Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Theme 8: Mystical/Mystic/O 487
If aspects of religion and spirituality challenge adequate description, ‘I feel there is
something very important in it but I also think we don’t have the vocabulary to say what that
is quite yet’ (DB 684), the mystical proves even more elusive. 488
One of the big influences on my life has been the mystical experience … it turned
my world view upside down and one of the things that I viscerally and intuitively
saw and felt was that the boxes that we create … felt like illusions … It was a
genuine mystical experience and I had a glimpse of another way of seeing and
another way of being and it didn’t have to do with these boxes: spirituality;
psychology; object relations; self psychology; all seemed in the Wittgensteinian
sense – nonsense, non sense, not stupid or silly but nonsense it just didn’t make
sense to me I just didn’t think that’s the way the universe worked’ (JR 109-120).
There is an inherent mysteriousness, ineffability (Klein 2003) and beyondness encountered
that Bion and Grotstein attempt to encapsulate with the concept of O and other aspects of
the unconscious whilst acknowledging the impossibility of this task (Lopez-Corvo 2003).
Eigen offers a different metaphor that of ‘coming through the whirlwind’ (Eigen 1992) to
capture this while Mollon adds,
there’s the Matte Blanco tradition which does seem to lead to … encounter with
something mysterious and other and a … path, one path to an awareness of God …
the later work of Bion … took a distinctly spiritual … leaning although it was
obscured by his dense language’ (PM 542-548) and ‘Grotstein … very much took
the further reaches of Bion’s thinking and took them a bit further and you do
certainly get a sense of the spiritual in his writings’ (PM 623-627).
Grotstein saw Bion’s O as his ‘venture into spirituality’ (JG 274). Such experiences have
found parallels in the concept of the ‘analytic third’ developed by Ogden (Ogden 1994,
2006) who defines it as an unconscious intersubjective construction between the analyst and
patient that offers potential for the unconscious inner object world of the patient to be
engaged with. This aspect of self connected via the unconscious to that which is beyond the
487 35 references.
488 See discussion in chapter one.
289