2. Religious Experience
There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a
navel as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown. –footnote near
the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams
The Oceanic Feeling
From: Civilization and its Discontents (1930)
There are a few men from whom their
contemporaries do not withhold admiration,
although their greatness rests on attributes and
achievements which are completely foreign to
the aims and ideals of the multitude... One of
these exceptional few calls himself my friend
in his letters to me. I had sent him my small
book that treats religion as an illusion and he
answered that he entirely agreed with my
judgement upon religion, but that he was sorry
I had not properly appreciated the true source
of religious sentiments. This, he says, consists
in a particular feeling which he himself is
never without, which he finds confirmed by
many others, and which he may suppose is
present in millions of people. It is a feeling
which he would like to call a sensation of
'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless,
unbounded - as it were, 'oceanic'. This feeling,
he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an
article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of
personal immortality, but it is the source of
religious energy which is seized upon by
various Churches and religious systems,
directed by them into particular channels, and
doubtless also exhausted by them. One may, he
thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the
Guido Reni: Christ crowned with thorns
A photographic print from Freud's
collectiongrounds of this oceanic feeling alone, even if
one rejects every belief and every illusion.
The views expressed by the friend [Romain Rolland] whom I so much
honour, and who himself once praised the magic of illusion in a poem,
caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this ëoceanicí feeling in
myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can attempt
to describe their physiological signs. Where this is not possible - and I am
afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of characterization -
nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational content which is most
readily associated with the feeling. If I have understood my friend rightly
... it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the eternal
world as a whole. I may remark that to me this seems rather in the nature
of an intellectual perception, which is not, it is true, without an
accompanying feeling-tone, but only such as would be present with any
other act of thought of equal range. From my own experience I could not
convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling. But this gives me
no right to deny that it does in fact occur in other people. The only
question is whether it is being correctly interpreted and whether it ought to
be regarded as the fons et origo of the whole need for religion.
I have nothing to suggest which could have a decisive influence on the
solution of this problem. The idea of menís receiving an intimation of their
connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling
which from the onset is 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, a genetic - explanation of
such a feeling.
The following lines of thought suggests itself. Normally, there is nothing
of which we are more certain than the feeling of ourselves, of our own
ego. This ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked
off distinctly from everything else. That such an appearance is deceptive,
and that on the contrary the ego is continued inwards without any sharp
delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the
id and for which it serves as a kind of façade - this is a discovery first
made by psychoanalytic research, which should still have much more to
tell us about the relation of the ego to the id. But towards the outside, at an
rate, the ego seems to maintain clear sharp lines of demarcation.
There is only one state - admittedly an unusual
state, but not one that can be stigmatized as
pathological - in which it does not do this. At
the height of being in love the boundary
between the ego and the object threatens to melt
away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a
man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'You' are
one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a
fact. What can be temporarily done away with
by a physiological (ie. normal) function, must
also, of course, be liable to be disturbed by
pathological processes. Pathology has made us
acquainted with a great number of states in
which the boundary lines between the ego and
the external world become uncertain, or in
which they are actually drawn incorrectly.
There are cases in which parts of a person's own
body, even portions of his own mental life - his
perceptions, thought and feelings - appear alien
to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are
other cases in which he ascribes to the external
world things that clearly originate in his own
ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it.
Thus even the feeling of his own ego is subject
to disturbances and the boundaries of the ego
are not constant.
Further reflections tell us that the adult's egofeeling can not have been the same from the
beginning. It must have gone through a process
of development, which cannot, of course, be
demonstrated, but which admits of being
constructed with a fair degree of probability. An
infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish
his ego from the external world as the source of
the sensations flowing in upon him. He
gradually learns to do so, in response to various
promptings.
A Boddhisattva from Freud's collection.
He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of
excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs can
provide him with sensations at any moment,whereas other sources evade
him from time to time - among them what he desires most of all, his
mother's breast - and only reappears as a result of his screaming for help.
In this way there is for the first time set over against the ego an 'object', in the form of something which exists 'outside' and which is only forced to
appear by a special action.
One comes to learn a procedure by which, through a deliberate direction
of ones sensory activities and through suitable muscular action, one can
differentiate between what is internal - what belongs to the ego - and what
is external - what emanates from the outer world. In this way one makes
the first step towards the introduction of the reality principle which is to
dominate future development (Cf. 'Formulations on the Two Principles of
Mental Functioning' (1911) Standard Edition Vol 12)
Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much
more inclusive - indeed, all-embracing - feeling which corresponded to a
more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may
assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary egofeeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist in them side
by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of
maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational
contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of
a bond with the universe - the same ideas with which my friend elucidated
the 'oceanic' feeling.
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