Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

the founders of intersubjectivity … he was able to make the most significant paradigm
changes in psychoanalytic theory and technique to date’ (Grotstein 2007: 4f.).
Two of the most significant psychoanalytic concepts that continue to have currency are his
ideas about the ‘container’ and the ‘contained’, as well as his understanding of the concept
of O (Lopez-Corvo 2003). Alhanati defines this as,
Ultimate reality or Absolute Truth which is unknown and unknowable. However, an
analyst, by suspending memory and desire, can be at-one with O and then can
consequently know evolutions of O. This is the analyst’s primary task. Becoming O
stands for the total experience, the openness to that which is unknown and
unknowable. It is a state of which unconscious preconceptions and saturated
elements did not interfere with experiencing emotional reality. O is the origin of any
transformation, the realisation, the thing–in–itself (Alhanati 2006: 331).
Eigen takes Bion’s concept of O expressing as it does the ‘void and formless infinite’ and
links this to the psychoanalytic explorations of the human person (1998: 16). From Bion’s
rich and complex amalgam of philosophical, religious, spiritual and psychoanalytic ideas
Eigen sees an interpretative strand where ‘he filters mysticism through psychoanalysis and
psychoanalysis through mysticism’ (Ibid.). Bion’s ideas have a paradoxical Platonic and
Hegelian focus where Godhead and O share a fundamental identity that can both be known
and will always be unknown. The human experience, described psychoanalytically, is
insufficient to say all there is to know but rather points to the fact we do not know or
exhaust other or Other.
Eigen draws on each of these theorists to illuminate the depths of human encounter
experienced in a psychoanalytic situation. In this place of a one-to-one humanness of
relationship it is possible to experience the abyss of non being, moments of madness,
psychic fragmentation, mystical illumination, the creativity of the true self, jouissance,
emptiness or the aliveness of embodied being.
It does carry a sense of mystery, the thrill of unknowing, shivers of awakening. It
does have a sense of taking as deeper into life, opening existence. Winnicott, Bion
and Lacan overlap in emphasising insufficiency in the face of who we are out of
what we go through. Winnicott emphasises unprocessable agony, a sense of agony
beyond what we can experience, an agony that drives us mad. Bion emphasises
shattering, explosive force, whether evil force destroying existence, or force of
terrifying truth. Lacan emphasises inability and fragmentation we fill with
imaginary wholeness. In each case, mystical feeling interlaces with insufficiencyexcess.
Mystical feeling often is aroused by a smaller psychic grouping
encountering a larger, more powerful grouping outside its boundaries. The first
reaction of biblical prophets encountering God may range from fear – terror to awe –
dread. Freud notes that mystical feeling is aroused by ego’s apprehension of id
(1998: 20).
Eigen was questioned about his psychoanalytic stance in an interview ‘You seem to be
reclaiming for psychoanalysis an actual, experiential dimension of mystery, of the infinite,
407