What Role Does Psychanalysis Play In Explaining Mystical Experiences?

In Freud’s view, the feeling of being one with the universe stems from the infant’s unity with the nurturing breast of the mother. This feeling is an activation of unconscious material relating to the original unitive feeling. In 1927, French dramatist Romain Rolland asked Freud to analyze the “oceanic feeling”, a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe.

Freud’s psychoanalysis perspective views religion as the unconscious mind’s need for wish fulfillment, as people need to feel secure and secure. He proposed that all religion is a form of neurosis and that belief in God is mass delusion. Freud’s analysis fails to explain mystical religious experience because of its sense of unity with something infinite and unbounded.

Recent evidence in neuroscience and psychology militates against the dominant theory of consciousness used in explaining mystical experiences. Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective viewed religion as a symbolic reflection of the child’s sense of weakness and helplessness when faced with dangerous and powerful nature. His analysis fails to explain mystical religious experience because of its sense of unity with something infinite and unbounded.

Mystical experiences can occur in religious and non-religious circumstances, coming unbidden in the midst of everyday life. In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, French dramatist Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to “a sensation of “eternity”.

What does the Freudian theory emphasize?

The psychodynamic perspective, originating from Sigmund Freud, emphasizes unconscious psychological processes and the role of childhood experiences in shaping adult personality. Although Freud was a medical doctor, his theories have evolved significantly since then, encompassing all theories in psychology that see human functioning based on the interaction of conscious and unconscious drives and forces within a person and between different personality structures (id, ego, superego).

Freud’s theory has been heavily criticized for several reasons, including its difficulty to test scientifically, its sexism, and its deterministic nature. It is difficult to make definite predictions about an individual’s behavior using these theories, and it is considered sexist in its suggestion that women who do not accept an inferior position in society are psychologically flawed.

Freud’s work has been influential beyond psychology, with Time magazine selecting him as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. His controversial ideas include suggesting that much of our behavior is determined by psychological forces we are largely unaware of, and that humans have strong sexual feelings from an early age, some directed towards their parents.

Despite these criticisms, Freud’s work has had a significant impact on psychology and has evoked strong reactions from both professionals and the public.

What was Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious?

In his theory of the psyche, Sigmund Freud posited that the unconscious mind is the repository of all disturbing or traumatic thoughts, memories, and feelings.

What is the Freudian explanation?

Freudian theory suggests that the unconscious plays a significant role in mental functioning, often influencing consciousness and behavior. It suggests that all psychological events are determined by past experiences, feelings, and fantasies, both conscious and unconscious. These experiences, often buried, continue to influence later feelings and behavior. Early childhood experiences, particularly with caretakers, have a significant impact on individual desires, fears, character, and object choices.

In Freudian thinking, every psychic act contains elements of both libidinal and aggressive drives, playing an essential role in psychic life and conflict. The specific nature of each person’s sexual and aggressive motives is unique, depending on their experience and innate endowment. Sexual and aggressive wishes are malleable and can undergo extensive transformation.

Did Freud believe in mysticism?

Freudian psychoanalysis initially rejected a spiritual and mystical understanding of the unconscious, but mysticism and notions of “the uncanny” had influenced Freud significantly. The “numinous” dimension became the province of Jung and his followers, with some insights being formulaic in terms of mythical archetypes rather than dynamic in terms of the core sense of self. In recent decades, object relations theorists have begun cautiously to incorporate mystic and religious thinking into their search for the essential aspects of the human psyche.

Michael Eigen’s book, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, is a collection of essays that use the work of seminal psychoanalytic thinkers such as Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, and Jacques Lacan to argue that somewhere in the very essence and core of the human psyche is the ultimate Emptiness and Fullness of God.

Eigen seeks psychoanalytic concepts wherein a trace of the godhead might be found, rather than professing a belief in a personal God. He sees divine madness in Winnicott’s “true self”, emptiness and otherness in Bion’s notion of “O”, and the holy joy of living that comes from relinquishing desire and accepting absence or lack as a signifier in Lacan’s jouissance.

The leitmotif running through Eigen’s book is the experiencing of God, not necessarily as a Being outside the self, but in our individual and collective lives, in the joys and agonies of the life and death of the self. He believes that psychotherapy has its own unique value distinct from various meditation practices, and that both therapist and patient must experience transformation to experience fullness and emptiness, life and death through each other.

What is the fantasy theory of Freud?

Desire and fantasy are closely related, with desire originating from the experience of satisfaction. Freud analyzed this relationship, stating that if desire is articulated through fantasy, then fantasy acts as a mediator between the subject and their wishes, and the negation of acting on their desires in reality. However, in contemporary society and media, fantasy is often considered a lower class possibility of the imagination.

It is a genre of its own in film, television, theater, and literature, but is generally considered a lower, more perverse, and unsophisticated reflection of reality in art. This class distinction is due to the culture of commodities and capitalism that supports the genre of fantasy in these varying media.

Fantasy architecture, restaurants, and television programs rely on human desires to produce audiences for commercials. The culture of commodities produces dissatisfaction by the falseness of its promises, generating a “dialectic of containment and excess”. The modern media representation of the genre fantasy is deeply rooted in fantasy as desire, an escape from reality through an imaginary scene representing the fulfillment of a wish.

It is important to distinguish the private or individual experience of fantasy in the mind, which is understood through psychology and Freud, from represented fantasy in art and mass media, which is essentially a collective experience.

What is the theory of mysticism?

Mystics believe that their experiences reveal an extrasensory dimension of reality, which cannot be detected through sense perception. Mysticism is often mistakenly thought to be irrational due to its obscure or cryptic nature. However, other mystical traditions, like Aristotle’s, take pride in their adherence to reason. Diogenes of Apollonia, a Greek philosopher of the 5th century BCE, introduced mystical ideas into Greek philosophy, stating that all existing things are created by altering the same thing and are the same thing.

Diogenes’ ultimate substance is called Air, which is both Soul (Life) and Intelligence. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics emphasized the contemplative life, which involves the soul’s participation in the eternal through a union between the soul’s rational faculty and the nous, which imparts intelligibility to the cosmos.

What is mystical experience explanation?

Themystical experience is a type of religious experience where the subject is transformed, experiencing a loss of individuality, oneness with all reality, and unity with the deity. This experience is central to all religious traditions, as it involves encountering the supernatural and experiencing a total loss of self and individuality. It is a numinal experience, individual and esoteric, and is a manifestation of the divine, absolute, deity, and supernatural. The essence of religion lies in the religious experience, and it is a unique and transformative experience that is deeply rooted in religious traditions.

What did Freud think about spirituality?

The attitude of Sigmund Freud towards the supernatural was ambivalent. He expressed a desire to devote his life to studying it if he had been younger, yet he also exhibited a pronounced antagonism towards it.

What is the psychology behind fantasizing?

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, believed that fantasies were channels for suppressing urges and desires, often covered up by symbolism and metaphor. Carl Jung further developed this idea, emphasizing the collective unconscious, which contains archetypal themes like survival, love, and power. Research shows that frequent fantasizers perform higher on divergent thinking and openness to experience tests, indicating a connection between fantasizing and mentally venturing into unknown territory.

Fantasy can be incorporated into conventional therapy techniques, such as acceptance and commitment therapy, using imagery to practice releasing thoughts. Tools of the fantasy genre are hardly new, such as tabletop role-playing games and metaphor-rich stories with families. Additionally, fantasy themes can be incorporated into experiences used in conventional therapy, such as discussions on self-care, which often touch on cognitive behavioral issues. The therapist may encourage the client to consider various facets of self-care, highlighting the importance of fantasy in therapy.

What is the psychoanalytic definition of fantasy?

The term “phantasy” can be used by psychoanalysts to refer to the imaginative fulfillment of frustrated wishes, conscious or unconscious. This condenses Freud’s main use of the term, which may also denote the primary content of unconscious mental processes, as the mental representative and corollary of instinctual urges. The differences between the two notions were first aired during the Controversial Discussions conducted by the British Psycho-Analytical Society during the war.

This paper provides an incomplete account of the differences between the two notions and notes how the term “phantasy” is still used for such widely differing notions. The paper suggests that the term “phantasy” is used to indicate the problems that must exist, of what we mean, and how to communicate our ideas, if different people mean such things by one technical term that is in constant use.

What are the criteria for mystical experience?

The final phase of a mystical experience is characterized by a sense of ineffability, transcendence of time and space, a heightened perception of truth, a loss of control, intensified emotion, and a disruption in perception.