Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

(Freud 1939).’ (Eigen 1998: 12). Freud’s view was that one of the values of
psychoanalysis was it ability to deconstruct all religious beliefs, and spiritual and mystical
experiences. This Freud clearly did in his, The future of an illusion (1927), A religious
experience (1928), and Civilisation and its discontents (Freud 1927, 1930, 1928), though
Eigen makes little reference to these.
Having challenged what had been an orthodox view of Freud’s religious concepts, Eigen
examines Freud’s understanding of the ‘oceanic feeling’ and believes that Freud has
underestimated the importance of such states of bliss and fusion (1998: 31, 190). Eigen
suggests that there is a complexity and an ambiguity in Freud regarding religious experience
that he never fully resolved (1998: 28). Eigen drew on four later psychoanalytic theorists,
Milner, Lacan, Winnicott and Bion in order to illustrate his understanding of psychoanalysis
and mysticism that gave adequate account of the term ‘oceanic feeling’.
Firstly, Marion Milner. 580 Milner was a British psychologist, educationalist - particularly
children, artist and psychoanalyst who has been in analysis with Payne from 1940 and was
supervised variously by Sharpe, Riviere and Klein, all key figures in the British
psychoanalytic world (Rayner 1991). She was ‘very close to Winnicott’ (Sayers 2002: 111)
who also analyzed her husband. Milner was asked by Winnicott to analyze Susan, a young
woman living with the Winnicotts who was to become hugely influential in Milner’s
writings, and she in turn was analyzed by Winnicott, a situation that soon became
unworkable. Milner used her work with Susan, who called herself a ‘mystic’, and Susan’s
doodles and drawings, to develop the importance of the mystical in psychoanalysis
expressed in her seminal book The Hands of the Living God (Milner 1969). Sayers
comments,
Bion’s writing is often very abstract, pared down and difficult to understand.
Milner’s books, by contrast, are immediately inviting and accessible. Perhaps that is
why they have been much more influential in bringing about greater sympathy, both
within and beyond psychoanalysis, with the project of finding and refinding health
and creativity through returning it to and reviving an illusion of inner-outer fusion
with the infinite which is so central to mysticism (Sayers 2002: 117).
Eigen views Milner’s contribution as providing an interpretative tool for both
psychoanalysis and mystical experience (1998: 13) focusing on embodiment, symbolization
and transcendence (1998: 14). Eigen gives space to Milner whose work on mysticism has
been largely neglected by the psychoanalytic community. 581
Secondly, Jacques Lacan. Lacan regarded as arguably the most eminent French
psychoanalyst of the last century, sought new meaning in Freud by drawing on philosophy,
linguistics, anthropology, and mathematics. He provided a new Freudian metapsychology
focused on three inter-related areas of human experience, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and
the Real. In a re-working of Freud’s drive theory Lacan viewed human sexual drives as
providing a more important function than just satisfaction and repression. Adopting the
term ‘jouissance’ Lacan advocated a psychological and embodied connection within oneself
580 Further biographical details can be found in Divine Therapy (Sayers 2003).
581 A good account of her work can be found in (Parsons 1990).
405