samadhi and sat thus for a long time. His body was transfixed, his eyes wide and unwinking, his breathing hardly perceptible. After a long time he drew a deep breath, indicating his return to the world of sense”[x]. Gupta also quoted Ramakrishna: “reasoning and discrimination vanish after the attainment of God and communion with Him in samadhi. …‘I’ and ‘you’…become silent when he is truly aware of Unity”. This may appear to contradict Rolland’s claim of always feeling connected yet in charge of his critical faculties, but can be understood when we contrast his experience with those triggered by the use of drugs. In those cases the experiences are unpredictable and the critical faculties may be impaired by the drugs.

Freud took over eighteen months to answer the question raised about the “oceanic feeling”. Writing in the first chapter of Civilization and its Discontents, he first stated that the question caused him “no small difficulty”, partly due to his inability to discover this feeling in himself. He described it as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”, but one that “sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology”. Reasoning from his theory of the development of the ego, he said it was due to the persistence of a primary ego-feeling “which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” and persisted “side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity” [xi]. Firmly embedded in the materialism inherent in the Enlightenment, Freud looked for an answer in sensations of the external world. Not only did he misinterpret the “oceanic feeling” as a feeling based on material sensations, he put it down as an immature regression to babyhood. This position is to constrain the Freudians’ understanding of mysticism and even “recent portrayals of Indian mysticism … in terms of regression, manic denial, depersonalization and derealization”[xii].

Rolland was not amused. In his Life of Vivekananda, he complained that psychologists, for example Pierre Janet, placed “awareness of the present, of present action, the enjoyment of the present” above “disinterested action and thought”; and at the bottom “the whole world of imagination and fancy”. Going further, he claimed that “Freud asserts that reverie … is nothing but the debris of the first stage of evolution”. Finally he recommended that the Freudian doctors needed psychological treatment themselves: “This depreciation of the most indispensable operation of the active mind…is in danger of becoming a pathological aberration. Physician, heal thyself!”. It appears that the Protestant work ethic and emphasis on action permeated a science studied the mind and thought processes. Rolland recognized this when he says that “psycho-pathologists… are … servants of a proud and Puritanical faith” [xiii].

Rolland sent copies of his biographies of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda that contained these complaints, to Freud in January 1930. Freud addressed Rolland’s criticism of psychoanalysis in two ways. First, he deflected some of the blame on to “C. G. Jung, who is a bit of a mystic himself and hasn’t belonged to us for years”. Second, he explained that the terms that they use, such as “regression, narcissism, pleasure principle are of a purely descriptive nature” and are value-neutral; so “reflecting is a regressive process without losing any of its dignity or importance in being so”. He seemed to be claiming that psychoanalysts can overload ordinary words and use them as technical terms but it is not their fault if lay persons interpret them on a scale of values. He then attacked the role that mystics place on intuition “to solve the riddle of the universe” when it is “worthless for orientation in the alien external world”[xiv]. Again he stresses the worldly aspect of his psychoanalytic theories. Not surprisingly, this is the last substantive response from Freud to Rolland in a correspondence that started in 1923. Interestingly, in the letter Freud writes that he will now try to “penetrate into the Indian jungle” and admits he “really ought to have tackled it earlier, for the plants of this soil shouldn’t be alien to me; I have dug to certain depths for their roots. But it isn’t easy to pass beyond the limits of one’s nature”. A confirmation that Freud has not escaped the influence of the “Oriental Renaissance”, yet has not studied it deeply as yet.

Schwab has documented the extensive influence on German, French and British artists and intellectuals that occurred following the colonization of Bengal at the end of the eighteenth century. From 1792 a stream of works translated from Sanskrit were to be circulated and discussed in Europe, leading to what he has termed the “Oriental Renaissance”. Hugo, Vigny, Michelet, Lamartine, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner and Tolstoy are just a few of those influenced by Indian works such as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads. But Freud seemed to have escaped its influence completely, at least in his analysis of the “oceanic feeling”, while he did admit having some acquaintance with Indian thought in his correspondence with Rolland.

Discussion

Freud believed that it was the sensual experience of the person that helped develop his or her inner world. This included external sensations such as touching and seeing, as well as sensations internal to the body. To develop an Oedipus complex, one had to be aware of the mother, the father and the sensations one felt in their presence. This was a view that predominated in the West, especially after the Enlightenment: anything worth studying had to be observable through the senses. Rolland believed instead that there was something deeper inside man that came from within the soul. This is the reason that Rolland disagrees when psychologists place “awareness of the present”, i.e. sense processing, above “imagination and fancy”. The Eastern, or more specifically Hindu, concept that the soul is reborn in different physical bodies and remains connected to the universal Being at all times did not resonate with Freud, it was “beyond the limits of (his) nature”.

This difference in their understanding of causation in the development of man’s psychology was the real problem here. Just like Weber, opposing Marx, claimed that the ideas in Calvinism may have led to capitalism, the argument between Freud and Rolland was whether the mind was built from a clean slate by the sensations encountered, or it came pre-configured to some extent and deeply connected to all other souls including a universal soul, Being. Just like the origins of capitalism, the reality is more complex than either was willing to admit. In the case of Freud, he would be hard-pressed to explain the differences in human behavior when the sensual environment was the same, especially at a very young age. Rolland pursued a Unitarian religion that all mankind could subscribe to, but forgot that the “oceanic feeling” didn’t occur naturally and the mystic performed arduous mental and physical labor before achieving the meditative state. Ashokananda points out that man is divine in potential, but “one needed recourse to dogma, mystical techniques and a guru to awaken what was innate and gain realization”[xv]. Thus most adherents would have to rely on faith and dogma rather than personal experience and a new Catholicism would thus emerge. This is probably why the Hindu religion is so different from the philosophy it is based on.

Hindu philosophy has a more complex view of human development: reincarnation means that the starting point for the human mind is not a clean slate, and later development of the personality depends on both the environment (in some sense fate) as well as the actions carried out by the individual (karma). Thus, while there is a deep unifying connection with the universal Being, and each person is born primed to behave in certain ways, the sensations of life also have a part to play. When it is time for the cycle to repeat itself in the next incarnation, only the balance sheet is transferred, so to speak, and the transactions forgotten.

Freud’s analysis of the “oceanic feeling” was taken very seriously by his colleagues and successors, who rejected all consideration of mysticism. Recently, some psychoanalysts are able to take a broader view of mysticism and the therapeutic benefits of meditation. Roland describes a patient in Mumbai who usually keeps her meditative and spiritual life a secret from her therapists since she has had negative experiences when she brought them up with classical Freudians; they consider meditation as regressive rather than therapeutic. After being in therapy with a progressive therapist the patient says: “meditation is better than psychoanalysis…but best of all is meditation and psychoanalysis”[xvi]. Vaidyanathan has collected several articles that favor a progressive view of Hinduism and mysticism in psychoanalysis.

Conclusion

Freud’s discussion of the “oceanic feeling” in Civilization and its Discontents and his correspondence with Rolland betray an unwillingness to consider that there is a psychoanalytic reality outside what he could comprehend using the traditions of western culture, philosophy and history. His psychoanalytic theory was universally applicable, there would be Oedipal myths in all societies, and the development of the individual’s psychological processes would be the same all over the world. As Parsons states, “While Freud sought to displace religion, psychoanalysis was still quite Western, carrying the values of his humanism, religious upbringing and scientific training”. Not that Freud was unaware of the teachings of the East: these had been translated and influenced European thought since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Freud and Rolland, just ten years apart in age, were both products of Western Europe’s malaise of the second half of the nineteenth century that would result in the wars and conflicts of the twentieth. The late nineteenth century was a time for overthrowing old ideas and concepts, like the final dispatch of monarchy in France in 1848. Using the scientific method as the primary tool, Marx was to question history and economics, Darwin biology, and Freud our understanding of the mind. Each thinker was revolutionary for his time and his origins, but all were firmly rooted in the scientific Enlightenment; for example, Freud went to great lengths to proclaim the scientific basis of his theories, despite widespread skepticism. Rolland, however, was an artist, working in music, literature and the theatre, yet he gained his fame as the conscience of Europe with his anti-war stance which was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. He questioned the nationalism in politics and religion that led to war, and promoted the unity of all mankind. Artists of the nineteenth century, like Rolland, were willing to look to the East and use the products of the “Oriental Renaissance” to find solutions to the problems that faced Man. Unfortunately, due to the dismissive treatment received by both mysticism and the “oceanic feeling” from Freud, the early psychoanalysts could not use this source for their insights. It is only recently that the field has matured away from Freud’s dismissive interpretation to include the fruits of mysticism.


Works Referenced

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Tr. and Ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961
Gupta, Mahendranath. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Tr. Swami Nikhilananda. Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1942.
Parsons, William Barclay. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Roland, Alan. Shakuntala in Vaidyanathan.
Rolland, Romain. The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1931.
Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. Tr. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Vaidyanathan, T.G. and Jeffrey J. Kripal, Ed. Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Prof. Paul Robinson: MLA 247: European Thought in the 20th Century
[i] Parsons, pg. 56
[ii] Rolland, pg. 166
[iii] Parsons, pg. 5 quotes R C Zaehner and William James. It is interesting to note that the metaphor recalls Freud’s reference to Schiller’s Diver.
[iv] Rolland, footnote pp 346-347.
[v] Parsons, pg. 8
[vi] Translates as ‘compulsive neuroses’
[vii] Parsons, pg. 173
[viii] Freud, pg. 21. This connection is made by Parsons based on an analysis of the Freud-Rolland correspondence.
[ix] Parsons, pg. 104
[x] Gupta, pg. 175
[xi] Freud, pp 11-15.
[xii] Parsons, pg. 10, 124
[xiii] Rolland, pg. 335, 343.
[xiv] Parsons, pp 176-77
[xv] Parsons, pg. 116
[xvi] Roland in Vaidyanathan, pg. 420