Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

consciousness. Some would describe this as a particular kind of electro-chemical activity in
the brain that forms neuronal pathways and others as mystical union, Buddhist
enlightenment or divine revelation. A crucial transition is the move from the non-verbal to
the verbal and what is gained for the child is the ‘capacity to unite parts into wholes, parts of
the self as well as parts of the object’ (Black 1993a: 71). What can be lost is the
‘uninhibited vividness of this present-tense experience’ and the ‘chaotic turmoil of “deep
unconscious phantasy”’ that form elements of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position (Black
1993a: 71f.). 296
Black draws on Loewald’s concept of ‘eternity’, experienced by mystics as a sense of
timeless moment and links this to psychoanalytic thought.
It becomes possible to conceive a further layer, a contemplative layer or
‘contemplative’ position is one from which the experience of being alive in the
world can be perceived … A developmental and neurological origin for this
contemplative position can be glimpsed in times of tranquillity with the mother in
the earliest phases of babyhood, which has then been inscribed in implicit form in
the nonverbal structures of the right hemisphere’ (Black 2006: 75).
This state can be replicated through meditation, such as Buddhist vipassana mindfulness
meditation, and ‘it is possible that this state also gives access to a more accurate or far-
reaching ontological perception … in terms of the Buddhist no-self doctrine’ (Black 2006:
76). Black’s contemplative position offers a two-fold contribution. Firstly, a new
understanding of transcendence as a capacity to go beyond ordinary pleasure-seeking, pain
avoidance motivations and narcissistic longings, to embrace reflection, understanding,
296 Black suggests that ‘past experience of the species, the convictions carried by religions, etc, may depend on
vividly experienced episodes in the protoverbal stage … not remembered in verbalizable form … stored in
implicit memory in the structures of the right brain … certain sorts of later experience can make a bridge
between protoverbal and verbal consciousness. To establish a unity between the two … has perhaps a very
special power, felt to be “significant”’ (Black 2006: 73f.).
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