Psychoanalytic Contributions on the Mystical

Abstract

The existence of clinical psychoanalysts who were or are mystics has largely escaped academic notice. Neither are their views well understood within the profession, where mystics are rare and mystical ways of thinking have generally been scorned and ignored. Previous scholarship on my topic is confined to a literature review in Michael Eigen’s (1998) major statement of his own position, a few pages and a scholarly article by Jones (2001, 2002), and several chapters in Sayers’ (2003) introductory survey of psychoanalysis, religion, and mysticism. The roster of psychoanalytic mystics nevertheless includes many eminent analysts from several major schools within psychoanalysis: Otto Rank (1884–1939), Erich Fromm (1900–1980), Marion Milner (1900–1998), D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971), Heinz Kohut (1913–1981), Hans W. Loewald (1906–1993), Wilfred R. Bion (1897– 1979), and, among living writers, James S. Grotstein, Neville Symington, and Michael Eigen. Mysticism is, of course, an enormous and poorly defined topic among both scholars and clinicians. Until the 1970s, it was widely but erroneously assumed that all mystical experiences were one and the same (for example, Heiler, 1932). The current consensus instead recognizes the diversity of mystical experiences (Almond, 1982). For social scientific purposes, I have elsewhere reflected recent textbooks in comparative mysticism by suggesting that “mysticism may be defined for contemporary purposes as a practice of religious ecstasies (that is, of religious experiences during alternate states of consciousness), together with whatever ideologies, ethics, rites, myths, legends, magics, and so forth, are related to the ecstasies” (Merkur, 2002, p. 10270). None of the psychoanalytic mystics were consistent with older definitions of mysticism that typically concerned introverted, solipsistic states and devaluations of the world of sense perception. The psychoanalytic mystics have instead been unanimous in following the “Outward Way” (Otto, 1932/1970) of