Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

This reductive view is challenged by Parsons who looks in detail at Freud’s relationship and
correspondence with Rolland (Parsons 1999) 319 who saw the ‘oceanic feeling’ not as
regressive psychopathology but as formative dimensions of personhood. Three key figures
stand out in advancing an explicit mystical dimension to psychoanalysis: Milner, Eigen and
Grotstein. 320
Marion Milner took a developmental and formative view of the mystical. Milner was a
member of the Independent tradition whose aesthetic writing (and drawing) expanded
psychoanalytic concepts into work with children and art therapy. Known primarily through
her association with Winnicott, Milner’s work focused on ‘the potential for health and
creativity in undoing the obstacles to mystical oneness with what she sometimes referred to
as God, the unconscious or the id’ (Sayers 2002: 105) and her work has been re-introduced
to psychoanalytic circles by Parsons (Parsons 1990, 2001), Eigen (Eigen 1998, 2001c) 321
and Sayers (Sayers 2002, 2003). Milner’s use of her self-experience within a
psychoanalytic frame predated the development of intersubjectivity and brings together
religious experience for Eastern and Western traditions (Goldman 1997; Raab 2000). 322
319 Black also discusses Freud’s engagement with Rolland in a wider discussion on Hinduism (Black 1993a).
320 Merkur identifies ‘psychoanalytic mystics’ as Rank, Fromm, Milner, Winnicott, Kohut, Loewald, Bion,
Grotstein, Symington and Eigen. However only Milner, Grotstein, Symington and Eigen ‘openly called
themselves mystics’ (Merkur 2009: 112).
321 Eigen’s work is erudite, elusive and enigmatic offering a unique combination of theorists alongside his
clinical practice that defies simple categorization.
322 A better-known and more influential contemporary of Milner, who also addressed mysticism, though rather
more obliquely, was Winnicott. A contemporary of Bion and Milner, Winnicott balanced the politics and
personalities of Anna Freud and Klein to pursue his unique psychoanalytic vision (Rodman 2003). He
developed an original view of the ‘transitional’ nature of early psychological development and subsequent
psychoanalytic engagement. In his earliest psychoanalytic publication in 1934 Winnicott acknowledged the
value of patients’ religious experiences that could not be dismissed as illusion or fantasy (Sayers 2003: 187).
Winnicott later recognized the value of mystical experience where withdrawal to an inner world, rather than
being pathological, was a resource enabling the person to become real (Winnicott 1965: 185f.). Concepts from
Milner, Bion and Winnicott influenced subsequent engagement between mystical experiences and
psychoanalysis as seen in the work of Eigen who offers an intersubjective form of I-Thou encounter.
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