Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Eigen adopts the same approach for mysticism and psychoanalysis that some Christians
have adopted in a dialogue between Zen Buddhism and Christianity. This discerns ‘behind
the engagement some sort of philosphia perennis which overcomes all dualisms … the
focus here is on experiencing the one ultimate reality which exists somehow above or
beyond the particularities of religious language ... based on an intuition of sameness’
(Barnes 2005: 455).
3. Eigen’s psychoanalytic ideas
Eigen begins by challenging the claim that psychoanalysis and mysticism are ‘mutually
exclusive’ (1998: 11) though he does recognise that ‘most psychoanalysts tend to be antimystical,
at least non-mystical (1998: 27). Eigen addresses these issues in three ways.
Firstly, he challenges the reductionist approach which sees all mystical experience as
infantile ego states relating to mother/father images. Freud sees ‘the ego’s perception of
deeper psychic structures or processes, or relatively boundless states associated with early
infant – mother fusion… Freud depicts early states in which “primary ego-feeling” (all is
ego) goes along with “primary identification” (all is object). Or, rather, boundaries are
open, so that I am part of you and your part of me are indistinguishable (I have you – You
are me). Yet Eigen points to Freud’s other writing, ‘mysticism is the obscure self
perception of the realm outside of the ego, of the id’ (1998: 27). So the two cohere when it
is recognised that,
our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more
inclusive – indeed, all embracing feeling which corresponded to a move into a bond
between the ego and the world about it… precisely those of limitlessness and of a
bond with the universe… the ‘oceanic feeling’ (1998: 28).
Eigen believes that Freud’s understanding failed to do justice to the depth and diversity of
all mystical experience.
Nevertheless, Freud’s writings are rich with implications for mystical experience…
he refers to the Almighty in informal ways, and uses mystical imagery to portray
creative processes… psychoanalysis was akin to the ancient mystery rites. Freud
writes more on religion than on any other subject except sexuality (1998: 13).
Secondly, mysticism is opposed by psychoanalysis because it is seen as a distraction from
the evolution of a distinctive analytic consciousness. Mysticism threatens to take the
psychoanalysis back into the realm of metaphysics that Freud believed he had escaped from
through the new route of metapsychology. Eigen expresses it bluntly, ‘Psychoanalysis is
too sophisticated to be mystical’ (1998: 27), a position he challenges throughout his book.
Eigen sees the reverse that it requires a great deal of psychoanalytic sophistication to engage
with the same depths, experiences and madness in one’s self and one’s patients that
mysticism encompasses.
Thirdly, Freud’s view that religion hinders the growth of the individual and Society from
reaching their full maturity due to dependence on something other than themselves, such as
‘the violent, temper tantrum, paranoid-schizoid, infantile … Jewish God (a volcano God)
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