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THE ENIGMA OF THE OCEANIC FEELING: REVISIONING THE PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF MYSTICISM. By W. B. Parsons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 252 pp.
The author presents a well-researched, comprehensive, and detailed discussion of the conversations between Freud and the French author/ mystic Romaine Rolland in an attempt to fill in the gap in the literature regarding the relationship between mysticism and psychoanalysis. Limitations in this discussion derive from the controversy engendered by the publication of Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927) and by Freud's pathologizing of mystical experience in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Until recently, Freud's position has formed the basis for the psychoanalytic understanding of mysticism. Parsons questions the simplistic assumptions that emerged in these early psychoanalytic peregrinations into mystical experience by conducting a close reading of the Freud-Rolland correspondence and elaborates the "complexities unaccounted for by the received view" (p. 4). Parsons observes that "Freud's reflections on mysticism are considerably richer, less pejorative, and more suggestive than has traditionally thought to be the case" (p. 51). From this stance and out of this analysis the author attempts to develop what he describes as "promoting a new constructivist agenda for the psychoanalytic theory of mysticism" (p. 5). Parsons approaches this task by carefully teasing out the juxtaposition between social-political reality and familial developmental interaction patterns such as Freud's oedipal dynamics to discuss conscious and unconscious motivations in "the depth of his love, admiration, and hopes for Rolland" (p. 26).
The author thus provides an important and rigorous discussion of various definitional strategies for understanding mysticism and their limitations. Questions stemming from scholarly debates within the academic study of mysticism such as between "perennialism" and "contextualism" serve as a framework. The influence of the historical context on psychoanalytic and academic debates on mysticism receives full consideration. This detailed and precise examination entails a twofold delineation of the conversation between Rolland and Freud and a revisioning of the psychoanalytic theory of mysticism based on the uncovered evidence of the scholarly research coupled together with more recent developments in psychoanalytic theory. The offered examination reveals the interaction between Rolland's intuited experiences and his intellectual learning that together contributed to his explication of...