Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

The sacred was given a unique focus through Otto’s influential work The idea of the holy
(1917) defined as a ‘wholly other’ experience, understood phenomenologically and based
on an extension of Schleiermacher’s theology, examining ‘feeling which remains when the
concept fails’ (Otto 1917: 13). A failing of nineteenth century German theology was the
dominance of rational categories where ‘religion’ and ‘holy’ were reduced to ethical
categories of ‘good’. This lost the uniqueness of the religious life that mystics and the
‘ineffable’ points to – the holy/sacred (Otto 1917: 19). Otto wanted to recover the ‘real
innermost core’ (Otto 1917: 20) through the numinous experienced within the person, and
also felt as objective and outside the self in what he terms the mysterium tremendum. 69
This consists of: awefulness; overpoweringness; energy/urgency; fascination; the ‘Wholly
Other’; that goes beyond mystical ‘nothingness’, void, and emptiness (found in Christianity
and Buddhism) where ‘God is not merely the ground and superlative of all that can be
thought; He is in Himself a subject of His own account and in Himself’ (Otto 1917: 53).
Otto offers a dichotomous Wholly Other, aweful and alluring, experienced through a sacred
numinous that was both in the self and beyond the self that could never be fully captured.
He saw this as an inborn capacity evoked through voice, sound, music, silence, art,
architecture, emptiness/distance, contemplation and relationship (Wulff 1997: 531). Otto’s
concept of the numinous was taken up by Jung who added archetypal dreams, visions and
synchronicities as evocations of the numinous, thus adding a psychological means of
69 ‘The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of
deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were,
thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane’, non-religious
mood of everyday experience. It may burst into sudden eruption, up from the depths of the soul with spasms
and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has
its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric
antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and
glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of –
whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures (Otto 1917:
26f.).
37