Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

searching; isolation and involvement; and idiosyncrasy and tradition. Mysticism offers a
known and felt sense of connection to transcendent Other, transcending time and possessing
inherent incommunicability. The challenges mysticism faces in the ‘future landscape’ of
‘our postmodern world with its developing spiritualities’ (Perrin 2005: 453) finds parallels
in psychoanalysis. 317 Macquarrie makes a distinction between mystical tendencies and full
blown mysticism, where one aspect is a noetic quality, a special form of knowing, that
corresponds to knowing a person rather than a fact (Macquarrie 2004). In this sense there
can be a unique overlap with psychoanalysis, so Eigen whose writing represents a highly
creative form of contemporary psychoanalysis is attuned to the ecstatic and the mystical
leaving the possibility for such in each therapeutic encounter (Eigen 1998).
Key figures 318
Freud variously understood mysticism as: a remnant of his Jewish tradition that he was
aware of but was inaccessible to him; a pantheistic connection with Nature as in the
Romantic tradition; an undefined aspect of dreaming and the unconscious; a derogatory
term used to ridicule Jung; an idea belonging to the past replaced by science; and in
discussion with Rolland a ‘primary ego feeling’ that formed an ‘intimate bond between the
ego and the world around it’ as a sense of the infinite encapsulated in the term ‘oceanic
feeling’. Freud’s theoretical engagement with mysticism is linked to primary narcissistic
union between a baby and mother that became the orthodox view within psychoanalysis.
term acquired a more technical significance when adopted by Ogden in the 1980s to combine Kleinian
concepts, intersubjectivity and his own concept of the ‘analytic third’.
317 Perrin identifies these as: radical embodiment; prophetic nature; chosen subservience; departure from
dualisms; language; ineffability; Theocentrism v. Christocentrism; and fragments (Perrin 2005: 453f.).
318 Aspects of Jewish engagement with mysticism and psychoanalysis are dealt with in an earlier chapter.
Eigen makes a good case for Bion and Matte-Blanco to be regarded as mystics (Eigen 2001c), although they
are interpreted by Eigen’s synthesizing hermeneutic.
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