Depth Psychology and Mysticism (Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism) 9783319790954, 9783319790961, 3319790951

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Editors and Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1 Introduction: Depth Psychology and Mystical Phenomena—The Challenge of the Numinous
References
Part I Methodological, Hermeneutic, & Inter-disciplinary Perspectives
Chapter 2 Rescuing Alexandria: Depth Psychology and the Return of Tropological Exegesis
Patristic Sources
Chapter 3 Dionysus in Depth: Mystes, Madness, and Method in James Hillman’s Re-visioning of Psychology
Introduction
Mystes: Dionysian Consciousness in The Myth of Analysis
“On Psychological Femininity”
Madness: Dionysus in Jung’s Writings
Method: Dream, Drama, Dionysus
Conclusion: Mystes as Means and as Method
References
Chapter 4 The Royal Road Meets the Data Highway
Introduction
Dreaming as a Source of Mystical Experience
Current Scientific Research on Sleep and Dreaming
A Depth Psychological Approach to Mystical Dreams
New Horizons in Mystical Dreaming
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5 Spirituality and the Challenge of Clinical Pluralism: Participatory Thinking in Psychotherapeutic Context
Psychoanalysis as a Foundation
Psychoanalysis Without Foundation
Participatory Theory and Reconciliation with Jung
Future Lines of Inquiry
References
Chapter 6 Descriptive Disenchantment and Prescriptive Disillusionment: Myths, Mysticism, and Psychotherapeutic Interpretation
What Is Mysticism?
Myths, Mysticism, and “Mysticism”
The Doctor Knows Best
Conclusion
References
Part II Historical & Theoretical Approaches
Chapter 7 Embodying Nonduality: Depth Psychology in American Mysticism
Judith Blackstone and the Realization Process
Hameed Ali and Karen Johnson’s Diamond Approach
Nondual Mysticism and Depth Psychology: Sociocultural Context
From Embedded to Experiential to Embodiment: Historical Trajectories
From the Personal Body to the Social Body: Future Directions
References
Chapter 8 Mysticism in Translation: Psychological Advances, Cautionary Tales
Framing Mysticism and Spirituality
Framing the “Psychology and Religion” Movement
Advances and Cautionary Tales
Experience and Process: Psychology of Approaches
Culture and History: The Case of Psychospirituality
Translation Reframed: Dialogical, Constructivist, Transformational
References
Chapter 9 Sigmund Freud and Jewish Mysticism: An Exploration
Mysticism, Narcissism, and the Death Drive
Mysticism and the Mother Goddesses
Mysticism and the Father God
Jewish Mysticism
Mysticism and Eros
Eros and Death: Twin Brothers
References
Chapter 10 Jung and Mysticism
Was Jung a Mystic?
What Is Mystical Experience?
Jung and Christian Mysticism
The Potentially Heretical Nature of Jung’s Approach
Stages of Mysticism
What Kind of Mysticism Is Found in Jung?
Is Jung’s Approach Compatible with Theism?
The Ontological Question
So…Was Jung a Mystic?
References
Chapter 11 Mystic Descent: James Hillman and the Religious Imagination
Spirit and Soul
Mundus Imaginalis and Deus Absconditus
Anima Mundi and Non-dualism
A Note on Postmodernism and Myth
References
Part III Self and No-Self, Knowing and Unknowing in Depth Psychology & Mysticism
Chapter 12 Apophasis and Psychoanalysis
Coincidence of Opposites
Deleuze
Derrida
Conclusion
References
Chapter 13 Divine Darkness and Divine Light: Alchemical Illumination and the Mystical Play Between Knowing and Unknowing
References
Chapter 14 Nothing Almost Sees Miracles! Self and No-Self in Depth Psychology and Mystical Theology
Introduction
The No-Self of Religion
The Self of Psychology
Deep Calls Out to Deep
References
Chapter 15 “In Killing You Changed Death to Life”: Transformation of the Self in St. John of the Cross and Carl Jung
St. John of the Cross
C. G. Jung
Catholic Mysticism and Depth Psychology
References
Chapter 16 The Buddhist Unconscious (Alaya-vijnana) and Jung’s Collective Unconscious: What Does It Mean to Be Liberated from the Self?
Jung’s Collective Unconscious and the Freedom from Opposites
Abhidharma and Buddhist Teachings of Karma
Buddhist Unconscious: Alaya-vijnana
Alaya-vijnana and Jung’s Collective Unconscious
Liberation from the Archetype of Self: What Does It Mean?
References
Index

Citation preview

Edited by Thomas Cattoi

& David M. Odorisio

DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism Series Editors Thomas Cattoi Santa Clara University Berkeley, CA, USA Bin You Minzu University Beijing, China

The exploration and interpretation of mystical phenomena is an integral part of the study of religion and spiritual practice, which consistently attracts the interest of scholars and the general public. At the same time, the term “mysticism” may encompass all kinds of transformative practices leading to an experience of ultimate reality or the divine outside the context of particular religious traditions. As a result of the increasingly interdisciplinary character of the study of humanities, scholars are becoming more interested in the contributions of different academic disciplines to the understanding of mystical phenomena. In the spirit of this growing conversation across disciplinary boundaries, the series provides a space for the interdisciplinary study of mysticism, where new methodologies informed by psychology, the natural sciences, or the humanities complement more traditional approaches from religious studies and theology. The series also privileges interreligious and comparative approaches to the study of mysticism, with a particular interest in Asian religions and minority religious traditions. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14851

Thomas Cattoi · David M. Odorisio Editors

Depth Psychology and Mysticism

Editors Thomas Cattoi Jesuit School of Theology Santa Clara University Berkeley, CA, USA

David M. Odorisio Pacifica Graduate Institute Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism ISBN 978-3-319-79095-4 ISBN 978-3-319-79096-1  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938343 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: William Blake, British (1757–1827), The Ghost of Samuel Appearing to Saul, c. 1800 Cover design: Fatima Jamadar Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

“It is well known to historians of depth psychology that the word ‘mysticism’ was loaded with negative connotations for most of the twentieth century…Times have changed in the field of psychoanalysis, and now the intersection of depth psychology and mystical experience activates the excitement of clinicians and theoreticians alike. The current volume is a remarkable testimony to the emerging intersection of individual spiritual experience and the explorations of depth psychological clinicians. It is an important read for anyone who is serious about the current understanding of these issues.” —Richard Stein, Jungian Analyst, San Francisco Jung Institute, San Francisco, CA, USA “When various academic disciplines collide, on occasion they eventually collude and even congeal into new forms of knowing. Such a series of encounters and armistices is nowhere more true than in the essays that comprise Depth Psychology and Mysticism. Herein an amazing roster of scholars cast both a ‘reverent’ and a critical eye on these two rich areas of study, so to ‘forge a new context,’ as one contributor phrases it, that reimagines rich and original third perspectives from the convergence of psyche, body and spirit in renewed cultural contexts.” —Dennis Patrick Slattery, Professor Emeritus, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, and author of A Pilgrimage Beyond Belief: Spiritual Journeys Through Christian and Buddhist Monasteries of the American Southwest (2017) “Depth Psychology and Mysticism…offer[s] a fresh, inter-disciplinary perspective from the fields of theology, religious studies and depth psychology that demonstrates the extraordinary developments taking place in the field.” —Brendan Collins, Professor Emeritus, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, USA, and Director, Center for Contemplative Psychology, Berkeley, CA, USA

To my wife Justyna. Per aspera at astra. Thomas Cattoi To the students, faculty, and staff of Pacifica Graduate Institute, That we may continue the work: animae mundi colendae gratia David M. Odorisio

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Cattoi for his generous invitation to first present at a panel on “Depth Psychology and Mystical Phenomena” at the 2016 American Academy of Religion and then to serve as co-editor of this book on the same topic—grazie mille. Thank you also to the many contributors of this volume for your hard efforts, not only in intellectual creativity, but also in the more mundane level of meeting deadlines, and working through the technical minutiae that come along with the editorial turf. Amy Invernizzi of Palgrave Macmillan has been instrumental and more than helpful from proposal to completed manuscript. To those I consider intellectual forebears at this often precarious intersection of depth psychology and “the mystical,” and who continue to inspire a creative passion in me for this work, namely Jeffrey J. Kripal and William B. Parsons—I thank you. Finally, to my family, friends, and network of “good angels” on both coasts—you keep me, and I keep you close to my heart. A thousand thanks to David Odorisio for his work and for his amazing drive; without them, this project would never have seen the light. Thanks to Phil Getz and Amy Invernizzi for their encouragement and for gently moving us on… and finally, my deepest gratitude to all contributors who shared their work with us. May the fire keep burning under the ashes. David M. Odorisio Thomas Cattoi ix

Contents

1

Introduction: Depth Psychology and Mystical Phenomena—The Challenge of the Numinous 1 Thomas Cattoi and David M. Odorisio

Part I Methodological, Hermeneutic, & Inter-disciplinary Perspectives 2

Rescuing Alexandria: Depth Psychology and the Return of Tropological Exegesis 19 Thomas Cattoi

3

Dionysus in Depth: Mystes, Madness, and Method in James Hillman’s Re-visioning of Psychology 37 David M. Odorisio

4

The Royal Road Meets the Data Highway 49 Kelly Bulkeley

5

Spirituality and the Challenge of Clinical Pluralism: Participatory Thinking in Psychotherapeutic Context 65 Robin S. Brown

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6

Descriptive Disenchantment and Prescriptive Disillusionment: Myths, Mysticism, and Psychotherapeutic Interpretation 81 Ira Helderman

Part II  Historical & Theoretical Approaches 7

Embodying Nonduality: Depth Psychology in American Mysticism 107 Ann Gleig

8

Mysticism in Translation: Psychological Advances, Cautionary Tales 127 William B. Parsons

9

Sigmund Freud and Jewish Mysticism: An Exploration 151 Christine Downing

10 Jung and Mysticism 167 Lionel Corbett 11 Mystic Descent: James Hillman and the Religious Imagination 183 Glen Slater Part III Self and No-Self, Knowing and Unknowing in Depth Psychology & Mysticism 12 Apophasis and Psychoanalysis 199 David Henderson 13 Divine Darkness and Divine Light: Alchemical Illumination and the Mystical Play Between Knowing and Unknowing 213 Stanton Marlan

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14 Nothing Almost Sees Miracles! Self and No-Self in Depth Psychology and Mystical Theology 237 David L. Miller 15 “In Killing You Changed Death to Life”: Transformation of the Self in St. John of the Cross and Carl Jung 253 June McDaniel 16 The Buddhist Unconscious (Alaya-vijnana) and Jung’s Collective Unconscious: What Does It Mean to Be Liberated from the Self? 269 Polly Young-Eisendrath Index 283

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Thomas Cattoi, STL, Ph.D., LMFT is Associate Professor of Christology and Cultures, Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University and Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA. He co-­ edits the journal Buddhist-Christian Studies and is the author of Divine Contingency: Theologies of Divine Embodiment in Maximos the Confessor and Tsong kha pa (Gorgias Press, 2009) and Theodore the Studite: Writings on Iconoclasm (Paulist Press, 2014). Dr. Cattoi is also a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT) in the State of California. David M. Odorisio, Ph.D. serves as Director of The Retreat at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, and is Adjunct Faculty in Pacifica’s Mythological Studies graduate degree program. David received his Ph.D. in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and teaches in the areas of methodology, psychology and religion, and comparative mysticism. He has published in Quadrant: Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Jung Journal, Philosophy East and West, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, among others. For further information, please visit: www.ahomeforsoul.com.

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Contributors Robin S. Brown, Ph.D., LP, NCPsyA  is a Psychoanalyst and Adjunct Faculty for the Counseling and Clinical Psychology Department at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is a member of the editorial board for Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. His academic work has been published widely and spans the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, and transpersonal theory. He is the author of Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking Towards the PostRelational (Routledge, 2017) and the editor of Re-Encountering Jung: Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018). Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.  is a psychologist of religion focusing on dreams and dreaming. He is director of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb), a senior editor of the APA journal Dreaming, and a former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. He is author and editor of several books, including The Wilderness of Dreams (SUNY Press, 1994), Dreaming Beyond Death (Beacon, 2006), American Dreamers (Beacon, 2008), Dreaming in the World’s Religions (New York University Press, 2008), Lucid Dreaming (ABC-Clio, 2014), and Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2016). He lives in Portland, Oregon. Lionel Corbett, MD received his medical degree from the University of Manchester, England, in 1966; served as a military physician; and became a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1974. In the USA, he did fundamental research into the biochemistry of the brain; began one of the first programs in the psychology of aging; was a hospital medical director of in-patient psychiatry; trained as a Jungian Analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago, 1978–1986; helped found a training program for Jungian analysts in Santa Fe, while carrying on a private practice and teaching psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Corbett has studied various spiritual disciplines including Christian and Jewish mysticism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Yoga and has had a personal meditation practice for 20 years. He currently teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA. Dr. Corbett is the author of 5 books, several training films, and over 40 professional articles. His books include: Psyche and the Sacred: Spirituality Beyond Religion; The

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Sacred Cauldron: Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Practice; The Religious Function of the Psyche; The Soul in Anguish: Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Suffering; and most recently, Understanding Evil: A Psychotherapist’s Guide. Christine Downing, Ph.D. is Professor of Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, and was the first woman president of the American Academy of Religion. She taught for almost twenty years in the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University (including Department Chair) and during the same period as a member of the Core Faculty at the San Diego campus of the California School of Professional Psychology. From 1963 to 1974, she served as a Faculty Member of the Religion Department at Douglass College of Rutgers University. She has also taught at the Jung Institute in Zurich and lectures frequently to Jungian groups both in the USA and abroad, as well as at American and European universities. Her undergraduate degree in literature is from Swarthmore College; her Ph.D. in Religion and Culture is from Drew University. Her books include Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love; Women’s Mysteries: Towards a Poetics of Gender; Gods in Our Midst: Mythological Images of the Masculine—A Woman’s View; and The Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time, among others. Ann Gleig, Ph.D.  is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Central Florida. Her research specialties are Asian Religions in America and Religion and Psychoanalysis. She is currently writing a book on recent developments in American convert Buddhism (Yale University Press). Ira Helderman, Ph.D., LPC is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Vanderbilt University’s Department of Human Development Counseling and holds a Ph.D. in Religion, Psychology, and Culture. Dr. Helderman’s historical and ethnographic research investigates how psychotherapists and psychotherapeutic frames shape contemporary religious activity in the USA. His current book project, entitled Prescribing the Dharma: The “Religious” and “The Not-Religious” in U.S. Psychotherapists’ Approaches to Buddhist Traditions (UNC Press), maps the diversity of ways psychotherapists have related to Buddhist teachings as a case study of how religion/secular binaries function in communities. Dr. Helderman has published some of his initial findings

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in peer-reviewed journals like The Journal of the American Academy of Religion and has presented his work at national and international conferences. While conducting his academic research, Ira also maintains a full-time private psychotherapy practice as a licensed mental health counselor in Nashville, TN. He has previously worked in a variety of clinical settings including the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital, Vanderbilt Psychological and Counseling Center, and Cumberland Heights Addiction Treatment Center. David Henderson, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, London, UK. He is a member of the Association of Independent Psychotherapists. His book, Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis: PseudoDionysius and C.G. Jung, is published by Routledge. Recent journal articles include “‘A Life Free from Care’—The Hermit and the Analyst,” and “Cultural Homelessness: A Challenge to Theory and Practice” published in Psychodynamic Practice. Stanton Marlan, Ph.D., ABPP is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Pittsburgh. An Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology and Clinical Supervisor at Duquesne University Psychology Clinic, and teaching and training analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, Dr. Marlan holds doctorates in both clinical psychology and philosophy, and is Board Certified in both Clinical Psychology and Psychoanalysis. He currently serves as President of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis, and President of the Pittsburgh Society of Jungian Analysts, as well as being a member of the Board of Trustees of the ABPP. Author of The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness (2005), and a forthcoming book on Jung and Alchemy entitled, The Philosophers’ Stone: The Alchemy and Art of Illumination, he has edited four books and written numerous articles on alchemy and Jungian ­psychology. June McDaniel, Ph.D. is Professor of the History of Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. Her MTS was from Emory University, and her Ph.D. was from the University of Chicago. Her research areas include mysticism and religious experience, religions of India, psychology of religion, women and religion, and ritual studies. She did field research on religion in West Bengal, India, for two years, funded by Fulbright and the American Institute of Indian Studies.

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She has had three books and over forty articles published. Her books include: The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (University of Chicago Press, 1989); Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004); Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives: An Introduction to Women’s Brata Rituals in Bengali Folk Religion (State University of New York Press, 2003); and Perceiving the Divine Through the Human Body: Mystical Sensuality (edited with Thomas Cattoi, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Her most recent research has been on Hinduism in Bali, Indonesia. David L. Miller, Ph.D. is Watson-Ledden Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and is a retired Core Faculty Member at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA. He is an honorary member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, the International Association of Analytical Psychology, and the International Society of Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority. Dr. Miller works at the intersection of religions and mythologies, literature and literary theory, and depth psychology. Since 1963 until the present, he is the author of more than 100 articles and chapters, as well as five books. For more information, see Dr. Miller’s Web site at dlmiller.mysite.syr.edu. William B. Parsons, Ph.D.  is Professor of Religion and Culture at Rice University. His publications include The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling (Oxford, 1999), Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (Routledge, 2001), Teaching Mysticism (Oxford, 2010), Mourning Religion (Virginia, 2008), Freud and Augustine in Dialogue: Psychoanalysis, Mysticism, and the Culture of Modern Spirituality (Virginia, 2013), and dozens of articles in multiple journals and edited books. He has served as Chair of the Department of Religion (Rice University), Director of the Humanities Research Center (Rice University), Editor (the psychology of religion section) with Religious Studies Review, and has been a Fellow at the Martin Marty Center of the University of Chicago and at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at Hebrew University. Glen Slater, Ph.D. is Associate Chair of the Jungian and Archetypal Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, where he has been teaching for over twenty years. He holds degrees in religious studies and clinical psychology, and is the author of numerous book chapters and essays that apply depth psychology to a wide range of topics—from gun violence to cyberspace, cultural psychopathology to

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the imagery of extraterrestrial life. He edited and introduced Senex and Puer, volume 3 of the Uniform Edition of James Hillman’s collected works, as well as the essay collection, Varieties of Mythic Experience. Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D. is a Jungian psychoanalyst, psychologist, author, and speaker. She is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont, Founding Faculty at the Vermont Institute for the Psychotherapies, and past president of the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies. She is in independent practice with individuals and couples in central Vermont. Polly is the originator of Dialogue Therapy, a time-limited couple therapy that integrates psychoanalysis and mindfulness and helps couples move from disillusionment to intimacy. Polly is the author of fifteen books, as well as many chapters and articles. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her most recent works are The Present Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Discovery (Rodale, 2014); The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance (Little, Brown, 2008); and The Cambridge Companion to Jung: New and Revised, of which she is co-editor with Terence Dawson (Cambridge University Press, 2008). In 2018, Shambhala Publications will publish Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path, Polly’s new book, which sets out the principles of Dialogue Therapy for a general audience.

List of Figures

Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2

Fig. 13.3 Fig. 13.4 Fig. 13.5

Fig. 13.6 Fig. 13.7

Fig. 13.8 Fig. 13.9 Fig. 13.10

“Dr. Faust”; engraving by Rembrandt (c1652) (Source https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/371738) 214 Illustration of a homunculus in a vial by Franz Xaver Simm, 1899 (Source https://www.theepochtimes.com/ homunculus-the-alchemical-creation-of-littlepeople-with-great-powers_1344375.html) 217 Rati-asana (detail). Stone, Khajuraho, Vishvanatha temple, 1059–1087 (Credit Oversnap 471246509/ iStock.com) 219 Stan’s Philosophers’ Stone (Source Photograph by author) 220 Illuminatio. From ARTIS AURIFERAE, QUAM CHEMIAM VOCANT, VOLVMEN Secundum, QUOD CONTINET, Basel, 1572, p. 345 (Source Photograph by author) 222 Eclipse (Credit Choreograph/iStock.com) 224 Nicolas de Locques: Les Rudiments de la Philosophie Naturelle. Paris, 1665, frontispiece (N. Bonnart) (Credit Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) 227 Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (Credit filipe_lopes/iStockphoto.com) 230 Peacock eyes (Credit Hypergurl/istockphoto.com) 231 Black Jaguar (Credit Ryan Ladbrook/istockphoto.com) 233

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Depth Psychology and Mystical Phenomena—The Challenge of the Numinous Thomas Cattoi and David M. Odorisio

The Catholic Cathedral of Kathmandu, built in the last decade of the twentieth century before the ravages of the civil war and the devastating earthquakes of 2015, is an unlikely sight in a country that until 2008 prided itself for being the last remaining Hindu monarchy in the world. Hidden in the backways of Patan, the building is ignored by the greatest majority of Western visitors to the Kathmandu valley, but it comes alive on Saturday mornings—Saturday being the day of rest in Nepal—when local Catholics and other immigrants come together for worship. Many Catholic churches in the Indian subcontinent imitate rather unimaginatively vernacular forms of European ecclesiastical architecture; with the exception of the Syrian churches of Kerala, whose tradition long predates the arrival in India of Latin-rite Christianity, Catholic churches built in India until relatively recently carefully eschew all reference to local T. Cattoi (*)  Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, Berkeley, CA, USA D. M. Odorisio  Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_1

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architectural or iconographic tradition. The Cathedral of Kathmandu, however, is a visual paradigm of cultural and theological inculturation. As soon as they enter, visitors notice the outlandish shape of the candelabra hanging from the ceiling, shaped as the crowns worn by the Newari kings of Patan before the ascendancy of the Shah dynasty in the eighteenth century. Paintings on the side walls portray Jesus walking around a landscape of stupas, mandirs, and beautifully ordered rice fields. In a particularly striking composition, Jesus sits on a hill delivering the sermon of the mount, encircled by a stylized dharma wheel—surrounded by his disciples like the Buddha at Sarnath, he is turning the wheel of the Gospel. What is most striking, however, is the huge painting that covers the apse behind the altar: a massive fresco of Jacob’s ladder, with legions of angels moving up and down huge slabs of marbles joining heaven and earth, the dwelling place of God and the home of humanity. It does not take long before visitors notice that the iconographic representation of the ladder is actually closely modelled on the stairs to the Swayambhu stupa, one of the most significant Buddhist shrines in the Kathmandu region. There, enormous steps carved in the rock lead one from the depths of the valley to a walled area centered around a stupa and a number of other minor shrines. Pilgrims from the whole Buddhist world— and increasingly, from the West—constantly walk up and down these steps, moving between modern Kathmandu at the bottom—littered by garbage and choked by pollution—and the residence of the gods and the bodhisattvas in a higher region, characterized by a relative peace and tranquility. The Cathedrals and the Swayambhu stupa are entry points were not only can one access the divine or ultimate reality, but also where the divine or ultimate reality can penetrate into our world. Behind the fresco and the stupa are liminal experiences that transcend the boundaries of the quotidian and the mundane: Jacob’s dream was an entry into a numinous dimension where ordinary spatiotemporal categories no longer apply, whereas the emergence of the stupa from the depths of the valley gestures to a mythical time when gods and men, bodhisattvas and heroes walked together on this earth, and the boundary between the ordinary world of sentient beings and the pure realms of the bodhisattva was blurred. The exercise in artistic inculturation behind the fresco in Kathmandu Cathedral is far more than an instance of iconographic appropriation; rather, it unwittingly, but no less forcefully, discloses the universality of humanity’s communing with the numinous, a commingling that

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encompasses an outward move toward self-transcendence and a descent into the depths of one’s own inner lives. Edward Edinger (1984) observed that throughout human history, our experiences of the numinous were mediated by established religious traditions, but went on to contend that after the emergence of modern psychology, these traditions’ interpretive ascendance had started to decline. While in the past, individual experiences of the ultimate or the divine were hermeneutically reconfigured to echo and simultaneously buttress the Judeo-Christian narrative, modernity’s hard-won understanding of the dynamics of the self questions the normativity of such interpretive moves and invites us to look deeper into the psyche for alternative ways to articulate these experiences. This of course goes a long way toward accounting for the popularity in the contemporary West of Eastern religious traditions, where the ultimate—whether conceptualized as brahman or Buddha nature—is radically immanent or even identified with the human person. The cartography of the inner life first mapped by Freud and then expanded by generations of scholars and practitioners after him suggests that it is the psyche that is the chief medium of religious experience, and thus, the classical differentiation between the divine and the psyche’s experience of the divine is heuristically insignificant. Indeed, for many early practitioners of psychology, such distinction had to be discarded; those who clung to a traditional, allegedly extrinsic notion of the divine—or indeed, to the classical Judeo-Christian narrative—were mired in the swamps of arrested development. The overt psychological reductionism of this approach rests on the conviction that all speculation about the nature of the divine outside the psyche ought to be avoided, while we should direct our efforts toward exploring how the different strands in humanity’s undivided continuum of consciousness coalesce in different configurations in different individuals, creating distinctive selves with their own psychological idiosyncrasies. Depth psychology will talk of the emergence and shaping of the personal self out of the vast cauldron of the transpersonal Self. Religious practices in theistic traditions enjoined a rejection of sin in compliance with God’s commands, whereas depth psychology invites us to hone in on our inner challenges to achieve integration. The call to introspection never ceases, but its source and its ultimate goal are reconfigured; rather than a mere stepping stone, psychological “work on the self ” is the very core of spiritual practice. Mystics like John of the Cross or Therese of Lisieux—or more recently, Teresa of Calcutta—would talk of the night

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of the soul, when God appears to leave them bereft of all consolation, their inner life desolate and parched, and yet this trial is the source of an ever-deeper communion with the divine, where ever-greater insight and intimacy into the divine are reaped, even if at high cost. Similarly, in depth psychology, all inner crises or pathologies can become epiphanies of the divine; they are not to be discarded as nuisances, or obstacles to the achievement of “functional neuroticism,” but they are manifestations of deeper shifts in the architecture of the soul, which can birth new and ever-expanding visions of the divine. The implication of such classical depth psychological approach is a sort of Husserlian suspension of all attempts to probe the actual truth of specific religious or theological claims based on individual experience, or indeed on texts purporting to interpret individual experience. The depth psychologist would abstain from passing judgement on the truthfulness of particular events that are regarded as foundational or as having a transformative impact on the life of a particular individual or community; rather, it will limit itself to illumine the repressed transpersonal experiences of the collective unconscious as they try to break out and manifest in specific archetypal forms. It is therefore illusory to split the individual soul from the broader consciousness of which it is a manifestation, and it would be clinically futile to try and heal it apart from this broader context. In this perspective, the divine is conflated with the transpersonal levels of the unconscious; archetypes are not Platonic ideas existing in some sort of celestial hyperuranion, but conceptual and imaginal patterns that are actualized once they enter into our individual consciousness and are given actual expression within a specific cultural context. As such, myth-making is part and parcel of what makes us human; while contemporary Westerners tend to view “mythology” as indicating old, possibly entertaining, but ultimately outdated attempts to make sense of the world—attempts now superseded by science and philosophy—mythology is the flowering of the unconscious in the soil of different human cultures, a pattern of symbols and stories that uncover the depths of the human condition and its desire to make meaning. Jacob’s ladder in ancient Palestine will become the ascent to Swayambhu in Nepal: an awareness of the flaws of the human condition, an aspiration toward self-transcendence, the intimation of a peak experience far removed from us and yet somehow always within reach, and the pull of the earth that impinges on us and calls us back to the depths.

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It is of course no surprise that adherents of classical religious traditions have historically viewed depth psychology as a threat—albeit one whose dangerousness is tempered by its rarefied and elitist character. This view of the collective unconscious as a repository of symbols that are articulated in distinctive ways by different cultures and civilizations is clearly at odds with the belief in a normative revelation disclosing the character of ultimate reality or the divine. The fact that belief in the JudeoChristian God emerged in a particular geographical area at a particular time is thus indicative of the fact that a certain culture was under the sway of a particular archetype, which eventually swept away alternative symbolic constructs on its way to a virtual monopoly over Western civilization. Educated practitioners of dharmic religions, perhaps, can more easily countenance the possibility that their panoply of symbols—deities, bodhisattvas, pure realms—is nothing but an efflorescence of the subconscious, though more traditional followers of these traditions may also be ill at ease with an all-encompassing psychological reductionism. This attitude of heuristic imperialism, however, may not be the only possible stance vis-à-vis the explanatory power of depth psychology. As Lionel Corbett (1996) states, “the axiom of the primacy of the psyche is itself a metaphysical position” (3), and like all metaphysical claims made by traditional religions, it is itself a claim that is difficult—and more likely impossible—to substantiate. For the early Christian writers like Origen or Athanasios of Alexandria, divine providence guided the universe toward its ultimate goal, and the eternal Logos manifest in the flesh and throughout the pages of Christian scripture offered a hermeneutic key that enabled one to reinterpret—and eventually to dismiss—the myths and fables of Greco-Roman religion. A depth psychological hermeneutic could fall prey to analogous hegemonic temptations, with the collective unconscious serving as an all-encompassing framework, holding in its embrace all that is needed to grant meaning to the human condition. If the “common conceptions of mankind” (koinē hypolēpsis) were a universally available Ariadne’s thread leading us out of the labyrinth of sin and corruption, the archetypes that emerge from the unconscious free us from the curse of meaninglessness and despair. A more measured— and perhaps less anxious—appraisal of the reach of depth psychology will uncover its de facto role as post-theological metanarrative—a role, however, that is not demanded by its own fundamental principles. In the nineteenth century, Christian theologies struggled for decades to assimilate the lessons of the Kantian turn to the subject.

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Catholic thinkers, shaped by centuries where the Tridentine manualist tradition had held sway, felt particularly threatened by a philosophical turn that appeared to ascribe such crucial importance to the cognitive operations of the subject. The apologetic traditions of the Church based on the vision of Aquinas—or at least its Suarezian rendition—rested on the appropriation of the Aristotelian discourse on causality and preferred to ground all speculative reflection about God’s existence on the reductio ad causam of the Angelic Doctor. If God can only be found in the recesses of our soul, and the starry sky above us is the only alternative, what of the enduring value of the Christian revelation? Who will guarantee that the God who grounds the moral law is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—or the God of Jesus Christ? The hegemonic tendencies of Hegel’s system could only heighten the concern of the theologians, who saw the Trinity virtually swallowed by the relentless advance of absolute thought. Eventually, however, the Kantian subjective wave could not be stopped by the dam of traditional Thomist realism. Rather than letting itself be swept away, however, Catholic theology accomplished a synthesis, where the exploration of the cognitive operations of the subject was put at the service of epistemological—and theological—realism. The work of the Belgian Jesuit Joseph Maréchal (1878–1944) laid the foundations for a new current in Thomism that would attempt to reconcile a firm commitment to the metaphysical character of Christian doctrines with a keen exploration of the way in which the individual subject came to apprehend their truth. This approach did not dissolve Christian doctrines in the solvent of the Kantian categories, but opened up a new horizon of theological exploration whereby the congruence between the human structures of cognition and the inner dynamics of Christian revelation were—tentatively, gradually—mapped out. Maréchal’s work marked the beginning of transcendental Thomism, which would flourish in the earlier and mid-twentieth century and give us figures of the stature of Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and Edith Stein. Where there had been mistrust, there was increasing collaboration; Kant’s intuition had become the springboard for a radically new approach to theological epistemology. This example from the history of European Christian theology suggests that perhaps depth psychology and the academic study of religion—both in its theological and its more “religionsgeschichtlich” rendition—could leave behind their hegemonic aspirations and engage in a

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renewed conversation about something both depth psychology and the academic study of religion are actually interested in—namely, religious experience and mystical phenomena. This experiential turn of course goes back to William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) foregrounds the foundational character of experiential analysis vis-à-vis all other aspects of the study of religion. James’ emphatic individualism meant that he could define religion as “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude”; in addition, he viewed experiences as “pure,” but did not think it important to locate such experiences in the context of specific cultural milieus or religious traditions (31). As Fraser Watts (2017) notes, such a decontextualized approach to religious experience hampers our exploration of all encounters with the numinous, as the latter always unfold in a context that is inevitably shaped by specific theological commitments or cultural preoccupations (53). As such, the exploration of religious and mystical experience is in need of a hermeneutic compass that enables scholars and practitioners to orient themselves when confronted by a reality that transcends them, sometimes threatens them, and almost inevitably transforms them. The purpose of this collection of essays, then, is to argue that depth psychology can serve as such a compass, helping one map and explore religious experiences that emerge from the most disparate cultures and traditions. In the same way as the appropriation of the Kantian turn saved Thomism from the trap of extrinsicism and buttressed the claims of a realist theological epistemology while affirming the cognitive role of the subject, the encounter between depth psychology and religious studies can open new vistas for religious phenomenology, treading a balance between the Scylla of psychological reductionism and the Charybdis of theological defensiveness. Since depth psychology affirms the role of the individual self as an instantiation of the collective unconscious and views religious symbols that are culturally and theologically contextual as articulations of our communal archetypes, this approach will enable one to acknowledge the reality of the subject’s encounters with the numinous while also affirming the role of our shared unconscious in generating linguistic and imaginal configurations of these experiences. In 1997, Stephen J. Gould authored an essay for Natural History where he talked of the non-overlapping magisterial of science and religion. This notion, which has gained great popularity over the years, simply asserted that theological and scientific claims belonged to different

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epistemic dimensions, and as such they could not contradict each other. One may be tempted to apply the same paradigm to the relationship between depth psychology on one hand, and approaches to the study of religion on the other, especially when the latter affirm the extrinsic ontological character of the realities that are experienced in religious or mystical phenomena. This may be a possible approach, which would eliminate the possible clash between depth psychological and theological commitments. A more fruitful approach, however, may be one where depth psychology and the traditional approaches to the study of mystical experience are viewed as complementary sources of insight, where adherents of one hermeneutic strategy can also benefit from the intuitions afforded by the alternative approach. In the same way as some transcendental Thomists veer more toward the Kantian and others toward the Thomist end of the spectrum, this approach would offer great methodological leeway, letting depth psychology reserve judgement on the ontological status of religious experience, and scholars of religion or theologians resort to the explanatory power of subconscious archetypes without necessarily agreeing as to their metaphysical source and character. The question whether speculative or descriptive claims about ultimate reality made by members of particular religious traditions can be regarded as phenomenologically grounded or as mere articulations of internal psychological dynamics is therefore revealed as a false dichotomy, which a new depth psychological hermeneutics of mystical phenomena can circumvent and lay to rest. Naïve accounts of religious knowing are surprisingly long-lived and have contributed to the popular misconception that theological claims are utterly meaningless, or that the only antidote to enlightenment skepticism is a second-order naiveté, where one returns to a child-like faith in metaphysical realities. To borrow a term from Fraser Watts and Mark Williams (1988), archetypes are interactional realities, and it is with these interactional realities that depth psychology is largely concerned, and when it comes to knowledge of such realities, sometimes “style” is more important than content, requiring careful attunement to experience, but also an attitude of “intellectual and emotional restraint” (151). If we acquire this style, we become like a priest for whom the rubrics of the Mass are no longer cumbersome shackles, but rather wings on which he can float effortlessly—and free from self-centered preoccupations—toward the divine. William Blake’s painting of the dream of Jacob, rather than the ascending steps of Swayambhu and Kathmandu Cathedral, portrays a

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spiral staircase, reminiscent perhaps of the Kundalini serpent that nestles at the basis of our spine. The angels that ascend and descend on the staircase remind us perhaps of the male and female energies that flow within our subtle body, and also recall Hermes’ caduceus, with the two serpents wrapped around a wand. Like the souls following their psychopomp into the afterlife, we can follow depth psychology’s invitation on a journey deeper into religious experience, moving toward an ever-greater awareness of ourselves and the mystery of the divine. *** The essays in this volume continue in the trajectory established at the turn of the nineteenth century when the “new science” of psychology and professional interest in esoteric and “occult” phenomena converged and led to what Ellenberger (1970) refers to as the “discovery of the unconscious.” These essays span the interdisciplinary fields of theology, religious studies, and psychology “and/of/in dialogue with” religion (Parsons and Jonte-Pace 2001, 1), with a specific focus on inquiries into the nature of self and consciousness, questions of “mysticism” and “mystical experience,” and approaches to these areas from within a variety of depth psychological hermeneutic “keys.” While a number of these topics have been approached in the past in various capacities and from varying psychological perspectives (e.g., psychoanalytic [Vaidyanathan and Kripal 1999], interdisciplinary [Parsons and Jonte-Pace 2001], or even with a specific focus on the psychology of mysticism [Belzen and Geels 2003]), this volume’s unique contribution lies within the specifically depth psychological nature of the inquiry and, even more so, with its often underlying Jungian orientation. This move was only of partial intent on the part of the editors, but should be noted as marking what has now become a rare collaboration among scholars of religion and depth psychologists of a more analytical/Jungian “flavor.”1 The volume is divided into three sections, each highlighting a distinct contribution to a depth psychological interpretive or methodological “approach.” The first, “Methodological, Hermeneutic, and Inter-Disciplinary Perspectives,” offers a variety of scholars working at various intersections including method, interpretation, and/or praxis. The second, “Historical and Theoretical Approaches,” includes essays 1 The issue of Jung’s critical reception among academic circles is too complex to outline here; for a more complete treatment see the essays found in Bulkeley and Weldon (2011), particularly Tacey (2011) and Miller’s (2011) contributions.

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by historians of religion and depth psychologists (or both) in comparative dialogue within the discipline of religious studies, or with a strong disciplinary orientation toward the psychology of religion and mystical experience. This section includes essays that historically contextualize or re-examine issues and questions in the field. The third and final section offers a “case study” on the topic of “Self and No-Self, Knowing and Unknowing in Depth Psychology and Mysticism.” This unique section includes essays by historians of religion and depth psychologists (or both) engaging in extended reflection on the variety of encounters in the history of mystical literature with emptiness and ecstasy, self-knowledge and self-forgetting, and constructions and annihilations of self in the dialogue between depth psychological and mystical experience. The first section, “Methodological, Hermeneutic, and InterDisciplinary Perspectives,” opens the volume with Thomas Cattoi’s essay, “Rescuing Alexandria: Depth Psychology and the Return of Tropological Exegesis.” Here, Cattoi engages with the first-century Christian exegetical debates among the Antiochean school of exegesis, which favored a literal interpretation of Biblical texts, and the Alexandrian, which was open to a multitude of interpretations, including allegorical. Cattoi focuses on Origen as a key representative of this approach and traces the demise of allegorical interpretation as it falls out of favor with the rise of historicalcritical approaches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cattoi then turns to Drewermann’s twentieth-century work on the infancy narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as a reimagined exegetical turn that implements a depth psychologically sophisticated hermeneutic that reconnects to the lineage of Alexandrian allegory without leaving behind the contextual lessons of historical-critical exegesis. David M. Odorisio’s essay, “Dionysus in Depth: Mystes, Madness, and Method in James Hillman’s Re-visioning of Psychology,” follows Cattoi in a methodological investigation of the underlying “structures”—and their implications—for a depth psychological hermeneutics of religion. Odorisio traces the varieties of Hillman’s Dionysian methodology through a focus on the categories of embodiment, emotion, and the erotic, and demonstrates how these qualities came to formulate the core theoretical vision of Hillman’s archetypal hermeneutic. Odorisio concludes by turning Hillman’s critique of traditional psychological epistemologies onto the discipline of religious studies itself and asks how a “Dionysian” depth psychological hermeneutic might undermine many of the key strategies of traditional historical-critical approaches to mystical

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experience while advancing a methodology that embraces personal subjectivity, including a risked “madness” of “losing one’s self ” in proximity to one’s scholarly material. Kelly Bulkeley’s “The Royal Road Meets the Data Highway” uses a depth psychological framework to map out the future potentials of twenty-first-century technological enhancements to mystical dreaming. Bulkeley asks: Can these tools make it easier for people to have mystical experiences in their dreams? Or do the tools alter and diminish the innate capacity for mystical dreaming? Bulkeley follows Ricoeur and Freud in asking how psychoanalysis as a “mixed discourse” can shed new light on the complex, multifaceted interplay between mind, body, and spirit. In doing so, he draws upon an interdisciplinary approach that brings together comparative religion, scientific research, and depth psychology to uncover increased understanding of mystical experiences in dreaming. Bulkeley concludes with a consideration of the future possibilities associated with three specific types of dream-enhancing technologies: chemical and electrical stimulants, neural scanners and playback monitors, and linguistic analysis. He claims that depth psychological traditions have a valuable role to play in assisting people to accurately identify the advantages and disadvantages of these technologies. Robin S. Brown’s “Spirituality and the Challenge of Clinical Pluralism: Participatory Thinking in Psychotherapeutic Context” suggests that the reticence of the clinical mainstream to more directly embrace spiritual concerns betrays an underlying dogmatism. To Brown, concepts of spirituality (and mysticism) have a paradigmatic importance and demonstrate the pluralistic failings of modern Western psychology. Brown draws on recent developments in American psychoanalysis as an example of spiritually oriented clinical practice, yet challenges its secularism. In doing so, Brown invokes the recent “participatory turn” in transpersonal psychology to revisit Jung’s work and demonstrate what he believes is the enduring importance of an archetypal approach to psychotherapy. Ira Helderman’s essay, “Descriptive Disenchantment and Prescriptive Disillusionment: Myths, Mysticism, and Psychotherapeutic Interpretation” questions the hermeneutic strategies and underpinnings of the therapist’s own interpretations of “mystical” material through an interdisciplinary approach that includes both psychotherapy and anthropology of religion. With a focus on the later, Helderman questions the differences among how psychotherapists and religious studies scholars might listen to stories,

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narratives, or accounts of mystical experiences, including the differences in how scholars or therapists might speak or write about mystical phenomena. Helderman argues that the way one answers such questions is telling of the lenses implicit within each discipline and traces the biases inherent in each through a compelling case study narrative. The second section of the volume focuses on historical and theoretical approaches to the depth psychological study of mysticism, beginning with Ann Gleig’s “Embodying Nonduality: Depth Psychology in American Mysticism.” Gleig explores the theme of nonduality through two contemporary American teachers and methods: Judith Blackstone’s “Realization Process” and Hameed Ali’s “Diamond Approach.” Gleig outlines how these teachers draw on the insights of depth psychology to assist in their presentation of an embodied nondual realization. Gleig then identifies the historical and cultural processes that have facilitated the integration of depth psychological insights as both aid and interpretive framework for mystical practice. She concludes by extending the work of Michel de Certeau to think about what such forms of psychodynamically informed mysticism signify in terms of the cultural history of mysticism in the West. William B. Parsons’ “Mysticism in Translation: Psychological Advances, Cautionary Tales” offers a genealogical, historical, and methodological “bird’s eye view” of the encounter between psychology and mysticism. Parsons begins by tracing the “cousin terms” of mysticism and spirituality, and traces their development from a Western “churched” context to an “unchurched” or psychological one. He then follows this with a historical overview of what he defines as the “three eras” of the psychology and religion movement (1880–1944; 1945–1969; 1970– present), including its important figures and key theories. Parsons then asks what are the contributions that psychology has offered in its interpretation of mystical phenomenon, and then, the related question, what are its pitfalls? He concludes by offering what he terms a “constructivist, dialogical, transformational approach” in which multiple disciplines are seated at the metaphorical interpretive table. Continuing the historical and theoretical theme, Christine Downing’s essay “Sigmund Freud and Jewish Mysticism: An Exploration” traces Freud’s relationship to mystical experiences from an initial reductive distaste to a curious ambivalence at the end of his life. Drawing from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as well as multiple letters, Downing teases out the multiple threads of Freud’s complex relationship

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to the topic of mysticism, particularly through the infant’s early narcissism and relationship to the mother, as well as an exploration of mysticism in relation to the father and father gods. Downing draws on Freud’s concept of the “death drive” to draw additional conclusions about the creative and destructive aspects of Freud’s “mysticism.” Downing additionally draws important connections between Freud’s methodology as found in The Interpretation of Dreams and Jewish biblical exegesis, or midrash. Lionel Corbett’s essay “Jung and Mysticism” responds to the challenging and often-asked question, “Was Jung a mystic?” After a helpful clarification of this debate, Corbett offers an overview of a variety of methodological approaches to the topic of mysticism from both psychological and historical-theoretical perspectives. Corbett then discusses differences between Jung’s psychology of mysticism and various Asian and European mystical traditions, often placing key figures in conversation with other twentieth-century scholars of mysticism. Throughout, Corbett responds to the question framed at the onset of his essay: Is Jung’s a psychology of mysticism—or a mystical psychology?—while continuing to (re)contextualize the question through a variety of theological, philosophical, and depth psychological debates. Glen Slater’s essay, “Mystic Descent: James Hillman and the Religious Imagination,” concludes the section on historical and theoretical approaches to depth psychology and mysticism by focusing on the tension James Hillman captures in his writings on the distinction between “spirit” and “soul.” Slater draws the psychological implications of these tensions to their fullest conclusions by examining alongside Hillman what the “soul” perspective might have to offer when articulating the “spiritual” nature of mysticism. Slater argues that a soul-bound depth psychology serves something intrinsic to the mystical vision itself, which continues to keep a perspective oriented toward soul close at hand rather than ascending to the supposed mystical heights of “pure spirit.” He concludes that the mystic might be more “soul-bound” than assumed, which illuminates the potentially important bond between depth psychology and mysticism. The third section of the volume offers a unique case study on theories and encounters of self and no-self, knowing and unknowing in depth psychology and mysticism. These five authors offer a focused analysis of the experience of self and selflessness in depth psychological and mystical experience, and examine from a multitude of angles—analytic, historical,

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and philosophical—the interplay of apophatic (“unsaying” or “unknowing”) and cataphatic (“to know”) traditions, through a comparative study of cross-cultural mystics and “mysticisms.” The first essay in this section, David Henderson’s “Apophasis and Psychoanalysis” focuses on the problem of unknowing in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Through a discussion that is both historical and theoretical—while remaining practical in orientation and applicable to psychoanalysts and therapists—Henderson argues that psychotherapy serves as a contemporary site of apophatic discourse. By placing writings by classical figures in the history of Christian mysticism, such as PseudoDionysius and Nicholas Cusa, in conversation with psychoanalytic, postmodern, and Jungian theory, Henderson offers a rich reflection and extended meditation on what he refers to as an apophatic “family resemblance.” His essay suggests that there are resources within the apophatic tradition that may aid the psychotherapist to think anew about “not knowing” and the “unknowable” in analysis. Stanton Marlan’s “Divine Darkness and Divine Light: Alchemical Illumination and the Mystical Play Between Knowing and Unknowing” explores a mutual overlap among certain mystical theologians, philosophers, and schools of depth psychological thinking. Marlan follows the via negative in Jung, Lacan, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Henri Corbin alongside their associated traditions of alchemy, analysis, mystical theology, and Gnosticism. Marlan’s chapter offers an extended meditation on images and metaphors of divine darkness and divine light, such as the solification and sol niger of the alchemist, Gnostic theophanies, jouissance, and transformational encounters with both ecstasy and self-negation. Marlan interprets these experiences—both of illumination and unknowing—not as a static, ontological fixed state, but as an ongoing process of renewal with profound depth psychological implications. David Miller’s “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles! Self and No-Self in Depth Psychology and Mystical Theology” directly engages what to many might seem problematic in the relationship between depth psychology and mystical theology. Contrasting a personal sense of nothingness or a modern day crisis of meaninglessness with the comparative mystical goal of “becoming nothing,” Miller explores the contradiction between “becoming someone” and becoming “no-self.” He asks if psychological and mystical “nothingnesses” are different, and offers a comparative analysis of these potentially different “nothings.” Miller argues that both “nothingnesses” are indeed the same “no-self.”

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June McDaniel continues this reflection on the locus of self-identification with her essay, “‘In Killing You Changed Death to Life’: Transformation of the Self in St. John of the Cross and Carl Jung.” Taking as her examples Spanish Catholic mystic and Doctor of the Church, John of the Cross, and C. G. Jung, McDaniel examines the ways in which visionary experiences act to transform the self. The point of contact here is in her comparison of modes of self-annihilation and self-renewal as witnessed in the writings of both figures. McDaniel first examines the processes of John’s “Dark Night” and compares this to Jung’s nekyia, or underworld journey of “Individuation.” In both instances, an “old self” is deconstructed or “killed,” which is followed in both systems by a renewal of psychological life or spiritual vitality. The final paper of this section, which also concludes the volume, is Polly Young-Eisendrath’s “The Buddhist Unconscious (Alaya-vijnana) and Jung’s Collective Unconscious: What Does It Mean to be Liberated from the Self?” Young-Eisendrath takes up the complex and often-debated question at the intersection of depth psychology and Buddhist studies regarding the nature of the Jungian archetypal Self and Buddhist teachings on “no-self.” Here, she argues that the archetype of the self arises from the collective unconscious, which she writes is analogous to the Buddhist alayavijnana (“storehouse consciousness” or “substrate consciousness”), and is not identical to the experience of no-self. YoungEisendrath analyzes the development of the Buddhist “unconscious” through the lens of Abhidharma and Yogacara psychology. Utilizing a phenomenological lens, she then clarifies the experience of the Self and in doing so engages the function of the collective unconscious as it arises in dreams, culture, language, and individuals.

References Belzen, Jacob A., and Antoon Geels, eds. 2003. Mysticism: A Variety of Psychological Perspectives. New York, NY: Rodopi. Bulkeley, Kelly, and Clodagh Weldon, eds. 2011. Teaching Jung. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Corbett, Lionel. 1996. The Religious Function of the Psyche. London and New York: Routledge. Edinger, Edward. 1984. The Creation of Consciousness. Toronto: Inner City Books. Ellenberger, Henri F. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. San Francisco, CA: Basic Books.

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Jonte-Pace, Diane, and William B. Parsons, eds. 2001. Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain: Contemporary Dialogues, Future Prospects. New York, NY: Routledge. Miller, David. 2011. Misprision: Pitfalls in Teaching Jung in a University Religious Studies Department. In Teaching Jung, edited by Kelly Bulkeley and Clodagh Weldon, 29–50. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Tacey, David. 2011. The Challenge of Teaching Jung in the University. In Teaching Jung, edited by Kelly Bulkeley and Clodagh Weldon, 13–28. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Vaidyanathan, T. G., and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds. 1999. Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Watts, Fraser. 2017. Psychology, Religion and Spirituality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, Fraser, and Mark Williams. 1988. The Psychology of Religious Knowing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Methodological, Hermeneutic, & Inter-disciplinary Perspectives

CHAPTER 2

Rescuing Alexandria: Depth Psychology and the Return of Tropological Exegesis Thomas Cattoi

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the exegetical method developed by the German theologian and psychotherapist Eugen Drewermann can help us regain access to a spiritually transformative reading of the Christian Scriptures without rejecting or questioning the value of contemporary scientific exegesis. The first section of this paper will outline the crucial importance of Origen of Alexandria (180–256) and more broadly of the Alexandrian school of exegesis, in the development of the practice of lectio divina, and will then suggest how the emergence of the historical-critical method resulted in the opening of a hermeneutic chasm between the contemporary reader of Scripture and the very tradition of allegorical and tropological exegesis. The second part of the paper will introduce Eugen Drewermann’s exegetical method, exploring how depth psychology enables him to affirm the ongoing transformative relevance of Scriptural narrative, without reducing the Biblical witness to a nexus of inspiring, though ultimately ahistorical myths, and simultaneously resisting the temptation to dismiss the insights of either historical-critical exegesis or traditional theology. T. Cattoi (*)  Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, Berkeley, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_2

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Drewermann’s deployment of subconscious archetypes as the cipher of his hermeneutics may not enable to us to recover the high Christocentric allegories of the Alexandrian tradition. At the same time, I will argue that a depth psychological reading will help contemporary readers—including those who no longer hold on to traditional theological commitments— to once again encounter Scriptural stories and narratives as loci of integration and spiritual transformation. In other words, the universal consciousness of humanity may hold few semina verbi, but contain a broad enough panoply of archetypes to help us recover the transformative import of the sacred text. The Alexandrian tradition of exegesis can be traced back to the second century of the Christian era, and it found its most accomplished practitioner in the figure of Origen of Alexandria (180–256). A prolific author whose commentaries to Scripture would provide endless spiritual nourishment and intellectual inspiration to generations of monastics and scholars, Origen was also the author of the first comprehensive overview of Christian theology, namely his treatise Peri Archōn (On First Principles), usually known under its Latin title De Principiis, and indeed handed down to us in the Latin versions of Rufinus and Jerome (Patrologia Graeca 11, 111–413). Origen’s worldview wove together elements of Middle-Platonism, Gnosticism, and Stoicism, while also developing a novel, and uniquely Christian vision of the cosmos and the place of humanity in the divine plan that was profoundly rooted in the witness of Scripture. For instance, Origen’s conflation of the Johannine concept of Logos with the Stoic notion of a cosmic intelligence that sustained the cosmos provided philosophical depth to the former, while also qualifying the latter and affirming the Logos’ personal character, as well as his personal involvement in the trajectory of the cosmic order (Daniélou 2016, 209–20). Similarly, Origen’s use of gnostic anthropological categories complemented his reliance on Pauline anthropology, while also furnishing his readers with a framework to conceptualize spiritual progress from a ‘carnal’ starting point, through a ‘psychic’ intermediate stage, to an ultimately ‘spiritual’ goal. The notion of the Logos sustaining creation to the final eschatological horizon that is already present in God’s own mind coexists with an emphasis on individual self-determination (autexousiotēs): While it is clear that individual logikoi—be they humans, angels, or demons—start at different levels of the ontological ladder, they are all given the chance to move closer to God and come and experience communion with him (251–58). The

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imprints of the Logos in all aspects of creation—which Origen calls logoi spermatikoi and the Latin tradition would call semina verbi—ensure that all creatures are ontologically tied to the mystery of the eternal Word. At the same time, the logoi are not categorical straightjackets setting limits to the development of the cosmos; rather, they are the blueprints for the ontological development of creation, as well as the benchmark for the ethical and spiritual development of the logikoi (258–62). How Origen approaches the Scriptural text is ultimately congruent with his anthropological vision. In Book 4 of De Principiis, we find something quite rare in early Christian literature: a methodological reflection on Scriptural exegesis (PG 11, 341–413). Origen distinguishes between a literal and a spiritual meaning of the Biblical text, but he also drives a wedge between an intermediate, ‘ethical’ reading and the more properly ‘spiritual’ interpretation that only more advanced individuals are able to grasp. If more anthropologically punitive gnostic schools could not envisage a ‘carnal’ individual leaving behind the shackles of the flesh and coming to drink at the wells of morality and pneuma, Origen is quite willing to imagine that less adept readers may begin by taking in the surface of the Biblical narrative, but may then progress to the ethical— ‘tropological’—meaning and eventually even get a glimpse of the spiritual interpretation. The trajectory of Scriptural exegesis from the literal to the ethical and the allegorical is thus mirrored by a similar trajectory in the reader’s spiritual growth, who at different moments of her life may grasp and be alternatively challenged or inspired by different meanings of the same text (Daniélou 2016, 139–74). Origen does not discuss this possibility explicitly, but there is nothing in his system preventing a rational being from regressing to lower levels of meaning if and when the readers falls prey to sin and thus can no longer elevate themselves to the depths of the divine mystery. The trichotomy of literal, tropological, and spiritual would become the gold standard for early Christian approaches to Scriptural exegesis; indeed, anyone familiar with Aquinas will recall that while the Angelic Doctor lists four meanings of Scripture, the anagogical meaning is just a variant of the allegorical meaning that is eschatologically tinged (ST I, Q.1, Art. 10). Indeed, the Origenist framework for Scriptural exegesis would remain unchallenged for centuries, and it was only the reformers, with characteristic anthropological pessimism, that would dare question this received tradition. From the deserts of Egypt to the Irish bogs, and from the pillars of Georgia to the monasteries of Flanders, generations

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of mystics would luxuriate in allegorizing readings of the sacred text, in the unshakeable certainty that in so doing they would come closer to the mystery of the divine. Readers of Origen’s time viewed Scripture as the inexhaustible mirror of the boundless Logos, where all treasures of wisdom and holiness were buried, and would have been utterly puzzled by the contemporary obsession for authorial intent and correct interpretation. If Maximos the Confessor’s Ambiguum 10 lists eighteen different allegorical readings of the Synoptic narrative of the Transfiguration, readers from late antiquity or the Middle Ages would simply rest in awe of the depths of the author’s spiritual insight, without for a moment doubting the legitimacy of his hermeneutic fancy (Louth 1996, 63–81). Anyone who has ever taken a course in early Christian thought is familiar with the terms ‘Alexandrian’ and ‘Antiochian’ schools of exegesis, and may have been told that the former is open to allegorical readings of the text, while the latter privileges the literal meaning. A better way to distinguish these two approaches—which in fact exist on a spectrum—is to claim that the Alexandrian school allows for a plurality of meanings reflecting the reader’s level of spiritual development, whereas the Antiochians seek to find the ‘correct’ meaning (skopos) of a particular passage (Perrone 2003, 13–46). The skopos can actually be allegorical, as with the passage in Luke 13:32 when Jesus refers to Herod as a fox. Origen’s approach is thus paradigmatic of this Alexandrian penchant for spiritualizing readings, even if throughout his works, the author of De Principiis is adamant that all these allegorizing interpretations are grounded in the historical meaning of the text. In other words, Origen did not just believe in a Galilea of the mind, or in a noetic incarnation of the Logos: The eternal Word of God, who sustained the universe through the imprint of the logoi spermatikoi, had truly taken flesh in a particular place at a particular moment in time, thereby inaugurating a new phase in the divine economy (Stefaniw 2010, 365–87). While Origen acknowledges the existence of three levels of interpretation, it is nonetheless a fact that in his exegetical writings he tends to conflate the tropological and the allegorical, or indeed move directly to the allegorical level. Origen appears to have little patience for the ethical injunctions an eager practitioner might find concealed in the pages of Scripture once she has moved past the letter of the text; he wants to move right into exploring the divine mystery, which—more often than not— means exploring the Christological undercurrents of the Old Testament.

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This kind of Christocentric exegesis, of course, is also an exercise of theological politics, as Origen seeks to hold together the legacy of the old covenant, with its emphatic assertion of divine uniqueness, and the books of the new covenant, with their hesitant, yet inescapable intimations of divine plurality (Louth 1996, 48–63). The supersessionist perspective of much of Origen’s allegorizing is troubling to many contemporary readers, but in the early Christian era it served a clear apologetic purpose by underscoring the congruence of the two divine covenants and the inescapably Christological character of the divine pedagogy. The other side of the hermeneutic coin, however, is that Origen and his epigones channeled their energies into ever more creative allegorical readings, and therefore the ethical/tropological meanings receded ever more into the background. Even the authors whose writings found their way into the eighteenth-century collection known as Philokalia, whose genre came closer to what we would today call spiritual direction, rather than speculative theology, are often more keener on the purely allegorical than the propaedeutic reading of the text (Burton-Christie 2012, 73–87). The Protestant reformation, despite its professed love for the Old Testament and its desire to free the text of Scripture from the shackles of institutionally approved exegesis, marked a profound shift in the spiritual reception of Scripture. Luther’s ambivalent attitude toward allegory emerges clearly when reflecting on the flood in his Commentary on Genesis: I have often asserted that I take no delight in allegories. Nevertheless, I was so enchanted by them in my youth that under the influence of the examples of Origen and Jerome, whom I admired as the greater theologians, I thought that everything had to be turned into allegories. Augustine, too, makes frequent use of allegories. But while I was following their examples, I finally realized that to my own great harm I had followed an empty shadow and had left unconsidered the heart and core of the Scriptures. Later on, therefore, I began to have a dislike for allegories. They do indeed give pleasure, particularly when they have some delightful allusions. Therefore I usually compare them to pretty pictures. But to the same extent that the natural color of bodies surpasses the picture […] the historical narrative surpasses the allegory. (in Pelikan 1960, 150)

A similar ambivalence can be traced to Calvin. The latter condemns allegory quiet harshly, but resorts to typology quite liberally, and routinely compares Aaron, Moses, Joshua, and David to Jesus (Leithart 2007).

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Indeed, while upholding the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, and emphatically rejecting the legitimacy of established ecclesiastical authority, Calvin views the insights of the Father as an entrée into the skopos of Scripture that centuries of clerical rule have obfuscated. If the Protestant reformation could be seen as a posthumous victory of the school of Antioch, encouraging a return to the literal meaning of the text, the historical-critical method in nineteenth-century Europe was markedly suspicious of allegory, reflecting an unprecedented preoccupation with authorial intention, as well as an openness to question conventional beliefs as to the composition and indeed the authorship of specific Biblical texts. The result of this exegetical approach did not merely foreground the wedge between the Scriptural witness and the doctrinal consensus of the tradition on issues such as Trinitarian theology and Christology, but also ensured that generations of Scripture scholars, educated at the feet of Harnack, Bultmann, and Conzelmann, would be highly suspicious of the allegorical strategy of the early church (Nowak and Oexle 2001). The problem with this approach, however, is that it erects a virtual barrier between the contemporary reader of Scripture and the tradition of edifying and spiritual exegesis that was developed from the very beginning of the Christian era. Scripture, stretched on the Procrustean bunk beds of redaction criticism and form criticism, can barely offer any sustenance to the weary soul, who will then turn elsewhere for spiritual solace. What Christian theologians therefore need is a way forward toward the re-enchantment of the Biblical page. The question however is how this can be accomplished without merely rejecting the insights of historical-critical analysis. If one can wonder whether there can still be a theology after Kant, who relegated the divine into a realm of epistemological inaccessibility, perhaps one can also ask whether there can be lectio divina after Harnack. Of course, even in the wake of modernity and postmodernity, some interpreters of Scripture merely choose to reassert the traditional Logocentric perspective that undergirded the Alexandrian worldview. For an example of this approach, we do not have to look further than Joseph Ratzinger—former Pope Benedict XVI. In his trilogy on Jesus, Ratzinger resorted to a highly traditional distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, he argues that the historical-critical method is able to give us an insight into the former, but only the faith of the church that is handed down to us from generation to generation

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can actually give us the latter (2011). Ratzinger does not dismiss the historical-critical method; indeed, no self-respecting scholar could afford to do so nowadays, but he wryly observes that this hermeneutic strategy has yielded everything it could possibly yield, and it is thus necessary to look elsewhere—chiefly in the writings of the church Fathers—for a satisfactory insight into the mystery of Christ (32–48). Ratzinger’s retrieval of the insights of Patristic exegesis in his Jesus trilogy reveals a theological mindset that is indeed not too different from that of the early Christian authors he references so lovingly. In this perspective, the hypostatic union is the hermeneutic key of the universe; the second Person of the Trinity acts in a composite manner through Jesus’ humanity and divinity, therefore serving as the ontological ground of the person of Christ, but the eternal Logos is also the ground of the cosmos, and as such it invests every aspect of the natural order with a propaedeutic dimension. This kind of cosmological Christocentrism ensures that all allegorical readings of Scripture are ultimately Christological, or geared toward an appreciation of God’s plan for the cosmos, of which the incarnate Christ is the first as well as final cause (Ratzinger 2011, 62–8, 95–100). Of course, the problem with such an approach is that access to the exegetical tradition is only possible for those who inhabit this classical Christological horizon. As in De Principiis, the spiritual import of the Scriptures is only available to those who already have the gift of faith. Eugen Drewermann’s approach, for its part, goes in a very different direction. Born in Dortmund in 1940, Drewermann was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1966, at a time when the German Catholic church was going through the upheavals that followed the Second Vatican Council. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as a diocesan priest and student chaplain, while also working as a psychotherapist. From 1979 onwards, he started to teach dogmatic theology and comparative religions at the Catholic Theological Faculty in Paderborn. It was at Paderborn in the 1980s that he began to speak and write about the need to radically reinterpret Biblical texts according to psychoanalytic and existential criteria—an approach he first outlined in his two-volume masterwork Tiefenpsychologie und Exegese (initially published in 1984–1985). A slew of volumes followed, including depth psychological interpretations of a number of Biblical texts, as well as a number of volumes on the question of God in dialogue with anthropology, biology, and cosmology,

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and even a commentary on some fairy tales by Andersen and Grimm.1 Difficulties with ecclesiastical authorities led his local bishop to withdraw Drewermann’s permission to teach at the Catholic Theological Faculty, as well as his eventual reduction to the lay state. In 2005, Drewermann actually formally left the Catholic church—an act made possible in Germany and Austria by the laws regulating church-state relations and the payment of the Kirchensteuer.2 What is Drewermann’s exegetical method? In his multi-volume work Wort des Heils, Wort der Heilung (1988), Drewermann concedes that the insights of the historical-critical method are crucial to the development of the Biblical sciences and they cannot be ignored or minimized. At the same time, according to Drewermann, historical-critical Biblical exegesis is too objective and one-sided (einseitig) and is unable to enthuse the contemporary reader, or appease her existential anxiety (26–40). Drewermann frequently uses the concept of Angst, which defines the individual’s feeling of existential dread as she faces the meaninglessness of her own existence and the overwhelming threats coming at her from all directions (Drewermann 2001, 206–34). In his perspective, anyone who is involved in pastoral care—whether in an ecclesial or a psychotherapeutic context—will not really be able to help the individual using tools that are purely theological or that are roots in a scientific approach to the Biblical text. As such, Biblical hermeneutics has to be expanded with the help of psychoanalysis (Drewermann 1994, 30–8). The method of depth psychology is then able to develop what he calls the ‘language games’ of theology (Sprachspiele) and the insights of the historical-critical method in a way that is ‘religiously fruitful’ (Krez 2008, 7). According to Drewermann (1994), the Bible is not primarily a historical book, although his attitude to the historicity of Scripture is ambiguous and perhaps not fully consistent (24–30). The Bible consists of ‘narratives, legends, fairy-tales, dreams and myths’ (Krez 2008, 6–8), all

1 See Eugen Drewermann, Der tödliche Fortschritt: von der Zerstörung der Erde und des Menschen im Erbe des Christentums (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet Verlag, 1983); …Und es geschah so: Die modern Biologie und die Frage nach Gott (Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag, 1999); Atem des Lebens: Die Moderne Neurologie und die Frage nach Gott. Band I: Das Gehirn (Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag, 2006); Landschaften der Seele oder: Wie man die Angst überwindet- Grimms Märchen tiefenpsychologisch gedeutet (Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag, 2015). 2 For biographical information about Drewermann, see Matthias Beier, Drewermann: Die Biographie (Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag, 2017).

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of which concern our relationship with God and Jesus. Psychoanalysis helps theologians find in Scripture images and symbols that portray typical life situations or processes; it is these images and symbols that actually matter, more than the narratives in which they are interwoven. The Scriptural images can then become points of entry into the human subconscious; in other words, they are historically contextualized manifestations of particular archetypes that capture profound human truths about the human condition, and that all human beings possess in the depths of their own subconscious. Drewermann views mythological imagination as no less universal than Enlightenment rationality, and its insights as no less ‘objective’ than the deliverances of reason. Archetypal images do not have a mere heuristic value for a better understanding of the human condition, but are also eudemonistically normative, presenting objective truths about the choices we face in our everyday life (Drewermann 2001, 635–45). Drewermann knows quite well that earlier psychoanalytic approaches to myth tended to view the latter as a mere subjective efflorescence of the human spirit, and different authors disagreed significantly as to its value for the exploration of the psyche. In the introduction to his exploration of the infancy narratives in the gospel of Luke, Drewermann (1994, 35) shares this quote from Karl Huebner’s Die Wahrheit des Mythos (1985): Admittedly, psychoanalysis also limited myth to the realm of the purely subjective. But by understanding that myth is a vital form of psychic release, and by believing that it had the power to derive this fact by scientific methods from the laws of psychic life, psychoanalysis conferred on myth the significance of something purely and simply necessary. The lost objectively binding nature of myth is thus replaced by its subjective compulsiveness.

In other words, myth was understood in early psychoanalysis as a transitional phase of primitive humanity and primitive language—an unavoidable phase perhaps, but still a phase that a ‘rational’ individual would leave behind. For Drewermann (1994), however, myth is not a childish disease to be outgrown so as to develop a set of antibodies; its role is not historically limited to less evolved periods in the history of humanity (30–38). Mythical imagery stretches down into the deepest roots of psychic life, constantly impinging on its essence, and as such it is not

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arbitrary or subjective. Indeed, after the Kantian turn to the subject, the very dichotomy between the ‘objective’ realm of the understanding and the ‘subjective’ realm of imagination appears hard to justify, since understanding and imagination are shaped by humanity’s cognitive and emotional faculties. At the same time, Drewermann also affirms that it is because of God that we can trust the archetypal images in our subconscious: In his own words, it is God who gave us these images ‘for the road,’ so that ‘we can find our way in this world and not lose sight of the path back to our eternal homeland’ (36). Using a depth psychological approach to the Biblical text ensures that the Biblical figures and narratives are brought closer to the deeper strata of the human psyche and acquire an ‘inner truth’ that is even more important than its historical counterpart. The notion of God is identified with ‘trust, strength, warmth, love, wisdom, and reason,’ even if he is also the ultimate subject who created and loved humanity. Drewermann (1994) wishes to discuss Jesus’ personality ‘beyond the Enlightenment dichotomy between myth and history’ (25), and he tends to view the miracles of the New Testament as spontaneous experiences that emerge out of the encounter with Jesus (Drewermann 2001, 239–46). Drewermann does not really develop a theology of atonement; indeed, he affirms that Jesus himself did not intend his death to have an atoning character, and he reads the mystery of the resurrection as merely an affirmation of God’s love and a trust that his love overcomes fear (27–35). It would, however, be incorrect to claim that depth psychology tries to eliminate the notion of sin. To the contrary, Drewermann is convinced that psychotherapy enables individuals to see more clearly their moral flaws, which reflect themselves in their existential insecurities and tension. Guilt is not something that exists on the level of an arbitrary morality, but once again is discovered at the existential level. Redemption takes place as the individual is able to move beyond her own inner conflicts and welcome the divine in her life, becoming the person God meant them to be (625–35). I am not aware of any text where Drewermann discusses Ratzinger’s approach that we discussed above, but most likely, Drewermann would be very skeptical of an approach based on overarching metaphysical narratives that may not be shared by most contemporary readers. If Ratzinger (2011) focuses on what for him is the false dichotomy between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, which he views as the result of two non-overlapping hermeneutic strategies (9–15),

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Drewermann uses depth psychology to overcome a second false dichotomy—that between theology and myth. On the one hand, Drewermann (1994) contends that it is essential for theology to become self-critical and move away from a dogmatic overreliance on rationality or ‘the self-assurance of its historical positivism’ (35); on the other hand, by way of depth psychology, psychoanalysis can also come to a more realistic appreciation of its potentiality and acknowledge that the Christian tradition can also offer transformative insights into the human condition. Let us now give two examples of Drewermann’s exegetical approach: One will be his analysis of the infancy narratives of the Gospel of Luke, which are explored in his volume by the same title, and the story of the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, which he discusses in the second volume of his Tiefenpsychologie und Exegese.3 Drewermann discusses the annunciation narrative from the Gospel of Luke (Lk. 1: 26–38) and connects it with the angelic epiphany in Rilke’s Duino Elegy, where angelic beauty is connected with terror (Rilke 2011). Both in his reflection on the book of Tobit and in his commentary on Luke, Drewermann (1994) interprets the vision of the angel image as a paradigmatic encounter with our own nature, or in other words, ‘the form in which we encounter ourselves on the way to maturation and fulfillment’ (46). The angel is thus an archetype of the dignity of our being, which we usually fail to discern, but which overwhelms us with its majesty whenever the veil of habit is stripped from our eyes. If Jewish thought viewed the angel Gabriel as a messenger of the last days, Drewermann prefers to view the manifestation of the angel as a personal eschatology, where we have to undergo a sort of personal judgement of our life. Drewermann views the Egyptian goddess Maat, who with her wings embraces the wing where the soul of the deceased is weighed, as a prefiguration of the Christian archangels, Gabriel who discloses God’s plan and Michael who is also portrayed as holding the scales of judgement (47). And yet, if we realize that the angel is ultimately the original model of our existential vocation, we shall cease to be afraid. The message will

3 Drewermann’s Dein Name is wie der Geschmack des Lebens: Tiefen-psychologische Deutung der Kindheitsgeschichte nach dem Lukasevangelium (Herder: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1986), was published in English with the rather misleading title Discovering the God Child within: A Spiritual Psychology of the Infancy of Jesus, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Crossroad, 1994). This essay relies on Heinegg’s translation.

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be ‘Do not be afraid, o Mary’ (Lk. 1: 30). As the angel discloses God’s plan for her, Mary comes to see clearly God’s plan for her existence. From the depth psychological point of view, this angelic epiphany comes to mean that this ‘self-experience’ is ultimately ‘an experience of God,’ and vice versa (Drewermann 1994, 50). The message of the angel is a message that only God can deliver, and that is only meant for a particular person. In the same way, human flourishing in its authentic sense is only possible through the grace of God, which in Egyptian iconography was portrayed by the outspread wings of Maat. The birth of the Messiah that follows the annunciation is thus an archetype of the divine permission to reimagine life. The divine child represents those realms of the human soul that grace presses into consciousness—indeed, this is done in a ‘virginal’ way as it is grace, and not will, that begets our vocation (51). It is important to note that Drewermann does not reject the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth of the Son of God, but views it as a statement about the nature of Christ—namely, Christ is the paradigm of existential integration, the one member of the human race in which the regeneration and realization of the human essence is accomplished. The childhood of Christ is eternal: ‘unless you become like children, you shall never enter the kingdom of God’ (Mt. 18: 3). For Drewermann (1994), the unexhausted life of the child Jesus is thus God’s guarantee that all human promise can be realized with help of his grace (51). Another episode from the Gospel of Luke that is the object of Drewermann’s attention is the encounter between Mary and Elizabeth popularly known as the ‘visitation’ (Lk. 1: 39–45, 56). The customary historical-critical reading of this passage tries to explain this passage in terms of the relationship between the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of John the Baptist (Drewermann 1994, 84–85).4 Mary’s visitation can then link John’s community and Jesus’ community, enabling the church to appropriate the former as a precursor to the Christian church. Drewermann does not dismiss this interpretation, but claims that we should look deeper into the transtemporal relationship of these two children, so that we can understand the ‘eternal’ precursory character of John with regard to Christ. Drewermann interprets John as the archetype of ethical renewal and contrasts this with Jesus’ archetype of religious renewal that transcends the strict demands of ethics. 4 Drewermann quotes E. Stauffer, Jerusalem und Rom in Zeitalter Jesu Christi (Bern: Dalp, 1957), 80–102.

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John threatens sinners with God’s punishment, proclaiming the inevitability of judgment with the virulence of Old Testament prophets (1994, 87). He also appears to have very clear and concrete ideas about what should be done: ‘He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none’ (Lk. 3: 10). For John, the Messiah who is to come will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire; ‘his winnowing fork is in his hand,’ and he shall gather the wheat, but ‘the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’ (Lk. 3: 17). John was right, and yet, Drewermann notes, he was also wrong, as Jesus did not himself winnowing the wheat from the chaff, but rather, he viewed himself as the physician who is sent to heal the sick (Mt. 2: 17). The Father that is revealed by Jesus is more interested in the lost sheep than in the ninety-nine who have no need of conversion; and it is impossible to recover the lost sheep launching out moral appeals in the style of John, because those who are lost are incapable of fulfilling any of them. Jesus does not demand ‘strengthening through fear,’ but ‘ripening through trust’ (Drewermann 1994, 93). Drewermann compares the disciples of John to people seeking to run well-adjusted lives, solving their inner conflicts and problems with repression and masking their mediocrity behind well-adjusted lives. Jesus wants us to move beyond this sadism of the superego and embraces the insight that we are sinners, profoundly in need of the mercy of God. Paradoxically, the Baptist was an ethical optimist—he thought it was possible to meet the demands of the moral law—whereas Christ, like Paul after him, taught we live and die purely by God’s grace (95–96). Indeed, even the deaths of John and of Jesus indicate this profound divergence: John dies incurring the revenge of Herod whom he angered through his moral protest, whereas Jesus’ death appears senseless, an unjust condemnation of an utterly innocent man. Yet, this death is not supposed to show us how to live, by way of a moral code, but rather to reveal what we should live on—namely God’s forgiveness. It is telling that John’s disciples recover his body, even as his death effectively marks the end of his movement, whereas Jesus’ apostles cannot hold on to their master’s resurrected body, but his resurrection signaled the beginning of an unprecedented revolution in the religious history of humanity. In this perspective, the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary is ultimately meant to symbolize the fact that the religious trumps the ethical perspective; salvation—inner integration— cannot be accomplished in our own terms, but only through God’s forgiveness, which eliminates the consequences of our shortcomings (102).

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This kind of tension between ethical demands and divine forgiveness—which makes inner integration possible—is also traced by Drewermann (2001) in his reading of the Book of Revelation (541–92). When reading the passage in Rev. 8: 2–9, 21 that comprises the vision of the six trumpets, he rhetorically asks what kind of person would have a dream where hail, fire, and blood rain from heaven and destroy onethird of the earth (552). Drewermann understands this vision as issuing from a punitive personality, where God is merely the archetype of a harsh and unforgiving Father. In a similar way, the visions of revelation portray human existence as somehow ‘burnt out,’ where one lives perennially in a flight, surrounded by walls of fire. The imagery of the sea of blood is opposed to the idea of the primeval waters (Urflut): Where the latter envelops the earth in a protective embrace, the former indicates a world controlled by fear (Angst). The vision of the fall of the star called Absinthe is just one further symbol of chaos; the stars of the heavens are an archetype of heavenly harmony and order, and their fall onto the earth can only indicate the falling apart and destruction of all values. When revelation tells us that the star Absinthe was able to poison one-third of all the waters on this earth, and that the dragon with seven heads swept away one-third of the stars in the heavens (Rev. 12: 1–6), Drewermann (2001) views this as a depth psychological symbol of what happens when the energies of the individual are ‘turned inwards in a poisonous and destructive way’ (553), which is what happens when there are no more ideals or aspirations in one’s own existential horizon. The fact that the sun and the moon lose their shine after the fourth trumpet indicates that such an individual’s life is no longer guided by the light of self-awareness during the day, and that dreams can no longer offer any insight during the night (554). At that point, the invasion of the locusts from the East indicates the inevitable transformation of one’s inner life into an abyss of insatiable greed—a life where the desire for pleasure becomes mechanical and self-destructive, like the insect’s desire for food. Moving on to Rev. 10, it is interesting to note how Drewermann (2001) interprets the episode of the first scroll that the prophet has to eat before moving on to the later visions (557–59). Drewermann acknowledges the value of applying conventional literary analysis to this passage, noting that the episode of the angel and the prophet serves as

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a sort of interlude in this endless series of fear-inspiring visions. From a depth psychological perspective, however, the eating of the scroll indicates the reception of the ego into the subconscious. This union or ‘marriage’ between ordinary consciousness and the deeper strata of the psyche lay the foundation for what according to Drewermann is the central vision of the whole Book of Revelation, that of the woman with child giving birth in the desert (568–76). In this perspective, the whole momentous trajectory of the seven trumpets is nothing but a lengthy process of self-realization culminating in the birth of the divine child in the heavens; but this divine child, as in the infancy narratives of the gospel of Luke, is nothing but the archetypal image of the integrated self. The tradition of the church Fathers famously identified the woman about to give birth with the Virgin Mary, and this interpretation had an enormous impact on the development of Marian iconography and Mariology; in the modern and contemporary periods, the image of the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, was associated with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Drewermann however views this vision as an archetypal display of the process whereby the psyche appropriates its own shadow, letting on and indeed expelling the more harmful and problematic parts, and giving birth—again, virginally—to the integrated self (574). The process of labor is likened to the lengthy work of therapy, whereby the patient births—or at least moves closer to—her own true self, out of a struggle with her lower, ‘nocturnal’ desire. This is the meaning of the cosmic battle between Michael and Satan, which symbolizes the battle between existential hope and resignation or even desperation. The archangel Michael, like Gabriel in Luke, acts as a sort of midwife for the birth of the true self (573). After reviewing a few examples of Drewermann’s exegetical approach, traditionally inclined Christians—and by that, I mean Christians holding on to traditional understandings of the Trinity and the hypostatic union, and wishing to be in continuity with the classical exegetical tradition—may wonder what to make of it. For his part, Drewermann does state that Luke’s narrative of the annunciation and revelation’s cosmic drama of the heavenly birth of the divine child ultimately concern the birth of the historical Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, and should not be read as ahistorical phantasies. At the same time, despite his carefully worded

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ambiguity, it is challenging, to say the least, to reconcile the interpretation of Christology and Mariology that we just discussed with the more traditional understanding of these mysteries. Drewermann’s assertion of the psychologically binding character of the archetypes, or his claim that their divine origin guarantees their hermeneutic trustworthiness, may still be insufficient for those who are committed to an understanding of Christianity as a historical religion, centered on the events of the incarnation and salvific death and resurrection of Christ. For Drewermann, Christianity is a paradigm of spiritual transformation, whose eschatological horizon is erased or is realized symbolically in the depths of the individual psyche. How is this different from the many demythologized versions of Christianity already on offer? Or is Ratzinger’s reassertion of a Logocentric hermeneutic the only alternative to a fragmented and spiritually sterile Biblical text? I would venture to suggest that the two approaches are not, perhaps, mutually incompatible. In other words, Drewermann’s depth psychological approach could complement Ratzinger’s approach within an overarching, neo-Origenist system. In this perspective, the literal interpretation of the Scriptural text would be the task of the historical-literal method, which would address issues such as authorial intent, literary context and form analysis. For seekers of inner transformation, the ethical or tropological meaning would emerge out of Drewermann’s exploration of the universal subconscious of humanity, that unfathomable receptacle of archetypal images that gives form to the mythic intuitions of the human spirit. This approach could be seen as an alternative—and not merely as a preparatory stage—to the classical Christological allegorizing that the Alexandrian tradition viewed as the apex of the hermeneutic endeavor. In this perspective, Drewermann’s approach enables weary postmodern readers to retrieve at least part of the lesson of Alexandria—namely the individually transformative power of the sacred text, its ability to directly address the existential needs of the individual while offering a path toward integration.

Patristic Sources Origen. De Principiis-Peri Archōn (On First Principles). In Migne, J. P. 1857–66. Patrologia Graeca 11, 111–413. Maximos the Confessor. In Migne, J. P. 1857–66. Patrologia Graeca, J. P. 1857– 66. Patrologia Graeca 91, 1031–1418.

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Other References Burton-Christie, Douglas. 2012. “The Luminous Word: Scripture in the Philokalia.” In The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, edited by B. Bingaman and B. Nassif, 73–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daniélou, Jean. 2016. Origen. Translated by Walter Mitchell. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Drewermann, Eugen. 1988. Wort des Heils, Wort der Heilung. Von der befreienden Kraft des Glaubens. Band I. Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag. ———. 1990. Tiefenpsychologie und Exegese. Band I: Die Wahrheit der Formen. Traum, Mythos, Märchen, Sage und Legende. Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag. ———. 1994. Discovering the God Child Within. A Spiritual Psychology of the Infancy of Jesus. Translated by Peter Heinegg. New York: Crossroad. ———. 2001. Tiefenpsychologie und Exegese. Band II: Die Wahrheit der Werke and und der Worte. Wunder, Vision, Weissagung, Apokalypse, Geschichte, Gleichnis. Düsseldorf und Zürich: Walter Verlag. Huebner, Karl. 1985. Die Wahrheit des Mythos. Munich: Alber Philosophie. Krez, Helena. 2008. Die Hermeneutik des Eugen Drewermann. Munich: Grin Publishing. Leithart, Peter J. 2007. “Calvin and Allegory.” In Patheos. http://www.patheos. com/blogs/leithart/2007/04/calvin-and-allegory. Louth, Andrew. 1996. Maximus the Confessor. New York and London: Routledge. Nowak, Kurt, and Otto Gerhard Oexle. 2001. Adolf von Jarnack: Theologe, Historiker, Wissenschaftspolitiker. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Pelikan, Jaroslav, ed. 1960. Luther’s Lectures on Genesis, vol. 2, Chaps. 6–14. St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House. Perrone, Lorenzo. 2003. Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition: Papers of the 8th International Origen congress, vol. 2. Leuven: Peeters. Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI). 2011. Jesus von Nazareth, Band II: Vom Einzug in Jerusalem bis zur Aufherstehung. Freiburg: Herder. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2011. The Poetry of Rilke. Translated by Edward Snow. New York: North Point Press. Stefaniw, Blossom. 2010. Mind, Text and Commentary: Noetic Exegesis in Origen of Alexandria, Didymus the Blind, and Evagrius Ponticus. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.

CHAPTER 3

Dionysus in Depth: Mystes, Madness, and Method in James Hillman’s Re-visioning of Psychology David M. Odorisio

Introduction Dionysian logic is necessarily mystical. (Hillman 1983, 39)

James Hillman, critical of reductionist, materialist, and even “Jungian” approaches to depth psychology, called for an imaginal, symptomatic, ideational, and multiple, or “polytheistic” approach to the psyche. He termed his re-visioning, archetypal psychology, drawing inspiration from neo-Platonic philosophy, Renaissance revivalists of ancient Greek culture, and modern thinkers such as Henri Corbin. Hillman’s turn toward philosophy and the humanities, as well as his poetic approach to psyche as “soul,” formed an imaginative and original psychological hermeneutic that considered seriously an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension of the unconscious.

D. M. Odorisio (*)  Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_3

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This paper examines the mystical and erotic in Hillman’s early thought through the influence of the ancient Greek god Dionysus. With a focus on the embodied, emotional, and erotic nature of Dionysus, I will show how these qualities came to formulate the core theoretical vision of Hillman’s archetypal hermeneutic and served as a critique of traditional psychological epistemologies, as well as of normative scholarly approaches in both the humanities and sciences. In “saving” image, symbol, and even the “mystical,” from an analytic, disembodied, and misogynist reductionism, Hillman’s archetypal psychology champions a form of transformational subjectivity, and personally redemptive mysticism, through an ontological affirmation of what Jung (1937) understood as the reality of the psyche. At the same time, as a postmodern thinker, Hillman’s creative engagement with classical Dionysian scholarship grounds his archetypal claims in the historical past, while simultaneously reimagining Dionysus as contemporarily alive (or denied) in therapies, ideas, and cultures of the present. Hillman’s “Dionysian hermeneutic” thus serves a multidimensional depth psychological function: (1) as an embodied and erotic hermeneutical tool for investigative research; (2) as a critical approach to disembodied, misogynist, or normative biases in scholarly thinking against potentially transformative mystical subjectivities; and (3) as an originative methodology in the depth psychological evaluation of mysticism within the field of religious studies. This essay is structured around Hillman’s three focused works on Dionysus and traces the varieties of his Dionysian methodological unfolding. I begin with his The Myth of Analysis (1972), followed by the essay, “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings” ([1972] 2001), and finally, Healing Fiction (1983). In following these erotico-mystical strands, a certain epistemology and methodology emerge that can be understood as characteristically “Dionysian.” In conclusion, I will explore what implications Hillman’s “Dionysian logic” might have for a depth psychological inquiry into mystical phenomenon, and consider how his Dionysian corrective to certain arenas of “Apollonian” analysis might influence scholarship within the discipline of religious studies.

Mystes: Dionysian Consciousness in The Myth of Analysis Hillman’s The Myth of Analysis (1972) can be read as a direct address to limitations he found both within psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and in the scientific materialism of his day. With extended historical surveys— and critiques—of medical, psychiatric, and depth psychological history,

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the book as a whole demonstrates the scope and vastness of Hillman’s scholarship, as well as the creativity of his vision, and the scathe of his tongue. The three essays that comprise Myth were composed in response to Hillman’s invitation to participate in the Eranos gatherings in the summers of 1967, ‘68, and ‘69, in Ascona, Switzerland. The later essay, on Dionysus, Hillman entitled, “On Psychological Femininity,” and was written in the midst of personal and professional crisis due to an affair with a patient that went public while Hillman was Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich. In a letter to his wife, dated March 11, 1969, Hillman wrote that this paper was written with “a great sense of time and urgency” (Russell 2013, 630), mirroring perhaps not only his own personal and professional crises, but also the collective cultural waves of the late 1960s in both Europe and America. This paper, on the “secondary position of women,” undermined “the whole venture of scientific psychology,” which Hillman came to deconstruct as, “aimed at repressing the Dionysian” (Russell 2013, 630). In his turn toward and invocation of Dionysus, Hillman would intentionally recover an undercurrent in Western depth psychological thinking that would restore and bring to the center of his archetypal project the themes of emotionality, eros, the body, and materiality in general, as well as the theoretical collapse of the repression of these qualities as projected onto a denigrated “feminine.” In disassembling what he considered to be the “Apollonic” logic behind scientific methodology and psychological analysis, Hillman reconstructs in Myth a depth psychology that embraces these “feminine” qualities and finds a champion in that most effeminate, and bisexual god of women—Dionysus. “On Psychological Femininity” The soul returns through the same door of its exile. (Hillman 2010, 290)

Hillman’s essay “On Psychological Femininity” traces the misogynist underpinnings of Western notions of science and psychology from Classical Greece through Galen to Freud, with the final conclusion that, “The same view of female inferiority…runs with undeviating fidelity from antiquity to psychoanalysis” (1972, 246–47). Hillman adds to his medical and psychological review his own theoretical critique of the archetypal dominants operating unconsciously throughout these historically male-oriented paradigms as well.

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Following Jung’s psychological interpretation of the Assumption of Mary, Hillman argues in favor of a reclamation of “the earth, darkness, the abysmal side of bodily man with his animal passions and instinctual nature, and to ‘matter’ in general” (Jung 1954, 195; Hillman 1972, 215)—all qualities which have historically—and negatively—been projected upon “the feminine.” In other words, to Hillman, “the abysmal side of bodily man” is less about male bodies than it is about the denigration of women through a “First Adam, then Eve” (1972, 248) phenomenon where female bodies—and women in general—come to represent unconscious, or “shadow,” aspects of male psyches.1 To Hillman (1972), psychiatric and scientific misogyny has “resulted in the need for psychotherapy to develop the inferior and feeble femininity” (249). In other words, the method (founded in a form of scientific misogyny) has created the pathology (hysteria), which has necessitated the cure (psychoanalysis). However, the “talking cure” remains incomplete in that it is limited by the misogynist assumptions inherent in its underlying method; therefore, as Hillman puts it, “the method defeats itself” (247). Acknowledging that scientific methodology arose from specifically male fantasies, Hillman (1972) writes, “We know next to nothing about how feminine consciousness or a consciousness which has an integrated feminine aspect [would] regard…the same data” (249). He continues: Even the determination of what constitutes appropriate data, the very questions asked, the way the eye perceives through the microscope are determined by the specific consciousness we call scientific, Western, modern, and which is the long-sharpened tool of the masculine mind that has discarded part of its own substance, calling it ‘Eve,’ ‘female,’ and ‘inferior.’ (250)

Hillman refers to this kind of consciousness as “Apollonic, for, like its namesake, it belongs to youth, it kills from a distance (its distance kills), and, keeping the scientific cut of objectivity, it never merges with

1 Hillman (1972) defines the “first-Adam-then-Eve fantasy” as that “which turns every investigation comparing the morphology of male and female bodies into the misogynist discovery of female inferiority”; he combines this with “the Apollonic fantasy, with its distance to materiality—a fantasy which denies a role to the female in the propagation of new life” as his two main critiques following his survey of Western scientific history (248).

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or ‘marries’ its material” (250). Hillman concludes his methodological deconstruction with, “Until the structure of… consciousness itself and what we consider to be ‘conscious’ change[s]… man’s image of female inferiority…will continue” (251). It is from this place that Hillman initiates his reconstructive movement: the turn toward the Dionysian. Hillman (1972) first argues in favor of Dionysian bisexuality and “androgynous consciousness” (259) as a therapeutic corrective to normative approaches and methods. He then unpacks a half-century of historical biases and scholarly projections upon Dionysian “madness” as psychiatric diagnosis (i.e., hysteria), agreeing with Dodds (1960) that, “our first step must be to unthink all this” (xii; Hillman 1972, 274).2 He then comes to the denouement of his essay, entitled, “The End of Analysis.” By “end,” Hillman (1972) means both telos, or purpose, of psychoanalysis, and its “termination in time: therapeutic psychology as over and done with” (288). Arguing against an analytical and scientifically oriented psychotherapy that leaves out, “Matter, body…female—and psyche too” (288), Hillman instead positively revisions psychology along Dionysian lines, with its emphasis on “prolonged moistening, a life in the child, hysterical attempts at incarnation through symptoms, an erotic compulsion toward soul-making” (294). “Cure” then comes to be equated not with scientific objectivity or Apollonian technique, but when “those realities of the psyche called ‘feminine’ and ‘body’ are integral with consciousness” (294). This necessitates a change in definitions of “consciousness,” as the “therapeutic goal” is now experienced as a “weakening of consciousness,” rather than a [Jungian] heroic “increase”; a “loosening and a forgetting…a true loss of what we have long considered to be our most precious human holding: Apollonic consciousness” (295).3

2 Hillman (1972) writes, “Our misogynist and Apollonic consciousness has exchanged [Dionysus] for a diagnosis. So without initiation into Dionysian consciousness, we have only that Dionysus that reaches us through the shadow, through Wotan and the Devil of Christianity” (274). Hillman is assuming here that a subjective and immediate experience (“initiation”) into the Dionysian is possible outside of the original ancient Greek context. 3 “Thus therapeutic psychology has an inherent contradiction: its method is Apollonic, its substance Dionysian” (Hillman 1972, 290). A dismantling of the Apollonian resolves (dissolves) this tension.

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Hillman’s call for an “end” of analysis, and even a “postanalytic age” (1972, 294), can be read biographically as a result of his separation from the Jung Institute and departure from Zurich. Theoretically, his critique of science and return to psychological aspects relegated to “the feminine” revisions and continues Jung’s work in creative and novel directions. Through a transformational encounter with aspects of the psyche considered “feminine,” so-called Apollonic consciousness shifts into an emotionally toned and embodied awareness of the psyche that is no longer one-sided in its approach. “Mystical, erotic, [or] depressive” experience is no longer something that one “has,” but is rather integrated within a multivalent and “bisexual” psyche (Hillman 1972, 290).

Madness: Dionysus in Jung’s Writings Hillman ([1972] 2007) further develops the theme of embodiment as central to a “Dionysian” consciousness in his essay, “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings.” Here, Hillman traces two divergent Dionysus’ as they develop in Jung’s corpus: the first, a Wotan-conflated Germanic hybrid, and the second, Dionysus dismembered, “a psychological process [requiring] a body metaphor” (27). As in Myth, Hillman’s turn toward the Dionysian is a turn toward the body—here as hermeneutic key—with dismemberment as metaphor for locating consciousness in the body. Hillman writes, “Dionysus offers new insight into the rending pain of self-division, especially as a body experience” (27). This “rending…can be understood as [a] particular kind of renewal…. necessary for awakening the consciousness of the body” (28–9). Dionysus dis- and re-membered initiates psyche into the “archetypal consciousness of the body” (29), through a Dionysian hermeneutic of renewal.4

4 “This is surely what a Dionysian individuation might look like: a kind of psychological dismembering, in which the multiple consciousnesses which reside in our belly, our feet, our genitalia and elsewhere gain recognition, and are given voice again” (Saban 2010, 115). This statement has profound implications for a depth psychological “hermeneutic of the body.” See also Levin (1985), Part III, “The Fleshing out of the Text” (206–23).

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Method: Dream, Drama, Dionysus In Healing Fiction (1983), Hillman again returns to his Dionysian depth psychological project begun in Myth. His focus again is method, only here, the interpretive landscape is the dream. Upending Freud’s (1900) interpretation of the dream as leading from latent to manifest, Hillman instead draws from Jung’s (1945) dream theory as “dramatic structure” with its nature and content “read as theater” (Hillman 1983, 36).5 From this perspective, dream figures are read as actors on a stage, and the dream as enactment rather than as an analytically interpreted “coded message” (37) to be deciphered allegorically (e.g., Freud). In other words, in shifting from allegorical to metaphorical, Hillman evokes Dionysus as god of drama. To Hillman (1983), “The unconscious produces dramas, poetic fictions; it is a theater” (36). Hillman frames his “Dionysian hypothesis” as a “logos” in its own right—not as opposed to, but different than, the clarity of the Apollonian. Dionysian “theatrical logic” aids in understanding “the dreaming soul from within” and speaks to its “theatrical poetics” (37). Healing (catharsis) occurs through finding “freedom in playing parts, partial, dismembered…never being whole but participating in the whole that is a play” of one’s own life (38). Embracing Dionysian division, Hillman (1983) writes, “The self divided is precisely where the self is authentically located… Authenticity is the perpetual dismemberment of being and not-being a self, a being that is always in many parts, like a dream with a full cast” (39). Hillman’s Dionysian logic shifts the interpretive frame not only from the perspective of below, but viewed from the interior as well. This vantage point is not that of the Apollonian or scientific view from above, exhibited by Pentheus “up his tree” as the “detached observer” (39). Rather, “Dionysian logic is necessarily mystical and transformational…requiring [a] process of esotericism, of seeing through,” embodying characteristics of “movement, dance, and flow” (39). Resolution occurs not through “conceptual opposites” (e.g., Jung), but through “dramatic tensions” (40). In the Dionysian portrayal, “we are composed of agonies not polarities” (40). 5 Hillman (1983) summarizes Jung’s dramatic interpretation of the dream as: “Statement of Place, Dramatis Personae, Exposition; Development of Plot; Culmination or Crisis; Solution or Lysis,” (36).

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Hillman’s dramatic lens shifts consciousness from mono Apollonianscientific logic to the polyphonic, theatrical, and “Dionysian” hermeneutic of enactment, personae, movement, and flow. In doing so, he argues against Freud’s reductionist hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur 1970) and embraces a participatory re-visioning, where consciousness itself is multivalent, with a variety of actors invoking numerous gods through multiple masks.

Conclusion: Mystes as Means and as Method Hillman’s Dionysian depth psychological re-visioning can be contextualized within what Parsons (1999) refers to as both a third-wave “transformational approach” (11) within therapeutic psychology, and operating within the framework of “psychology as a religion” (13).6 Furthermore, Hillman’s formulations of a Dionysian hermeneutic can not only be read alongside but also potentially contribute to Kripal’s (2001, 2007) investigations regarding the transformative dimensions of a “hermeneutical union” that can be considered academically gnostic (Kripal 1999, 369). Writing from within a strong psychology as religion orientation, however, distinguishes Hillman from Kripal’s (2007) Feuerbachian and gnostically informed “mystical humanism” (88), in that Hillman places the revelatory and ontological implications of his transformational hermeneutic firmly within the imaginal capacities of the psyche itself. To Hillman (1972), it is through engagement with archetypal material (as image), that one emerges as mystes. In this sense, Hillman’s underlying epistemological claims can be considered not only “mystical” in the classical sense,7 but also “gnostic,” in that he affords a revelatory and ontologically numinous dimension to the psyche’s image-generating orientation.8 6 Parsons (1999) is referring specifically to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with three historical (yet overlapping) “waves,” or trends: (1) Freudian reductionism, (2) neo-Freudian “adaptive” approaches to religion, and (3) “transformational” approaches favorable to religious or mystical experiencing (10–11). 7 “In Greek to initiate is myein…the initiate is called mystes, and the whole proceedings mysteria” (Burkert 1985, 276). Hillman (1972) adds: “Dionysian events…make sense through a psychological hermeneutic, as reflections of psychic events…. Accordingly, it will be in terms of psychic consciousness or mystery consciousness that the…phenomena are to be comprehended” (277–78). 8 Although Kripal remains agnostic on certain ontological claims, his later work on comic books and the image-generating and symbolic capacity of the psyche is more in alignment with Hillman's position here (see Kripal 2011, 2017).

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Articulating these claims, Hillman (1972) describes the psyche’s “reflective subjectivity, its own afflictions, pathologies, and fantasies” as the locus “where the archetype can speak individually and directly, where our psychopathology is a revelation, a gnosis” (217).9 This is Hillman’s own “mystical hermeneutic” par excellence and reveals his ontological assumptions about the inherent numinosity of the psyche and firmly establishes his claims within the context of a psychology as religion framework. Hillman’s telos is the transformation of consciousness itself. His interest is not in novel or adaptive therapeutic ideation alone; rather, Hillman’s depth psychological project is mystical, methodological (i.e., hermeneutic), and gnostic at its core. I would like to conclude with a few open-ended considerations for the depth psychological study of mysticism, orientated in two directions: (1) toward scholarship within the discipline of religious studies, specifically within the field of comparative mysticism, and (2) toward the scholar as practitioner/witness-participant of mystical realities (Kripal 2001). If Hillman (1972) can question the “Dionysian possibilities for therapeutic psychology” (266), I believe it is fair to ask the same of certain methodological assumptions within the field of religious studies as well, and to question these implications for scholar-practitioners of mystical orientations. To Hillman, “consciousness informed by the Dionysian approach brings quite a different point of view” (263). What layers of meaning would such an approach reveal if implemented within the academic study of religion? If the moisture of Dionysus, the embodiment of his dance, or the multiple personae of his dramatic troupe were suddenly—and without warning—let loose upon what is often considered methodologically “normative”?10

9 Compare to Kripal (1999): “For [some] scholars, academic method and personal experience cannot be so easily separated…. There is something genuinely ‘mystical’ about the work of such scholars…. They do not so much ‘interpret’ religious ‘data’ as they unite with sacred realities, whether in the imagination, [or in] the hidden depths of the soul…. Their understanding, then, is not merely academic. It is also transformative, and sometimes salvific. In a word, it is a gnosis” (369). 10 By “normative,” I am referring here to “monosyllabic,” i.e., androcentric and logocentric approaches that often discount embodied, intuitive, or imaginal experiencing in research. Coppin and Nelson (2005) and Romanyshyn (2007) outline a variety of such hermeneutic and methodological possibilities from within a depth psychological orientation that could be considered “Dionysian.”

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If Dionysus were to be invoked as “loosener” (lysios), what, in the academic study of religion or comparative mysticism, would need “setting free, deliverance, collapse, breaking [of ] bonds [or] laws, [or] the final unraveling…[of ] plot” (Hillman 1983, 29)? What would be the implications of going to pieces alongside one’s scholarly material, or encountering ideological dismemberment of one’s “objective” apparatuses?11 Hillman (1983) suggests, “if we miss the possibilities for light in experiences of dissolution [or dismemberment], we then tend to emphasize, as a defensive compensation, centering and wholeness” (30).12 Perhaps more relevant here would be a defensively “monotheistic” or Cyclopsesque reliance on cognicentric interpretations of mystical phenomenon.13 From this perspective, some approaches to scholarship, while perhaps commendably constructed at the altar of Apollo, might simultaneously be serving a defensive, even colonizing strategy, limiting or reducing the same material one sought to illuminate, thus defeating (in this case) the mystical with one’s own method (Hillman 1972, 247). A Dionysian methodology would attempt to “stay always within the mess of ambivalence, the comings and goings of the libido, letting interior movements replace clarity, interior closeness replace objectivity, the child of psychic spontaneity replace literal right action” (Hillman 1972, 295). Religious studies as a discipline, and its study of mystical phenomenon in particular, when approached from the perspective of Dionysian consciousness, might not resemble “scholarship” at all, at least not as it has been traditionally defined or currently envisioned. An “end of scholarship” might just occur, lest scholars of mysticism become, as Hillman warns, like “trained analysts of greater ‘consciousness’ who are also imaginal duds” (297). 11 Kripal (1999) adds, “Many scholars of religion, no doubt, remain relatively unaffected [by their material], protected as they are by a thick skin of skepticism, objectivity, relativism, and religious doubt” (368). 12 Hillman’s remarks on “centering and wholeness” are made in the context of his critique of the “defensive” possibilities inherent within Jung’s psychology of the mandala; Hillman’s move toward de-centering the self would “encourage a loosening of central (ego) control in the interests of experiencing the essential diversity of the self” (Saban 2010, 115; see also Samuels 1983). 13 Ferrer (2003) defines the term cognicentrism as “the privileged position that the rational-analytical mind (and its associated instrumental reason and Aristotelian logic) has in the modern Western world over other ways of knowing, e.g., somatic, sexual-vital, emotional, aesthetic, imaginal, visionary, intuitive, contemplative” (39, fn. 3); for an example of such a “corrective” approach in practice, see Ferrer (2011).

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References Burkert, Walter. 1985. Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coppin, Joseph, and Elizabeth Nelson. 2005. The Art of Inquiry: A Depth Psychological Perspective. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. Dodds, Eric R. 1960. “Introduction.” In Euripides Bacchae, edited and translated by Eric R. Dodds, xi–lix. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Ferrer, Jorge N. 2003. “Integral Transformative Practice: A Participatory Perspective.” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 35 (1): 21–42. ———. 2011. “Teaching the Graduate Seminar in Comparative Mysticism: A Participatory Integral Approach.” In Teaching Mysticism, edited by William Parsons, 173–92. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York, NY: Basic Books. Hillman, James. 1972. The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. [1972] 2007. “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings.” In Mythic Figures, 15–30. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. ———. 1983. Healing Fiction. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. ———. 2010. “The Imagination of Air and the Collapse of Alchemy.” In Alchemical Psychology, 264–317. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. Jung, Carl G. 1937. Psychology and Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1945. “On the Nature of Dreams.” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, translated by R. F. C. Hull, 281–300. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1954. Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype. In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by R. F. C. Hull, 75–112. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kripal, Jeffrey J. 1999. “‘The Visitation of the Stranger’: On Some Mystical Dimensions of the History of Religions.” CrossCurrents 49 (3): 367–86. ———. 2001. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2011. Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Levin, David M. 1985. The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Parsons, Wiliam. 1999. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Romanyshyn, Robert. 2007. The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books. Russell, Dick. 2013. The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Vol. 1: The Making of a Psychologist. New York, NY: Helios Press. Saban, Mark. 2010. “Staging the Self: Performance, Individuation and Embodiment.” In Body, Mind and Healing After Jung: A Space of Questions, edited by Raya Jones, 110–26. New York, NY: Routledge. Samuels, Andrew. 1983. “Dethroning the Self.” In Spring: An Annual of Archetypal and Jungian Thought, 43–58. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, Inc.

CHAPTER 4

The Royal Road Meets the Data Highway Kelly Bulkeley

Introduction The world’s religious and spiritual traditions differ from one another in countless ways, from beliefs about divinity to dietary practices, from moral virtues to rituals of worship. Unfortunately, and all too often, these differences develop into misunderstandings, tensions, and violent conflicts. This makes it all the more important to highlight instances where the world’s religious and spiritual traditions do agree on something of great meaning and value to all. Such is the case with mystical dreaming, a capacity for revelatory experience in sleep that is grounded in the evolved nature of the human brain and that opens our minds to new realms of insight, power, and creativity. As many researchers in the comparative study of religions have shown, dreams with mystical qualities of wonder, transcendence, and inspiration have been reported in cultures around the world and throughout history (Irwin 1994; Jedrej and Shaw 1992; O’Flaherty 1984; Plane and Tuttle 2013; Tedlock 1989; Young 1999). These researchers have provided strong evidence to support Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical insight that “It is in dreams that one can catch sight of the most fundamental and stable symbolisms of

K. Bulkeley (*)  Sleep and Dream Database, Portland, OR, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_4

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humanity passing from the ‘cosmic’ function to the ‘psychic’ function.” (Ricoeur 1967, 12) Within that historical and cross-cultural context, I aim to forecast the future potentials of mystical dreaming as they are propelled forward by twenty-first century technological advances. Revolutionary new tools are expanding people’s engagement with dreaming, and as these tools grow in power and sophistication, they are raising questions about the benefits and dangers of trying to enhance the dreaming process in such extraordinary ways. Can these tools make it easier for people to have mystical experiences in their dreams? Might the new technologies have especially valuable applications in therapy, spiritual guidance, and cultural self-awareness? Or do they disrupt and diminish the natural capacity for mystical dreaming? Are they in fact just new and improved mechanisms for mind control, enabling especially insidious forms of oppression? These questions do not have simple answers. But we need to start thinking about them now. The sooner we can shed light on the potential impacts of dream-enhancing technologies, the sooner we can benefit from their advances and protect ourselves against their dangers. I use the resources of depth psychology—a lineage reaching back to William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung—to illuminate what I believe to be the most fruitful future paths for exploring new dimensions of mystical dreaming. Specifically, I will draw upon Paul Ricoeur’s (1970) notion of Freudian psychoanalysis as a “mixed discourse” that Freud developed to help us talk about mental phenomena with aspects of both force and desire, both bodily driven instinct and mentally conceived thought. Ricoeur claimed the value of psychoanalysis, and the depth psychological tradition that grew out of it, was to enable a better understanding of the creative tension between these elements of human life. By using both methods of energetics and hermeneutics, Ricoeur showed how depth psychology can shed new light on the complex, multi-faceted interplay between mind, body, culture, and spirit. I begin this chapter with a discussion of dreaming as a source of mystical experience in historical and cross-cultural contexts and among present-day populations. Next, I offer a brief discussion of current scientific research on dreaming as a natural process of the evolved brain–mind system. The findings from comparative religions are clear, and the scientific findings are clear, but what remains a challenge is bringing the two discourses into dialogue with each other. This is where Ricoeur and other figures in depth psychology play a role. With their ideas as guiding

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principles, the core of the chapter considers the future possibilities associated with three types of dream-enhancing technology: (1) chemical and electrical stimulants, (2) neural scanners and playback monitors, and (3) “big data” analysis. These new technologies are already making an impact on people’s interactions with their dreams, and the power of these tools will only increase in coming years. Now more than ever, the depth psychological tradition has a vital role to play in identifying the advantages and disadvantages of these transformational developments.

Dreaming as a Source of Mystical Experience The definition of mysticism is a challenging topic in itself. In this chapter, I use a general definition that draws on what William James (1958) referred to as the four “marks” of mysticism. A mystical experience, in his view, involved ineffability (difficulty describing the experience in ordinary language), noesis (the revelation of special knowledge), transience (the experience is relatively brief ), and passivity (the individual feels helpless and powerless during the experience). James spoke of mysticism as an intense and overwhelming encounter with something more, something greater and more powerful than ourselves; however, we might define that “more” in theological or philosophical terms. This approach has the appeal of highlighting connections between phenomena appearing in many different arenas of life, both formally religious and nonreligious. Although James focused mostly on psychological factors, there are always cultural dimensions to a mystical experience, too, along with multiple influences from the individual’s lived religious and spiritual environment. James’ four descriptors all influence my basic definition of mysticism; as I understand and use the term, mystical dreams also have these same general qualities. In previous research (Bulkeley 2009), I have studied the patterns of form, content, and meaning in dreams that people themselves have described as “mystical” (relying on their own self-definition of the term). The results from this study indicate that mystical dreams are experienced by around half the population, women more than men, and their prototypical form involves good fortunes, friendly social interactions, and unusual/non-human characters. The study’s findings certainly contradict a view of mysticism as deriving from abnormal or pathological brain functions, and they also clash with theories that claim all mystical experiences lead toward a universal core of pure consciousness. The mystical dreams

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reported by people in this study had much more coherence and complexity than the former view can abide, and much more emotional and imagistic variety than the latter theories can explain. The most frequently appearing motifs included death (such as a visitation from someone who has died), Christian themes, light, precognition, reassurance, nightmares, and epistemological confusion. Most of the dreams people reported as having mystical qualities were emotionally positive and even joyful, with a sense of great beauty, abundance, and harmony. A few of the dreams, however, involved darker feelings of fear, confusion, and existential terror. Death played a role in many of the dreams, both positive and negative, and almost all of the dreams touched directly on the individual’s religious and spiritual beliefs in waking life. This was a small study, but the findings are consistent with extensive research from history, anthropology, and comparative religions in highlighting recurrent features of mystical dreaming (Bulkeley 2008). In virtually every known religious tradition, people have reported dreams with powerfully mystical qualities. Each tradition has responded to these dreams in its own distinctive way, but the recurrent patterns do appear across all cultures. These classic motifs of mystical dreaming include several of those already noted: visitations from the dead, the appearance of gods and demons, brilliant light and wondrous beauty, reassurance and healing, horror and despair, inspiration and ecstasy, flying and otherworldly journeys. In some traditions, the authorities become uncomfortable with the unpredictable imagery and potentially heretical implications of such dreams, and efforts are made to discourage serious attention to them. Extremely orthodox, highly controlled branches of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and other traditions have sometimes moved in that direction (Bulkeley 2008). In other branches and other traditions, however, the mystical potentials of dreaming are recognized, celebrated, and actively sought as a personal and collective good. Examples of this approach include many Native American groups, Tantric Buddhists, Sufi Muslims, Qabbalistic Jews, Wiccans, Australian Aborigines, and shamanic traditions in various parts of the world (e.g., Irwin 1994; Lohmann 2003; Tedlock 1989; Young 1999). A key finding from this area of research is the widely distributed nature of several recurrent types of dreaming that have been associated with mystical experiences through history and into the present day. An easy way of illustrating this point is to consider the results of survey research asking contemporary people about specific types of dreams with

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classically mystical qualities. Table 4.1 shows the aggregated findings of several surveys of American adults, asking them questions about their sleep and dream patterns. The survey data is available at the Sleep and Dream Database, a digital archive and search engine I have directed since 2009 (see Bulkeley 2016). The participants in these surveys were asked if they had ever experienced one of these types of dreams. The results suggest that mystically charged dreams are a widespread phenomenon, although not universally prevalent. Almost half the respondents, both male and female, had the experience of being aware within a dream that they were dreaming. This kind of lucid, metacognitive awareness within a dream is a highly sought phenomenon in Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, and many indigenous spiritual traditions around the world (Young 1999). On the question of flying in a magical or supernatural fashion, 39% of men and 33% of women said they had experienced such a dream. Magical flight, of course, is a perennial theme in mystical literature, as an exhilarating embodied experience of transcendence and liberation. More women (44%) than men (33%) reported having dreamed of a dead person appearing as if alive. Virtually every religious and spiritual

Table 4.1 Mystical dream themes among contemporary people

Male (%)

Female (%)

Yes No Not sure Flying

33 58 9

44 47 9

Yes No Not sure Lucid awareness

39 58 4

33 64 3

Yes No Not sure Predictive

48 47 5

45 52 3

Yes No

19 81

30 70

Visitation

Note Visitation N = 4222 M, 4041 F; Flying N = 3223 M, 2737 F; Awareness N = 4396 M, 4164 F; Predictive 999 M, 1304 F

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tradition speaks of these kinds of dreams in reverential terms (e.g., Jedrej and Shaw 1992). Sometimes the dead person’s appearance elicits joy and reassurance, and sometimes the dead person brings a mood of fear and guilt. For those who have them, such dreams make a major impact on their beliefs about death and the afterlife. More women (30%) than men (19%) also reported having a dream that accurately predicted something that later happened in waking life. This is the least frequently reported type of dream with mystical qualities—i.e., a large majority of the population has not had such dreams—and yet the number of people who have experienced predictive dreams is not trivial. At a minimum, it suggests that this aspect of dreaming, with its long pedigree in the cross-cultural history of mysticism, is personally familiar to a considerable number of people in contemporary society.

Current Scientific Research on Sleep and Dreaming Despite the many methodological challenges involved in the study of dreams, a great deal of high-quality scientific research has been performed over the past several decades (Barrett and McNamara 2007; Domhoff 1996, 2003; Pace-Schott et al. 2003; Solms 1997). While a number of basic questions remain unanswered, present-day investigators have been honing in on several basic ideas that accord well with current empirical evidence. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a trigger for dreaming, but is not isomorphic with dreaming. All mammals have sleep cycles in which their brains pass through various stages of REM and non-REM sleep. Dreaming seems to occur most often, and most intensely, in REM sleep, a time when many of the brain’s neuro-electrical systems have risen to peak levels of activation, comparable to levels found in waking consciousness. However, dreaming occurs outside of REM sleep, too, so the two are not identical or necessarily linked. REM helps the brain grow. The fact that REM sleep ratios are at their highest early in childhood (newborns spend up to 80% of their sleep in REM, whereas adults usually have 20–25% of their sleep in REM) suggests that REM, and perhaps dreaming, have a role in neural maturation and psychological development. Dreaming also occurs during hypnogogic, hypnopompic, and non-REM stage 2 phases of sleep. In the transitional times when a person is falling asleep (hypnagogic) or waking up (hypnopompic), various kinds of

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dream experiences can occur. The same is true during the end of a normal night’s sleep cycle, when a person’s brain is alternating exclusively between REM and non-REM stage 2 phases of sleep, with a relatively high degree of brain activation throughout. Dreams from REM and non-REM stage 2 are difficult to distinguish at these times. The neuro-anatomical profile of REM sleep supports the experience of intense visionary imagery in dreaming. During REM sleep, when most but not all dreaming occurs, the human brain shifts into a different mode of regional activation. Areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in focused attention and rational thought become less active, while areas in the limbic system (involved in emotional processing, memory, and instinctive responses) and the occipital lobe (involved in visual imagination) become much more active. This suggests that the human brain is not only capable of generating intense visionary experiences in dreaming, it has been primed to do so on a regular basis. The recurrent patterns of dream content are often continuous with people’s concerns, activities, and beliefs in waking life. This is known as the “continuity” hypothesis, and it highlights the deep integration of waking and dreaming modes of cognition. People’s dreams tend to reflect the people and things they most care about in the waking world. A great deal of dream content involves familiar people, places, and activities in the individual’s waking life. This indicates that the dreaming imagination is fully capable of portraying normal, realistic scenarios; in other words, dreaming is clearly not a process characterized by incoherence, irrationality, or bizarreness. The discontinuities of dreaming, when things happen that do not correspond to a normal waking life concern, can signal the emergence of unusual creative insights. Research on the improbable, unreal, and extraordinary elements of dream content has shown that, on closer analysis, this material often has a figurative or metaphorical relationship to the dreamer’s waking life. Metaphorical themes and images in dreams have a long history in the realm of art and creativity, and current scientific research highlights the dynamic, unpredictable nature of dreaming as an endless generator of conceptual novelty and innovation. Dream recall is variable. Most people remember one to two dreams per week, although the memories often fade quickly if the dreams are not recorded in a journal. On average, younger people tend to remember more dreams than older people, and women more than men. Even people who rarely remember their dreams can often recall one or two

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unusual dreams from their lives, dreams with so much intensity and vividness they could not be forgotten. Dream recall tends to respond to waking interest. The more people pay attention to their dreams, the more dreams they are likely to remember. Dreaming helps the mind to process information from waking life, especially experiences with a strong emotional charge. From a cognitive psychological perspective, dreaming functions to help the mind adapt to the external environment by evaluating perceptions, regulating emotional arousal, and rehearsing behavioral responses. Dreaming in this view is like a psychological thermostat, preset to keep us healthy, balanced, and ready to respond to both threats and opportunities in the waking world. Post-traumatic nightmares show what happens when experience is too intense and painful to process in a normal way, knocking the whole system out of balance. The mind is capable of many kinds of metacognition in dreaming, including lucid self-awareness. During sleep and dreaming the mind engages in many of the activities most associated with waking consciousness: reasoning, evaluating, remembering, deciding, and monitoring one’s own thoughts and feelings. Lucid dreaming is one clear example of this, and so are dreams of watching oneself from an outside perspective. These kinds of metacognitive (thinking about thinking) activities were once thought to be impossible in dreaming, but current research has proven otherwise. The findings of this research indicate that dreaming has available the full range of the mind’s metacognitive powers, although in different combinations from those typically active in ordinary waking consciousness. To summarize, recent findings from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and sleep laboratory research are broadly compatible with a view of dreaming as having roots in healthy, natural, evolved functions of the brain– mind system. More specifically, the findings of modern dream science can account for the physiological accompaniments of people’s subjective reports of mystical dream experiences. Intense visual imagery, otherworldly powers, transcendent awareness, revelatory insights, overwhelming emotions—these are the hallmarks of mystical dreaming, and they are all grounded in the natural cycles of the brain’s activities during sleep.

A Depth Psychological Approach to Mystical Dreams The evidence from the history of religions is clear, and the evidence from scientific psychology is clear as well. What is missing is the bridging language that can integrate these realms of inquiry and open the way to

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greater exploration and deeper insights. This would be a good place to point out that the depth psychological tradition first got started at the cutting edge of then-current neuroscience and evolutionary theory. James, Freud, and Jung were all highly trained experts in the best brain science of their day. Their theories were intended to build and expand on that scientific foundation, not ignore or defy it. They recognized that new advances in neuroscience could illuminate realms of the mind previously glimpsed only through religion and art. Depth psychology originally emerged as a pioneering effort to bring current brain–mind science into a mutual dialogue with the religious and artistic heritage of humankind (Ellenberger 1970). Paul Ricoeur’s work focused on Freud, but his theory in this regard can be applied to James and Jung as well. Ricoeur said one of Freud’s greatest contributions was the development of a “mixed discourse” between force and meaning. The “force” language in Freud refers to the physiological instincts and animal drives that stir within the bodily nature of every human. Freud’s notion of the Id, which can be translated into English as “the It,” indicates his recognition of a deeply impersonal realm of energy in the mind, energies that directly connect us to the biological and physical processes of reality as a whole. In a famous footnote, Freud (1965) writes, “there is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown” (143). At the same time as he talks about the energetics of instinctual force, Freud also talks about the interpretation of meaning. This “meaning” language involves letting your experience, intuition, and empathetic imagination guide your exploration of people’s beliefs, ideas, values, and desires, as expressed in unconscious phenomena like dreams. Freud devotes great attention to subtle, far-ranging studies of the interweaving of personal and cultural symbolism in the unconscious. Although he frequently criticized religion, he spoke favorably of art as one of the best means of channeling instinctual force into conscious meaning. The mixed discourse that Freud developed in his psychoanalytic theory also characterized the work of James and Jung, with the difference that they saw more positive benefits in religious and spiritual activities than he did. It also characterizes the work of many others in depth psychological tradition, and it remains a necessary conceptual framework going forward. For the purposes of this chapter, the mixed discourse of depth psychology offers the strongest resource available for evaluating the future of mystical dreaming. An ability to speak about both brain

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science and religious revelation, both cognitive processing and spiritual growth, is essential to that task. Much more could be said, of course, about the many branches of depth psychology and their illuminating ideas about dreaming, but in the remainder of the chapter, I will draw most directly on a small subset of ideas found in several people’s works. Freud’s (1965) grand claim that dreams offer a royal road to knowledge of the unconscious mind still stands as the working hypothesis of most depth psychologists. Virtually everyone who studies the topic remarks upon the startling creativity of dreaming and its seemingly infinite capacity for novel feelings, ideas, and sensations. Many depth psychologists emphasize that dreaming discloses autonomous modes of awareness and intelligence, with significant potentials for insight beyond what is accessible to the ordinary waking mind. The therapeutic power of dreaming has provided a practical resource for many depth psychologists working in clinical settings. Special attention is often given to nightmares, as windows into unconscious conflicts and areas for future growth. Dreaming has an expansive temporal range, looking back to memories from early life and looking forward to future possibilities. My own theory, which draws on all of the above, suggests that dreaming is a kind of imaginative play in sleep, the spontaneous and highly creative activity of the psyche freed from external constraints and able to playfully explore its own nature, power, and potential (see Jung 1974; Hunt 1989; Hillman 1979; Perls 1970; Grotstein 2000; Hartmann 2000; Knudson 2001; Kramer and Glucksman 2015).

New Horizons in Mystical Dreaming We do not know exactly where the latest advances in dream-related technology will lead us, but we can pose some of the questions these advances will inevitably face. In the remainder of this chapter, I will highlight these questions in relation to new tools for stimulating dreams, imaging dreams, and tracking dreams. By stimulating dreams, I mean substances and procedures to stimulate special kinds of dreams. Examples include researchers who are experimenting with galantamine, a plant extract that increases the neurotransmitter acetylcholine that predominates in REM sleep, and ayahuasca, an Amazonian plant with mind-altering properties. Other researchers are testing devices like transcranial magnetic stimulators and light-emitting masks worn over the eyes to prompt lucid dreams. Although it is rarely

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discussed as such, the biggest experiment on dream-altering substances is the widespread use of prescription drugs in modern society. Virtually no research is devoted to the side effects of psychoactive medications in terms of their long-term effects on sleep and dreaming. This is despite widespread reports that many of these medications (and of course alcohol) have disruptive effects on the sleep cycle and the capacity for dream recall. The troubling implications—medical, psychological, cultural, and spiritual—of these side effects are rarely discussed, but that may be about to change. Future dream-stimulating substances and devices will be increasingly able to target specific regions and systems of the brain with greater speed, intensity, and control than ever before. At some point, we can imagine the invention of pills and devices that allow people to select various kinds of mystical dreams to experience during sleep, like people today choosing which video game to play. These developments should be understood in the historical context of rituals of dream incubation, which, as depth psychologists have long known (Meier 1966), are practiced in religious traditions around the world as a reliable means of stimulating spiritually significant dreams. All substances and devices that try to stimulate dreams are essentially tools of dream incubation, and this will be true in the future, too. The promise of dream incubation methods with greater speed and intensity is alluring, but they also pose the risk of abruptly thrusting people into realms of the psyche for which they are dangerously unprepared. This is precisely the virtue of classic dream incubation rituals: They provide a safe framework of guidance, meaning, and support, which allows the individual to go deeply into the realm of mystical dreaming, and then return to the community with revitalizing energy. Without attention to the need for such a framework (similar to the holding space of depth psychological therapies), new technologies may stimulate overly intensified dreams that people are not able to handle or process. The promise of control is especially problematic from a depth psychological perspective, because an emphasis on controlling dreams inevitably limits encounters with deeper, more autonomous dimensions of the unconscious. For many depth psychologists, the great value of dreaming is the way it reveals valuable aspects of the psyche beyond the ego and its sphere of control. The concern here is that focusing on control can lead to myopia, ego inflation, and failure to recognize dangers before it is too late. As an overall assessment, future progress in dream-stimulating substances and devices seems inevitable, but the risks are huge and need much more study. There is currently no reason to think the dreams

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generated by these new technologies will be better, more profound, or more insightful than other dreams generated by traditional methods of dream incubation. Turning now to new technologies for imaging dreams, let us consider the questions and challenges facing efforts to create a means of displaying dreams on a video monitor. Researchers are making some progress in identifying correlations between specific neural patterns in REM sleep and waking images. This kind of research is providing the earliest building blocks leading to a device that could allow for an external visual representation of a person’s dream while they are asleep. This would be the ultimate realization of a classic science-fiction idea, and it would likely elicit a big wave of public enthusiasm. Researchers would be thrilled by it, too. If an accurate dream-imaging device were truly available, it would have huge potential for illuminating the brain/mind dynamics of dreaming. The concerns begin with the danger that such devices will flatten people’s sense of dreaming into a string of computer-generated images. As depth psychologists have shown in great detail, the experiential lifeworld of dreaming involves a complex and multi-dimensional sensorium intertwined with personal associations, multiplicities of consciousness and awareness, primal instincts, physiological drives, archetypal themes, cultural symbols, and metaphorical language. No matter how much technology improves, it seems hard to imagine any monitoring device perfectly conveying what one person’s dream feels like to another person. Still, lots of progress is possible between here and perfection, especially with advent of virtual reality (VR) technology, which opens possibility of a more immersive way of representing dreams, either one’s own or other people’s. It seems likely that people will find enjoyment, insight, and perhaps therapeutic value from VR representations and reentries into a dreaming simulacrum. In the hands of a skilled therapist, it could perhaps become a powerful tool for healing. But in the wrong hands, such devices have tremendous potential for harm. Most alarmingly, they could be used to spy on people’s sleeping minds, revealing their personal secrets and rebellious impulses. If the devices were operated wirelessly, at a distance and without people’s knowledge, it would provide an incredibly powerful secret surveillance system. What about “incepting” people by planting external ideas, images, feelings into their dreams? If the technology for dream-imaging develops far enough, the inception process might simply mean reversing it: Once you know that a certain neural pattern correlates with a dream of a running horse, you now know that if you impose the same pattern

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on a person’s sleeping brain, you will presumably make a running horse appear in the person’s dream. The analytic complexity of modeling such neural activities and accurately correlating them with dream imagery is beyond anything currently being done. But it is not impossible. The overall assessment here is that progress in imaging dreams also seems inevitable, especially in the realm of VR, and potentially positive, but also carrying serious dangers for many kinds of abuse. Finally, new tools for tracking dreams are drawn from the general field of data mining, in which large amounts of information are scanned using powerful computer programs to identify quantitative frequencies and patterns of content. Unlike the other two approaches, this one does not try to alter, monitor, or manipulate the dreaming process during sleep. Based on what is currently possible using these technologies, we can foresee in the not-too-distant future the development of a dynamic and easily accessible digital system for dream journaling that helps people gain a deeper self-awareness of their cycles of dreaming, with far greater clarity and precision than anything humans have been capable of in the past. This kind of system could be applied in sports training, artistic creativity, relational psychotherapy, and spiritual guidance, with special attention to identifying dreams with emergent qualities of mystical experience. The dangers of this technology are enormous, as worrisome as anything on the horizon with the just-mentioned tools for stimulating and imaging dreams. A digital dream journaling system that can accurately identify people’s biggest concerns in waking life could also be used for malevolent purposes such as revealing secret wishes, immoral desires, and antagonistic feelings toward other people, politicians, the police, the church, etc. Such a system would be a potent means for authorities to monitor seeds of dissent. More subtly and perniciously, the system could be programmed to guide people toward interpretations of their dreams that make them feel weak and helpless, or violently angry with someone, or passionately attached to a special leader, or complacently satisfied with the status quo. These threats are real, and yet they should not overshadow the dramatically positive changes portended by this line of dream-tracking technology, which is advancing faster and in more practical directions than the tools for dream-stimulating or dream-imaging. The advent of digital technologies for dream interpretation will likely have the same impact on dream research that the invention of the telescope had on astronomy. For untold millennia, humans gazed with naked eyes upon the starry heavens. Then the telescope was invented, and suddenly people could see into the same heavens with unprecedented clarity, range, and depth.

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This is exactly what digital technologies are making possible in dream research. Since the dawn of recorded history humans have wondered about their dreams and tried to understand their mysterious meanings. Now we have tools that radically magnify our analytic powers, enabling us to illuminate and explore previously unknown realms of the psyche.

Conclusion The future prospects for new dream-enhancing technologies are both tremendously exciting and profoundly worrisome. To defend against the most dangerous problems, I offer the strategic motto, “the best defense is a strong offense.” We proactively learn as much as we can about these technologies, become more informed about their use, develop the positive potentials as quickly as possible, and make them widely accessible so people can become familiar with the benefits of interacting with their dreams in these ways. That will hopefully lead to greater public awareness and vigilance against the ever-present potentials for abuse. More specifically, I suggest continuing to rely on the guidance of depth psychology and Ricoeur’s concept of mixed discourse, striving to integrate research languages of force and meaning. All of the technologies mentioned here could, in principle, design their functions in accordance with depth psychological insights about the innate human capacity for mystical dreaming. That would be the surest way to cultivate these technologies in fruitful directions, in which they serve as valuable allies for healing, creativity, self-knowledge, and spiritual transformation.

References Barrett, Deirdre, and Patrick McNamara, eds. 2007. The New Science of Dreaming. Westport: Praeger. Bulkeley, Kelly. 2008. Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2009. “Mystical Dreaming: Patterns in Form, Content, and Meaning.” Dreaming 19 (1): 30–41. ———. 2016. Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Domhoff, G. William. 1996. Finding Meaning in Dreams: A Quantitative Approach. New York: Plenum. ———. 2003. The Scientific Study of Dreams: Neural Networks, Cognitive Development, and Content Analysis. Washington: American Psychological Association.

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Ellenberger, Henri. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1965. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Avon Books. Grotstein, James. 2000. Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences. New York: Routledge. Hartmann, Ernest. 2000. Dreams and Nightmares: The Origin and Meaning of Dreams. New York: Basic Books. Hillman, James. 1979. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper and Row. Hunt, Harry. 1989. The Multiplicity of Dreams: Memory, Imagination, and Consciousness. New Haven: Yale University Press. Irwin, Lee. 1994. The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. James, William. 1958. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Mentor Books. Jedrej, M. C., and Rosalind Shaw, eds. 1992. Dreaming, Religion, and Society in Africa. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Jung, Carl Gustav. 1974. Dreams. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Knudson, Roger. 2001. “Significant Dreams: Bizarre or Beautiful?” Dreaming 11: 166–77. Kramer, Milton, and Myron Glucksman, eds. 2015. Dream Research: Contributions to Clinical Practice. New York: Routledge. Lohmann, Roger, ed. 2003. Dream Travellers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Meier, Carl A. 1966. “The Dream in Ancient Greece and Its Use in Temple Cures (Incubation).” In The Dream and Human Societies, edited by G. E. Von Grunebaum and R. Callois. Berkeley: University of California Press. O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. 1984. Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pace-Schott, Edward, Mark Solms, Mark Blagrove, and Stevan Harnad, eds. 2003. Sleep and Dreaming: Scientific Advances and Reconsiderations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Perls, Frederick. 1970. “Dream Seminars.” In Gestalt Therapy Now, edited by J. F. Shepherd and I. L. Shepherd. New York: Harper Colophon. Plane, Anne Marie, and Leslie Tuttle, eds. 2013. Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1967. The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1970. Philosophy and Freud: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Solms, Mark. 1997. The Neuropsychology of Dreams: A Clinico-Anatomical Study. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum. Tedlock, Barbara, ed. 1989. Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Young, Serinity. 1999. Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Imagery, Narrative, and Practice. Somerville: Wisdom Publications.

CHAPTER 5

Spirituality and the Challenge of Clinical Pluralism: Participatory Thinking in Psychotherapeutic Context Robin S. Brown

Insofar as spiritual concerns have to do with the living experience of meaning, secularly minded clinicians are liable to perceive spiritually informed approaches to practice as a possible threat to clinical receptivity. As Pargament (2013) puts it, however, “When it comes to religion and spirituality, no one is neutral. This general rule of thumb applies to atheists and agnostics as well as theists, and it applies to psychologists as well as their clients.” Because spiritual commitments are always reflected in our definitions of reality, to define spirituality will always in itself reflect a commitment of spirit. This is readily forgotten in the context of the clinical situation, which, in its tendency to isolate, assess, and diagnose, often assumes a great deal from the outset. Thus, the endeavor to include spirituality within the clinical domain is deeply important yet very much problematic. It is important, because such a move promises to challenge

R. S. Brown (*)  Columbia University, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_5

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the biases of the Western psychiatric paradigm. It is problematic, because it threatens to destabilize our clinical assumptions in ways that can be disturbing and difficult to accommodate. The emphasis in the clinical literature on promoting the theme of spirituality as a protective factor for mental health can readily obscure the extent to which spiritual concerns imply metaphysical claims about the nature of reality—claims which may in fact question the legitimacy of the proofs and justifications to which “spirituality” is being made subject. For this reason, I have previously emphasized (Brown 2015b) that the mainstream clinical paradigm is misguided in conceptualizing spirituality merely as a life domain. Rather, it might be considered that a person’s spirituality is expressed across the whole spectrum of their experiences and beliefs. If there is any hope of maintaining a culturally competent approach to practice, it is therefore essential that we recognize the clinical situation is itself an expression of particular metaphysical commitments—commitments which in mainstream thinking often come to reflect the materialist assumptions of Western science, and which thus tend to refute even the basic legitimacy of mind itself (Brown 2015a), let alone the claims of most wisdom traditions. In effect, the subject of spirituality underscores the magnitude of the challenge posed if clinicians are to adopt a theoretical stance that is even moderately sensitive to the needs of multiculturalism. Meeting this challenge requires, at the very least, a radical shift in how we conceptualize clinical authority. Yet in stark contrast to this need, a spiritually informed approach to practice leaves clinicians all the more vulnerable to inflations and unconscious identifications with power (Caplan 2011). It is on this account that contemporary psychoanalytic thinking has much to offer the conversation. Although historically the field of psychoanalysis has itself been no stranger to authoritarianism, it is in seeking to address this deficiency that much of the most interesting theorizing of the last 30 years has emerged. In this chapter, I briefly examine how contemporary psychoanalysts have sought to meet the challenges of clinical pluralism in attempting to maintain clinical authority without implicitly dictating to the patient’s worldview. I then go on to argue that the psychoanalytic field’s lasting commitment to secular values nevertheless undermines this pluralistic sensibility. Drawing on the “participatory” thinking of Richard Tarnas and Jorge Ferrer, I show how recent developments in transpersonal psychology might stimulate the psychoanalytic mainstream to re-examine the work of Jung.

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Psychoanalysis as a Foundation For those possessing only a passing familiarity with the subject, psychoanalysis may seem an unlikely ground upon which to base a spiritually receptive clinical approach. But although Freud is known widely as a staunch atheist, the suspicion also arises that he protests too much. With the extent to which psychoanalytic practice can trace its intellectual roots to German idealism, it should come as no surprise that Jung was able to find in the tropes of depth psychology a home for his own more spiritually inclined sensibility. Yet the personal split between Freud and Jung was carried forward by their supporters and, even now, more than a hundred years subsequent to the collapse of their relationship, reflects a significant and still inadequately addressed rift in intellectual discourse (see Brown 2018). If a single theoretical theme were to be identified as the lasting cause of contention between these two schools, then the spiritual orientation of Jung’s work would perhaps be the most obvious. Yet despite the extent to which Freudian psychoanalysis has seemingly been aligned with a secular worldview, the psychoanalytic tradition has nevertheless generated a number of thinkers often considered to have expressed ideas of a significantly “mystical” bent. As Eigen (1998) has shown, figures such as Lacan, Winnicott, and Bion can readily be interpreted as such. Nevertheless, the extent to which some of the field’s most gifted theorists might be read in this fashion has had little impact on the largely secular flavor of psychoanalytic discourse in the Englishspeaking world. Yet in the course of the last 30 years, the nature of this secularity has undergone a significant shift—one that has established the groundwork for a necessary re-engagement with spirituality. The nature of this shift has come to be acknowledged by means of the widely applied designation relational, a term used to reflect a range of clinical approaches that emphasize “the experiential and relational aspects of human development, of psychopathology, and of the therapeutic efforts at relieving psychopathology” (Ghent 1989, 177). The relational movement in psychoanalysis is typically said to have been initiated by Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell, whose Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory sought to represent a sea change in psychoanalytic theorizing. Drawing American interpersonal theory and British object relations into dialogue with the then dominant Freudian tradition, Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) argue for a broad shift in how the psychoanalytic situation should be conceptualized. The basis for this shift

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lies in a claim that the Freudian emphasis on instinctual drives and tension release has been convincingly challenged by a range of theoretical perspectives that foreground the need to establish and maintain relationships. Although Freudians have conventionally perceived the nature of our personal relations to depend on the satisfaction of innate motives, the relational outlook turns this position around to suggest that human beings are first and foremost predisposed to establish relationships such that our wider motivations are founded in our experiences of other people. As Hoffman (1992) would subsequently claim, however, the more radical shift implied in the relational trend is arguably figured in an underlying change in epistemology. Because psychoanalysis in the USA had, for much of the twentieth century, been intimately tied to the practice of medicine,1 the institutionally endorsed reading of Freud tended to emphasize his status as a scientist. As such, psychoanalysis was typically taught and practiced against a background of positivist assumption. The relational emphasis on the social, by contrast, has invited a very different way of thinking about knowledge production. By stressing that our experience of the world is determined socially, relational thinkers have often courted postmodern theory as a basis for intellectual support. Challenging orthodox views, relationalists have placed considerable emphasis on the notion of social constructivism (Hoffman 1992; Stern 1992) or “perspectivism” as others prefer to term it (Aron 1996; Orange 1992). Constructivist thinking emphasizes the ways in which our understanding of the world around us is always socially mediated. Reflecting this sensibility, relationalists have developed nuanced approaches to treatment that foreground the analytic interaction while deemphasizing the question of clinical authority. Classically, the analyst was perceived to have acquired through the training process sufficient self-recognition as to be able to take a basically objective view of the treatment. This notion has slowly come to seem less supportable. The blank screen approach maintained through careful monitoring of the countertransference has been broadly challenged in favor of an attitude

1 As addressed in The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud (1926) himself was explicitly opposed to the practice of psychoanalysis being restricted only to the medical community.

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that recognizes the inevitability of reciprocal influence. Perceiving the creation of meaning within the treatment as a co-construction between analyst and patient (Aron 1996; Bromberg 1998; Mitchell 1988; Pizer 1998; Stolorow et al. 1987), relational thinking has made tremendous strides toward establishing a less authoritarian therapeutic outlook. Far from the dogmatism of the past, recent psychoanalytic thinking has thus come to reflect a profound engagement with the problem of clinical pluralism. But if psychoanalysis is to be considered a constructivist hermeneutic rather than a science, this raises significant theoretical challenges. Should it be argued that meaning-making is always dependent on context, then it becomes questionable in what sense a clinician might claim some measure of therapeutic authority such as to justify their interpretive role. In this light, therapy seems liable to register itself as nothing more than a kind of interpersonal reconditioning, the underlying intention of which is merely to coerce social obedience on the basis of consensus rule. Put simply, adopting a strong-form approach to social constructivism as the epistemological basis for clinical practice appears to render the therapeutic enterprise without foundation. For this reason, relational thinkers stop short of suggesting that truth is entirely relative. Rather, the weaker form of constructivism favored by relationalists claims that while our relationship to truth is always fundamentally limited by context, our perception is nevertheless of something that has an existence in its own right. As I have shown elsewhere (Brown 2017b), however, the foundation proposed by relationalists is often by implication a fundamentally secular one having to do with an underlying conception of the material world. In other words, the kind of constructivism endorsed by relational thinkers belies a metaphysic that largely coincides with the supposedly outmoded assumptions of classical thinking. As such, although relational psychoanalysis has done much to promote a pluralistically nuanced approach to treatment, the underlying secular worldview remains intact. Thus, even when contemporary psychoanalysis engages the question of spirituality with ostensible open-mindedness (e.g., Sorenson 2004), the basic assumptions of contemporary discourse have already dictated to the conversation. Furthermore, while a classical approach would be more likely to ascribe to a frank rejection of spirituality, in seeking to appear neutral on this issue the relational position runs the risk of failing to acknowledge its own underlying commitments.

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Psychoanalysis Without Foundation How might contemporary psychoanalytic practice seek to establish a more satisfactory philosophical basis that would reflect the field’s recent commitment to pluralism? To understand how this question manifests in the clinical situation requires that we think in terms of motivation, for it is our preconceptions concerning human motivation that reflect the most fundamental sense in which we ascribe meaning to the communications of others. What causes people to act? Out of concern not to depersonalize the clinical interaction, relationalists have historically sought to avoid leaning too heavily on universally binding principles of “human nature.” For this reason, the subject of motivation is one that has generally been avoided (Teicholz 2010). Greenberg (1991) has pointed out, however, that if there is to be any question of clinicians seeking to understand their patients, then adopting some rudimentary ideas about motive seems unavoidable. If relationship is to be considered primary, then it remains to be established why, and to what end. In attempting to answer these questions, relationally oriented theorists have often relied on attachment theory as a basis for theoretical support (Beebe and Lachmann 2003). Recognizing how recent infant studies can be said to reflect basic relational assumptions, attachment theory suggests itself to many contemporary analysts as offering a biological basis from which to make binding statements about human motivation. In this fashion, however, a fundamental incompatibility comes to be registered between those pluralistic sensibilities emphasized at the level of clinical interaction, and the system of theoretical justification given to support them. The theme of spirituality is uniquely constituted to draw attention to this deep-seated conflict in recent psychoanalytic thinking. Questions of spirituality raise theoretical problems that, by virtue of their relationship to the challenges of cultural diversity, demand attention. Clearly, the field’s sustained reliance on the grounding legitimacy of scientific discourse threatens to impose secular assumptions on patients. Does this then imply the need of a more wholehearted engagement with postmodern epistemologies? If such a move is to be made, then it remains to be established on what ground psychoanalysis is to stake its truth claims— how is motivation to be conceptualized? Furthermore, although postmodern theorists are sometimes argued to demonstrate an underlying theological sensibility (Coward and Foshay 1992; Smith 2006), postmodern thinking has conventionally emphasized that meaning should

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be considered an effect of language. As such, postmodern theorists have consistently sought to delegitimize metaphysics. This has implications not only for the grounding of therapeutic practice, but also for claims pertaining to the ontological validity of spiritual worlds. Any appeal that therapeutic practice makes to universals must acknowledge from the outset that metaphysics has thus been invoked. Although offering a firm basis in which to anchor practice, the implied metaphysics of Western science has often proven reductive in respect to lived experience. It is therefore noteworthy that Freud, despite his credentials as a conventional scientist (Sulloway 1979), offers a quite nuanced approach to the question of motivation. Consider the following statement: If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an “instinct” appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychic representation of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. (Freud 1915, 121)

In conceptualizing the drive as a liminal concept, Freud resisted the obvious temptation of directly explaining motivation in terms of biology. He even went so far as to describe the drives as “mythological,” stressing both their necessity and their epistemic uncertainty (Freud 1933, 95). As such, Freud’s commitment to a psychological model of mind appears to maintain the possibility of assuming a nonessentialist stance. However, despite this encouragingly flexible outlook Freud does not appear to have regarded this position as a long-term solution, and Freudians in the English-speaking world have consistently sought to rectify it. Biologically oriented analysts remind us that the origins of Freud’s drive theory can be traced to his early work with neurophysiology and to an initial belief that all psychological change might ultimately be explained in terms of energic shifts in the brain (Freud 1895). Thus, insofar as Freud retained an underlying hope that the uncertain nature of the drives might one day be resolved in terms of empirical science, his more challenging statements on this issue are wont to be understood not as a fundamental epistemological stance, but merely as the expression of an admirable scientific caution—one that is perpetually in danger of being dismissed in light of the latest advances.

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Although in Freud’s work it is the final inaccessibility of biological truth that appears to suggest caution in seeking to make objectively valid statements about human motivation, it was Jung who recognized that the question of meaning-making associated with the drives implies a confession of faith. Jung made the critical move of re-conceptualizing the drive concept in terms of spirit. He went about doing this by proposing the notion of archetypes: Innate predispositions of mind that structure our experiences of meaning and which are thus foundational to any act of interpretation. For Jung, the archetype as a spiritual principle has theoretical priority over the biological notion of instinct—meaning, that is, before matter (see Brown 2013). As Hillman (1975) puts it, the archetypes can be considered “the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world. They are the axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return” (xix). Yet this approach has created serious obstacles in the reception of Jung’s work. Two distinct lines of criticism might be construed: The first suggests that Jung’s thinking in terms of spirit registers his work mystical and lacking in a necessary scientific basis, whereas the second is reflected in the postmodern suspicion of foundational truth and a concern that Jung’s psychology is ultimately essentialist. If Jung’s archetypal thinking is to be taken more seriously as a basis from which to theorize motivation in the clinical situation, an interpretation is necessary such as to negotiate between these two lines of criticism. This would entail offering an outlook that provides a more convincing theoretical foundation than is implied by the stronger forms of constructivism, yet strives to respect the postmodern refusal of metanarratives. Such a reading might seek to emphasize the role of belief in the clinical encounter, and in so doing challenge the enduring tendency of attempting to secure theoretical legitimation in science. A reading of this kind may now be offered by way of the recent “participatory turn” in transpersonal theory.

Participatory Theory and Reconciliation with Jung Historically, transpersonalists have often attempted to mediate divergent truth claims with recourse to the “perennial philosophy”—a conceptual framework adopted from the philosophy of religion that would seek to reconcile different forms of spirituality under an overarching

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metanarrative. In this light, the world’s religious traditions are perceived to offer different interpretations of the same spiritual reality. Although relatively ecumenical, in seeking to reconcile divergent approaches to spirituality with an underlying conception of truth, the perennialist sensibility threatens to impose some rather severe limitations on the tremendous variety of religious experience. Contradictions are not allowed to stand because divergent positions are required to conform to a pre-given schema, often with the effect that the experience of meaning comes to be categorized and treated developmentally. By extension, this strategy entails not only passing fixed value judgments on individuals, but also on the world’s religions. It is partly in seeking to respond to these limitations that Jorge Ferrer (2002) has undertaken a significant “revisioning” of transpersonal theory in light of the challenges of pluralism. Drawing on a broad tendency in the history of ideas first identified by Tarnas (1991)2 and referred to by means of the designation “participatory,” Ferrer (2002) shows how this theoretical trajectory might provide a more convincing basis from which to conceptualize transpersonal experiences. The participatory approach posits that spiritual experiences emerge co-creatively in the encounter between the individual and the cosmos. As Ferrer (2011) states, this outlook “allows the conception of a multiplicity of not only spiritual paths, but also spiritual liberations and even spiritual ultimates” (5). Ferrer’s approach is influenced by Varela et al.’s (1991) notion of enaction—a term that these authors use to express the idea that embodied activity gives rise to a world of cognitive distinctions that are reflective of the mutual relationship between organism and environment. Knowledge is no longer considered merely reflective of a pre-given reality, but rather the environment as we experience it is brought into existence in an active process that can itself be considered fundamentally transformative. Ferrer argues that the participatory turn

2 Tarnas (1991) states that the participatory worldview was initiated by Goethe, and can be traced through the work of such figures as Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, and Rudolf Steiner. Sherman (2008) has subsequently suggested that the emergence of participatory thinking in the West can be traced as far back as Ancient Greece, and can be roughly divided into three historical phases: the formal (associated with Plato), the existential (associated with Aquinas), and the creative (a phase still developing, and which coincides with the paradigm identified by Tarnas).

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reflects an enactive understanding of the sacred, so that spiritual experiences are to be understood as co-creative events. The Kantian distinction between the world itself and our experience of it is thus problematized in suggesting that cognition is actively implicated in the disclosure of the world itself: “Participatory enaction, in other words, is epistemologically constructivist and metaphysically realist” (Ferrer and Sherman 2008, 35). Such an approach avoids the tendency of reductively perceiving spirituality as nothing but a construct of culture, yet safeguards against the threat of dogmatism. A participatory reading of Jung’s archetypal theory thus offers a significant and largely unrecognized basis from which to think about the generation of clinical meaning. Of the different approaches to Jung’s work identified by Samuels (1985), it is the archetypal school founded by James Hillman that can be considered most closely aligned with a participatory sensibility (see Brown 2017a). However, in the degree to which the archetypal school has emphasized the phenomenal (the archetypal image) to the extent of rejecting the noumenal (the archetype itself) altogether, archetypal thinking has been made subject to the same kind of criticism aimed at those relationalists argued to lean too heavily on postmodern ideals—with the refusal of a metaphysics, approaches of this nature lack a theoretically satisfying ground in which to anchor meaning (see also Brown 2014). As Hillman (1975) himself states, his own approach ultimately results in a “radical relativism” (xxi).3 Although retaining the archetypal school’s commitment to pluralism, the participatory outlook does not shirk metaphysics. A participatory view suggests that metaphysical truth is enacted creatively between self and not-self. Thus, a spiritual referent such as is encapsulated in Jung’s notion of the archetype comes to be considered “malleable, undetermined, and creatively open to a multiplicity of disclosures” (Ferrer 2008, 149). A participatory approach seeks to problematize the rigid distinction between things in themselves and our experiences of them. Furthermore, although recognizing that human maturation is inevitably plural, a participatory approach need not necessarily reject the notion of development or individuation. In positing a dynamic and emergent spiritual ground, this conception of the transpersonal offers an alternative

3 It is perhaps largely for this reason that archetypal thinking has waned as a distinct clinical school (Samuels 1998).

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basis upon which to anchor interpretation—one in relationship to which any given perception of truth must account not only for its contextual dependence, but also for the ways in which our spiritual referents are themselves evolving. Although this distinctly unstable cosmology clearly implies the need for a good deal of epistemological hesitancy, in the extent to which some notion of transcendence is retained this outlook nevertheless preserves a basis for belief. From a participatory perspective, Jung’s archetypal thinking thus offers itself as a way of theorizing motivation in the clinical situation that, if adopted with considerable care, might bridge the gap between relativism and essentialism. As Tarnas (2012) writes, Rather than an objectivist top-down transcendent spiritual/archetypal reality governing human experience […] we have the radically pluralistic, multivalent, multicentric, improvisatory, incarnational cocreativity of human life. Thus the Many has ontological value vis-à-vis the One, the manifest vis-à-vis the unmanifest, the creatures vis-à-vis the Creator, the people vis-à-vis the ruling archai, the concrete particulars vis-à-vis the Platonic Idea. (58)

This perspective reflects a challenging reading of Jung’s psychology that emphasizes the archetypes as context dependent and historically contingent, yet not to the extent of annulling transcendence. For clinicians trained to uncritically accept the assumptions of positivism, this outlook is liable to be dismissed as unhelpfully speculative or more simply “not scientific.” However, in the extent to which the therapeutic profession has come to recognize multiculturalism as a central ethical concern, clinicians can no longer afford to labor under the misapprehension that philosophy is irrelevant to practice. As the basis for a clinically defensible epistemology of human motivation—that is, one that allows for the patient’s personal autonomy and self-agency—a participatory approach to archetypal theory is noteworthy for its pluralistic flexibility. Thus, it might be argued that Jung’s ideas could yet find their way back into the clinical mainstream not by minimizing the more esoteric aspects of his archetypal thinking, but by emphasizing them. Equally, if spirituality is to be better recognized within the clinical domain, this endeavor cannot be restricted to ameliorative justifications in terms of the system as it stands, but should seek to show how spiritual concerns challenge paradigmatic assumptions.

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Future Lines of Inquiry Clearly, there is much work yet to be done in continuing to explore how participatory thinking might be employed, both clinically and academically, so as to aid negotiations between the universal and the particular. The reflections offered in this short chapter are necessarily somewhat schematic, but I hope to have imparted an initial sense of the considerable importance that may be attached to drawing participatory thinking into clinical practice. A participatory reading of Jung’s psychology suggests not only the possibility of a future dialogue between Jungian thinking and relational psychoanalysis, but also that, in seeking to meet the needs of clinical pluralism, spiritually oriented practitioners have much to gain from engaging with psychodynamic psychology. This line of thinking may potentially be extended in a number of directions. Within Jungian circles, the participatory approach offers a much-needed metaphysical foundation for the archetypal school associated with James Hillman; one that might also moderate some of Hillman’s positions, thus rendering them less incompatible with the findings of the classical and developmental schools. For relational analysts, meanwhile, an engagement with participatory thinking can stimulate greater recognition of the extent to which secular commitments are implied by present theoretical models, and a more direct engagement with the problems of agency and suggestibility that arise where relationship is considered determinative. Finally, examining the particular nuances of Jung’s archetypal thinking may stimulate debate as to how far the participatory turn in transpersonal theory can still enable us to endorse qualitative distinctions concerning spiritual development. Speaking from a clinical position, my own perspective (Brown 2017b) emphasizes the idea that the interpretative commitment implied by a clinical stance is inevitably grounded in personal belief. In an effort to maintain a pluralistic sensibility, I suggest that an ethically satisfying approach to practice might require that we account for the inevitability of a clash of ideals, thus leading me to consider approaching the clinical encounter as a trial of the clinician’s professional faith. In attempting to safeguard a pluralistic view of the clinical relationship, the validity of psychotherapeutic practice must always remain open to question. Therapy begins with an act of faith when the clinician assumes their role as such. An ethical approach to practice thus requires that the clinician must grapple with the possibility that the therapeutic encounter may result not only in the cessation of the clinician’s faith in their given approach, but even in the therapeutic situation itself.

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References Aron, Lewis. 1996. A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis. Relational Perspectives Book Series. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Beebe, Beatrice, and Frank M. Lachmann. 2003. “The Relational Turn in Psychoanalysis: A Dyadic Systems View from Infant Research.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 39 (3): 379–409. Bromberg, Philip M. 1998. Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Brown, Robin S. 2013. “Beyond the Evolutionary Paradgim in Consciousness Studies.” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 45 (2): 159. ———. 2014. “Affirming the Contradiction: Jungian Aesthetics, Reification, and the Shadow.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 8 (3): 66–74. ———. 2015a. “On the Significance of Psychodynamic Discourse for the Field of Consciousness Studies.” Consciousness 1: 1–10. ———. 2015b. “An Opening: Trauma and Transcendence.” Psychosis: Psychological, Social and Integrative Approaches 7 (1): 72–80. ———. 2017a. “Bridging Worlds: Participatory Thinking in Jungian Context.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 62 (2): 284–304. ———. 2017b. Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking Towards the Post-relational. Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge. ———. 2018. Re-encountering Jung: Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge. Caplan, Mariana. 2011. The Guru Question: The Perils and Rewards of Choosing a Spiritual Teacher. Boulder, CO: Sounds True. Coward, Harold G., and Toby Foshay. 1992. Derrida and Negative Theology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Eigen, Michael. 1998. The Psychoanalytic Mystic. New York: Free Association Books. Ferrer, Jorge N. 2002. Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2008. “Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the Question of Religious Pluralism.” In The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies, edited by Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman, 135–69. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. 2011. “Participatory Spirituality and Transpersonal Theory: A Ten-Year Retrospective.” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 43 (1): 1–34. Freud, Sigmund. 1895. “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 281–391. London: The Hogarth Press.

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———. 1915. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 109–40. London: The Hogarth Press. ———. 1926. “The Question of Lay Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 177–258. London: The Hogarth Press. ———. 1933. “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 1–182. London: The Hogarth Press. Ghent, Emanuel. 1989. “Credo—The Dialectics of One-Person and Two-Person Psychologies.” Contemporary Psychoanalsis 25: 169–211. Greenberg, Jay R. 1991. Oedipus and Beyond: A Clinical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenberg, Jay R., and Stephen A. Mitchell. 1983. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hillman, James. 1975. Re-visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row. Hoffman, Irwin Z. 1992. “Discussion: Toward a Social-Constructivist View of the Psychoanalytic Situation.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 2 (4): 74–105. Mitchell, Stephen A. 1988. Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Orange, Donna M. 1992. “Perspectival Realism and Social Constructivism: Commentary on Irwin Hoffman’s ‘Discussion: Toward a Social-Constructivist View of the Psychoanalytic Situation’.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 2 (4): 561–65. Pargament, Kenneth I. 2013. “What Role Do Religion and Spirituality Play in Mental Health?” APA. http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2013/ 03/religion-spirituality.aspx. Pizer, Stuart A. 1998. Building Bridges: The Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis. Relational Perspectives Book Series. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Samuels, Andrew. 1985. Jung and the Post-Jungians. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1998. “Will the Post-Jungians Survive?” In Post-Jungians Today: Key Papers in Contemporary Analytical Psychology, edited by Ann Casement, 15–32. London: Routedge. Sherman, Jacob H. 2008. “A Genealogy of Participation.” In The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies, edited by Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman, 81–112. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Smith, James K. A. 2006. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Sorenson, Randall Lehmann. 2004. Minding Spirituality. Relational Perspectives Book Series. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

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Stern, Donnel B. 1992. “Commentary on Constructivism in Clinical Psychoanalysis.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 2 (3): 331–63. Stolorow, Robert D., Bernard Brandchaft, and George E. Atwood. 1987. Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach. Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Sulloway, Frank. 1979. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. New York: Basic Books. Tarnas, Richard. 1991. The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View. New York: Harmony Books. ———. 2012. “Notes on Archetypal Dynamics and Complex Causality in Astrology.” Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology 4: 39–60. Teicholz, Judith Guss. 2010. “The Achilles Heel of Psychoanalysis: Meditations on Motivation: Commentary on Paper by Robert P. Drozek.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20: 569–81. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 6

Descriptive Disenchantment and Prescriptive Disillusionment: Myths, Mysticism, and Psychotherapeutic Interpretation Ira Helderman

Isaac begins speaking before he has even finished sitting down. “I was on my front stoop reading this book,” he says: reading that you can have a “spiritual awakening” without even being aware of it, until one day, when, as if for the first, you notice the wonder of cloud formations or birdsong. And in the exact moment that my eyes fell on the word “birdsong,” an entire field of birds directly beside me, ground-feeding the next lot over, suddenly stopped squawking and hooting and hollering. I hadn’t even noticed they were there, as far I knew they didn’t exist, until they went totally silent. And, in that moment, something happened to me.

However, whenever Isaac tries to put into words what “happened” it sounds deeply wrong in some way, and, worse, “hippie-ish.” It was not a feeling, but something like it—a not-feeling—“more about absence then

I. Helderman (*)  Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_6

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presence”—a deep openness, in which he and the birds and the silence itself “weren’t, you know…connected, but, like, of a piece…and all wide-open spaces in-between.” Whatever happened, Isaac felt utterly and completely transformed. “Everything looks different now,” he says. And ever since that day, he continues, the depression that has plagued him for years has disappeared. How would you respond to Isaac? Would you remain silent and just listen? For what reason would you make that choice, for what purpose? Do you attempt to only hear what he wants you to hear? Or do you attempt to also listen for what he is not telling you? Might you hear something in his story that he is not conscious of relaying? Or that he may not want to relay? Do you tell him what you think “happened” to him? Would you name it—like the book he was reading described—as a “spiritual awakening”? What about a “mystical experience”? For what reason would you make that choice, for what purpose? Perhaps the most important question is this one: Who are you in this fictional scenario? You could be a psychotherapist sitting across from Isaac in your clinical office. But you could also be a sociologist or anthropologist of religion listening to Isaac’s account as part of a semi-structured interview for your research on mystical experience. A number of my fellow contributors to this volume are religious studies scholars of various sorts—historians, anthropologists, etc. A few others, meanwhile, are practicing therapists. I am both. How differently do psychotherapists and religious studies scholars listen to narratives like Isaac’s? How differently do they speak or write about them? Though the following chapter is informed by my multiple identities, it is primarily written for an audience of religious studies scholars. In it, I argue that the way we answer the above questions tells us something important about the discipline of religious studies as a whole and, along the way, a thing or two about psychotherapy as well. ***** Both psychotherapists and religious studies scholars have long been interested in particular phenomena. As described by Leigh Eric Schmidt (2003) and others, nineteenth-century scholars of religion believed that these phenomena could be found in peoples across the world, and labeled them “mysticism.” This seemingly mere observation, this description of elements perceived in diverse peoples, then became an explanation. Believing it to be, by definition universal, “mysticism”—in the form of

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“mystical experiences”—was presented by scholars like William James (1902) as a core essence generating other universal anthropological phenomena that all peoples shared: “religion.” In this understanding, all peoples had the capacity to have mystical experiences, and these mystical experiences led to the creation of diverse religious traditions. For the Protestant men who formulated it in Europe and the USA, this explanation seemed useful for working through a world of diverse religious traditions and making sense of religious “others.” This understanding of “mysticism” was, Schmidt (2003) explains, “a means of interreligious engagement—a sympathetic meeting point in an increasingly global encounter of religions” (290). In this account, mystical experience is universal; however, it is the interpretations of such experiences by specific communities that can differ. A number of both religious studies scholars and psychotherapists have carried these sets of assumptions to their study of the topic of mysticism. Most have sought to describe the mystical in more detail, and many have attempted to explain its origins and function—often, to explain the origins and function of what happened to people like Isaac. Psychotherapists and religious studies scholars can appear to take very different approaches to the tasks of describing and explaining the mystical and mystical experiences. However, it is striking that the element that would seem to be the most obvious difference in orientation between these communities is frequently missed by commentators. For example, in a representative review essay titled “Mysticism and Psychoanalysis,” religious studies scholar Robert A. Segal (2011) states that, beyond only the description and explanation of origins and functions, “earlier social scientists” of religion once sought to assess the “truth of religion,” to determine “whether what adherents believe is true” (1). Segal expresses disappointment that, in contrast, “timid…present-day social scientists shun the issue of truth as lying beyond their professional ken” (1). As examples of “more daring social scientists,” Segal focuses on psychotherapists like C. G. Jung and, a figure he calls “one of the grandest cases,” Sigmund Freud (1). However, there is at least one major flaw in the basic premise of Segal’s formulation here—a misapprehension that shades everything that follows in his essay’s explication. Figures like Freud and Jung did not, at least primarily, identify as “social scientists.” They identified as physicians. To highlight this distinction, I have submitted elsewhere that Freud or Jung are better described, not as practicing the discipline

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of “psychology of religion,” but as “therapizing religion.” Here, “not only psychological but psychotherapeutic frames founded on ideas about health and illness are employed to analyze” (Helderman 2016, 944; 2018) teachings and practices that therapists define as religious. In his now famous description and explanation of “the oceanic feeling” (Freud 1930), often simply named—incorrectly to some (e.g., Parsons 1998, 1999)—his theory of mysticism, Freud finds sensations of oneness with the universe to be a vestige of a developmental stage, the undifferentiated union a baby feels with its mother. A person’s healthy maturation, however, comes with a sense of autonomy and individuation. Freud’s theory then is based entirely on his thinking about what constitutes psychological illness and what constitutes optimal psychological functioning. Segal appears to overlook that Freud and others psychotherapists’ theories about phenomena like “the oceanic feeling” are not merely descriptions or even assessments of their ontological reality. To use a word we will later hear Segal himself evoke, they are diagnoses; and the healer, perhaps unlike the theorist, does not make a diagnosis and then walk away. Segal is correct that a figure like Freud, “rarely hesitated to use [his] findings about the origin and function of religion to assess the truth of religion” (2011, 1). But he did not believe that he did so for the “truth’s sake.” He did so for the purpose of healing suffering people— people suffering from, among other things, illusions. This dynamic could, at first glance, seem to answer our above questions about the difference between how therapists and religious studies scholars listen to accounts like Isaac’s. Many religious studies scholars believe they are tasked only with naming and describing phenomena (description). Others believe their work extends beyond this to explain or interpret that phenomena (interpretation). Religious studies scholars might listen to Isaac’s narrative to ascertain whether it qualifies to be designated as a “mystical experience” and to offer an interpretation of how it functions. Most mainstream clinical psychotherapists, however, believe they have a different purpose. They believe their responsibility is to offer care to people who are often in great pain. Typically, when clinicians name, describe, and explain, they do so toward that end. A psychotherapist’s effort to determine whether Isaac has had a mystical experience will frequently also be an effort to determine whether what happened was “healthy” for him. Many clinicians will be especially attuned to Isaac’s report that, ever since that day on his front stoop, his

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depressive symptoms have lifted. Some therapists might be excited to hear Isaac’s news. Others could become concerned; they could wonder whether to name what Isaac describes as a “manic episode” that will bring with it dangerous impulsive behaviors precipitant to a later swing back down to depression. We could make the claim, in sum then, that while religious studies scholars offer descriptions, psychotherapists provide prescriptions. The remainder of this chapter explores this hypothesis, tracing distinctions between descriptive and prescriptive treatments of the topics of mysticism and mystical experience. We will examine when psychotherapists and scholars name and describe “the mystical,” when they seek to explain and interpret it, and when they make prescriptions in regard to it. Ultimately, we will find that many of the prescriptions that psychotherapists make when it comes to mystical experience may more rightly be considered descriptions of a reality, a set of natural processes they believe they only observe. Conversely, we will find that the descriptions, explanations, and interpretations of religious studies scholars on the topic of mysticism are also often highly prescriptive. It is simply that the diagnoses and prescriptions they advance are meant to achieve different ends. Some may claim that, as I referenced above, they work only to increase “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” and perhaps there are those for whom this is actually the case. But many scholars advance implicit and explicit claims about what is more or less beneficial, perhaps even more or less healthy, for society as a whole. Finally, these considerations seem fundamental to the discourse surrounding the entire subject of mysticism. Both scholars and psychotherapists deliberate on the relationship between “experiences” like the one Isaac reports and, for scholars, classification, interpretation, and assessment, or, for therapists, diagnosis, interpretation, and prescription. For some, like William James, “experience” seems to precede and exist independently of the interpretation or attributions one makes about that experience. From this perspective, whether one names Isaac’s experience a “spiritual awakening,” “mystical experience,” or “manic episode,” the experience itself remains the same. For others, most famously Stephen Katz (1978), all of this is inextricably bound up together; one’s language, embedded cultural assumptions, range of knowable options for interpretation, cannot be separated from some kind of unmediated experience. Within this discourse, then, questions about description and interpretation are foundational to understanding what mysticism is.

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What Is Mysticism? Read in a certain way, to ask “what is ‘mysticism’?” is to assume that something called “mysticism” does in fact exist. This is the strange, if not uncanny, thing about language; the way naming and describing something can seem to bring it into existence. Perhaps, to write a book on the topic of mysticism, to write a book about “psychoanalytic mystics,” for example, one must assume that there are phenomena that can be classified as shared among a group of people thus named as both psychoanalysts and mystics. In his Explorations of the Psychoanalytic Mystics, psychoanalyst Dan Merkur (2010) advocates for a broad understanding of what should be named as mysticism that could apply to widely diverse phenomena—diverse, but common enough to all be named under the heading “mysticism.” Writing from a clinical vantage point, Merkur states that: to reflect the current trend in comparative surveys, mysticism may be defined 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. (1)

Merkur views certain “religious experiences” to be central to a definition of mysticism, a definition that further encompasses a “so forth” of teachings and practices “related” to those experiences. Throughout his book, Merkur’s assumption is that such experiences exist as an ontological reality. One can name those experiences using different classifications (“spiritual awakening,” “mystical experience,” or, as Merkur does above, “religious experience,” etc.), but it is the experiences that are important. This position allows Merkur to examine psychoanalysts that barely utter the word “mysticism,” or discuss the topic in a highly limited fashion alongside the self-proclaimed “psychoanalytic mystic,” Michael Eigen. Merkur tells us that it was, in fact, this very move that produced his entire book. And the way he came to that move is interesting for our purposes. Though Merkur writes from a clinical perspective as a practicing psychoanalyst, he has also engaged in serious religious studies scholarship, spending “twenty years as an academic student of religion.” The shift led him to have:

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a radical re-orientation to psychoanalytic literature. As an academic I appreciated the literature as a body of theories. Now I read the same texts as efforts to verbalize clinical observations that anyone may confirm (or disconfirm) independently…My re-orientation has made for a great deal of re-reading familiar authors with new eyes, finding self-evident all manner of things whose presence I had never suspected. The current project began to take shape when I found myself appreciating the relevance to mysticism of a considerable body of psychoanalytic writings that are not conventionally read in such a manner. Where, for example, I had long prized a few passages where Winnicott discussed mysticism explicitly, I now appreciate the place of those passages in his clinical thinking and, conversely, the relevance to mysticism of his thought as a whole. (Merkur 2010, v)

It should be noted that what Merkur deems “explicit” discussion of mysticism here is actually often a discussion of the experiences that Merkur believes qualify to be classified as mystical—whether the analysts themselves have named them as such. This tension between “explicit” and “implicit” attention to the mystical runs throughout Merkur’s book. And yet, Merkur (2010) can describe “Federn, Milner, Winnicott, Loewald and other psychoanalytic mystics [as] express[ing] themselves primarily in secular terms, while quietly intimating their mysticism at appropriate junctures for the benefit of attentive readers” (250) because he believes mystical experiences to be a reality even if only “quietly intimated” or described in “secular” terms. Religious studies scholars have at times taken a similar approach to descriptions of the mystical, presuming that there are indeed particular observable phenomena that, though they can be classified under different names, can be traced through human history. William Parsons, for example, is sensitive to the idea that there are various forms of the experiences Merkur analyzes. Both commentators believe that diverse forms of these experiences thus deserve to be designated under diverse categories. Parsons (2008) has, for instance, identified a particular mystical type that he names “psychologia perennis… a collective body of religious psychologies…[which] have become a way for many to express and monitor issues pertaining to existential meaning, wholeness, numinous mystical experiences, and individuation” (99–100). Parsons describes this “psychologia perennis” to be both a kind of mysticism unto itself and a “cultural strand” figuring in “the development of [a larger] unchurched, individualistic, psychologically informed mysticism” (116) that he

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believes is dominant throughout contemporary society. Parsons suggests that, “despite some real differences in therapeutic technique and metapsychology,” thinkers and practitioners as various as “Rolland, Jung, Bucke, Assagioli, Maslow and the transpersonalists” (111) have all contributed to the development of this form. Merkur and Parsons thus both offer descriptions of a set of specific activities of psychotherapists and psychologists. But they also forward explanations for the origins and functions of these activities. Currently, Merkur tends to write in his capacity as a psychoanalyst, while Parsons as a historian and scholar. But they both attribute an increased interest in mysticism among psychotherapists and psychologists to the same cause: the fall of religion to the forces of secularization. Following Peter Homans (1989), Parsons (2008) employs Freud’s theory of “mourning and melancholia” to explain the origins and functions of his “psychologia perennis.” In fact, he names it “the product of mourning” (101). Parsons’ thinking is grounded on a common secularization thesis which predicts that scientific findings about the nature of reality will make religious belief unsustainable in society. The result, Parsons writes, is that “the power of a religious worldview…to command allegiance wanes and symbols ‘die’ (disenchantment, as [Max] Weber would have it)” (101). The resulting intrapsychic tumult can actually engender mystical experiences in people. Further, a healthy mourning process “can [also] result in a response to the loss of religion in the form of the creation of new ideals and symbols, one of which is the formation of the psychologia perennis” (102). What cannot be overemphasized, however, is that psychotherapists’ turn toward mystical experience as a way of responding to an imagined disenchantment of society is not second-order description but the stated intention of those psychotherapists. In many cases, it is their prescription for a society in need. In fact, whether they looked at mysticism positively or negatively, the psychotherapists and psychologists that Segal, Merkur, and Parsons discuss nearly all believed in an imminent secularization of society and positioned the development of their psychotherapies in relation to it. Freud, for example, thought he was witness to the wane of religion and believed that psychoanalysis had a key role to play in this process by exposing the true psychodynamic origins of religious adherence. Though Freud saw religious traditions as offering a regulative function in the erection of “civilization,” he still held, as religious studies scholar Jason Josephson-Storm (2017) has recently described, a:

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deeply felt wish that humankind would awaken and reject at least the false delusions of religion…[In this] Freud has moved from disenchantment as an objective model to disenchantment (or at least secularization) as a therapeutic agenda; he has moved from observer to advocate. (195)

Or, more correctly, Freud has moved from observer to physician. Freud not only advances a description of an observed secularization, nor only explains its causes. He is prescribing secularization as a healthier, more mature stage of human development. However, most of the psychotherapists that receive special treatment by both clinical (Merkur) and scholarly (Parsons) observers on the subject of mysticism were generally less focused on how their work could cure an unhealthy attachment to religious belief. They instead were more concerned about a different, for some, more dire sickness: the dis-ease that secularization and scientization inflict upon society. To see this, we need only look to the figures that usually follow in a common “family tree” within many explications of the topic of “psychoanalysis and mysticism”: C. G. Jung and Erich Fromm. As I have discussed elsewhere (Helderman 2018), both of these clinicians also anticipated the decline of traditional religious institutions. But they also both voiced deep concern that the loss of religious traditions would leave people without resources for the inner exploration they saw as required to reach an ultimate level of psychic health, a full actualization or liberation of the self. Jung and Fromm each had distinct understandings of what defines self-actualization or self-realization and how exactly such a state is achieved. More than that, they had extremely different preferred forms of mystical experience.1 Nonetheless, what Fromm and Jung both shared was a conviction that disenchantment on its own would leave humanity in a dysfunctional state and that society’s turn toward other means to activate “religious experience” was compensatory for this loss. Psychotherapy could aid in this process of compensation. In fact, it is possible that Jung came to believe that it was the superior means for its attainment.

1 Fromm (1950) criticized Jung in this regard for raising up “a specific kind of emotional experience” of submission that held the psychological roots of what Fromm designated “authoritarian religions”: “surrender to a higher power, whether this higher power is called God or the unconscious” (19).

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From a certain angle, the perspectives of clinicians like Freud, Jung, and Fromm can all be read as prescriptive. Freud prescribes disillusionment, while Jung and Fromm, in a certain sense, prescribe mysticism as a response to such disenchantment. But, from another angle, these theories can be read as largely descriptive because they are so fundamentally developmental in nature. The entire design of talk therapy, as formulated by Freud and his colleagues, was founded upon understandings of healthy and unhealthy human development. It posited that all human beings pass through certain childhood stages and that a person’s life can be deeply shaped by what occurs during, for instance, the Freudiantheorized oral or anal stages of development. Still feeling the shock waves of the scientific revolution of Charles Darwin (and, in Freud’s case, related figures like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), therapists like Jung believed that all of humanity was also undergoing its own evolutionary development. Influenced by anthropologists of religion such as Edward Tyler and James Frazer, both Freud and Jung thought that, where “primitive man” made sense of the world through the myths that were proto-religion, humanity had progressed to discover a science that revealed the truth of the natural world. All three early clinicians thought that the public’s increased interest in mystical experience was a resulting next step in this evolutionary process, though they had very different perspectives on whether this was positive or negative. But if all of this amounts to natural developmental processes, then perhaps there is nothing to prescribe, only phenomena to be observed, described, and explained. Jung is likely the most extreme case here, often presenting his very self, in formulating his analytical psychology, as a conduit for a great Spirit of history (if not the Specter that Homans and Parsons conjure with their talk of death and mourning). Contemporary therapists like Michael Eigen carry forward the notion that both renewed mystical practice and the design of psychotherapeutic modalities are part of the larger development of humankind. Many other psychotherapists merely describe certain experiences that an observer like Merkur names “mystical.” But Eigen (1998) has been unabashed in his adoption of the label, dubbing himself a “psychoanalytic mystic.” Like Jung, Eigen too explains the invention of psychotherapy as a next evolutionary step begun by religious traditions. In his writings, he often weaves back and forth between psychoanalytic theory and, for example, exegesis on a Tanakhic story about Moses to declare that “psychoanalysis is part of the evolution to open hearts with words, a tendency that

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needs to spread throughout the social body” (Eigen 1998, 91–92). This is a descriptive statement about what psychoanalysis “is,” as well as a prescription of a “need.” In his writings, Eigen repeatedly refers to “evolution” and the “evolutionary challenges” that humans face. He describes a “long-range evolutionary process, [of] millions of years perhaps…[in which] we’re still very young” (Eigen 2010, 67). He prophesizes that “there is a still, small voice in the margins, an evolution that awaits us” (Eigen 2009, 72). Jung can, at times, sound as if he believed his analytical psychology was a final stage of an evolutionary progression. For Eigen (1998), psychoanalysis is not the end of the line. Instead, psychotherapy is only one element of “cross-fertilization” that makes up “the patchwork blend” (25) he describes himself to inhabit—a blend made up of religious, scientific, artistic, and many other sources. Mysticism, psychotherapy, and, for that matter, “science” (Eigen 1993, 77)—all human phenomena are part of a larger evolutionary development. Psychotherapists like Jung and Eigen are thus optimistic to the core in their descriptions of the secularization of society. Both perceive a sort of indomitable spirit in human beings, a will toward the numinous or transcendent that can never be totally repressed despite efforts to do so. In this sense then, secularization can never be entirely successful. This raises a larger question that complicates the common descriptions and explanations of both scholars and psychotherapists for increased attention to the subject of mysticism. Many explain the origins of such a turn to be found in secularization. But, what if secularization is not actually occurring, what if visions of secularization are just an illusion?

Myths, Mysticism, and “Mysticism” For decades now, sociologists have cited copious data to dispute or revise secularization theses (e.g., Casanova 2006). Ever the sociologist, Fromm (1950), himself had observed as far back as the 1950s that religious practice did not seem to be dying out as Freud and others predicted (176). The above-mentioned Josephson-Storm (2017) titles his recent book The Myth of Disenchantment and observes that “today in neither Europe, nor America, nor the rest of the globe can one find the disenchanted world anticipated by the major theorists of modernity” (18). Freud and Jung might have believed that science would ultimately triumph over religious belief, but historian Peter Harrison (2015) has also named the

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modern concept of “religion” as clearly demarcated and in conflict from “science” as a myth. Harrison offers an explanation for “the invention of the ‘conflict myth’” (2015, 172) clarifying that he does not only utilize the term “myth” because such ideas “are historically dubious, but also because they fulfill a traditional function of myth—that of validating a particular view of reality and a set of social practices” (173) (namely the social practices known as “science,” constructed as a unique, notreligious discipline with epistemological authority). Perhaps human beings have not evolutionarily matured beyond an intrinsic anthropological/psychological need to mythmake, but have simply traded one set for another. The problem comes more into focus when considering what precisely is “dying” away in a secularization narrative that says religion is dying or dead. Josephson’s premise that disenchantment is a myth actually follows from another proposition: that a pre-modern “enchanted world,” as described by Weber or more recently by Charles Taylor (2007), is itself also myth. In a previous work, Josephson (2012) joined a long line of scholars who argue that “religion” is a socially constructed category. These scholars (e.g., Nongbri 2013) have observed that the English word “religion” (and its Latinate roots) only relatively recently took on its present-day dominant meanings. The modern concept of religion was “invented” by European men during an imperial and colonial era. These men believed that the different peoples they were encountering in an increasingly globalized world all shared a common universal anthropological reality they named “religion.” This “religion” in its various forms always happened to look a lot like Protestant traditions (based centrally in beliefs in divinities; founded by a “great man”; centered on texts, etc.). From the beginning, however, there were numerous communities for whom this “religion” did not fit. For example, as Josephson (2012) describes, Japanese communities did not recognize the concept when first introduced to it by interlopers from the USA during diplomatic negotiations. If the concept of religion itself is actually only a modern invention—a projection if not illusion—then perhaps there is nothing to die off. As I mentioned above, mystical experience has actually been raised up as a solution to this seeming problem. Perhaps, the category of religion is a limited construction that does not universally apply to all peoples. Perhaps, Buddhism or Daoism does not qualify as “religions” exactly, and thus, it is nonsensical to group them alongside Christianity

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as “world religions” (remembering that “Buddhism,” “Daoism,” and “Christianity” are themselves all constructions). Perhaps instead what peoples really share in common are certain experiences, experiences of a “numinous,” or “More.” In this theory, these experiences are unmediated, based on a shared universal state of existence, a transcendent reality. This reality is the universal then, and, beyond human comprehension, it can only be imperfectly interpreted by specific communities. Highly divergent teachings and practices—what we call “religions”—have grown up then as interpretations of universal religious or mystical experiences. Religious studies scholars like Wayne Proudfoot (1985) and Grace Jantzen (1995) have traced the lines of discourse that frames “mystical experience” in this manner. Reading their work, it becomes clear just how easily scholars’ descriptions slip into the prescriptive. Beginning in the late 1970s, scholars not only began to describe when and how communities came to speak of this universal transcendent realm of existence accessible through unmediated mystical/religious experience. They also prescriptively critiqued such rhetoric as, not to put too fine a point on it, unhealthy for society. As Schmidt (2003) helpfully summarizes, critics first argued that the advancement of mysticism as a category was part of: a larger ‘protective strategy’ designed to seal off a guarded domain for religious experience amid modernity—one in which religious feelings would be safe from reductionistic explanations and scientific incursions [and then that this move has]…become a way of keeping politics, materiality, embodiment, power relations, and social ethics off the scholarly table. The very depoliticization of ‘religious experience’ was, in other words, highly political and required dismantling. (274)

The role of the imagined threat of secularization should again be noted here. The critics that Schmidt (2003) cites interpret the valorization of certain religious experiences to be a defense against scientific advancement. The idea is that religious beliefs may be disproven by scientific truth, but inner affective religious experience is inaccessible to scientific methodologies and thus protected from their apparent epistemological authority. Beyond only exposing these true, unseen dynamics, however, the critics that Schmidt (2003) cites, such as Jantzen (1995), perceive there to be a perniciousness in empowered males of European descent, claiming that there is a realm of existence free from the dynamics of power that

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work to their benefit. Others (e.g., Carrette and King 2005) believe that a discourse that raises up individual, privatized experience ultimately reproduces harmful ideologies of individualism and global capitalism. Clearly, these positions are highly prescriptive. It is just that they are prescriptive about concerns that are different than those of psychotherapists working toward, for example, symptom reduction in a patient’s clinical depression. It may seem clear to us that thinkers like Jantzen (1995) offer prescriptions in that they speak out against a “rhetoric of religious experience” that they believe contributes to oppressive forces in human society. In principle, though, religious studies scholars are often conflicted about being prescriptive. As described by critical theorists of religion such as Fitzgerald (1999), academics became increasingly aware through the twentieth century that the roots of contemporary scholarship in Europe began within Christian scholasticism. Religious studies scholars have (unsuccessfully to Fitzgerald’s mind) strived to free themselves from theological commitments and adopt the scientific-designated values of objectivity and neutrality. Prescription can thus seem better left to members of what are now separate differentiated communities: theologians. And yet, while I have described critiques of the rhetoric of mystical/ religious experience as obviously prescriptive, not all religious studies scholars appear to agree. Richard King (1999), for example, concurs with much of the above criticism of the notion of the mystical as unmediated experience of a universal, transcendent reality. But he does not name such criticism to be prescriptive. To King, efforts to avoid certain types of discourse, to problematize the way that mystical experience is spoken about, are not “prescriptive.” What is prescriptive is taking a definitive position on the actual existence of what he calls the “realm of human experience” at issue here—the truth or falsity of mystical experiences and mysticism. King (1999) warns that scholars move out of their disciplinary jurisdiction into “prescription” if they eliminate “the possibility (and nothing more) that there [is] a realm of human experience that might indeed be devoid of conceptualization, linguistic forms and socially constructed forms of apprehension” (172). King asserts that such a strong version of “radical constructivism moves beyond description and analysis to prescription and reductionism” (172). If we are seeking distinctions between the perspectives of scholars and clinicians, it is notable that, while King here discourages definitive conclusions about the truth or falsity of the mystical, a psychoanalyst like

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Merkur is concentrated on mystical experiences as ontological realities he believes both exist and are highly impactful on human being. Put simply, while Merkur is interested in mysticism, the critics Schmidt (2003) and King (1999) reference are interested in “mysticism” as a term, concept, and category. Having absorbed the above lines of critical commentary, Merkur acknowledges that “the failure of the common core hypothesis has led some scholars to abandon the concept of ‘mysticism’ as a mistaken scholarly construct” (2010, 1). But, counting himself among “ecumenically minded scholars [who] continue to see the value of comparative studies of religious experiences” (1), he advances a broader definition of mysticism that would take into account many diverse forms. Merkur remains convinced of the existence of “religious experiences” and seeks to simply adjust how such experiences are named and described. Critics and genealogists of the category of “mysticism” usually do not explicitly or conclusively take a position on the ontological reality of the mystical experiences that Merkur focuses on. King (1999) has drawn out this distinction by noting that “one can accept the position that ideas such as ‘the mystical’ are social constructions, but that does not in and of itself require us to accept the view that all dimensions of human experience are socially constructed” (172). In other words, there could be a universal transcendent reality accessible through unmediated mystical experiences even if descriptions of it have been problematic. Again, however, King too does not himself assert that such “a dimension of human experience” actually exists. To take a definitive position either way would be to “move beyond description and analysis to prescription and reductionism.” Scholars are to remain impartial on such matters. What is fascinating about all of this is that what King characterizes as prescription can actually be viewed as mere description. One typically does not view the phrase “grass grows on the ground” as a prescriptive statement. But, to King, the statement that “mystical experiences of an unmediated transcendence do exist” does not appear to be a simple comparable description of reality. Instead, the question of the ontological reality of such mystical experiences is commonly approached as one of belief, a contested truth claim in a way that the phrase “the sky is blue” is not. And religious studies scholars, unlike theologians, are not to make statements of belief. We may have noticed above that King (1999) thus only attempts to persuade his colleagues of mystical experiences’ “possibility (and nothing more)” (emphasis added)—that those colleagues

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“at least entertain the possibility that such perspectives are a legitimate stance to adopt and engage them in constructive debate” (183). It is all a rhetorical matter; the goal is “constructive debate,” and it is the form that debate takes that can be harmful or not, that can, for instance, avoid or reproduce Orientalizing colonialist and imperialist attitudes. In response to critiques of the idea of mystical experiences that transcend social construction, King cites alternative, perhaps to his mind preferable, descriptions of an unmediated reality within Asian teachings and practices. A stance that eliminates “the possibility” that this reality actually exists, he argues, is Eurocentrically based in a post-Kantian tradition that does not make room for the perspective of Asian religious practitioners who “have been subjected to centuries of colonial oppression and the ideological subversion of their traditions by Westerners who have claimed to know better” (King 1999, 172). In the section below, however, we will hear a scholar like Robert Segal (2011) baldly advocate that his colleagues should not only “know better,” but “know best.” And he does so in a fascinating way.

The Doctor Knows Best What would King or Jantzen say to Isaac if he told them the story from the start of this chapter? Would they inform him about the history of usages of the term “mysticism”? And what would they conclude about his experience’s perceived effects? Would they think he is knowingly or unknowingly fabricating the whole incident, deluding himself and misapprehending his own effect? Given the chance, would they tell him that he was misinterpreting his experience in an ideologically harmful manner and offer correction? Segal bemoaned the fact that present-day social scientists of religion seem to avoid answering these latter questions and make claims about the truth or falsity of mystical experiences. King indicated that taking such a definitive position “moves beyond description and analysis to prescription and reductionism.” Segal (2011) expresses disappointment that contemporary social scientists of religion “profess to be unable to determine anything about the truth of religious claims—an issue they readily leave to philosophers and theologians” (1). He finds contemporary scholars of religion and psychology such as Jeffrey Kripal (2007) and William Parsons in err for not employing psychoanalysis more directly in order to assess the truth of mysticism, instead framing:

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psychoanalysis and mysticism [as] supposedly engaged in dialogue. But that characterization of the relationship is wrong. A theory of mysticism is engaged in ‘dialogue’ with mystics in only the sense of depending on them for data, just as an analyst, even of the silent type, is engaged in dialogue with patients in the sense of depending on them for data. But the theory explains the data, not converses with the data. The mystic is not a fellow theorist but the object of theorizing. The proper analogy for theorizing is not that of conversation…but that of diagnosis. The mystic is like the patient, the theorist like the doctor. In theorizing, as in medicine, the doctor (of philosophy) knows best. (2011, 10)

Segal argues here that scholars abdicate their responsibility when they fail to evaluate the truth of the mystic’s experience. And, importantly, he makes this point using the language of psychotherapy—of the clinic, doctors, and patients. Segal means to appeal to the power and authority of the healer. The patient does not question the knowledge authority of the physician; they assume that the healer “knows best.” And, moreover, they may want the healer to “know best.” Of course, notably, in his analogy, Segal does not imagine scholars writing prescriptions, only making diagnoses. However, the very concept of diagnosis is only intelligible as embedded within a larger treatment process. What treatment plan does Segal imagine follows from a scholar’s diagnosis? (For that matter, does he truly conceive of psychoanalysts as only “engag[ing] in dialogue with patients in the sense of depending on them for data”?) King (1999), meanwhile, exhibits an awareness of the dynamics of power Segal evokes when he presses scholars to “at least entertain the possibility” that there is deep truth in particular accounts of mystical experiences. Both Segal and King know that there is power in naming, interpreting, and analyzing. Segal suggests that social scientists should not shy away from adopting this authority. King, on the other hand, states that its use should be contextualized in historical systems of power. Isaac, from the above scenario, may hold a position of privilege in his culture beyond that granted him already by his sex—a position of privilege similar to those Jantzen (1995) critiques, such as William James. But the Asian populations that King speaks of have been disempowered and marginalized by imperial powers from Europe, England, and the USA. It is for this reason that the prescription King (1999) offers his colleagues is that they be wary when analyzing these communities as they “have been subjected to centuries of colonial oppression and the ideological subversion of their traditions by Westerners who have claimed to know better” (172).

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Psychotherapists have also long known of the power inherent in analyzing and interpreting the other and have contemplated the role of authority in the healing process. Freud believed that the analysand’s trust in the authority of the analyst was necessary for cure. In fact, in transference, the analyst takes on the role of the parent before whom, in infancy, all humans feel completely and utterly powerless. Since the inception of psychoanalysis, however, psychotherapists have struggled with the hierarchy that seems inevitable in the therapeutic relationship. Feminist psychologists, for example, have sought to mitigate this power imbalance in a variety of ways. Clinicians have likely acquired an awareness of the power they wield when diagnosing and interpreting because they sit across from the objects of that interpretation in their offices and consulting rooms. If Isaac has a therapist who interprets and diagnoses in a manner that doesn’t seem to fit, he can tell that therapist; he can answer back. When King (1999), however, analyzes the sixth-century Advaitic thinker Gaudapada, Gaudapada is unable to respond. Texts written millennia ago may appear to stand inert without recourse in the face of misinterpretation. Religious studies scholar Russel McCutcheon (2008) writes about this in a review of the same work by Kripal (2007), treated by Segal. And, interestingly, like Segal, he also employs the medical metaphors of psychotherapy. But he does so to question the use of psychoanalytic interpretation in the study of mystics and mysticism. McCutcheon encourages scholars to contemplate: what happens when the people about whom [scholars] write fail to recognize their meanings in the diagnostic mirror that we hold up to them. To do so, we might begin by asking why these people are being diagnosed in the first place; for…Freud’s patients came to him because they felt something to be askew in their lives; he did not take his couch, uninvited, to them (though, admittedly, Freud certainly was fond of generalizing his findings to large groups of people and the species as a whole; perhaps this is the speculative shortcoming of his work). Recent uses of Freud’s theories by some scholars of religion therefore seem to lack one of the crucial parties necessary for proper psychoanalytic treatment: the willing patient, whose own insights and interpretations…brings part of the “talking cure” to the couch (i.e., it takes two to talk). (759–60)

McCutcheon challenges the use of psychological and psychotherapeutic theories to interpret phenomena like “mystical experiences.” And

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McCutcheon’s argument here is, at base, a functional one; he argues that the truth is only revealed in psychoanalysis through the safe, open interpersonal participation of both analyst and analysand. A therapist’s interpretations will remain limited when working with someone who is heavily defended. “It takes two to talk,” McCutcheon says, and this is, of course, literally true. Whatever power dynamics exist in a therapeutic relationship, it is the patient who ultimately holds the power to choose whether or not to present for a therapy session. And, once analyst and analysand sit in an office together, they both hold interpretive perspectives on what happens inside and outside of that office. There are times when scholars do face a comparable situation, or perhaps, predicament. The above-mentioned sixth-century Gaudapada may be unable to reply to his contemporary readers, but as McCutcheon (2008) writes, “Academia’s so-called Others, once far removed in both space and time from our armchair predecessors, now read and review our books, and write books of their own about, of all things, us and our efforts to represent them” (749–50). At times, an interpretive contestation can occur in real time. Sociologist of religion Courtney Bender (2010) has sat in the exact position referenced at this chapter’s outset— across from people like Isaac in her role as an interviewer. She has thus frequently had opportunities to hear those she studies “answer back.” Bender has noted this intersubjective dynamic and the “peculiar and special roles that religious studies scholars, and social scientists in particular, continue to play in shaping the worlds of experience that [she] encountered and lived within” (16) in her study of contemporary “mystics” and “metaphysicals.” She describes her interviewees as “actively laying claim to the findings of social scientists and experimentalists, sometimes adapting scholarly research for their own purposes” (14–15). Scholars’ descriptions and interpretations on the subject of mysticism and mystical experience, having been published for public consumption, can be picked up by practitioners themselves and be “adapt[ed]…for their own,” at times prescriptive, “purposes.” Further, Bender actually reports on ethnographic interactions with “mystics” in which she finds the interpretative tables turned upon her. She introduces an interviewee she refers to as “Eric” whose “account of the mystical experience that led him to believe that he is the reincarnation of the famous mystic Hildegard of Bingen contains many of the common elements that marked experiential narratives I heard in numerous interviews” (Bender 2010, 59). However, in one

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conversation with Eric, Bender the questioner begins to be questioned herself—in this case, about her own dream life. She rebuffs Eric’s suggestion that she writes down her dreams explaining that, to her, writing “‘them down changes them…the writing of the dream is a different thing than the dream itself.’…Eric diagnosed my resistance as not wanting to confront the ‘pain’ in my dreams, a suggestion that I bristled at and that effectively ended our conversation that evening” (82–83). Bender “bristles” at finding herself the patient being “diagnosed” as the mystic frames her using his own interpretative lens about the nature of experience. Another ethnographic encounter with a group of “mystics” is even more informative. In this interaction, Bender (2010) casually makes a film recommendation to the cohort when “I immediately realized that I had been misunderstood” (188). “Something I had said suggested that watching the movie was mystical…A bit irritated at this thought, I kept talking…try[ing] to pull myself out of her—their—interpretations” (188). And yet, the more Bender talks, the more material she gives her listeners to interpret as further demonstrating that the experience of watching the film was mystical: As they began to speak again, tying the links ever tighter, my frustration turned back on myself. Why did I continue to be surprised by my own language’s capacity to be drawn into their interpretive projects? The people gathered in the room required little effort to hear my words, and my world, as enchanted; it was likewise no stretch on my part to understand how they had come to understand them as such. (188)

Bender says here that it was “no stretch on my part to understand” how she was being interpreted in this manner because she had thoroughly analyzed the worldviews of her subjects and the way they read experiences. She knows these mystics well (if not Segal’s “best”), well enough to recognize how they might interpret her. The episode thus portrays a kind of contestation of interpretation. Bender notes that “our languages were almost the same: both populated by invisible forces that took shape in narratives that marked heretofore unseen relations and connections” (189). Both Bender as scholar and the “mystics” she studies employ interpretative frames that reveal “unseen,” perhaps, unconscious truths. Bender’s mystics listen to her describe going to the cinema and find that there is much “More” to her experience than she is aware.

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Scholars might read an account of such talk and find that it reproduces a long-standing line of discourse. A psychotherapist, meanwhile, could hear all of this and recall Freud’s writing on “magical thinking.”

Conclusion This chapter has considered distinctions between how psychotherapists and religious studies scholars listen to accounts of mystical experience. We tested a hypothesis that the seemingly obvious difference is that one community describes the mystical, while the other makes prescriptions in regard to it. But, in conclusion, we have clearly seen that this distinction is easily blurred. We have heard various scholars actually employ the metaphors of psychotherapy and medicine, the relationship between healer and healed, to touch upon this very point. Meanwhile, psychotherapists have long known what Bender’s above final episode powerfully displays, that there is actually a prescriptive power in naming, describing, and interpreting. Many who have sat in the analysand’s seat know exactly how Bender feels when she describes her feelings at being “misunderstood.” And they likely can relate to being “irritated” as they are told that the strength of disagreement they have with their analysts’ interpretations only further indicates “defensive resistance.” The interpersonal dynamics of interpretation have long been theorized by psychotherapists for clinical settings. And future research could be conducted to ascertain what such theory could offer religious studies scholars. What is worth noting in conclusion, however, is that clinicians’ discussions are grounded in deep insights into the relationship between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and the awareness that description can itself be healing and is thus worth prescribing. From the inception of their discipline, talk therapists have conceived of interpretation as a therapeutic technique. Freud believed that interpretation was one of the analyst’s primary responsibilities. Processes like transference were automatic. They would happen “naturally” under the proper conditions. But, only an analyst could offer the interpretation that, when fully absorbed as authentic insight, creates transformation. Therapists have thus long known that there is power in holding the interpretive keys, or perhaps, wearing the “decoder ring,” that allows them to reveal the true “invisible forces” at work in a person’s life.

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References Bender, Courtney. 2010. The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carrette, Jeremy, and Richard King. 2005. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. New York: Routledge. Casanova, José. 2006. “Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective.” The Hedgehog Review 8: 1–22. Eigen, Michael. 1993. The Psychotic Core. London: Karnac. ———. 1998. The Psychoanalytic Mystic. London: Free Association Books. ———. 2009. Flames from the Unconscious: Trauma, Madness, and Faith. London: Karnac. ———. 2010. Eigen in Seoul: Volume One, Madness and Murder. London: Karnac. Fitzgerald, Timothy. 1999. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University. Freud, Sigmund. 1930. Civilization and Its Discontents. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works. Translated and edited by James Strachey, 59–145. London: Hogarth Press. Fromm, Erich. 1950. Psychoanalysis and Religion. New Haven: Yale University. Harrison, Peter. 2015. The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Helderman, Ira. 2016. “Drawing the Boundaries Between ‘Religion’ and ‘Secular’ in Psychotherapists’ Approaches to Buddhist Traditions in the United States.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84 (4): 937–72. Helderman, Ira. 2018. Mindful of “Religion”: Psychotherapists and Buddhist Traditions in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Homans, Peter. 1989. The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature (Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902). 2010 First Library of America Edition. New York: Penguin. Jantzen, Grace M. 1995. Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Josephson, Jason Ānanda. 2012. The Invention of Religion in Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Katz, Steven T. 1978. “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism.” In Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, edited by Steven T. Katz, 75–100. New York: Oxford University Press.

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King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East”. London: Routledge. Kripal, Jeffrey. 2007. The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCutcheon, Russell. 2008. “A Gift with Diminished Returns.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76 (3): 748–65. Merkur, Dan. 2010. Explorations of the Psychoanalytic Mystics. Amsterdam: Rodolphi. Nongbri, Brent. 2013. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Parsons, William. 1998. “The Oceanic Feeling Revisited.” The Journal of Religion 78 (4): 501–23. ———. 1999. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. “Psychologia Perennis and the Academic Study of Mysticism.” In Mourning Religion, edited by William Parsons, Diane Jonte-Pace, and Susan Henking, 97–123. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Proudfoot, Wayne. 1985. Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2003. “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism.’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71 (2): 273–302. Segal, Robert A. 2011. “Mysticism and Psychoanalysis.” Religious Studies Review 37 (1): 1–18. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

PART II

Historical & Theoretical Approaches

CHAPTER 7

Embodying Nonduality: Depth Psychology in American Mysticism Ann Gleig

Within the field of psychology of religion, depth psychology—used here in the broadest sense of the word to signal those psychologies that orient themselves around the concept of the unconscious—has been commonly adopted to assimilate and assess mystical experience in relationship to psychodynamic phenomena. These interpretations fall under a wide range of evaluative perspectives: from the critical, in which mysticism is typically dismissed as psychologically regressive, to the celebratory in which mysticism is heralded as a legitimate expression of psychic health. In the psychoanalytic field, for example, William B. Parsons (1999) has identified three main stances: the “classic” in which mysticism is seen as infantile, defensive, and an obstacle to mature ego development; the “adaptive” in which mysticism is viewed as offering avenues for creativity, vitality, and healing; and the “transformational” perspective in which mystical states actually point to developmentally mature states beyond the purview of classic analytic goals (152–65). A similar range can be found within Jungian lineages. On the one hand, we find Jung himself (Clarke 1995) cautioning that mystical A. Gleig (*)  University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_7

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states can signify the onslaught of overwhelming archetypal energies and his warnings to his Western audience that Asian contemplative practices pose a threat to the goal of individuation. On the other, contemporary Jungian analysts, such as Young-Eisendrath (2002), have embraced and advocated for the value of Buddhist practice. While hermeneutical stances radically differ, however, both critical and celebratory camps are united in how they position both discourses: Depth psychology remains the privileged framework and mysticism is evaluated in terms of what it reveals (or does not reveal) regarding psychic maturation. This chapter takes a different approach by examining the work of two contemporary American spiritual teachers—Judith Blackstone and Hameed Ali—who are concerned less about what mysticism reveals about psychological health and more about what psychological knowledge can do for mysticism. Both teachers draw on depth psychology as a tool or aid to reach mystical goals—in this case, “the embodiment of nonduality”—rather than adopt it as a lens to interpret or assess mystical experiences. In analyzing their work, I focus on two themes in particular: the reframing of karmic obstructions such as vasanas, samskaras, and skandhas into the language of psychodynamic theory such as self-representations and object relations, and the insertion of narratives of individuation and relationality into Asian nondual ontologies. Next, I identify some of the historic and sociocultural processes that have facilitated the adoption of depth psychology as aid to mystical practice in contemporary American spirituality. In conclusion, I creatively extend de Certeau’s (1992) work to forward a threefold schema—embedded, experiential, and embodied—to historically situate such psychologically informed/integrative mysticisms as well as suggest how one might critically evaluate such phenomena.

Judith Blackstone and the Realization Process Judith Blackstone (2013) is an American nondual teacher and former psychotherapist who has developed the “Realization Process,” which “integrates the process of spiritual realization with psychological and relational healing and embodiment.” It consists of a series of exercises that combine meditative practices and somatic work. Blackstone teaches the realization process across the USA in a variety of formats including one-on-one sessions and group workshops and retreats as well as

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offering a teacher training program, which certifies students to teach the approach independently. While unaffiliated with any specific religious lineage, Blackstone has significant experience in Asian contemplative traditions. She trained in Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, including a residential period in the Rinzai Zen Dai Bosatsu monastery in upstate New York, and was a student of the Hindu guru Sai Baba for over forty years. She is also formally trained in depth psychology and worked as a licensed clinical psychotherapist in private practice for 32 years before retiring in 2013. While the realization process clearly draws upon this dual body of knowledge, Blackstone presents her teaching as new and primarily experientially based. Having suffered a serious dance injury in her twenties, she embarked on an intuitive psychosomatic healing exploration that ultimately resulted in the development of the realization process. Her approach primarily emerged “out of the obstacles and insights of my own path and in response to the needs of people who have come to practice with me” (Blackstone 2012, 11). A well-known figure in Western transpersonal and nondual spiritual circles, Blackstone has written a number of influential articles and books on the interface between nonduality and spiritual awakening. Blackstone (2007) places Asian mysticism into conversation with psychoanalytic theories of intersubjectivity to explore how nondual experience can aid in psychological healing and how psychotherapeutic knowledge can aid in the embodiment of nonduality. She defines nonduality as “a fundamental unconstructed dimension of our being or consciousness” (24) and nondual realization as “the experience that our own body is saturated with consciousness, just as the objects around us are saturated with consciousness” (27). While thoroughly versed in constructivist and essentialist debates around mysticism, she espouses a qualified perennialist view of nonduality, identifying her understanding of nonduality with the Tibetan Dzogchen lineage, Kashmir Saivism, and Advaita Vedanta. Her distinct approach is based on a discrimination between a cognitive realization of nonduality in which there is a conceptual recognition of nondual states occurring primarily in the realm of perception and an embodied realization of nonduality in which the body is fully experienced as this nondual luminosity. As Blackstone (2012) explains, “We can experience our own body and everything around us as transparent, as made of (or pervaded by) a single, luminous, sentient unbounded expanse of transparency” (4).

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Blackstone’s aim is to move from the cognitive to the embodied and this where psychoanalytic theory comes to play. She claims that the fixations that obscure nonduality are not just conceptual, as generally mapped out in premodern nondual models, but also include unconscious psychosomatic holding patterns in the body, which have arisen in response to traumatic painful childhood relational experiences. These rigid, unconscious somatically based self-representations and object relationships not only result in dysfunctional psychological patterns, but also restrict one’s ability to access and abide in nondual awareness. And, because many traditional nondual methods of instruction focus solely on cognitive barriers, they are limited in overcoming these unconscious structures. Taking the Dzogchen instruction “to settle one’s attention in an all-inclusive fashion on the present moment,” as her example, Blackstone (2012) explains that “our sensory perception is limited by the psychologically based constrictions throughout our whole body. So, if we hold our attention open on the present moment, we will only be as open and attentive as our somatic patterns of constriction allow” (7). Blackstone believes that traditional Asian nondual systems do not fully address these particular obstacles because they did not have psychological developmental knowledge. As she explains, “Although Asian philosophy refers often to the ‘obscurations’ that obstruct nondual realization, the origin of these obscurations in the matrix of childhood relationships is not part of their knowledge” (Blackstone 2007, 30). Hence, traditional nondual systems are limited in how they can tackle these patterns of constriction: “If someone is fairly open to begin with, and they begin to meditate, some of those patterns will fall away. However, the deeper ones usually need to be worked with directly in order to release.”1 By working directly, Blackstone refers to the integration of psychological knowledge with meditative techniques; used independently both methods are limited. Another area in which psychological knowledge extends the methods of traditional nondual contemplative traditions is the interpersonal realm. Blackstone observes that many accomplished practitioners on the nondual path struggle with relational issues, which she traces back to early interpersonal experiences. To address this, Blackstone draws on attachment and intersubjectivity theory to develop exercises that facilitate a

1 Interview

with Judith Blackstone September 14, 2014.

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continuity between nondual internal experience and interpersonal interaction. In her words: Psychologically we develop patterns of fragmentation as young children in relation to our parents. We can meditate very nicely sitting on our pillow then see another person and be right back into that fragmented space. So, in the realization process I teach practices for experiencing oneness with someone else in the pervasive space, while still experiencing inward contact with yourself.2

Another distinctive feature of Blackstone’s nondual approach is her claim that one can embody nonduality and yet still preserve a sense of unique individuality and relational boundaries. While nonduality has traditionally been presented as the loss of individuality, Blackstone (2012) counters that, “even our unique individuality, with its memories, talents, opinions and preferences is more clearly revealed, more intimately known, in the clear, unobstructed space of nondual consciousness” (10). Maintaining a distinctive but non-defensive sense of “I” also enables one to foster healthier interpersonal interactions. Through the realization process, one develops the ability to experience both a sense of unity with others and the capacity to maintain clear, “authentic” boundaries and not lose oneself in merger. Speaking primarily to a psychoanalytic audience, Blackstone (2008) reframes this as a form of subjectivity that includes both “the sense of oneself as a separate being, and the experience of participating in a fluidly reciprocal self/world matrix” (2).

Hameed Ali and Karen Johnson’s Diamond Approach The Diamond Approach is the name of the spiritual path that has been developed since the 1970s by Hameed Ali and Karen Johnson. It is taught through the Ridhwan School and Ridhwan Foundation, a nonprofit organization, which has its main base in Berkeley, California, where both Ali and Johnson reside. The Ridhwan School has grown steadily over the last decade and currently has around 4000 students in official groups and another 350 who work directly with Ridhwan teachers outside of a group context. There are around 60 groups, which meet across the world in the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand 2 Ibid.

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with groups also about to start in Asia and South Africa. It has almost 200 ordained teachers-ministers. The format of the seminary (teacher training) program has varied over the years but the current iteration consists of an intensive ten-year program. More recently, the Ridhwan Foundation has been offering Diamond Approach Online programs, which almost 2000 students have participated in. Ali is a prolific writer and has published over ten books with Shambhala Publications alone under the pen name A. H. Almaas.3 Similar to Blackstone, Ali trained in various contemplative lineages including Buddhism, Sufism, and Gurdjieff work and has a PhD in psychology with a specialty in Reichian psychology. He was also a member of a spiritual group in Berkeley led by Chilean spiritual teacher and Gestalt therapist Claudio Naranjo who played an instrumental role in bringing the enneagram teachings to the USA Aspects of all of these different lineages are evident in Ali’s prolific writings as well as certain practices of the Diamond Approach. While the Diamond Approach draws on Asian and Western mysticism, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, and the Gurdjieff work, and extensively utilizes psychoanalytic theory, Ali insists it is not a theoretical integration but an experientially based revealed teaching (Schwartz 1995). Ali presents the Diamond Approach as a living, revealed teaching, and in language reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhism, has delineated “four turnings” in the work.4 Ali draws significantly on the insights of depth psychology—particularly psychoanalytic developmental theory—for the first two turnings, which are concerned with the integration of nondual realization in daily life. Ali describes ultimate reality or “true nature” as having both an unmanifest and manifest dimension. From the unmanifest—rendered most frequently as an impersonal nondual absolute— arise differentiated essential aspects such as compassion, love, will, and strength. Similar to Platonic forms, these are understood as the manifestation of true nature in the specific qualities needed for functioning in the world. Correspondingly, the Diamond Approach has a dual telos: (1) self-realization: the recognition of the unmanifest as the true nature of self and reality, and (2) self-development, the embodiment of true nature in all its differentiated forms (Almaas 2001a, b, 2004). 3 Personal

Correspondence with Dana Harrison, Director of Ridhwan School. H. Almaas. 2017. The Alchemy of Freedom: The Philosopher’s Stone and Secrets of Existence. Boston and London: Shambhala. 4 A.

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The attainment of these two goals is narrated as the soul’s individuation and maturation process, with the soul here referring to individual consciousness—one’s personal sense of “I.” This process consists of three basic stages—merger, differentiation, and reunion—which although not acknowledged by Ali is structurally similar to Romantic and Jungian models of individuation (Kirschner 2002). The soul, which Ali genders as feminine, begins life infused by both true nature and the instinctual survival drives. To mature, she must develop cognitive faculties that can only be gained through ego development. The problem, however, is that during this necessary developmental period, the soul becomes identified with the internalized self-images and object relations that make up egoic self-identity and loses touch with her nondual ontological ground. Drawing on an extensive knowledge of psychoanalytic developmental theory, Ali establishes a precise correlation between the loss of essential aspects and developmental stages. For example, he charts how during the Oedipal stage, contact with essential will is lost. In place of this lost essential aspect, an ego structure arises, in this case “false will,” which basically mimics the lost quality and functions as an egoic substitute for it. In order to recover contact with their nondual ontological ground, students in the Diamond Approach must work with the specific unconscious ego structures that obscure each essential aspect. First, they must gain conceptual insight into the precise psychodynamic issue that led to the loss or “hole” of the essential aspect. Second, they must be able to phenomenologically tolerate the feeling of the “hole,” an experience which is normally unconscious and defended against. If the student can undertake both of these cognitive and phenomenological tasks, the lost essential aspect re-emerges out of the hole and is recognized as one’s true nature. A specific example with a student working directly with Ali is useful to illuminate this process: I worked with you on Tuesday night on understanding my concept of working to earn a living. I am either afraid to do anything because of my feelings of inadequacy, or I work on grandiose plans to get rich…I felt a lot of fear while working on this issue, and it was around my inadequacy. When you worked on getting me to feel this I kept going back to my grandiose ideas. This happened a few times, and finally I stayed with the feeling of inadequacy. I felt an emptiness and fear that I did not exist. As I explored the feeling of emptiness it felt like a hole and then a big cave. There was substance there and as I felt the substance I began to

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feel strength in it. It felt like the strength I try to get by being grandiose, except that it felt real and it felt like my strength. It is hard for me to feel this real strength because I am so identified with the feelings of inadequacy and grandiosity. They are both in my head and neither are able to give me the strength I need to function, as Essence does. (Almaas 2001a, 371)

A fundamental part of the soul’s individuation process is the realization of a unique essential aspect called the “personal essence” or the “pearl,” which is the only essential aspect that is personal rather than impersonal in nature. The pearl reconciles the poles of impersonal being and the individual ego and, in Ali’s (2001a) words, explains “how Being, impersonal and eternal becomes a person, a human being on earth” (161). The realization of the pearl is a complicated procedure, which basically involves a precise understanding of and progressive dis-identification from the constellation of self-images and object relations that make up the egoic self-identity. The end result is the recognition of an essential subjectivity that is both completely autonomous and fully relational. It is free of all internalized self-images and has a capacity for true contact, which is unavailable from both impersonal being and the inherently narcissistic ego (Ali 2001a, 33–90). Similar to Blackstone’s model of individuality, the pearl allows one to be a unique individual, a normative Euro-American self with its dual Romantic and Enlightenment heritage, but without the defensive separating and dualistic boundaries of ego. It thereby bridges a series of apparent dualities: between impersonal ontology and personal experience, spirituality and psychology, “the man of spirit” and the “man of the world.” Like Blackstone, Ali claims that the methods of traditional mysticism cannot adequately penetrate these unconscious ego structures because knowledge of them was only made available through the field of depth psychology. Similarly, while mystical traditions such as Sufism hint at the realization of the pearl, its detailed explication is only possible because of developmental theory. Depth psychology, in other words, is seen as bridging gaps in premodern mysticism and enabling a new level of spiritual realization. Ali (2001a) describes such work as “a psychologically grounded spirituality,” which “does not separate psychology and spiritual experience and hence sees no dichotomy between depth psychology and spiritual work” (n.p.). As he further explains, “This work demonstrates that what is usually considered psychological investigation can arrive at dimensions of experience which have always been considered to be the product of spiritual practice or discipline” (n.p.).

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Nonetheless, Ali is insistent that such work is not therapeutic in nature but rather utilizes psychological knowledge in service of spiritual awakening and embodiment. Under the “FAQ” section on the Diamond Approach website, for example, it states “The Diamond Approach is a spiritual path and is not intended as a psychotherapy… It is not intended for therapeutic purposes; its orientation, view, methodology and knowledge as a whole differ fundamentally from the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.” Similarly, while trainee teacher-ministers read extensively in psychoanalytic development theory as part of their seminary training, Dana Harrison, the director of the Ridhwan School, was keen to clarify that, “These concepts are not taught separately from the path of the Diamond Approach, and we do not teach psychoanalytic theory per se as part of our seminary programs.”5

Nondual Mysticism and Depth Psychology: Sociocultural Context The work of Blackstone and Ali can be situated in a wider network focused on the dialogue between nondual mysticism and depth psychology. Early investigations of the encounter between the two fields came from a small network of therapists and spiritual teachers residing in the marginal and often dismissed field of transpersonal psychology. In 1998, this group founded the Nondual Wisdom and Psychology Institute, which has run annual conferences since 2000, an annual retreat since 2009, and in 2011 launched Undivided: An Online Journal of Nonduality and Psychotherapy.6 Papers from the conferences have been published in two edited collections (Prendergast et al. 2003; Prendergast and Bradford 2007). Participants located in California have started a Nondual Wisdom Clinical Consultation group that runs group salons three times a year. Many of those involved, as well as Blackstone and Ali, have presented their work at the annual Science and Nonduality (SAND) Conference, which began in 2009 and has grown in size and reputation since. The October 2017 conference includes topics such as the “The Essence 5 Personal

Correspondence with Dana Harrison, September 2, 2017. An Online Journal of Nonduality and Psychotherapy. http://undividedjournal.com/about-the-journal/, accessed February 6, 2017. 6 Undivided:

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of Nonduality,” “It Didn’t Start with You: How to Break the Cycle of Inherited Family Trauma,” and “Sacred Space and Conscious Community.” Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo, the founders of the conference, have developed the nonprofit organization Science and Nonduality, which hosts virtual events in addition to the California-based conference in order to make the dialogue accessible for a wider international audience.7 Prendergast et al. (2003) defines nonduality as “the understanding and direct experience of a fundamental consciousness that underlies the apparent distinction between perceiver and perceived” (2). As with Blackstone and Ali, this network is aware of constructivist critiques of perennialism and advances what might be labelled as a “qualified perennialist” approach, which sees nonduality as the fundamental reality articulated in multiple Asian and Western mystical traditions, but also recognizes fundamental distinctions between different models of nonduality. One such distinction, for example, is between the Buddhist Madhyamaka understanding of emptiness as the lack of inherent existence of any phenomena and the Buddhist Dzogchen understanding of emptiness as actual nondual consciousness. A second distinction is between forms of nonduality that emphasize the unconditioned or absolute over the conditioned or relative realms of reality as found within Advaita Vedanta, and between forms of nonduality that embrace both the unconditioned and the conditioned as expressed by Dzogchen and Zen Buddhism and Kashmir Saivism. Participants in this network favor models of nonduality that embrace both the relative and absolute dimensions of reality. They reframe these models as forms of “mature nondual embodiment” in which the “transcendent” or “vertical” unconditioned realm of being becomes embodied in the “immanent” or “horizontal” conditioned realm of human experience. The process of individuation is seen as a crucial aspect of this embodiment process. As Welwood (2003) states “Individuation is the forging of a transparent vessel—the authentic person who brings through what us beyond the person in a uniquely personal way” (149). Such individuation necessitates drawing on the insights of depth psychology:

7 Personal

Correspondence with Mauricio Benazzo, September 7, 2017.

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The hard truth is that spiritual realizations often do not heal our deep wounding…most modern spiritual practitioners continue to act out unconscious relational patterns developed in childhood. Often what is needed here is psychological work that allows us to bring the underlying psychodynamics that maintain these patterns into consciousness. (Welwood 2003, 161)

Analyzing wider conversations between nonduality, depth psychology, and science, it is clear that Blackstone and Ali are prominent examples in a well-established psychospiritual culture. What are the key historic and sociocultural processes that have facilitated the emergence of this network and its psychologically informed mysticism? One significant factor is the western socio-historic shift from religious to psychological culture as tracked by scholars such as Philip Rieff and Peter Homans. Rieff (1968) traces the modern replacement of early religious “positive communities” by therapeutically orientated “negative communities.” In the past, societies were “positive communities” being governed by a cultural symbolic which encouraged control of behavior and an ethic which favored the group over the individual. The repression of socially destructive instincts, such as aggression and sex, was achieved through the acceptance of an authoritative “language of faith” and the idealization and internalization of a cultural superego. The institutions of the “Church” and the “Party” enabled positive communities to prevent anomie and reintegrate neurosis through religious forms of healing in which the unconscious was encountered in a non-direct manner. In contrast, negative communities encourage a direct engagement with the unconscious and foster a therapeutic mode of self-awareness. Influenced by Freud’s dictum “where id was, there ego shall be,” they are suspicious of cultural forms like religion and politics which are understood as symbolic representations of unconscious content. The shift from repression to direct engagement with the unconscious leads to the collapse of the cultural superego and the replacement of the “Church” and the “Party” with the “Hospital” and “Theatre” as the new cultural spaces for the working out of previously repressed psychic contents. The individual is privileged over the group and a new cultural subjectivity— named by Rieff (1968) as “psychological man”—has emerged who finds meaning in experience-near psychological experience rather than experience-distant religious frameworks.

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Whereas Rieff strictly demarked the religious and psychological and was critical of the cultural shift from the former to the latter, Peter Homans (1979) offers a more nuanced and optimistic perspective of the transition between the two. He draws on Freud’s theory of mourning to examine the cultural products created from the dramatic dislocations wrought by modernity. Homans saw systems such as depth psychology as forms of “creative mourning,” which transform rather than abandon elements of the lost religious past. He argues that as the great Western religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity were subject to secularization, the people who were attached to them suffered from social upheaval and a loss of the meaning provided by religious symbols and ideas. He identifies three specific effects of modernity: The decline of the power of traditional religion to organize personal and social life; a diffuse and heightened sense of personal self-consciousness, in which consciousness tends to be structured and meaning realized primarily in the context of personal, private, and psychological experiencing; and an emerging split between personal self-consciousness and the social order, eventuating in a devaluation of the social structure as a source of and object for personal commitment. (Homans 1979, 93)

While it would be a mistake to reduce either Blackstone or Ali’s work to psychology, their psychodynamic re-articulation of karmic conditioning is a perfect illustration of such creative mourning. They transform a traditional religio-ethical karmic narrative into a contemporary psychosomatic one in which in utero and early life experience rather than past life conditioning is forefronted as the central obstruction to mystical realization. Similarly, both teachers focus on personal and interpersonal experience as the privileged space of meaning rather than an external system of religious imperatives or ethics. For example, under the “FAQ” section on the Ridhwan website, it states, “There is no ideology, no belief system to follow, no special diets to adopt,” and qualifies that although the Diamond Approach is incorporated as a religious organization, it “works toward the experience of reality not towards the development of a belief system to which one must adhere.” In addition to the cultural shift from the religious to the psychological, a second significant factor is the historically unprecedented shift from a monastic to a lay demographic. Asian nondual traditions have historically been populated by renunciates living in a controlled religious

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environment. However, as these traditions have been subject to the ideological and geographical dislocations of modernity, the “householder” rather than the renunciate has become their privileged subject. Within such a wider “this-worldly” turn, questions of individuation and relationality have increasingly come to the forefront as practitioners struggle to relate mystical experiences to daily life in the twenty-first century. As with Blackstone and Ali, for many of these figures, depth psychology with its multiple models of individuality and relationality has become the primary bridge between the nondual ontologies and everyday life in the modern world. Popular American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, who is a friend and student of Ali’s, is representative of such a trend. In a series of domestically titled texts, Kornfield (2000, 2011) has called for an “embodied enlightenment,” which integrates the insights of western psychology with Buddhism and privileges everyday householder life as site of awakening. A third significant factor in the emergence of a psychodynamically nuanced mysticism is the numerous and now well-documented guru scandals that have inflicted Buddhist, Hindu, and Asian-inspired lineages in the West and cast doubt on traditional liberation narratives. These scandals are often pointed to as evidence of limits in premodern contemplative traditions, particularly nondual lineages such as Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta and used to legitimate the incorporation of depth psychology into such systems. In the wake of the Zen sex scandals, for example, American Buddhist teachers such as Barry Magid, Grace Schireson, and Diane Hamilton have incorporated psychoanalytic and/or Jungian theory and practices into their Zen teaching and training. As do Blackstone and Ali, these teachers commonly reference Welwood’s (2002) concept of the “spiritual bypass,” which draws attention to how spiritual practices can be used to prematurely transcend rather than work through various developmental conflicts and emotional vicissitudes. Magid, for instance, points to research done by American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield who interviewed almost a hundred spiritual teachers and found they were still struggling with psychodynamic issues despite having had powerful enlightenment experiences. Combined with the sexual scandals, Magid (2008) argues that this is clear evidence that while Zen offers deep insights into the nature of reality, it does not resolve unconscious dynamics, particularly emotional and sexual issues (2008, 17–18). In a similar vein, both Ali and Blackstone refer to the scandals as evidence that spiritual practice

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alone is not sufficient to resolve psychodynamic conflicts. Ali’s writings, for instance, contain many reflections such as this: In the past, religious and spiritual traditions dealt with these manifestations through moral and ethical purification. Because of the increasing secularization of society, these practices are generally not applied strictly and completely. However, psychological understanding shows us that even moral and ethical purification might not be effective in dealing with deep-seated neurosis, or with what is called structural neurosis. Our present understanding of how unconscious beliefs and motivations may manifest in distorted attitudes and behavior can help us see how one can be scrupulously devout and moral but at the same time be addictive, abusive or otherwise psychologically unhealthy. Events across the range of modern spiritual institutions demonstrate this amply. (Almaas 2004, 10)

From Embedded to Experiential to Embodiment: Historical Trajectories To situate Blackstone and Ali in terms of the broader cultural history of Western mysticism, I want to creatively extend cultural historian Michel de Certeau’s work to offer a threefold schema—embedded, experiential, and embodiment—that loosely maps onto premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural epochs. De Certeau (1992) noted that in early Christianity, mystical experience was completely rooted within a religious matrix of three interrelated contexts: biblical, liturgical, and spiritual. Mystical experience implied the presence of an objective reality that could only be accessed via the meditation of church and tradition. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, a shift occurred. Mystical practice was uprooted from its traditional contexts and one witnessed the emergence of mysticism as a substantive (la mystique), the understanding of mysticism in terms of a subjective experience divorced from church and tradition and the investigation and the interpretation of such experiences from a scientific/psychological perspective. Concurrent with this was the formulation of a new category of universal religious types—mystics—and a new understanding of the sacred or “absolute” as a universal dimension of human nature obscured beneath a diversity of religious institutions and doctrines. According to Parsons (2008), the emergence of a universal, sacred inner dimension of the human, and a generic understanding of the absolute allowed for the psychologization of mysticism and spirituality.

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It links the figures of Romaine Rolland, William James, Carl Jung and transpersonal psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Roberto Assagioli, and Ken Wilber in a lineage that Parsons designates as “the perennial psychology” (68). While acknowledging real differences in metapsychology and technique among these thinkers, Parsons sees them united by several themes: first, in their championing of the individual as an unchurched site of religiosity; second, in their support of the valorization of personal mystical experiences; third, that they advance various permutations of perennialism; fourth, that they identify the innate, intuitive, mystical capacities; fifth, that they develop various psycho-mystical therapeutic regimens; and sixth, that they share a social vision consisting of the emergence of homo mysticus (Parsons 2008). To this list, I would add a seventh: a strong interest in and selective borrowing from nondual Asian contemplative traditions. In short, de Certeau and Parsons (who follows de Certeau) trace a shift from premodern, traditional forms of mysticism, which are completely embedded in specific religious, ethical, communal, and soteriological frameworks to modern forms of mysticism, which are highly experiential, individualistic, and decontextualized. Robert Sharf has discussed this modern experiential emphasis in relationship to the presentation of Asian religions in the West. Sharf (1998) traces the modern understanding of the essence of spirituality as an individual experience to Schleiermacher’s attempt to protect religion from Enlightenment critiques. This perennial, experiential model was adopted and applied to Asian religions by figures such as Swami Vivekananda and D. T. Suzuki. Sharf, however, questions the assumption that experience is central to traditional Asian religions and redirects attention to the dimensions of ethics, ritual, and scripture that were neglected or discarded in the process of modernization (94–116). On the one hand, both Blackstone and Ali demonstrate many characteristics of modern mysticism: They are heavily experiential, psychologized, perennialist, and de-institutionalized. The modernist distinction between objective and subjective reality can also be seen in Ali’s fundamental differentiation between “essential objective experience” and “subjective egoic experience.” On the other, however, both teachers attempt to go beyond an experiential approach to mysticism. For both, mystical experiences are of limited value: in and of themselves such experiences do not address unconscious psychodynamics and in certain cases can even exacerbate them. Hence, of much more importance is the full

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integration or embodiment of those experiences. Rather than returning to a traditional ethical and religious framework, however, they turn to the insights of depth psychology to re-embed and re-envision these experiences into new contexts. In this sense, Blackstone and Ali point toward a new postmodern stage in the history of mysticism: one that is marked by an emphasis on the embodiment of mystical experiences. Efforts to go beyond the modern experiential approach to mysticism and, in effect, recontextualize that, which has been decontextualized in the dislocations of modernity, can be seen across the field of contemporary spirituality. Recently, the rhetoric of integration and embodiment has replaced an earlier modernist emphasis on mystical experience and attainment. Integral teacher Terry Patten, for example, hosts a series called “Beyond Awakening,” which focuses on the embodiment of awakening experiences and the development of a fully engaged spirituality.8 Similarly, well-known spiritual teacher Adyashanti suggests that Western nonduality is witnessing a “second wave” of nondual approaches that are more integrated and embodied than early iterations.9 Another common rhetorical trope emerging alongside this shift from experience to embodiment is a call for collective as well as individual awakening. The theme of collective awakening has been particularly prominent in recent racial justice, diversity, and inclusion initiatives in American Buddhism (Gleig 2016).

From the Personal Body to the Social Body: Future Directions In conclusion, I would like to consider how to critically evaluate contemporary forms of psychologically informed mysticism. Rather than dismiss such approaches as psychological dilutions of traditional mysticism, as scholars such as Jeremy Carrette and Richard King (2004) have done, I suggest a more fruitful approach is to interrogate them on their own terms; put simply, just how embodied are they? As Hugh Urban (2003) notes, embodiment refers not only to the reality of the human flesh but 8 Terry Patten, “Beyond Awakening: The Future of Spiritual Practice,” Beyond Awakening. https://www.beyondawakeningseries.com, accessed February 6, 2017. 9 Adyashanti and Francis Bennett, “A Conversation About Spiritual Integration and Embodiment,” March 26, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/events/787380351310029/ ?active_tab=discussion, accessed February 6, 2016.

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also to the embodiedness of humans in their lived social, cultural, and political realities (280–82). Such an understanding of embodiment is a postmodern refutation of the modernist ahistorical universal subject abstracted from its specific social and cultural location. Hence in order to claim the status of an embodied rather than experiential mysticism, such systems must attend to the sociocultural and political dimensions as well as intrapsychic and interpersonal aspects of embodiment. While both Ali and Blackstone fare well in terms of individual and relational dimensions of embodiment, sociocultural and political aspects are much less developed in their work. Neither pays much attention to what might be thought of the social ego or the social unconscious and neither considers the sociocultural biases and ideological underpinnings of the field of depth psychology itself and the ways in which their spiritual approach might unconsciously reproduce certain cultural assumptions. Blackstone reports, for example, that for students who are part of marginalized groups, social, cultural, and economic conditions are inevitably addressed as part of their healing process. She explains: I think that pretty much anyone who belongs to a minority group has specific suffering and trauma - on a spectrum from lack of acceptance to persecution and abuse. So, healing always includes resolving these issues. Issues include the trauma of having to go to school in make-shift shoes or ragged clothes, being bullied because of sexual orientation, even the suppression and socially imposed limitations that are gender specific to both genders. Children are also traumatized by images they are subjected to visually or verbally such as Christ on the cross (who died for us!) or stories of “gas chambers” or “death trains” or “potato famines.” Feeling love for oneself is particularly challenging when one is part of a hated or denigrated group.10

Nonetheless, while such issues might arise in working with particular students, Blackstone does not explicitly address sociocultural themes in her texts. Similarly, although Diamond Approach students work painstakingly through the identifications resulting from family psychodynamics, they do not address the internalization of sociocultural identities and conditioning such as race and class. In fact, the neglect of sociocultural issues in the official Diamond Approach teaching has come under 10 Personal

correspondence with Judith Blackstone, September 2, 2017.

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increasing question from within the School itself. A small group of students in California and a small group in Texas independently started their own inquiry into unconscious racial conditioning and white privilege in individual students, the school, and the teachings. Another group—Divergent Inquiry Group (DIG)—was founded by current and former Ridhwan students, “to question fundamental aspects of their spiritual teaching, its culture, and the culture at large.” DIG is committed to inquiring into the ways in which unconscious sociocultural assumptions manifest in the Ridhwan School and limit the Diamond Approach teachings. There is some evidence that such grassroots student efforts have impacted the senior teachers and official policy in the school. One example was a workshop on “Race and Ridhwan: A Shadow on the Soul” offered on September 10, 2016, at the Ridhwan Center in Berkeley. It inquired into questions such as “What are the structures, conditioning, and history that we live out as result of racism and privilege in the US?” Another was the publication of an official diversity and inclusion statement by the “Obsidian Synod,” a decision-making group composed of senior teachers, which recognized that, “Souls are influenced not only by personal history but also by culture, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, age, physical ability and various other differences between human beings,” and declared the Ridhwan School was committed to “examining our blind spots in these areas.”11 Such preliminary efforts to address the social as well as personal body must be continued and expanded upon if Blackstone and Ali wish to claim the status of a truly embodied mysticism. One way forward is to increase dialogue with culturally and politically nuanced lineages within the broader field of depth psychology. Wilhelm Reich ([1933] 1980), for example, provides an early resource for looking at the relationship between psychic subjectivity and political ideologies, while more recently feminist psychoanalysts such as Jessica Benjamin (1988) have illuminated the interplay between intrapsychic and sociocultural forces. Similarly, the field of critical psychology has raised many important questions about unconscious ideological forces such as capitalism and neo-liberalism as shaping and operating within depth psychology itself (Carrette 2007).

11 “The

Diamond Approach: Monthly News & Information”, February 2017 email.

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Engagement with such sources can shed awareness on the social as well as personal unconscious and extend the project of awakening to include both cultural and psychological spiritual bypass.

References Almaas, A. H. 2001a. The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach. Boston and London: Shambhala. ———. 2001b. The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in SelfRealization. Boston and London: Shambhala. ———. 2004. The Inner Journey Home. Boston and London: Shambhala. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books. Blackstone, Judith. 2007. The Empathic Ground: Intersubjectivity and Nonduality in the Psychotherapeutic. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. “Meditation and the Cohesive Self.” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 3 (4): 447–64. ———. 2012. “Embodied Nonduality.” Undivided: The Online Journal of Nonduality and Psychotherapy. http://undividedjournal.com/?p=536, n.p. ———. 2013. “The Realization Process” (website). http://www.realizationcenter.com. Carrette, Jeremy. 2007. Religion and Critical Psychology: Religious Experience in the Knowledge Economy. London and New York: Routledge. Carrette, Jeremy, and Richard King. 2004. Selling Spirituality. London and New York: Routledge. Clarke, J. J., ed. 1995. Jung on the East. London: Routledge. De Certeau, Michel. 1992. “Mysticism.” Diacritics 22 (2): 11–25. Gleig, Ann. 2016. “The Dukkha of Racism: Racial Inclusion and Justice in American Convert Buddhism.” Patheos. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/ americanbuddhist/2016/01/the-dukkha-of-racism-racial-inclusion-and-justice-in-american-convert-buddhism.html. Homans, Peter. 1979. Jung in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kirschner, Suzanne. 2002. The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis: Individuation and Integration in Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Kornfield, Jack. 2000. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path. New York: Bantam Books. ———. 2011. Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are. Boston: Shambhala. Magid, Barry. 2008. Ending the Pursuit of Happiness. Boston: Wisdom Publications. Parsons, William B. 1999. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 2008. “Psychologia Perennis and the Academic Study of Mysticism.” In Mourning Religion, 97–123. Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press. Prendergast, John J., and G. Kenneth Bradford. 2007. Listening from the Heart of Silence. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Prendergast, John J., Peter Fenner, and Shelia Krystal. 2003. The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Reich, Willem. [1933] 1980. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. 3rd ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rieff, Philip. 1968. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York: Harper. Schwartz, Tony. 1995. What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America. New York: Bantam Books. Sharf, Robert. 1998. “Experience.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 94–116. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Urban, Hugh B. 2003. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Welwood, John. 2002. Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Personal and Spiritual Transformation. Boston and London: Shambhala. Welwood, John. 2003. “Double Vision: Duality and Nonduality in Human Experience.” In The Sacred Mirror, 138–63. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Young-Eisendrath, Polly, and Shoji Muramoto, eds. 2002. Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Mysticism in Translation: Psychological Advances, Cautionary Tales William B. Parsons

Speaking to the intersection between psychology and mysticism is more difficult than may initially appear. There is the thorny definitional problem with respect to the use of the term mysticism. Then, there are numerous methodological questions with regard to various psychological approaches: etic/emic debates, hermeneutical limits, cultural biases, etc. What has been and now is the existing relation between psychological models and mystical phenomena? What should it be? There are no obvious or easy answers here. The following, which consists of four linked sections, is but an attempt to offer a frame for such conversations. And, as the conversations progress, so too might the frame.

Framing Mysticism and Spirituality It is helpful to begin by clarifying the academic use of the term mysticism and its cousin, “spirituality” (Parsons 2011, 3–8). At first, the Greek mystikos, derived from the verb muo (to close), lacked any direct reference to the transcendent, referring only to the hidden or secret dimensions W. B. Parsons (*)  Department of Religion, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_8

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of ritualistic activities. As Louis Bouyer (1980) notes, the link between mysticism and the vision of the divine was introduced by the early Church Fathers, who used the term as an adjective (mystical theology; mystical contemplation) and defined it with respect to three (biblical, liturgical, spiritual) interrelated contexts. Importantly, God could be accessed only through the auspices of church and tradition, a total religious matrix. Mystical experience was not indicative of an innate generic religious consciousness but signified the “the experience of an invisible objective world: the world whose coming the Scriptures reveal to us in Jesus Christ, the world into which we enter, ontologically, through the liturgy” (52). To this day, theologians are engaged in the task of articulating “mystical theology,” an enterprise in which subjective religious “experience” is acknowledged as valuable but fully embedded in and mediated through scripture and church tradition. From this perspective, there is no “raw” or basic substratum of experience that exists “apart from,” “beneath,” or “before” its complicity in a total religious matrix. Indeed, bona fide Christian mystical experiences cannot be had without entry into the Church and its accouterments. Comparatively, one could speak of “mysticisms” (Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, etc.) as over against “mysticism.” The term “spirituality” followed a similar trajectory. Scholars are agreed that the locus classicus of the modern use of the term spirituality resides in the letters of St. Paul. Spiritus and spiritualis (being Latin translations of pneuma and pneumatikos) and, making its appearance in the fifth century, the noun spiritualitas, signified those individuals whose mind, will, and heart were ordered and led by the “spirit” (over against those egoistically attached to and led by the things of the world). Through the centuries, the term carried alternate meanings, at one point being used in a juridical sense to denote ecclesiastical offices and property. By the seventeenth century, it came to be used in the more familiar sense of denoting internal dispositions and states then finally settling, by the mid-twentieth century, to denote the aims and goals, practices and virtues, of believers defined relative to the totality of a churched, religious matrix (Principe 1983, 127–43). It is here that the multi-volume Paulist Press series “Classics of Western Spirituality” belong, as do the many degree programs found globally in “spirituality.” One could further observe that mystical theology and “classic spirituality” were inexorably allied. As Bernard McGinn (2004) observes, the two terms (mysticism and spirituality) are intertwined and more, that

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“if we take spirituality as a broad term signifying the whole range of beliefs and practices by which the Christian church strives to live out its commitment to the Spirit present in the Risen Christ (1 Cor. 6:14–20; 2 Cor. 3:17), then we can understand mysticism as the inner and hidden realization of spirituality through a transforming consciousness of God’s immediate presence. Mysticism, or more precisely, the mystical element within Christian spirituality, is the goal to which spiritual practices aim” (McGinn 2008, 44). Importantly, McGinn goes on to add that while the appropriation is personal, it is “not an individualistic one, because it is rooted in the life of the Christian community and the grace mediated through that community and its sacraments and rituals” (McGinn 2008, 44). Just as classic spirituality and mystical theology danced together through the centuries, so too it is the case that “modern” usages of both terms, also inexorably allied, emerged from their joint womb. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the notion of a mystical theology had migrated to France where it was first used as a substantive (la mystique). Michel de Certeau (1992) reminds us that this shift was linked to the emergence of several innovations: (1) a new understanding of the divine existing within human beings which was universal and hidden beneath the diverse religious traditions and doctrines; (2) the delineation of the topic as a singular “experience”; (3) a new discourse which framed contemplative figures as social types (“the mystics”); and (4) the allowance for such experiences to be investigated scientifically (11–25). In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, liberal Protestantism secured the widespread use of mysticism as a substantive and, as Leigh Schmidt (2003) notes, solidified its modern form, now understood as “ahistorical, poetic, essential, intuitive, and universal” (268). Similar historical and cultural forces colluded to produce a modern variant of spirituality. Liberal religious traditions (e.g., Transcendentalists, Unitarians, Quakers, Spiritualists, Vedantists, Theosophists), their values (e.g., individuality, solitude, inner silence and meditation, ethical reforms, creative self-expression, appreciation of religious variety), and their consummate figures (e.g., Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, James, Howard Thurman, Rufus Jones, Margaret Fuller, Sarah Farmer) produced a specifically American version of spirituality. By the dawn of the twentieth century, Walt Whitman was able to say: “Only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion come forth at all” (Schmidt 2005, 4) thereby signaling, as with the term “mysticism,” an

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unchurched, nontraditional, even anti-institutional orientation toward the divine. For our purposes, this new invention signaled a dramatic reversal, a paradigmatic example of which is found in the work of William James (1902). In his Varieties of Religious Experience, James treats mysticism as an individual “experience” which, seen as an innate potentiality of our subconscious mind, was available to all. Theology, philosophy, liturgy, ritual, and the various aspects of church organizations, all crucial for access to the presence of God for the Church Fathers, were but secondary phenomena derived from the primary experiential matrix (31–32). It is here, then, at a remove from churched mysticism, that the modern psychological study of mysticism enters the debate over translations of mysticism.

Framing the “Psychology and Religion” Movement James was but one of the major figures who dominated the initial, formative period of the psychology of religion. How are we to think of this emerging cadre of theorists and, indeed, the sweep of the field as a whole? One could, of course, trace back the relation between psychology and religion to the originative figures of various religions. Buddha’s four noble truths have a psychological ring to them, as is well illustrated by Huston Smith, who, in a television series, translated the noble truths as “symptom, diagnosis, prescription, treatment” (Smith 1958). Or, as has been noted by multiple psychologists, one could point to St. Augustine’s introspective ruminations in his classic spiritual autobiography The Confessions, where he spoke of his “divided will” and of the existence of a “subterranean shrine” (memoria) that acted like the “stomach” of the mind, containing sexual desires which manifested themselves in dreams (Augustine 1963). The point, then, is that modern psychology is not necessarily wholly “new.” The wisdom it contains draws in part from that found in the religious past. At the same time, there is also something new about modern psychologies, namely that what constitutes the nature of the religious imagination can be empirically investigated and theorized, the latter used fruitfully as a tool for hermeneutical investigation. It is this shift that historians point to when they trace the emergence of the earliest theories that now make up the “psychology and religion movement” to the late nineteenth century (Homans 1987, 66–74).

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While one could justify mapping the periods that make up the subsequent development of the dialogue between religion and psychology in alternate ways, a good enough way of thinking about the evolution of this movement is to divide it into three distinct periods: 1880–1944; 1945–1969; and 1970–present. Each period is marked by distinct originative figures, the creation of innovative theories, and related but different projects (Parsons 2016, 3–22; Jonte-Pace and Parsons 2001). The more familiar type of nomenclature refers to the relation between psychology and religion from the nineteenth century on with respect to the qualifying preposition “of.” The psychology “of” religion, then, assumes a specific psychological model or method (of various kinds), a series of cultural phenomena (“religion”) and a one-way relationship between the two: psychological models provide the lens through which one deciphers the meaning of religious ideation and practice (one aspect of the hermeneutical task). If one looks into one’s dark garage with a flashlight, then, depending on the shape of the lens (usually a circle, but imagine that it could also be a triangle or a square), one will see the contents of the garage etched out in the shape of your lens. In this analogy, the lens is the specific psychological model you are employing while the content of your garage is “religion.” Psychology sheds light on religion, but only in relation to the nature of the model (or “shape of the lens”) involved. What this usually means, at least for psychologists “of ” religion, is that the various elements of the human imagination, the expression of which is invariably shaped by culture, personal biography, and psycho-physiological determinants, will be present in every religious map of the inner world. In this sense, religion is akin to a cultural “movie,” in which the (dis)contents of one’s psyche and the cultural surround are “projected” onto the cultural “screen” in the disguised and distorted form known as “religion,” only to be retranslated and reinterpreted according to its proper source (the human imagination). The issue here is reductionism: the extent to which any model’s interpretation of mysticism is but a reflection of the parameters and limits of that model. Most of the originative theorists who were writing during the initial period of the relation between psychology and religion (1880–1944) are framed as having practiced the psychology of religion. This is certainly true of the most well known of them, namely James, Freud, and Jung. But there were many others, however buried they may be by the tides of history. A case in point: the famous photograph, taken in 1909 at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, of a group of significant figures

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of that time, including not only Freud, Jung, and James but G. Stanley Hall (of Clark University) and multiple others. Importantly, while the academic project involving psychology and religion has been referred to as the psychology of religion, one can tease out related, different, and multiple academic enterprises and projects during its long history. As far back as the initial originative period and even more clearly in its “second” (1945–1969) and “third” (1970–present) periods, one can spy other enterprises and projects animating the historical sweep of the field. For example, as paradigmatically represented in the work of Jung, Maslow, and the transpersonalists, psychological theories have come to “replace” religion. That is to say, many find their existential needs for meaning and wholeness met by certain psychological analyses of human suffering and their prescriptive solutions. In some cases, these psychologies explicitly articulate what they consider to be a “religious” or, better, “spiritual” dimension to the self. When this happens, we have an example of a psychology that acts “like” religion. Not so much psychology “of” religion but psychology “as” religion or, better, a psychospirituality. There are yet other projects that constitute the relation between psychology and religion. Historically, it is the case that there have been many instances of psychological models, performing their of religion task, getting a response from the religious tradition in question. In other words, what we have here are dialogical projects such as the psychology-theology dialogue, which has morphed into pastoral psychology or practical theology, and the psychology-comparativist dialogue. The dividing line is whether one thinks that the healing regimens of religion consist “only” of trajectories mapped “better” by psychological models, or whether, even granting that human cultural and developmental projections are invariably evoked and are manifested in such trajectories, there also exists a wisdom and inner terrain explored and cataloged in religious traditions that are as yet foreign to, and often misunderstood by, psychologists. Because the origins of the field are western, the first real response to psychology of religion came from representatives of Christianity (hence the psychology-theology dialogue). The Protestant pastor and lay analyst Oskar Pfister, one of Freud’s early dialogue partners, would so qualify, as would (in the “second” period) the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who wrote dozens of essays on the relation between theology and psychology and was a principal architect of pastoral psychology. In this dialogue, religious intellectuals and theologians, speaking for their religious

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traditions, engage and critique psychology, offering new avenues for intellectual discussion. This is also true of the psychology-comparativist dialogue, for example, with respect to Buddhism, where figures such as Heisaku Kosawa (Freud’s correspondent) and D. T. Suzuki (Fromm and Horney’s correspondent) were keen on integrating Buddhist conceptions of consciousness and healing techniques with psychological models (Parsons 2009). Moreover, as we will see, these “dialogical” projects reveal that the relation between psychology and religion ends up expanding its methodological scope, eventuating in a broad interdisciplinary conversation. For our purposes, this will extend to anthropology and sociology—disciplines that have engaged the value-neutral and universal claims of psychoanalysis, exposing its implicit cultural assumptions and status as an ethnopsychology, as well as those cultural disciplines that have uncovered, as part of the supposed “value-neutral” and “scientific” status of psychology, structural gender and racial inequities and, importantly, an implicit (and debatable) epistemological stance with respect to foundational concepts like the “self,” the “body,” and “reality.” This form of dialogue tends to favor the religious intellectual who has sympathies with religious forms of understanding self and cosmos. Contrary to the more reductive movie analogy we linked above to the psychology of religion, in which religion is “nothing but” the projected elements of the human imagination, dialogical projects are better framed with respect to an astronomical metaphor. Take as an example seeing a bright star on a clear night. Let us say that the star represents the light of the divine, whatever you may consider that to be. If you were a theologian, or a religious believer of any kind, you would insist that the light “is”: the evidence given to the physical eye is enough to confirm its reality. Theology might go even further to hypothesize about the nature of that star: how big it is, in what galaxy it is, how hot it is, etc. Psychologists participating in the various dialogical projects may or may not think the star exists, but they at least are willing to contribute to the religious task of deepening and clarifying the relation to the light by showing how it is refracted by the Earth’s atmosphere and by the perspective of where the observer is situated on the planet (that is to say on the purely human element involved in understanding the light). The job of those working in these projects is to try and understand that very human developmental and cultural “baggage” we carry along for the ride. One understood and clarified that the believer’s religion to the light is acknowledged and, to the extent possible, shorn of that baggage.

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Given this historical sweep of the relation between psychology and religion and its multiple projects, the field is better captured by, as we proposed earlier, the designation psychology and religion. The latter is inclusive (in acknowledging that dialogue and diversity have come to characterize the contested terrain that marks the psychological and religious) and neutral [for it understands that its many varying participants (e.g., scholars, practitioners, religious professionals)] situated in their diverse social settings (e.g., the university, the clinic, the seminary, the church/mosque/temple/monastery) champion different, and sometimes opposed, intellectual agendas. This broad designation, then, would encompass, as but two of its projects, the psychology of religion and psychospirituality, admitting that the dialogical projects and more inclusive social scientific approaches have also played, and continue to play, an important role. While the boundaries of the various projects are distinct enough to merit should separate designations, it is also the case that is in practice occasionally porous so that, like a Venn diagram, they encroach upon, even blur, each other’s boundaries.

Advances and Cautionary Tales Now that the stage has been set, we are in a better position to selectively assess theories and studies of mysticism within the various projects of the three periods. Since space prohibits any attempt to be comprehensive, our mining is necessarily limited and selective (although not arbitrarily so). The hope is to unearth portable lessons, which, once established, will provide resources for thinking through the larger set of issues and debates in the field. Experience and Process: Psychology of Approaches Contrary to James and many others, one could argue that one of psychology’s seminal contributions to the academic study of “mysticism” is to see it less in terms of a singular experience but as a therapeutic process. While the momentary insight gained through singular experience (James’ noesis) is of notable import, the idea of mysticism as process incorporates the latter as facilitating the cultivation of dispositions, capacities, and virtues—that is to say, of the religious life. This is in line with the “definitions” of mysticism found not simply in the traditions and theological reflection (e.g., the Buddhist four noble truths; McGinn’s (1991)

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valorization of Christian mysticism as a “process”) but also is evinced in the “dialogical” projects within the psychology and religion movement (to which we will speak shortly). Surely, this is the proper, larger meaning of “mysticism.” Once mysticism is rendered as process, the signature advance of the psychology of mysticism is that of the familiar Ricoeurian (1977) hermeneutics of suspicion. Put colloquially, and as noted in the previous section, any faith endeavor carries with it our developmental and cultural baggage. Even if one were to allow, as do the dialogical projects, the light of the divine, it is still the business of psychology to speak to the atmospheric distortions of that light. Psychological models, refined through numerous clinical data, can say something about the “what” of that baggage in ways that remain unarticulated, if not wholly ignored, by traditional forms of mysticism. This applies to issues found during the course of mystical process, significant mystical relationships, and mystically driven religious doctrines. While the examples are numerous, one can, for example, point to Jeffrey Rubin’s carefully crafted analysis of Louis Nordstrom, an American Zen master who had the insight of kensho but also suffered from unresolved developmental conflict—conflict that interfered with his work, his relationships, and even spurred an attempt at suicide (Brown 2009). The fact that awareness of such dynamics is better cataloged by psychology is affirmed by the meditation teacher and psychologist Mark Epstein (1995), who suggests that Buddhism has never articulated, nor does it have the resources to address, the depth of brokenness found in a concept like the object relations theorist Michael Balints’ “basic fault.” The Buddologist and psychotherapist Jack Engler (1986) concurs, adding that the psychological motivation behind some seeking “emptiness” or anatta (no-self) may well lie in the pervasive influence of archaic narcissistic structures. In such cases, doctrines like anatta are not in the service of liberation but of a “higher” form of repression, defensiveness, grandiosity, and fragmented self-esteem. One could also point to any number of cases in the “scandal” literature, notably Sudhir Kakar’s (1991) Kohutian analysis of the dynamics of the guru–disciple relationship, which exposes the role of excessive and blinding idealization (the psychological infrastructure of “belief”) in offering, on the one hand, a healing “developmental second chance” but can also, on the other hand, degenerate into sexual perversion and power abuse.

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The psychology of mysticism, then, is invaluable in deciphering the contribution of what James (1902) referred to as the “hither” side of the More. The danger is that it can and has fallen prey to complete reductionism. Historically, there are numerous instances of this. Perhaps most famously is Freud’s (1930) reduction of all things mystical (subsumed under the generic term “oceanic feeling”) to empirical, developmental considerations (in Freud’s case being the pre-oedipal). His colleague Franz Alexander (1931) went on to interpret stages in the meditative process as but levels of regression ranging from melancholia to the memory of the intrauterine state, the latter being the proper psychological referent of the term “nirvana.” Then, commenting on the intent of the mystic to seek The Real, there is this remark made by a contemporary “eminent analyst”: I am afraid that the Hindu striving toward Nirvana may well be related to the terrible failures and cruelties of this culture (as the appalling prevalence of abysmal poverty, the infantile death rate, the infamous castes system, with its ugly notion of the ‘untouchable,’ the dismal failure to control over population) and the dangers of escapism implicit in a too unworldly approach to life. The unhappy results are of a magnitude which cannot be overlooked; I am afraid that reality testing may well have fallen by the wayside in the striving toward ‘moksha.’ (Kakar 1982, 295–96)

In the classic reductive approach, there is no light, only atmospherics and projection, often understood (and easily dismissed) as pathology. In contrast, another strand within the psychology of mysticism has promoted what can be referred to as an adaptive approach. This is illustrated in Carol Zaleski’s (1987) refusal to side with either the religious or reductive psycho-physiological interpretation of near-death experiences in favor of a Jamesian adaptive, pragmatic perspective on the value of the religious imagination. For Zaleski, it is not so much the different perspectives on the origin of NDE that matters (one emphasizing materialistic reductionism, the other allowing for consciousness beyond materialism) so much as their effect on the life narrative of individuals (usually positive). This is again evident in Kenneth Wapnick’s (1980) analysis of St. Teresa. Utilizing the more “adaptive” theories of schizophrenia extant in the 1960s and the case history of a schizophrenic episode (that of Lara Jeffries), Wapnick frames Teresa as an example of a more “successful” and adaptive version of what can be called “churched”

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schizophrenia. Again, engaging Zen, Herbert Fingarette (1965), utilizing case histories run through ego psychology, concludes that the Zen concept of the “no-self” is equivalent to “losing” the “transference self.” Buddhism, in effect, is rewritten as a kind of “eastern psychoanalysis” complete with an “eastern” nomenclature. While this is undoubtedly a more favorable view of mysticism, one may ask: what has happened to the religious insistence (the “farther” side) of the More? Scholars of religion might begin to answer this question by pointing out that in many cases the psychological reconstruction and understanding of a specific mystical text or figure are not always accurate. That is to say, if one is to analyze a text as an instance of a “case history,” it behooves one to at least get the case right. Thus, for example, Franz Alexander’s (1931) pathologizing of Buddhism clearly drew upon suspect third-party sources and bad translations in his “armchair” analysis of nirvana (Parsons 2009, 179–210). Again, Wapnick’s (1980) summary of Teresa’s mystical process is more than questionable and obscures the nature and intent of both her “experiences” (not only does he focuses only on the episodic “union” of the fifth mansion, which is not as important for Teresa as the permanent “union” of the spiritual marriage or the “union” of wills, but he also neglects the entirety of visions, raptures, and locutions of Mansion 6) and her “process” (indeed for Teresa the goal is in fact “union” with God’s will, namely an active saintly altruism, mystical “experiences” being but facilitators of that aim). For the scholar of religion, one can only conclude that Wapnick has misread the “case” of Teresa. The question of “what happened to the text” can take a more convoluted, if not twisted, turn. Take, for example, the contemporary ambivalence concerning the introduction of “mindfulness” as part and parcel of a western culture seeking tension release. Adepts in the “traditions” may feel that meditative practices, once uprooted from their metaphysical and ethical matrix, can only lead to a misappropriation of their true aim and import. Complimentary to this would be a cultural approach, exemplified in Carrette and King’s Selling Spirituality (1994) that points to the incipient spiritual narcissism fermented when such practices are run through neoliberal capitalism. A paradigmatic, if earlier and Hindu version of this, can be found in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s missionary advocacy of Transcendental Meditation—an advocacy that sheared TM from its Upanishadic basis and presented it as commensurate with western culture and science. The gauntlet was taken up by Herbert Benson,

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Harvard medical school, and a host of others, leading to over a thousand empirical studies, summarized well by Donovan and Murphy (1997), who concluded that such practices named three psychological states, waking, dreaming, and deep dreamless sleep, while valorizing a fourth, the all-important “hypo-metabolic” waking state: a super alert, intellectually fecund, physically primed body–mind state that, as was predicted by TM practitioners, fit perfectly with the needs of corporations that sought to enhance the capacity for creative productivity in the pursuit of excellence and ever renewed growth. As any Indologist would know, this mimics the same psychology found in the Mandukya Upanishad, but with one significant difference. The fourth and deepest neti-neti “turiya” state has now been replaced with the hypo-metabolic waking state— which, without being too flippant, answers the question of what happens to an ancient mystical text when it is shipped from the Indus valley to twentieth-century American medical schools. There is yet a third approach one could take that of the transformational which, in contrast to the reductive and adaptive approaches, is open to what James (1902) called the “farther” side of the More. What we call a transformational approach would include what James called “wild facts” (i.e., anomalous phenomena and the Jamesian “white crow,” running counter or contradictory to the generally acknowledged nature and limits of reality), authorizing one to engage in a “radical empiricism” which valorizes, as a part of the hermeneutical task, personal mystical experiences (like James’ encounter with nitrous oxide, where he came to see multiple dimensional realities, all separated by what he called the “filmiest of screens”). For James (1902) no account of the universe in its totality could be had without taking such transformational elements into account (378–79). In other words, circumscribed data sets (and hence limited theoretical models), lack of existential familiarity with mystical experience, little if any engagement with mystical practices, and what can be shown to be misreads of mystical texts and influence of culture, argue for at least a methodological humility, a certain cultural self-reflection, a reticence to move from the particular to the universal, and an openness with respect to “white crows.” Culture and History: The Case of Psychospirituality This brings us to the case of the psychopsiritualities. On the face of it, such models may well meet much of the criteria for success just

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elaborated. For, as our preferential naming of such models suggests, do they not fit seamlessly into a sophisticated notion of the “transformational”? Let us take Jung as a paradigmatic (hence “portable”) example. Surely, in contrast to Freud and classical psychoanalysis, we have in Jung a much more theoretically open and sympathetic interpretation of mysticism. And yet even a cursory survey of the multiple criticisms that have been leveled at Jung from scholars, adepts, and “textologists” reveals many of the same problems. Thomas Clearly (Clarke 1994) speaks to this general point when, commenting on Jung’s interpretation of the Secret of the Golden Flower, he remarks that the text Jung used “was in fact a garbled translation of a truncated version of a corrupted recension of the original work” (170). The Buddologist and psychotherapist Luis Gomez (1995), in a trenchant analysis of Jung’s small essay “The Psychology of Eastern Mediation,” which is focused on a psychology of a relatively late Chinese Buddhist visualization sutra, and by taking apart piece by piece Jung’s numerous mistakes, concludes that his analysis brackets crucial and essential features of doctrine (not the least of which is the doctrine of karma), crucially ignoring its primary import as a visualization text. Is Jung’s analysis really about Buddhism, or is it simply a projection of his own psychology? It is this last point that needs to be explored more fully. Clarke (1994) goes on to say about Jung that: it is necessary to ask whether Eastern spiritual practices are being squeezed unnaturally to fit into his own model of psychological development. There may indeed be some broad analogies between, say, the discipline of kundalini and the path of individuation, but from this it cannot be inferred that they represent, at a fundamental level, the same process. (168)

He adds that efforts like this, in which theory contains, monitors, and organizes “the East,” have led multiple scholars to level the charges of “colonialism” and “orientalism,” the latter charge being reinforced by Jung’s unfortunate propensity to engage in stereotypical characterizations (e.g., “the mysterious Orient”; “the baffling mind of the East”; “the dreamlike world of India”; “the odorous East”; “the unfathomabless of India” [161]). One can tease out of Clarke’s account a few important cautionary tales. The first is purely cultural (and applies to psychologists of

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religion as well). The history of the psychology and religion movement, as framed in an earlier section, contains multiple studies in which the resources of anthropology and sociology are brought to bear on the supposed value-neutral and objective status of western psychology. In short, they see culture in, around, and through such models. Was Freud (1950), who “ontologized” Oedipus in Totem and Taboo, justified in universalizing a nuclear complex he found in himself and in his patients? Or is he better thought of, as anthropologists have intimated, as a psychologically gifted ethnographer of fin de siècle Viennese culture where, as a result of the industrial revolution, fathers were absent enough to exacerbate the jealousy and competitiveness engendered in their sons? In which case, Oedipus is a universal possibility but not a universal actuality, leaving room for other, perhaps more dominant complexes depending on the socio-historical surround. Again, one can question Erikson’s (1950) life cycle theory with respect to both the length and normativity of “adolescence” and the seemingly Christian virtues (love, hope, and faith) which adorn the successful navigation of Erikson’s stage appropriate existential conflicts (is it an accident that he was an Episcopalian?). So too have feminists and race theorists pointed to culturally coded, essentialized notions of gender, race, and the nature and value of the “individual” found in psychological models (Brickman 2003; Mitchell 1975). This brings us to the question: are we better off seeing western psychologies as ethno-psychologies? And, insofar as they hide the “ethno” by parading as value-neutral, empirical, and “scientific,” absolutely in need of such critical voices? The fact that matters of culture impact “translation” today is forcefully brought home by Kakar who is, not surprisingly, an Indian psychoanalyst (and dialogical theorist of the third period). Kakar is fully aware of the tendency of applied psychoanalysis to be marred by unarticulated value judgments and hidden developmental norms, rejecting psychoanalytic theorists who have analyzed cultures like Masson (1980), Roheim (1950), and Devereux (1969) on just such grounds. “Cultural judgments,” writes Kakar (1995), “about psychological maturity, the nature of reality, “positive” and “negative” resolutions of conflicts and complexes often appear in the garb of psychoanalytic universals” (281). Kakar insists that all attempts at applied psychoanalysis must be qualified by taking into account new information gleaned through specifically Indian case history material and relevant ethnographic observations. Attempts at psychoanalytic reductionism and the devaluation of nonwestern, emic

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modes of gaining knowledge aside from those based on rational calculation and empirical verification can only: lend credence to the position of an increasing number of third-world intellectuals who maintain that the western sciences of man, including psychoanalysis, are in fact culture-bound ethnosciences whose claim to universality is both based upon and is an aspect of the global political and economic domination by the West. (289)

But the cultural is not the only level that needs a cautionary tale. Moving to a linked critique from the perspective of the comparative study of mysticism, we can focus on the specific way in which ethnopsychospiritualities frame the farther side of the More. One can begin to explore this question by asking, in turning to Jung once again, how he came to formulate his psychology. In adding psycho-social sophistication to our earlier genealogy (in the first section), we can say that Jung’s theory is a deidealized and mourned cultural product of classical, traditional mysticism (see Parsons 2013, 142–56). How so? The methodological key behind this assertion lies in what Peter Homans (1989) dubs a Weberian “double ideal type”—one he refers to as “the tension between a common culture and analytic access” (122). Analytic access, by which is meant the kind of introspective activity found in depth psychology, is in “tension” with what Talcott Parsons (1964) refers to as a “common culture” for, sociologically speaking, analytic access always takes place at the margins of culture. The double ideal type thus presupposes an inclusive concept of “mourning,” one which is defined with respect to the psychological concept of disillusionment or deidealization, involves both the cognitive and affective dimensions of the psyche, and extends what is mourned to social and cultural “objects” like values, ideals, and symbols. In an ideal-typical sense, the process is envisioned as starting when the power of a religious worldview or common culture to command allegiance wanes and symbols “die” (disenchantment, as Weber would have it). What was previously idealized, and hence believed or given allegiance to, becomes deidealized. This loss leads to mourning, a regressive process that involves, to various degrees depending on the person, an introspective engagement with unconscious contents. This is so for the unconscious, previously worn “on the outside”—that is, projected onto, hence contained and monitored by, religious ideation and hence dealt with in an

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“experience-distant” manner—no longer finds nourishment on the collective level. Such loss loosens unconscious contents, including in some cases unchurched mystical experiences. The dramatic upsurge of the unconscious may result in breakdown, despair or cynicism. However, it also provides an opportunity for individuation, that is to say the process of growing out of the social womb and the integration of previously unmonitored unconscious contents—a process that can result in a response to the loss of religion in the form of the creation of new ideals and symbols. Among the latter, at least with respect to the originative psychologists, is the formation of psychospirituality. And, as evinced by the latter, such ideas usually display some form of connection with the religious past. While deidealized and in some sense rejected, religion is never wholly left behind but rather repudiated and assimilated in varying degrees and proportions. In a very real sense, religion “lives on” in psychological formulations. The birth of psychospirituality, then, is understood as in part dependent on secularization, the deidealization of religious ideation, and the subsequent theorization of unconscious processes previously expressed through and monitored by public religious narratives. In Jung’s case, it runs as follows: due to an inability to fully idealize and enter into the world of Protestantism, a fact he attributes to a father who, despite being a pastor, was himself ambivalent about Christian doctrines and communicated as much to his son (Roberts’ 1976 “vague father”), significant experiences [cataloged in his famous Red Book (2009) and in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961)] of disillusionment with religion (notably his “cathedral fantasy” and his reaction to his first communion 1961), and subsequent self-fragmentation and encounter with archetypical material, Jung literally created, as he himself admits, a “public” psychological theory out of his own “private” experiences. In his view, what had been historically expressed and contained in religious symbols and narratives now became rightly understood as located in the psychological processes of the collective unconscious and its archetypical modes of expression. So it is that, with respect to Jung’s works, one can draw a direct correlation between his personal “confrontation with the unconscious” (1961) and his theorizing about them (1972). This theory of mourning, in providing psycho-social depth to the textual and historical genealogies sketched in the first section, offers a portable lesson applicable to psychospiritualities in general. For example, it is significant that de Certeau (1992), in his observations concerning

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the appearance of a disembedded use of the term mysticism, makes note of what he calls a “significant debate,” namely that between the French professor, social activist, and novelist Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud, over the nature of the “oceanic feeling”—a debate played out in the opening chapter of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). De Certeau thinks it significant for it is here that he finds, in Rolland’s efforts to secure a “mystical psychoanalysis,” the trend toward a noninstitutional form of mysticism and spirituality. Rolland based the “oceanic feeling” on his own personal mysticism, avowing a perennialism “totally independent of all dogma, all credo, all Church organization, all Sacred Books…the true subterranean source of religious energy which, subsequently, has been collected, canalized, and dried up by the Churches” (Parsons 1999, 173–74). It was to this he attached a cultural agenda— the promotion of what he called a “mystical psychoanalysis” and a “universal science-religion.” Rolland’s “modern” understanding of mysticism fits hand-in-glove with that offered by Jung and James (as seen in the genealogy mapped in the first section). Jung (1938), when faced with religion, turned to Rudolph Otto, proclaiming that religion “is a careful and scrupulous observation of the ‘numinosum’… by the term ‘religion’ I do not mean a creed… Creeds are codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experience” (4–6). Of course for Jung the experience of the “numinosum” came to mean the emergence of strong archetypical material. So too R. M. Bucke (1993), Maslow (1976), and a good portion of the transpersonalists and neurocognitive takes on mysticism (e.g., D’Aquili and Newburg’s (2002) “absolute unitary being”; Jill Bolte Taylor’s (2009) “Step to the right”). One must entertain the notion that, far from being free of any socio-historical context, psychospiritualities are bound by often-unacknowledged cultural assumptions and limited by the nature of “mysticism” inscribed in their theories. Along these lines, it is crucial to note that psychospiritualities are apt to proclaim a mystical perennialism but that the “cores” they valorize are different. Only by virtue of a charity that goes well beyond critical thought can one equate Bucke’s cosmic consciousness, Jung’s Self archetype, Rolland’s “oceanic feeling,” Maslow’s “peak experience” and an AUB. Comparatively, this presents a problem, as is brought home forcefully in Jung’s (Meckel and Moore 1992) conversation with the Zen master Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, who thought Jung’s theory (with respect to “experience”) could not account for nondual states or (with respect

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to “process” issues) the eradication of all suffering. One can ask: did Jung (and, of course, other founders of psychospiritualities) take a private “mystical experience” or “developmental scheme” and universalize it as the perennial core in a “public” psychology? Simply because Jung thought that the insight of nonduality was impossible or that suffering was never exhausted does not mean that others did not breach those (impossible) barriers. Again, we have already seen what Clarke thought of Jung’s attempt to read “individuation” into Tantra. In the case of Bucke, “process” was extended to include sociopolitical and historical factors (the “development” of the human species). But his evolutionary scheme was both racist (Aryans progress faster to cosmic consciousness) and misogynist (cosmic consciousness is found “mostly” in males). To be clear, this is not to argue against the use of ethno-psychospiritualities or any other psychological model. It is, however, to argue against essentialism and unarticulated assumptions in favor of bona fide dialogue and multiple layers of cultural and “transformational” reflexivity. Of course this acknowledges that the outcome of the latter may well be an appreciation of unbridgeable differences between “ethno-psychospiritualities” and “mysticisms.”

Translation Reframed: Dialogical, Constructivist, Transformational Given the above considerations, the matter becomes how to best articulate a revised methodological proposal that can best guide the relation between psychology and mysticism. Put succinctly, the trajectory of our narrative leads us to advocate a dialogical, constructivist, transformational approach. Dialogue requires that multiple partners (e.g., textologists, philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and comparativists) sit at the table. Constructivism requires reflexive awareness of often assumed and unarticulated layers of construction not only in mystical texts, process, and figures but also in psychological models of all kinds. Transformational approach signals that psychologists are open to new data sets (wild facts), an advocacy of personal experimentation (i.e., James’ “radical empiricism”) and methodological humility (e.g., the admission of the limitations of theory). A case in point is recent “third-period” psychological studies of Buddhism. Many of these scholars, like Jack Engler, Mark Epstein, and

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Judy Blackstone, wear two hats (the insider Buddhist practitioner; the outsider clinician-scholar) and practice their own form of radical empiricism (here meditation; for James it was nitrous oxide). Yet, Blackstone (2007) explicitly takes on the Theravada tradition invoked by Engler and Epstein, both of whom she thinks represent what the Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche Tsultrim Gyamtso refers to as the Rangtong understanding of Self. In the Rangtong view, says Blackstone, the “eye” of the observing self cannot find a way to “turn around” and “know” itself. In the Rangtong view, all that one can “see” are fragments of emotions, sensations, thoughts, and volitional urges. This is the view, proclaims Blackstone, which is found in Mark Epstein’s (1995) proclamation of “thoughts without a Thinker” and in Engler’s (1986) Theravadan description of anatta. In the Shentong view, on the other hand, the “eye” can see itself. The Shentong view is expressed by the Tibetan notion of the “clear light” of consciousness: a “knowing” that is completely unimaginable and nonconceptual, luminous and blissful, self-knowing and self-aware, naturally shining forth as conceptual and emotional obstructions are dissolved. This is instructive for not only does it hold that what we understand by the term “mysticism” is comprised of a family of related but potentially different states (perhaps not only in degree but in kind), but also that differences are found not only between traditions but within them, and further: that such differences are making their way into the dialogue between psychology and the mystical element in the world’s religious traditions. Process issues run into similar limits and hurdles. Engler (1986), for example, in attempting to bridge western psychology and Buddhist developmental trajectories and aims, distinguished between conventional and contemplative lines of development, the former theorized through Kohut’s lens as aiming at growing a cohesive self and the latter, theorized through a Theravada Buddhist lens, aiming at the truth of anatta. The relation between the two developmental lines was thus the motto: “you have to have a self before you lose it.” This linear relation between the two of development was modified through the auspices of Jeff Rubin (1996) who, in attempting to account for guru neuroses and scandals, argued that the relation was not linear but complex and interactive. While this may seem copacetic to many, what remains unaddressed is that the Buddhist developmental scheme insists on life cycles (i.e., reincarnation) as part of “process.” Surely that is beyond the purview of any psychological model. At best, it could be treated as one element within a

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psychologically adaptive “anatta representation” (being a cultural variant of Rizzuto’s (1979) western “God-Representation”), the Winnicottian, transitional dimension of it being epistemologically neutral with respect to the veracity of rebirth (Parsons 2010). Again, some accomplishments within mystical process (e.g., “flow” experiences) might fit within the psychological purview, but what about a liberated aim such as the Tibetan Buddhist “rainbow body”? And what might psychologists make of the comparativist scholar Jeff Kripal’s (1996) conclusion that psychoanalysis may have understood the unconscious homoeroticism driving Ramakrishna’s visionary quest but, in the end, even psychoanalysis must be relativized with respect to a Tantric “developmental” progression: “Freud only got to the third chakra” (43). If nothing else, the mystical lays claim to the Jamesian “white crow,” suggesting that the quilt of the human personality has farther reaches than is commonly granted. James went on to opine that humans are mostly similar, but with important differences. But one wonders whether it is more accurate to say humans are vastly different, with just enough commonalities to enable discourse and empathy. This is also to suggest that “mysticism” is better understood not “in general” but case by case. This point is not unlike what Geertz (1973) once said of generic definitions of faith (e.g., Tillich’s generic notion of “ultimate concern”), namely that their insipid character renders them, comparatively speaking, prescriptively useless. In this sense, surely what James (1980) once said about mysticism still holds, namely that “we had better keep an open mind and collect facts sympathetically for a long time to come. We shall not understand these alterations of consciousness either in this generation or the next” (221).

References Alexander, Franz. 1931. “Buddhistic Training as Artificial Catatonia.” Psychoanalytic Review 18 (2): 129–41. Augustine, St. 1963. The Confessions. Translated by Rex Warner. New York: Mentor. Blackstone, Judith. 2007. The Empathic Ground. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bouyer, Louis. 1980. “Mysticism: An Essay on the History of the Word.” In Understanding Mysticism, edited by Richard Woods, 42–56. Garden City, NJ: Image Books.

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Brickman, Celia. 2003. Aboriginal Populations in the Mind. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, Christopher. 2009. “Enlightenment Therapy.” New York Times Magazine, April 23. Bucke, Richard Maurice. 1993. Cosmic Consciousness. New York: Citadel. Carrette, Jeremy, and Richard King. 1994. Selling Spirituality. New York: Routledge. Clarke, J. J. 1994. Jung and Eastern Thought. New York: Routledge. D’Aquili, Eugene, and Andrew Newberg. 2002. Why God Won’t Go Away. New York: Ballantine. de Certeau, Michel. 1992. “Mysticism.” Diacritics 22 (2): 11–25. Devereux, George. 1969. “Normal and Abnormal.” In Man and Culture, edited by Warner Muensterberger, 113–36. London: Rapp and Whiting. Donovan, Steven, and Michael Murphy. 1997. The Physiological and Psychological Effects of Meditation. Petaluma, CA: Institute for Noetic Sciences. Engler, Jack. 1986. “Therapeutic Aims in Psychotherapy and Buddhism.” In Transformations of Consciousness, edited by Ken Wilber, Jack Engler, and Dan Brown, 17–52. Boston: Shambhala. Epstein, Mark. 1995. Thoughts Without a Thinker. New York: Basic Books. Erikson, Erik. 1950. Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton. Fingarette, Herbert. 1965. The Self in Transformation. New York: Harper and Row. Freud, Sigmund. 1930. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, vol. 2, 57–146. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1950. Totem and Taboo. New York: W. W. Norton. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gomez, Luis. 1995. “Oriental Wisdom and the Cure of Souls: Jung and the Indian East.” In Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism, edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr., 197–250. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Homans, Peter. 1987. “The Psychology and Religion Movement.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade, vol. 12, 66–74. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1989. The Ability to Mourn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern Library. ———. 1980. “A Suggestion About Mysticism.” In Understanding Mysticism, 215–23. Garden City, NJ: Image Books. Jonte-Pace, Diane, and William B. Parsons, eds. 2001. Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain. New York: Routledge. Jung, Carl. 1938. Psychology and Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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———. 1961. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage. ———. 1972. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. The Red Book. New York: W. W. Norton. Kakar, Sudhir. 1982. “Reflections on Psychoanalysis, Indian Culture and Mysticism.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 20: 289–97. ———. 1991. “The Guru as Healer.” In The Analyst and the Mystic, 35–54. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. “Clinical Work and Cultural Imagination.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 64: 265–281. Kripal, Jeffrey J. 1996. Kali’s Child. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maslow, Abraham. 1976. Religion, Values, and Peak-Experiences. New York: Penguin. Masson, Jeffrey. 1980. The Oceanic Feeling. Dordrecht: Reidel. McGinn, Bernard. 1991. The Foundations of Mysticism. New York: Crossroad. ———. 2004. “The Letter and the Spirit: Spirituality as an Academic Discipline.” In Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality, edited by Elizabeth Dreyer and Mark Burrows, 25–41. Baltimore: John Hopkins. ———. 2008. “Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal.” Spiritus 8: 44–63. Meckel, Dan, and Robert Moore, eds. 1992. Self and Liberation, New York: Paulist Press. Mitchell, Juliet. 1975. Psycho-Analysis and Feminism. New York: Vintage. Parsons, Talcott. 1964. “The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems.” In Social Structure and Personality, 17–33. New York: Free Press. Parsons, William B. 1999. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. “Psychoanalysis Meets Buddhism: Development of a Dialogue.” In Changing the Scientific Study of Religion: Beyond Freud, edited by Jacob Belzen, 179–210. New York: Springer. ———. 2010. “Of Navels, Chariots and Winged Steeds.” In Disciplining Freud on Religion, edited by Greg Kaplan and William B. Parsons, 107–46. Landham, MD: Rowan Littlefield/Lexington. ———. 2011. “Teaching Mysticism: Frame and Content.” In Teaching Mysticism, edited by William B. Parsons, 3–8. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Freud and Augustine in Dialogue: Psychoanalysis, Mysticism, and the Culture of Modern Spirituality. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2016. “Psychology of Religion: An Overview.” In Religion: Social Religion, edited by William B. Parsons, 3–22. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan. Principe, Walter. 1983. “Toward Defining Spirituality.” Studies in Religion 12 (2): 127–43. Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Rizzuto, Ana-Maria. 1979. The Birth of the Living God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robert, Marthe. 1976. From Oedipus to Moses. Garden City, NY: Anchor books. Roheim, Geza. 1950. Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: Culture, Personality and the Unconscious. New York: International Universities Press. Rubin, Jeff. 1996. Psychotherapy and Buddhism. New York: Plenum Press. Schmidt, Leigh. 2003. “The Making of Modern Mysticism.” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71: 271–302. ———. 2005. Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. San Francisco: Harper. Smith, Huston. 1958. Buddhism—A Lecture. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oBJD8kvHoqY. Taylor, Jill Bolte. 2009. My Stroke of Insight. New York: Penguin. Wapnick, Ken. 1980. “Mysticism and Schizophrenia.” In Understanding Mysticism, 321–37. Garden City, NJ: Image Books. Zaleski, Carol. 1987. Otherworld Journeys. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Sigmund Freud and Jewish Mysticism: An Exploration Christine Downing

In trying to learn as much as I could from Freud’s engagement with mysticism, I found myself, in ways I had not anticipated, having to come to terms with my own complicated and ambivalent relationship to this theme, and thus to parts of myself that demanded acknowledgment. So this paper looks a bit different from the one I had set out to write. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) famously declares that he could discover no trace of “oceanic feeling,” the sense of being wholly at one with the world, in himself and furthermore that this mystical feeling did not fit his understanding of religion, which he saw as issuing from need, not fulfillment (64, 72). It would be easy to interpret this as signifying a radical dismissal of the reality and psychological importance of mysticism—a rejection of mysticism tout court. But this would be to underestimate Freud and to overlook his sustained thoughtful reflections on this topic. So I want to look more closely, first at what he goes on to say in the early pages of Civilization, then at what he has to say in the rest of the book, but also at what he writes elsewhere. Always, I believe, we need to read with C. Downing (*)  Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_9

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suspicion (especially when Freud sounds most assertive), as he himself taught us to do, in ways consonant with the approach of midrashic and kabbalistic commentary (though this is not a connection Freud himself makes). This will mean reading Freud against Freud, paying attention to little hints, little slips, and going beyond Freud in directions he suggests but does not himself pursue. Freud’s exploration was evoked by a letter from Romain Rolland in which Rolland had let Freud know of his full agreement with the arguments put forward against dogmatic and institutional religion in Future of An Illusion. A full nineteen months later, Freud writes Rolland that his letter “has left me no peace” (Parsons 1999, 174). Clearly, something had been stirred—something big enough to elicit not just a few paragraphs but a whole book. In Rolland’s letter, Freud (1930) tells us, he had said that for him the real source of religion is a “feeling of which he is never free, which he is inclined to call a sense of ‘eternity,’ a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic,’ a subjective fact, not an article of faith” (64). Rolland’s letter refers to a spontaneous religious sentiment, totally independent of all dogma and all hope in a personal survival, the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the “eternal” that has sustained him throughout his life, that has never failed him, and provides a continuously available source of vital renewal. He emphasizes that this “oceanic” feeling has nothing to do with personal yearnings, that it is imposed on him as a fact (Parsons 1999, 36). Although Rolland has been careful not to mention any ideational conclusions and has not mentioned unity, this seems a bit disingenuous, for he seems actually to have come to more noetic assumptions than acknowledged in his letter. There is evidence that Rolland’s early mystical experiences were brief, staggering, fleeting, and illuminating: “Suddenly everything took on meaning, everything was explained” (Parsons 1999, 103). His present sense of being in persistent immediate communion with something eternal is thus a deliberately sought achievement, associated with a conviction that one emerges from unitive experience with a new impression of the true nature of the self and the universe (103). So perhaps Freud (1930) is on to something when, having confided that he has no direct experience of this feeling, he says he can therefore only concentrate on its “ideological component” (72). He seems to have intuited the almost irresistible move from experience to cognitive

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elaboration. In any case that is what he is disputing: not that such feelings exist but the interpretive conclusions and the solace that may be drawn from them. Although at this point Freud questions its primacy, he goes on to give us a persuasive description of the psychological genesis of this feeling (like Jung in Answer to Job, Freud carefully avoids any ontological or metapsychological speculation). He reminds us that psychoanalysis has taught us that our normal sense of an autonomous “I” clearly set off from everything else is a delusion, that actually the “I” extends inward with no clear boundary into the unconscious. Although most of the time the “I” seems to be clearly delineated, at moments of intense erotic passion, the borderline between self and object may become so blurred that we feel that “I” and “you” are one, making possible an evanescent experience of a return to a time when there was as yet no “I” or “you.” As Freud (1930) writes: Our present ego-feeling is therefore only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive – indeed all-embracing – feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or lesser degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe – the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the ‘oceanic’ feeling. (68)

Mysticism, Narcissism, and the Death Drive Freud continues in Civilization to write of the newborn child’s painful discovery of its separation from its mother, of its new awareness of self and other, and goes on to suggest that the pain associated with this separation may issue in an attempted regressive detachment from the external world, in the illusion of an autonomous “I.” It is important to realize how different Freud’s understanding of narcissism is from our contemporary pejorative and pathologizing associations with the term—as he sought to make clear in a letter he wrote to Rolland shortly after the publication of the book (Parsons 1999, 176). Narcissism is simply one of the two directions in which psychic energy flows: backward and forward, inward and outward, and archaeologically and teleologically.

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Narcissism is associated with that backward and inward flow. He relates narcissism to the liminal moment between “before” and “after.” It arises in response to the separation between what is not yet an “I,” and not yet an object. Consciousness begins with the experience of separation and loss. Since the domain explored by psychoanalysis is psychical experience, anything earlier lies outside, and exists only in memory, in fantasy, only for the imagination—only afterward. Then, as self and other are co-created, there arise the twin possibilities of self-love and other-love. Narcissism thus represents an earlier, more original stage than Oedipal love—love directed toward others. It arises out of a longing to deny loss, dependency, neediness, and out of a longing to claim selfsufficiency. It represents the fantasy that separation is not the ultimate truth, that to begin with we were whole in ourselves and at one with the world. There is always nostalgia for that imaginal “before.” For Freud, narcissism is in a sense based on an illusion; we are in a world with others, we are not self-sufficient, and we are not the world. But it is also true that the narcissistic longings never die. For we all long to return to that earlier fantasized world where self and other were one; we all long to believe that separation is not the ultimate truth (Freud 1914, 100). Freud wrote his 1914 essay on narcissism in response to Lou AndreasSalome’s urging. When he sent her the finished essay, she wrote him back about her somewhat different understanding of narcissism, an understanding grounded in a conviction that the separation never fully occurs; we remain embedded in our original narcissism. We are still affiliated at the roots even when already on the way to self/other discrimination. “There is a kind of narcissism that is an experience of being wholly at one with the world, not just absorbed in oneself” (Pfeiffer 1972, 23). For Salome, narcissism is the persistent accompaniment of all our deeper experiences, always present, yet still far beyond any possibility of making its way from the unconscious into consciousness. Note the difference in emphasis: For Freud, this original narcissism persists primarily as longing; for Salome as subliminal present experience. Years later, when Freud sends Salome a copy of Civilization, she writes him: My attitude to ‘religious’ questions remains different from yours. I have often said to myself that when there is complete harmony in someone’s attitude to life there is no need for the oceanic feeling. When this harmony no longer exists, then those ‘feelings’ announce themselves: not only as

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‘wishes’ which one imagines to have been realized simply and naively, but also as a kind of dim memory of things having been different once upon a time. (Pfeiffer 1972, 183)

Freud responds, “I am delighted to observe that nothing has changed between us. I strike up a – mostly very simple – melody; you supply the higher octaves for it; I separate the one from the other, and you blend what has been separated into a higher unity” (Pfeiffer 1972, 185). Thus, it seems that for Salome being at one with the world is a given, for Rolland an achievement or discovery, and for Freud an illusion. Freud explores mysticism’s relation to orgasmic fulfillment—to the narcissistic temptation to withdraw libido from the outer world and thus to recover that sense of being whole in ourselves and at one with the world that we fantasize we experienced “at the beginning.” He makes clear that he recognizes this longing for oneness, for wholeness and consolation, as representing one of the two deepest forces at work in the human soul—and perhaps ultimately the deeper one. Freud emphasizes the connection of our longings for peace, harmony, resolution, and completion to what he calls the “death drive.” Obviously, the death drive is not “bad.” It is for Freud one of the two primary drives at work in the human soul, the other being Eros. In Civilization, much of his discussion of this drive focuses on how, when the longing for harmony is frustrated, it turns into aggression against whatever intervenes between ourselves and a longed-for peace. So the emphasis falls on the death drive’s destructive aspects, on the power of our wishes to be free of our inescapable involvement with others, and the consequent restriction on the satisfaction of our own impulses that those connections entail. So, yes, our relation to the death drive is profoundly ambivalent. It is creative and destructive. We long for the harmony it promises and we fear the merging, the loss of self, it threatens. This fear, as we will see, may be stronger in Freud than he realizes and may lead him to overemphasize the inaccessibility of that “before” and the illusory quality of the consolation mysticism may provide. In Freud’s earlier exploration of this drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he recalls a game he had observed his grandson playing —throwing a ball out of reach and then retrieving it. “Mother is gone— and then I bring her back.” The separation is acknowledged—and symbolically overcome (15). Mysticism, too, acknowledges the separation and symbolically overcomes it.

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Mysticism and the Mother Goddesses Since Freud associates mysticism with the longing to overcome the loss of our early symbiotic relation to our mother, it is not surprising that he will see it as connected to mother-focused, goddess-centered religions. Although most of his extended discussions of religion focus on the father god of his own Jewish heritage, he always mentions his awareness that the worship of the great mother goddesses came first (Freud 1913b, 149; 1939, 23). When early on in Civilization, Freud questions the primacy of the longing to erase the separation from mother he associated with mysticism, he seems temporarily to have conveniently forgotten how in the mid-1920s he had come to recognize the all-important role played in the psychology of both males and females by the “pre-Oedipal” mother, the mother of earliest infancy (Freud’s reluctance to fully accept this is signaled by his choice of language, which suggests that for him the Oedipal phase, the phase of attachment love, is somehow still the “real” thing). He explicitly likens the discovery of this earliest childhood period to Bachofen’s discovery of the Minoan-Mycenaean period in Greek religious history when goddesses were more important than gods (Freud 1931, 226). Freud (1931) speaks of the first mother attachment as lost, “connected to some specially inexorable repression” (226). He finds this period elusive, dim, and difficult to resuscitate, “perhaps because I’m a male analyst and don’t often get this transference” (or perhaps he resists it when it appears?). Because the boy’s relation to the pre-Oedipal Mother had been screened from view by the Oedipal love directed at her first surrogate, the actual mother, the distinction initially became evident to Freud in relation to female psychology. But he sees the revival of the relation to this earliest mother as more frightening for males. She evokes the realization of their utter dependence on her for their very being— their vulnerability, contingency, and mortality (Freud 1931, 226). Indeed, it is striking how regularly Freud, perhaps unconsciously, associates the mother with death. Both of the dreams about his mother recorded in Interpretation of Dreams bring this association into view (1900a, 294; 1900b, 553). He ends his essay on “The Theme of the Three Caskets” by speaking of: …the three forms taken on by the figure of the mother as life proceeds: the mother herself, the beloved who is chosen after her pattern, and finally

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the Mother Earth who receives him again. But it is in vain that the old man yearns after the love of woman as he once had it from his mother, the third of the Fates, alone, the silent goddess of death will take him into her arms. (1913a, 301)

Freud was clearly more at ease in exploring the ambivalence inherent in our relationship to father than to mother. His father’s death when he was forty somehow forced him to recognize how much he had resented and been embarrassed by a father he had imagined he had loved unreservedly. On the other hand, Freud often refers to his sense of the lifelong impact of having been his mother’s favorite and, more generally, of the unambivalent unconditional love that mothers have for their children. Indeed, this fantasy appears, unexpectedly, almost intrusively, in a passage in Civilization where, while elaborating on the possessiveness and aggression present in all affectionate and living relations among humans, Freud (1930) adds “with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child” (113). Unable to imagine her ambivalence, he cannot access his toward her. This is, I think, Freud’s most important illusion. There is a block beyond which, “we” (but he may mean “I”) cannot penetrate. In interpreting our dreams, we come to a place beyond which we cannot go, a place he calls the navel of the dream—a revealing metaphor (Freud 1900b, 525). The navel, after all, signifies our once-upon-a-time connection to the mother and marks our enduring separation from her. The block seems to lie behind his sense of personal disconnection from the oceanic feeling that he describes so well. Much earlier Freud (1901) writes, “To my regret I must confess that I am one of those unworthy people in whose presence spirits suspend their activity and the supernatural vanishes away” (260). Something similar appears in his essay on Unheimlichkeit, the uncanny–“that class of the terrifying which leads us back to something long known to us,” once very familiar, once heimlich, our mother. But though once familiar, it is now strange, unknown, and unconscious. Freud (1919) writes: The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place. It is long since he has experienced or heard anything which has given him an uncanny impression, and he will be obliged to translate [transfer] himself into that state of feeling, and to awaken in himself the possibility of it before he can begin. (217)

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I may be stretching but I cannot help but sense genuine regret here and not just dismissal—Freud may even be expressing envy of those who have more ready access to this feeling. Despite his enormous efforts at self-analysis, confrontation with this archaic sphere seems to be too threatening for Freud. The longing is real; however, the belief that it can be overcome is a consoling illusion, representing a wish for consolation he can’t provide us (or himself). In reading of Freud’s resistance, I was forced to recognize my own. I was forced to see that it is not that such experiences are inaccessible to everyone, but that they have in large measure been so for me. I have been held back. Indeed, I have held myself back. Both are true. For me. For Freud.

Mysticism and the Father God In Civilization, Freud makes an amazing leap. After writing about how when what the child most craves, its mother’s breast, is unavailable, it can “be summoned back only by a cry for help,” Freud (1930, 67), not pausing to explain the redirection, says that the feeling of helplessness leads to a turn to father, although clearly the child’s cry was directed to mother (72). In a later essay, where once again he is supposedly writing about all of us, but perhaps more particularly about himself, Freud (1937b) writes: Up until your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby and brought you grave disillusionment. Your mother left you for some time, and even after her reappearance she was never again devoted to you exclusively. Your feelings toward your mother became ambivalent, your father gained a new importance for you. (261)

Fathers arrive later in an infant’s life. We were never one with them. They are—and will remain—‘other.’ Freud is persuaded that religion arises out of need, not fulfillment. The oceanic feeling of oneness with totality is an experience of fulfillment, not of longing for mother but of experienced reunion with her. But that is an illusion. We cannot really return, and because she is irretrievably lost, we turn to father. “To me the derivation of religious needs from the helplessness of the child and a longing for its father seems irrefutable” (Freud 1930, 72).

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Despite his acknowledgment of the priority of goddess worship, Freud always quickly turns to father-centered religion. In Totem and Taboo, he presents religion as emerging not from what mother gives but from what father prevents, forbids, or withholds. Religion begins with how the resentment sons direct against the primal human father—who forcibly exacts obedience from them—leads them to band together to murder him. Afterward, they discover the love and dependence that resentment had hidden. They come to recognize their ongoing need for the kind of order and the limitations the father had imposed, for a symbolic father, a father god (Freud 1913b, 143). Thus despite Freud’s professed atheism, Judaism’s emphasis on a father god who is both protective and demanding is for him the epitome of religion—a religion based on communal relationship, not union. For Freud, the relationship to God the Father is very much a relationship to the god of the fathers, the god of his father. Among Freud’s fondest childhood memories are those of sitting on his father’s lap, as they together turned the pages of the Phillipson Bible. He knows that the grandfather after whom he was named was a Hasidic rabbi, and that his father, though in many ways a very secularized Jew, grew up in a Hasidic milieu. Freud (1925) once wrote, “My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learned the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest” (8). Recall the power of Freud’s own lifelong identifications with Jacob, with Joseph, and especially with Moses.

Jewish Mysticism In an early letter to Jung in which Freud explores the complex numerology associated with his conviction that he would die between the ages of sixty-one and sixty-two, he relates this to “the specifically Jewish nature of my mysticism” (McGuire 1974, 139). This encourages Bakan (1958) to investigate analogies between Freud’s hermeneutics and those of the Jewish midrashic and kabbalistic traditions—some of which Freud himself recognized, others probably not. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900b) writes, “We have treated as Holy Writ what previous writers have regarded as an arbitrary improvisation” (514). Much like the midrashic rabbis, he breaks up the dream (as they broke up the received text) and treats each detail separately, giving close attention to every element as having profound inner meaning.

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Like the rabbis, he realizes that interpretation is an ongoing process, that we never reach a definitive meaning. And like the kabbalists, he distinguishes between manifest and latent, literal and symbolic readings, and translates what seem to be events in the outer world into revelations about our inner worlds. In the Zohar, the stories of the Torah are only her outer garments. The Lech lecha, the “Go forth” addressed to Abraham in Genesis 12 and 22, means “Go into yourself” (Bakan 1958, 247). I want to take Freud’s reference to “the Jewish nature of my mysticism” in a different direction, to suggest that by reading Freud “beyond Freud” we can see him as leading us toward a different mysticism than the unitive one from which he finds himself estranged. Perhaps his “wound,” his limitation, his finding himself at a limit, at an impenetrable barrier, can be seen as what Ellenberger (1970) calls a “creative illness” (449)—something that leads Freud to see, or almost see, a different mysticism, a specifically Jewish mysticism, a mysticism of exile. For Freud’s very Jewish imagination, we always find ourselves already cast out of an Eden whose entrance is guarded by the cherubims and their sword. There is no possibility of return. Moses is prevented from entering the Promised Land, though he has great difficulty in accepting that God would withhold this reward from him. And at the end of the narrative part of the Bible, the Hebrews are sent into exile. From this perspective, to be human is to be in exile, nomadic, and always underway. In suggesting that there is something distinctive about Jewish mysticism, I am following the lead of Gershom Scholem ([1946] 1995) and his insistence that there is no such thing as mysticism in the abstract, only the mysticisms of particular religious traditions. What is particular to Jewish mysticism is that it proceeds from an acceptance of the destruction of the dream harmony. It does not seek to restore original wholeness, but rather to bridge the gap between human and divine by creating a relationship, an erotic connection, not fusion. Indeed, Scholem claims, there is no room for Jewish mysticism as long as the abyss between ourselves and God has not become a fact of inner consciousness. The immediate consciousness of the interrelation and interdependence of things, their essential unity, which precedes duality and knows nothing of it, is alien to the spirit of Jewish mysticism. Jewish mystics endeavor to be in relation without being absorbed, to maintain their separate personalities. Even in the ecstatic frame of mind, the Jewish mystic almost invariably, according to Scholem, retains a sense of the distance between the creator

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and the creature. The focus falls on the experience of presence, an experience that creates both distance and relationship. Awareness of God’s presence leads to an enhanced recognition of otherness, not its reduction. What is most important is devekutha, being in intimate communion with God, not any form of ecstasy that seeks the extinction of self or denial of divine–human separation (Scholem [1946] 1995, 7). Moshe Idel, a more contemporary student of Jewish mysticism, disputes Scholem’s claim that there was never any unitive mysticism in Judaism. He notes that because Kabbalah was primarily presented as reflection on texts and not as autobiographical accounts of personal experience, it is difficult to gain a psychological understanding of Jewish mysticism (Idel 1988, 24, 27). Idel may well be right, but my concern is to focus on those distinctive aspects of Jewish mysticism that Scholem brings into view. The Jewish mysticism most pertinent to my exploration is not Kabbalah but Hasidism, a mysticism to which I was first introduced by Martin Buber. I have often spoken of how my understanding of Freud is shaped by my having come to him from Jung and how I therefore read him in a way that emphasizes his reliance on myth and metaphor. But it is probably equally important that I came to him by way of Buber and thus was prepared to embrace how much more attuned Freud is than Jung to the essential role in our lives of our relationships with others. Hasidism arose as an attempt to strip Kabbalah of its apocalyptic elements in the aftermath of the upheavals associated with the messianic pretensions of Sabbatai Z’vi and Jacob Frank. Those upheavals made it painfully evident that, as Scholem warns, one never knows what will become of the vital ecstatic forces that mysticism may release (Scholem [1946] 1995, 329). Scholem shows that the danger that Freud intuited exists at a personal level can be actualized in the political realm as well (as it was of course again during the Hitler years). Hasidic mysticism focuses not on cosmic renewal but on an inner experience of renewal. It is a religion of the every day, esoteric not exoteric, an in-this-world mysticism, which is concerned with how being in relation with God informs how we act in the world with our neighbors, with actual particular others. It is a mysticism of the “I” and the “You,” the caller and the called, self and other. As Buber put it, it is a response to the experience of God’s presence, of his “You” spoken to me, a “You” that is already always there that awakens my “I.” Only an “I” can in response say “You.” I become ever more fully “I” as I say “You.”

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This mysticism recognizes the mysterious otherness of the other and honors the “between” that both marks the distance between us and the relation that bridges it (Buber 1972, 100).

Mysticism and Eros Hasidic mysticism is, of course, never addressed in Freud’s Civilization, and although his father grew up in a world suffused with its teachings, I doubt that Freud knew very much about it. Yet I believe that in a subliminal way its perspectives are present in Freud’s book, particularly in the profound things he has to say about Eros, the force at work in us that directs us to the unknown, the future, and preeminently to others. To others as other. Not fusion but relationship. Freud puts a significant effort into distinguishing Eros from narcissism (and thus from unitive mysticism) and suggests how the impossibility of returning to the original lost oneness with our mother can lead us toward relationship with others. He sees how the recognition of the inaccessibility of that once-upon-a-time that exists only in the imagination can propel us forward toward sublimation, toward the world, and toward others. Eros leads us first into connection with our actual mother, a surrogate for the lost archaic mother, and then, lifelong, to a series of other relationships. Narcissism, the reflexive turning back to self, is for Freud a kind of death, as Eros, the turning toward actual others, is an affirmation of life. Eros is an active, forward-moving energy, that directs us outward, toward fellowship with particular others, to increasingly more inclusive groups. It is the power that binds human groups—families, tribes, and nations—together (Freud 1930, 141). Eros is a tension-increasing dynamic that issues in its own kind of pleasure, beyond the tension-reducing pleasure associated with the death drive (Freud 1920, 55). Eros inspires relationships that accept, indeed celebrate, difference. In a later letter to Rolland, Freud wrote, “I have rarely experienced that mysterious attraction of one human being for another as vividly as I have with you; it is somehow bound up, perhaps, with the awareness of our being so different” (Parsons 1999, 178). Mysticism based on Eros accepts finitude as somehow enhancing life. I think here of how in Freud’s (1916) much earlier essay on transience, he writes of how the fleetingness of life makes it all the more to be cherished—how our mortality adds depth, resonance, and seriousness to life (307).

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Eros is, I submit, the other face of mysticism. But not its only face; it is never the only mysticism …

Eros and Death: Twin Brothers Eros mysticism is always implicitly in tension with unitive mysticism, the mysticism Freud associated with the mother goddesses. This was well recognized within Judaism. Even the prophets had to admit to the never wholly suppressed attraction of the Baals and the Asteroths. The Book of Exodus makes clear that the scene of the revelation of God’s presence and the making of the golden calf belong together. The two are in a sense synchronous; the people accept God’s covenant and simultaneously reject it. The longing for something consoling is a necessary complement to the recognition that we are always facing the radically unknown, the new, the future, and the always mysterious other. As noted, in Civilization, Freud (1930) makes clear that the longing for oneness, for wholeness and harmony, represents one of the two deepest forces at work in the human soul—and perhaps ultimately the deeper one. Freud’s mother was still alive during the time he was writing Civilization. After her death, late in 1930, when Freud himself was already 74, he wrote Ferenczi: It has had a strange effect on me – no pain, no mourning, which can probably be explained by the secondary circumstances, the advanced age, the sympathy with her helplessness at the end. But at the same time a feeling of liberation, of being set free, that I also think I understand. I was not allowed to die as long as she was alive and now I may. Somehow the values of life have been markedly changed in the deeper layers. (Jones 1957, 152)

Freud’s second daughter, Sophie, died during the influenza epidemic that swept the world shortly after the end of the First World War. Because he knew what it was to suffer the death of one’s child, he had not been willing to impose such suffering on his mother, despite the unremitting pain associated with the cancer of his jaw that had first been diagnosed in 1923. So he had fought heroically, and now no longer needed to. Now he was free to yield. Something at the deeper layers had indeed been changed. He seems now to have come to understand differently his earlier phrase about death as being a coming home to mother. This last period of his life is resonant with the theme of Nachtraglichkeit, the delayed discovery of

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meaning in ancient long-forgotten events. As he wrote Salome, “This issue of reawakened memories…has pursued me throughout the whole of my life” (Pfeiffer 1972, 205). The major writing project of Freud’s last years, Moses and Monotheism, centers on the theme of “the return of the repressed.” Consciously, he is referring to the repression of the memory of the murder of the original Moses that is the strange thesis of the book. But perhaps more personal repressions are now being overcome as well. In 1936, Freud writes a letter to Rolland on the occasion of the latter’s 70th birthday in which he confides how the memory of his one and only trip to Greece is insistently recurring to his mind. He writes of how actually being in Greece seemed “too good to be true,” and that a part of him wanted to disavow it. He had not allowed himself the possibility of believing he might ever find himself in Athens. It was an unexpected fulfillment, as though what had been repressed was not something fearful or dangerous, but rather the possibility of fulfillment, the possibility of consolation (Freud 1936, 242). Somehow, his mother’s death had freed him of the need to barricade himself against unitive mysticism. He is now open to fulfillments and consolations that had seemed unavailable earlier. In his posthumously published essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud (1937a) writes that overcoming the repudiation of femininity is the hardest task in analysis, for both men and women. He writes of what an enormous challenge it is to overcome our fear of passivity and vulnerability, loss of autonomy, and death (252). He is writing in general terms but once again perhaps especially about himself. This is a challenge that in these last years, he may have met. My prayer might be: “May we all. May I.” It is clear that mysticism continued to intrigue him. His very last written words, scribbled a few weeks before his death, were: “Mysticism—the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the I” (Freud 1941, 300).

References Bakan, David. 1958. Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition. Princeton: Van Nostrand. Buber, Martin. 1972. On Judaism. New York: Schocken. Ellenberger, Henri F. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1900a. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, edited by James Strachey, 57–146. London: Hogarth Press.

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———. 1900b. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 5: 339–617. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1901. “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 6: 1–289. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1913a. “The Theme of the Three Caskets.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 12: 289. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1913b. “Totem and Taboo.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 13: 1–163. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1914. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 14: 67–103. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1916. “On Transience.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 14: 303–7. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1919.  “The ‘Uncanny.’” In  The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 17: 217–51. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1920. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 18: 1–63. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1925. “An Autobiographical Study.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 22: 7–74. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1930. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 2: 57–146. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1931. “Female Sexuality.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 21: 221–45. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1936. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 22: 239–49. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1937a. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 23: 209–53. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1937b. “Constructions in Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 23: 255–69. London: Hogarth Press.

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———. 1939. “Moses and Monotheism.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 23: 1–137. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1941. “Findings, Ideas, Problems.” In  The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 23: 299–300. London: Hogarth Press. Idel, Moshe. 1988. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jones, Ernest. 1957. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3. New York: Basic Books. McGuire, William, ed. 1974. The Freud/Jung Letters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parsons, William P. 1999. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pfeiffer, Ernst. 1972. Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome Letters. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Scholem, Gershom. [1946] 1995. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books.

CHAPTER 10

Jung and Mysticism Lionel Corbett

Was Jung a Mystic? Jung did not want to be viewed as a mystic. He wanted to be seen as an empirical scientist or a phenomenologist of the psyche. In the minds of Jung’s critics, such as the Freudian tradition, to refer to a body of work as mystical is to cast doubt on its validity, because mystical experience is impossible to replicate or study objectively. Such experience cannot be falsified in the usual scientific sense, and it cannot be quantified. Therefore, for the skeptic, to call Jung a mystic is to devalue his work, and this is especially true for those gripped by the mythology of scientism.1 At the same time, for many of Jung’s admirers, rather than being a term of derision, authentic mystical experience is actually a supreme attainment and an experience of the deepest ground of reality. It is true that Jung was interested in many topics long regarded as at least esoteric, if not mystical, and his interest in the direct experience of the numinosum surely qualifies him as an explorer of realms of reality 1 By

“scientism,” I mean the notion that empirical science is the most reliable worldview, or that the scientific method is the only way to arrive at truth.

L. Corbett (*)  Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_10

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usually confined to the mystics. Furthermore, mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Jacob Boehme had an important influence on Jung (Dourley 2014). Classical psychoanalysts typically understand mysticism reductively as the experience of intrapsychic processes such as a repeat of the earliest infant–mother fusion. In contrast, Jung thinks of a mystic as one who has had “a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious” (Jung 1976, ¶218). For him, “[m]ystical experience is experience of archetypes” (¶218), and all religious experience originates from this level (Jung 1969, ¶2–10). However, there are many forms of mysticism, including nature mysticism, ecstatic mysticism, theistic and atheistic mysticism, quietist mysticism, and mysticisms of contemplation, action, and non-action (Underhill 1961). Whether all of these can be considered experiences of the transpersonal psyche, or whether they even have a common core, is not at all clear, except to say that they are all experiences that occur beyond the ego. Jung believed that the psyche has an intrinsic religious function that expresses itself in the spontaneous production of numinous experiences (Corbett 1996). What distinguishes Jung from traditional mystics is his psychological analysis of these experiences and his attempt to make them of psychotherapeutic value. Jung believed that the direct experience of the numinous is more important than being told about God. For Jung, metaphysical schemes and theological theorizing are much less interesting than a lived experience of the numinosum. Jung was obviously very permeable to the unconscious, beginning early in life. Looking back on his childhood at the age of 83, he was able to say that it was already clear to him “that God, for me at least, was one of the most certain and immediate experiences” (Jung 1961, 62). The flowering of this mystical sensibility is seen in experiences such as his 1944 Kabbalistic visions of a mystic marriage, in which he says “I was the marriage” (294). If Jung is a mystic according to his own definition, since he had many such direct experiences of the objective psyche, how does his approach to mysticism compare with traditional forms of mystical experience? Answering this question is complicated by the fact that there is no comprehensive description of mysticism that would encompass all its manifestations and claims. Many of the definitions of mysticism are radically affected by the author’s personal metaphysical commitments. Some writers assume that the theistic form of mysticism is the highest form.

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But Jung’s approach is not theistic in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense. The imagery that arises from the objective psyche may have no relationship to the Judeo-Christian tradition in spite of being numinous, and Judeo-Christian religionists would not accept Jung’s idea that religious experience is synonymous with experience of the objective psyche. There are skeptical accounts of mysticism that reduce or pathologize mystical experience, granting no ontological reality to the mystic’s experience. Jung would radically disagree; he believed that the psyche is real, so that experiences of the numinosum are experiences of something real—they are psychological facts. Neither would Jung agree that people who have numinous experience are necessarily unbalanced; these events often occur to normal people, although they do tend to occur during periods of stress when the ego is relatively vulnerable and unusually permeable to the unconscious. Of course, psychotic people may also have numinous experiences. Here, it is worth noting that, from a Jungian point of view, the mystic swims in the same waters in which the psychotic drowns—that is to say, both mystics and psychotic people experience transpersonal levels of the psyche, but healthy mystics do not stay there for long. After the experience, they return to consensual reality and they show no other signs of psychosis. As the old saying has it, the difference between the mystic and the psychotic is that the mystic knows who not to talk to—meaning that her judgment and her ability to function in consensual reality are preserved. There are of course psychotic mystics; numinous experiences are not confined to emotionally healthy people. Indeed, a psychotic episode may be triggered by a numinous encounter. Presumably the individual who becomes psychotic is unable to contain the affective intensity of the experience without either fragmenting or identifying with its archetypal contents.

What Is Mystical Experience? In its traditional usage, the term mystical experience often refers to the subjective experience of direct contact with the divine or with transpersonal dimensions of reality. During such experience, the mystic senses a truth that cannot be grasped by conceptual thought, or she gains knowledge or insight about the nature of reality that lies beyond rational understanding. In Underhill’s (1961) words, mysticism is the art of establishing a conscious relationship with the absolute. This may

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take a variety of forms. Often it means the experience of a sense of oneness or unity with all of reality, or at least the experience and conviction that all things are connected and emerge from the same transpersonal source. Mystics of many Asian traditions have no difficulty proclaiming that the personal self is entirely lost in these states, known as samadhi or satori, like a drop of water losing its nature in a cup of wine. Such states are often accompanied by the sense that absolute reality is loving and good, or even that love is the basis of everything. At these moments, a complete loss of any subject–object distinction may occur, often obliterating any sense of difference between the inner and outer worlds, sometimes accompanied by a sense of timelessness. There is often no sense of a discreet personal ego. Devotional traditions such as Judaism and Christianity prefer to think in terms of experiences of union with the divine rather than the complete unity of the human and the divine, since their theology is not comfortable with the idea of the loss of discrete human identity in mystical experience. A profound sense of the presence of the divine is also common among many mystics. Among nature mystics, such as St. Francis of Assisi, Jacob Böhme, or Walt Whitman, the divine presence is mediated by the natural world. Yet another type of mystical experience occurs when our everyday ego consciousness seems to be overwhelmed by a sudden insight into the nature of reality, as if the individual is vouchsafed special knowledge about the purpose of his life. This is sometimes described as a cleansing of the “eye of the soul,” or it can be thought of as an experience of gnosis, or direct intuitive knowledge of the divine. A voice that is other than the ego may be heard. There is therefore a wide range of mystical experience; to describe it, mystics of various traditions use terms such as “nothing,” “emptiness,” and “void,” as well as “bliss” or “ecstasy.” Love mystics, such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, use erotic language, for example, describing the soul uniting with God in a spiritual marriage. These mystics obviously feel the divine within, just as the Self is located within the psyche rather than in an entirely transcendent dimension. Numinous experiences are completely convincing; unlike faith or belief in doctrine and dogma, direct experiences of the transpersonal domain carry a sense of absolute authority—they are self-authenticating. Because of the similarity of mystical experiences across traditions, these experiences often transcend denominational boundaries, because the archetypal energies of the unconscious are fundamentally the same in all

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of us, even if they take on local color as they emerge through personal and cultural levels of the psyche. For Jung, the term “unconscious” only represents the unknown. In his words: “The concept of the unconscious posits nothing, it designates only my unknowing” (Jung 1973, 411). The unconscious is the spiritual dimension of existence. In other words, he believed there is a transcendent, unitary background to reality, but nothing can be said about its nature, other than the fact of its existence. This is the source from which archetypal imagery arises in the form of images and symbols, and this is the source of the mystic’s experience. There have been many attempts to describe the quality of mystical experience. For William James (1958), the experience is ineffable, or incapable of verbal description in ordinary language. The experience is noetic or gives new insight or knowledge not available to ordinary experience. The experience is transient, and the subject is passive, experiencing something that originates from outside the individual. Rudolph Otto (1958) described the emotional quality of numinous experience, or contact with the holy, as mysterious, tremendous, and fascinating. The experience is one of awe or dread, in the face of which the subject feels small, in touch with an otherness that is completely outside of his everyday experience. The Bible is replete with these experiences, such as the story of Moses hearing the voice of God speaking from a burning bush, or Saul on the road to Damascus hearing the voice of Jesus. Other examples are the vision of the glory of the Lord in Isaiah 6: 1–3 or the vision of a heavenly chariot in the book of Ezekiel 1: 26–28. Some of these encounters are much more subtle, such as Elijah’s experience of the divine as a still small voice (1 Kings 19: 12). What is important to Jung is that these mystical experiences are not confined to the saints and founders of the traditions; they also occur to ordinary people (Corbett 1996, 2006). For Otto, such an experience implies the presence of the Judeo-Christian God; for Jung, it means contact with the objective or archetypal level of the psyche, and this is an important difference between Jung’s approach to spirituality and traditional religious systems. Another difference between Jung and Otto is that for Jung, God cannot be wholly other, which was the case for Otto, since something wholly other “could never be one of the soul’s deepest and closest intimacies—which is precisely what God is” (Jung 1968, 11, fn. 6). Jung believed that descriptions of the experience of the transpersonal level of the unconscious are indistinguishable from descriptions of

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religious experience.2 Mystical experience often includes visionary states that consist of archetypal imagery such as light or fire, which have important symbolic meaning. A six-winged seraph appeared to St. Francis, an image derived from Isaiah (6: 1–2), who saw God seated on a high throne surrounded by heavenly beings. In the case of Francis, the seraph contained an image of Christ crucified, an example of an archetypal image colored by theological expectations. Francis also had a mystical experience while praying before a crucifix in a church, when a voice from the figure on the cross told him to “repair my house,” which produced an ecstatic state. This is a clear example of the power of a living symbol that bridges between consciousness and the archetypal level of the psyche. Otto (1932) wrote that mysticism means that “nonrational, numinous elements predominate and determine the emotional life” (159). However, a single numinous experience is not enough to make the individual a confirmed mystic. It is preferable to apply this term to those who spend their life in pursuit of such experiences, usually through devotion to a spiritual practice. Yet brief numinous experiences are not uncommon; they may occur in dreams or visions, or they may be triggered by love, by great music or art, or by the natural world. They tend to give one a sense of otherness and exaltation, but they are only a brief taste of what mystics describe. The true mystic is overwhelmed with certainty about what he has experienced; before his experience, he may have believed in the traditional figures of his religion, but now he has experienced these directly. It is not clear whether the Christian mystic’s experience of the mystical marriage of the soul with God is subjectively similar to or identical with the Buddhist’s experience of nirvana, or whether this state is the same as the “cloud of unknowing”3 of Christian mysticism. These states of consciousness could be the same state colored by different

2 I should note here that the idea that mystical experience is an experience of the unconscious goes back to von Hartmann (1868), who wrote that the essence of the mystical is the “filling of consciousness” (363) with a content that involuntarily arises from the unconscious. However, von Hartmann did not develop the notion of the dynamic unconscious or the archetypal level of the unconscious. 3 The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous fourteenth-century work of Christian mysticism, which teaches that one can only approach God through unknowing, without reference to the intellect.

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cultural and religious expectations. However, since the steps or processes by which the mystics of these traditions have arrived at such a peak are entirely different, and since they use different practices and belong to very different religious cultures, it may be that the final stage is also different. One of the criticisms of mystics is that they incorporate their tradition’s theology into the content of their experiences. Certainly, as Katz (1983) points out, the Buddhist and the Christian goals are based on very different ontological assumptions. That is, mystical experience may be mediated or shaped by concepts that the subject brings to the experience. Katz believes that Christian mystics report experience of Jesus or the Trinity or a personal God, rather than the non-personal, Buddhist experience of the void. He believes that the particular spiritual path that the mystic follows, and the texts he has studied, to some extent create the mystic’s experience. For example, Christian mystics, having been raised to seek Christ as a lover, are likely to experience him in that way. Katz (1983) believes that Christians do not experience nirvana, and Buddhists do not experience the union of the soul with God. For example, Katz believes that Eckhart’s Godhead with no attributes is not the Christian equivalent of nirvana or sunyata, because these concepts of ultimate reality are metaphysically quite different. However, from a psychological point of view, these traditions may both be describing states that result from contact with the archetypal psyche and a suspension of ordinary ego activity. The experience is then interpreted through the mystic’s cultural lens and expectations, colored by his or her tradition’s teachings. From a Jungian perspective, these forms of mystical experience imply the encounter of the ego with levels of the psyche beyond the ego, because for Jung (1969) the archetypal or transpersonal level of the unconscious is synonymous with the spiritual dimension. For example, within a Jungian framework, experiences of unity or oneness with all things are interpreted as experiences of the Self, which Jung understands to be the totality of the psyche. Jung believes the experience of the Self, or the intrapsychic image of God, cannot be distinguished from the experience of the divine itself. The Self can be distinguished conceptually from God but not practically (Jung 1970, ¶546). Jung (1966) points out that the height of the expression of the Self is felt in the unio mystica, the sense that the ego is lost in the divine, which is common to mystics of both Asian and European traditions (¶314). Jung also says that the experience of the Self is “nearly always connected with the feeling of timelessness, ‘eternity’ or immortality” (1976, ¶694).

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Similarly, Buddhist descriptions of the void or emptiness surely refer to levels of consciousness beyond name and form, although that tradition would not refer to these as experience of the Self. This level might correspond to noumenal levels of the archetype that are deeper than its symbolic manifestations. I should note here that Jung mistakenly believed that the presence of an ego is essential for consciousness. The Eastern notion of pure consciousness without an object, with no distinct ego, seemed to him to be a form of unconsciousness, and here, he differs radically from Asian meditative traditions (Corbett and Whitney 2016). Christian mystics typically strongly identify with Christ, sometimes even experiencing similar bodily wounds or stigmata. In their subjective mystical encounters, which sound like active imagination, they typically experience Christ, angels, or the Blessed Virgin Mary. But for Jung, archetypal or mythic figures from any religious pantheon might be as important and equally numinous. As Katz (1983) notes, Muslims or Kabbalists never encounter Christian images; rather, they encounter figures that are consistent with their own preformed, doctrinal orthodoxy. Jung would say that this is because the same archetype—such as a savior or wisdom figure—can appear in a variety of different forms, depending on local cultural traditions. St. Teresa of Avila (2004) for instance received mystical revelations that confirm Christian doctrine such as the Trinity. The exact form or local name given to the manifestation of the archetype is not of primary importance from a psychological point of view; the Mother archetype is expressed in one culture as the Blessed Virgin Mary, in others as Quan Yin, Durga, or Demeter, but these forms all point to the same archetypal deep structure, the feminine aspect of the Self. The archetype takes on a local content because mystics experience archetypal levels of the psyche in ways that are saturated with their own expectations and colored by material from personal levels of the unconscious. It is at these personal levels that numinous experience may either reinforce or challenge preconceived theological expectations. It is true that many mystics do not report imagery from traditions other than their own, but this may be because the mystic is unwilling to reveal that she has had an archetypal experience related to an alien tradition. In the past, this might have led to persecution, excommunication, or even death. In clinical practice, I have come across contemporary contemplatives who do report imagery from traditions other than their own, not only in dreams but also in visionary states. Sometimes an unorthodox numinous manifestation is attributed to the devil, or,

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as Jung (1969) pointed out in his discussion of Nicholas of Flüe, the mystic may modify or rework the experience to make it fit traditional expectations.

Jung and Christian Mysticism There are some ways in which Jung’s psychology is consonant with Christian mysticism. One is found in the work of the thirteenth-­century mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp, who addresses God in her poems, saying: “Conquer me, so that I may conquer you…” (McGinn 1988, 202) clearly indicating the sense that just as she is affected by God, she believes that she affects God in their relationship—consonant with Jung’s idea that the ego and the Self mutually influence each other. She also seems to have suffered in her relationship to God. Hadewijch describes the love of God not only as a blessing but also as a hell that “turns everything to ruin,” producing “disquiet and torture and pity” (204). This sounds very much as if she has discovered what Jung will later refer to as the dark side of the Self that has to be suffered. She asks God to “make my nature so fair/That it will be wholly conformed to your nature…I should burn to ashes in your fire” (207). This attitude is consistent with Jung’s (1970) notion that “the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego” (¶778). Inge (1899) suggests that there are three propositions or articles of faith on which the Christian form of mysticism rests. One is that the soul can discern spiritual truth that can be trusted as much as we can trust the organs of sensation. Jung would certainly agree with this, since he sees the soul as a bridge to the experience of spirit. As Corbin (1972) pointed out, the mundus imaginalis gives us veridical information that is as reliable as the information we gain from the senses or the intellect. The imaginal realm acts as a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious. Another of Inge’s propositions is that, since we can only know what is like ourselves, in order to know God we must partake of the divine nature. Again, Jung would agree, since our essential nature is based in the Self. Inge’s third proposition is that holiness is required to experience God—by this, he means a purity of heart. In traditions such as Christianity and Islam, there is a gulf between human beings and the divine. However, in Jung’s approach, the divine is found deeply within our own subjectivity. Another point of difference between traditional Christian mystics and Jung’s approach is that

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Christian mystics often stress love as an essential component of the mystical ascent. The divine is often referred to as the Beloved, and the mystic feels that she is the lover who seeks consummation of her love in union with the divine. For Jung, love would only be one form of connection to the Self. If the ground of reality is love, as many mystics have held, we are faced with the interesting question of the relationship between love and the unconscious. Jung (1973) shows a mystical sensitivity to love when he writes: “love is more spiritual than anything we can describe… It is an eternal secret” (298). He describes transpersonal love as “a kosmognosis, a creator and father-mother of all higher consciousness” (Jung 1961, 353), and talking of love, he says that “we should name the unknown by the more unknown…that is, by the name of God” (354). It is important to note that for Jung the divine can only be experienced within or by means of the psyche, and the particular image of God that we experience cannot be separated from the psyche. It is only a prejudice of the monotheistic traditions to insist that God is beyond the psyche and to deny the “essential identity of God and man” (Jung 1969, ¶100).

The Potentially Heretical Nature of Jung’s Approach Jung (1967) believes that “only the mystics bring creativity into religion” (¶482). He believes this because mystical experience can renew traditional symbols by making them come alive for the individual and also because new symbolic material may arise from the depths of the psyche that may revitalize the tradition and provide what is missing. In this way, the mystic may become a heretic. For example, Jung (1976) notes that the Christian tradition has had a very masculine God-image, but Christian mystics have experienced the feminine dimensions of the divine (¶221). From the point of view of the tradition, archetypal images that are outside the acceptable canon may be regarded as heretical or pagan. It is therefore not surprising that new and private mystical revelation based on direct contact with the archetypal unconscious may threaten the tradition. This form of revelation has political and social implications for the institution, so that orthodox members of a religious tradition sometimes view their own mystics with distaste, or at least with circumspection. Mystics may be theological anarchists. But they have experiences that affect them psychologically. They develop a new attitude,

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unlike the traditionalist who goes to church but subsequently feels no change in himself. Mystics may feel dangerous to the established traditions because they threaten the power and influence of the priests and the hierarchy, who insist they are the final interpreters of the founders’ experience and intentions, and they are the only ones who understand divine revelation. Orthodox traditions want us to remain faithful to their doctrines and dogmas and their approach to salvation, but mystical experience may serve a deconstructive function, which is why some mystics, such as Marguerite Porete, were charged with heresy and were burned at the stake. However, it is no longer true that the only way to experience the divine is through the revelation told in the scriptures; personal revelation is possible through direct contact with the objective psyche. Traditional religious structures offered a clear path to salvation and a universe with fixed meanings. But the mystic upends that notion with new information, just as Jung (2009) reports the emergence of a new God-image in The Red Book. In the past, he would have been accused of blasphemy.

Stages of Mysticism Mysticism can be described in terms of a final goal or as a path with specific practices. In the Christian mystical tradition, the steps on the mystical path are divided into three stages: the first is purgation, the second is illumination, and the third is union. Purgation means repentance and purification of oneself, involving self-scrutiny. One tries to remove everything that is self-centered, any need for power and possessions. This may require detachment, renunciation, and freedom from the tyranny of the ego. This stage surely corresponds to an examination of the shadow and the attempt to make it conscious, as well as what Jung refers to as the relativizing of the ego. Illumination means that one’s feelings, volition, and intellect are all directed toward God, and one becomes aware of an idea or truth that is given from within, rather than relying on rational analysis. The mystic is content to live in a state of unknowing, accepting the mystery of being. Underhill (1961) describes this stage as the complete surrender of one’s personal striving to the will of God. In the final stage, the mystic experiences God directly, perhaps as a spiritual marriage, accompanied by joy and further revelations. However, Jung

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would suggest that this is only one possible archetypal sequence that leads to the experience of the Self or the objective psyche. For him, this can be attained by a conscious commitment to attend to numinous material emerging from the unconscious, or by means of conscious attention to the individuation process. If Jung is correct, this approach to the unconscious can be seen as a mystical path in its own right, even though Jung eschewed such a designation.

What Kind of Mysticism Is Found in Jung? Mysticism is often divided into cataphatic and apophatic forms (McGinn 1988). Cataphatic mysticism is filled with images of the divine and is often associated with love mystics, such as Bernard of Clairvaux. It is sometimes called a via positiva or a via affirmata, since it tries to affirm something positive about the experience of the divine, for example, seeing God as love or as the sum of perfection. Apophatic mysticism is a via negativa, insisting that nothing positive can be said about God because all categories are inadequate; we can only say what God is not, unless the divine chooses to reveal itself a certain way. Even metaphors or descriptions of God as goodness or as love fall short. Since Jung focuses on a wide variety of numinous imagery, one might imagine that he falls into the cataphatic category; however, he believes that no specific image is the archetype itself, which is unknowable, suggesting an apophatic approach. However, when Jung (1976) says that mystics are people who have a particularly vivid experience of the collective unconscious, he does not take into account the important tradition of unknowing and negative theology in the Western tradition. The experiences of mystics with very different backgrounds sometimes sound similar. From Jung’s point of view, this is not surprising, since all mystical experience arises from the same source; the mystic has an intense, relatively unmediated experience of the archetypal dimension. For Jung, these experiences are forms of personal revelation, although their content may contravene the received teachings of the tradition, which is partly why official Christianity rejected gnostic teachings. Although such a revelation may contribute to a mystic’s wholeness, and may add to the wholeness of the collective, an unorthodox revelation (such as a vision of Christ as a woman) may make it difficult for the mystic who is committed to his tradition. The mystic

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may then try to understand his experience in terms of his tradition even if it means distorting the content of the experience in the process. The classic example is that of the fifteenth-century St. Nicholas of Flüe, who experienced a terrifying vision of the angry face of God pierced by swords. Jung (1969) pointed out the heretical nature of this vision, since it contradicted the Christian image of a loving, all-good God (¶474–87). Driven by the fear of falling afoul of the Inquisition, Nicholas was forced to transform his vision into an image that was doctrinally acceptable. Often, mystical revelations seem to compensate when the tradition is too one-sided. From Jung’s point of view, this is not surprising; the objective psyche may produce imagery from any religious tradition, or it may produce completely novel numinous imagery, irrespective of the subject’s tradition. The archetypes themselves transcend culture, although they must dress themselves in local cultural forms or folkloric imagery in order to express themselves and be understood. But certain archetypal symbols, such as the divine manifesting within light or fire, are common, as we see in the biblical stories of the burning bush, or the nimbus of light around the heads of saintly figures.

Is Jung’s Approach Compatible with Theism? In various ways, Jung’s notion that mystical experience arises from the depths of the psyche is at variance with traditional theistic beliefs that the divine is completely transcendent of the psyche. For Jung, although mystical experience is an experience of non-ego, it remains a psychological experience located deeply within human subjectivity, and it is real because the psyche is real. This was one of the main bones of contention between Jung and theologians who could not tolerate Jung’s notion that the divine is radically immanent in the psyche. Martin Buber (1952) insisted that the divine must be beyond the psyche, not somehow coextensive with it. Victor White (1960) was intolerant of the idea that the divine could have any darkness in it. Jung is clear that the Self, or the innate God-image in the psyche, may take any number of forms; it is not confined to the dogmatic images of one tradition such as Christ or the biblical Yahweh. We recognize manifestations of the Self by their numinosity and emotional power, and not by their specific content. This is really a new myth of God.

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The Ontological Question The mystic claims to experience a subtle or spiritual level of reality imperceptible to the ordinary senses and not experienced under ordinary circumstances. Is there such a reality, or can the mystic’s claims be reduced to a disturbed brain, a psychological defense, or an overheated imagination? There are many reductive psychoanalytic explanations for mystical experience, raising the question of whether mystics are truly experiencing what they claim to experience. Mystics can be accused of being hysterical, suggestible, or of misinterpreting the visual aura of migraine or temporal lobe epilepsy as if they were supernatural phenomena. Rational arguments or critiques of these experiences have no effect on their subjects, because by definition the subject claims to be experiencing that which is beyond conceptual thought, and his experience does not arise within ordinary sense knowledge. The obvious problem with this argument is that if we have no criteria for examining such claims, anyone can claim anything to be an authentic expression of the holy, so we have no alternative but to rely on criteria such as those of Otto (1932) or James (1958).

So…Was Jung a Mystic? Jaffe (1989) believes that Jung was a scientist who would not discount the unknown and mysterious, even though such material is outside the purview of ordinary methods of science. She points out that he tries to strike a balance between the transcendent and the observable, retaining an empirical attitude to what can be observed without denying that there is a transcendent reality. That is partly why he believes that the archetype in itself can only be known by its symbolic manifestations. For example, the Holy Spirit of Christianity is often depicted in the tradition’s iconography as a bird, but it is clear that the bird image only points to the spiritual dimension. The bird can be observed, but that which it indicates is transcendent. The same inexpressible truth can manifest itself in different ways. In summary, I suggest that Jung’s approach to the psyche is a mystical path for our time. Given the waning power of the traditional images of God, and the cultural lack of faith in external religious authority and dogmatic theology, Jung’s psychology is an antidote to an overly rational, despiritualized, mechanical view of the world.

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References Avila, Teresa. 2004. The Life of Teresa of Avila by Herself. New York: Penguin Books. Buber, Martin. 1952. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row. Corbett, Lionel. 1996. The Religious Function of the Psyche. New York: Routledge. ———. 2006. “Varieties of Numinous Experience.” In The Idea of the Numinous, edited by Ann Casement and David Tacey. New York: Routledge. Corbett, Lionel, and Leanne Whitney. 2016. “Jung and Non-duality: Some Clinical and Theoretical Implications of the Self as the Totality of the Psyche.” International Journal of Jungian Studies 8 (1): 15–27. Corbin, Henri. 1972. Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, 1–9. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. Dourley, John. 2014. Jung and His Mystics: In the End It All Comes Down to Nothing. New York: Routledge. Inge, W. R. 1899. Christian Mysticism. London: Methuen and Co. Jaffe, Aniela. 1989. Was C. G. Jung a Mystic? Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Press. James, William. 1958. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Mentor Books. Jung, C. G. 1961. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by Aniela Jaffe. New York: Random House. ———. 1966. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. The Practice of Psychotherapy. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1967. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Alchemical Studies. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1968. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Psychology and Alchemy. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 12. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1969. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Psychology and Religion: West and East. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1970. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 14. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1973. Letters: Vol. 1. Edited by Gerhardt Adler and Aniela Jaffe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1976. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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———. 2009. The Red Book, Liber Novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Katz, Stephen. 1983. “The ‘Conservative’ Character of Mysticism.” In Mysticism and Religious Traditions, edited by Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press. McGinn, Bernard. 1988. The Flowering of Western Mysticism. New York: Crossroad Publishing. Otto, R. 1917/1958. The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press. Otto, Rudolph. 1932. Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism. Translated by Bertha L. Bracey. New York: Macmillan. Underhill, Evelyn. 1961. Mysticism. New York: E. P. Dutton. Von Hartmann, Eduard. [1868] 1931. Philosophy of the Unconscious. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. White, Victor. 1960. Soul and Psyche: An Enquiry into the Relationship of Psychotherapy and Religion. London, UK: Collins.

CHAPTER 11

Mystic Descent: James Hillman and the Religious Imagination Glen Slater Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; Lift up the stone and you will find me there. The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77

Mysticism presents the depth psychologist with a number of fruitful contradictions. Although the mystical vision is sometimes regarded as the essence of religious experience, it most frequently appears at the fringes of faith traditions. Although marked by the pull of the spirit, rather than being focused on the afterlife it typically seeks merger with the divine in this life, often via the natural world. Although the mystic sets out to know the divine, this knowledge is imbued with unknowing and, in some cases, a marked vision of emptiness. The mystic mostly avoids creeds and self-positing beliefs in order to find God in direct experience. And once encountered, mystical experience is conveyed through poetry and metaphor—through the realm of the imagination. When placed against a background of widespread religious decline, it may be this maverick bent of mysticism that fuels our continued interest in it. Such must be the case when we consider the rise of notions

G. Slater (*)  Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_11

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like “secular mysticism” (Hunt 2003) or “modern mysticism” (Gellert 1994), wherein this particular religious mode has little trouble coexisting with progressive politics, New Age philosophies, and certain currents of science. Indeed, in recent decades a number of publications have attempted to merge mystical and scientific understandings, especially in the realm of physics (Capra 1975; Goswami 1993; Zukav 1979). For those who have largely abandoned organized religion, those who seek spirituality but not dogma, and those who read sacred texts in a symbolic and poetic manner, mysticism offers a still walkable bridge to the divine, channeling the religious impulse into an attempt to understand the essence of being. As Evelyn Underhill (1914) puts it: “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality” (3). The mystic might even be considered a kind of religious humanist, making mysticism a religion you can have without having religion. At the opening of last century, in his ground-breaking The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1902) stated “that personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of consciousness” (379). James goes on to cite a number of then contemporary seekers, one of whom writes of his mystical encounters “as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and all past growth” (397). James later notes: “Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else” (405). More than a century later, mysticism’s continued traction may be largely attributed to the individual rather than communal sense of identity it fosters, especially in the way it distances itself from reactionary religious expressions in the form of fundamentalism and fanaticism. That the term “mysticism” itself derives from the Greek μυω, which means “to conceal,” and that rational understanding is not as much value to the mystic as the felt sense of ultimate reality, perceived through devotion and intuition rather than textual teachings and abstract thought, suggests the mystical viewpoint is the very antithesis of the fundamentalist one. Mystical perceptions alter individual consciousness in a radical way and resist formulation into collective beliefs or literal understandings. Neither preacher nor prophet, though a mystic may teach a path to the divine they have little need to reveal tribal truths or start movements for salvation. As Cupitt (1998) observes, “in their devotional writings they are conspicuously silent about the great salvation-machine and all its concerns” (3). The mystic quests an eccentric relationship with the

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divine, and it is this quest that is resonant with those who wander in today’s religious backlots and byways. All these attributes of mysticism engage the depth psychologist, who understands the value of direct religious experience while being inclined to let the conundrums of faith and theology take a back seat. Once we consider that C. G. Jung’s (1969) critical notion of “psychic reality” (¶680) and mystical perspectives both pertain to the intersection of spiritual ideas and instinctual impulses, a rich dialogical space opens. The term “religious instinct” (Jung 1970, ¶653), the assertion that archetypal patterns link spiritual and biological impulses (Jung 1969, ¶343ff.), and the study of these patterns in mythology and religious texts form the core basis of a Jungian psychology of religion. This approach is stated most plainly when Jung asserts “religious ideas … originate with the archetypes, the ‘careful consideration’ of which—religere!—constitutes the essence of religion” (¶427). These critical Jungian ideas undergo “re-visioning” in the work of James Hillman (1975), providing us with an unexpected basis on which to pursue a depth psychology of mysticism and even contemplate the mystical implications of depth psychology. Hillman (1997) focused on the enduring concept of soul as “a tertium between the perspectives of body (matter, nature, empirics) and of mind (spirit, logic, idea)” (13) and argued for a psychological polytheism based on archetypal imagination. To this end, he drew a clear distinction between soul and spirit—a distinction he sets out in the foundational essay, “Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline” ([1976] 2005). Approaching mysticism in light of the vivid contrast Hillman draws here, as well as the ensuing sense of soul’s downward rather than upward movement, is what will concern us in the rest of this chapter.

Spirit and Soul Mysticism comes in a vast variety of flavors, yet running through them all is the desire to dwell in the convergence of the finite and the infinite. Whereas the mystic may go through a phase of burning away finite attachments in order to make contact with the infinite, there is inevitably a return to divine immanence, both within and around the initiate. This meeting place of heaven and earth has traditionally pertained to the Platonic metaxy, which is sometimes personified as the anima or feminine

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soul, and is a dimension often realized in and through love (eros). To employ Hillman’s topographical metaphors, whereas the mystic might easily be regarded as a mountain climber ascending the peaks, mystical experience is better grasped as a downward trek, moving from light to dark and into existence in the vales and the complications of life. This soul-tending direction of mysticism speaks directly to contemporary seekers, who realize that spirituality can no longer be lived at the expense of psychic reality, but must be amalgamated with it. Mysticism has passed through the death of God and the diminished authority of the Church relatively unscathed precisely because of this bearing. Today, the vales of being are omnipresent, and ignoring them leads only to denial and dissociation, escapism and scapegoating, to which other kinds of religious expression are not immune. This situation necessitates a holistic psychospiritual vision, an awareness that a purely transcendent notion of divinity is no longer viable, and a sense that only a vision of spirit and nature bonded seems fitting or adequate. In the original German, Jung (e.g., 1968) uses the terms “seele” and “psyche” interchangeably (¶9n). Jungian psychology has largely followed suit, in English moving easily between soul and psyche, yet preferring the latter to designate the totality of psychic processes that form the subject of the field. While also freely exchanging these terms, Hillman built his psychological perspective around the poetic and qualitative attributes of soul, in order to maintain closer ties with the humanities and peel his approach away from the sciences. For Hillman (1997), soul had to be “the primary metaphor of psychology,” despite or even because of it being “deliberately ambiguous” and “resisting all definition” (24–25). He also promoted soul-making as the primary task of psychology, offering a sequence of meditations on this theme that began with his book Suicide and the Soul (1964), gained further ground with The Myth of Analysis (1972), and culminated in Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), where he states: “By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance … Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground…” (xvi). Soul is “that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern” (xvi). These attributes are further qualified in describing soul’s critical associations with depth, with death, and especially with imagination, summarizing these notions by noting it is “that mode which recognizes

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all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical” (Hillman 1975, xvi.). Drawing many of these reflections together, Hillman quotes his favorite Presocratic, Heraclitus: “You could not discover the limits of the soul (psyche), even if your traveled every road to do so; such is the depth (bathun) of its meaning (logos)” (xvii). Soul-making is, most simply, the cultivation of these qualitative states, particularly “the realization of images” (Hillman 1997, 36) and how “images become the means of translating life-events into soul” (37). Hillman takes the term from Keats, who wrote: “Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of Soulmaking’” (35). These descriptions of soul and soul-making prepare us to appreciate the stark contrast Hillman draws in “Peaks and Vales,” where he argues spirit and soul belong to very different perceptual modalities, with spirit showing more affinity for pneumatic values, rarified realms and abstract thought, and soul being occupied with emotion, meaning and history, as well as the felt presence of places and things. Whereas spirit is drawn to dry, airy, well-lit spaces that promote distinction and clarity, soul thrives in shaded, moist, and contained environs that foster connection, reflection, and mystery. Writing as “an advocate of soul,” Hillman ([1976] 2005, 81) articulated how spiritual aspirations and values appear from a soul perspective, which is often disconnected from actual lived experience and worldly habitation. Once the complications and innate expressive modes of psychological life are realized, spiritual teachings and principles can seem most otherworldly. As Hillman puts it: The soul feels left behind, and we see this soul reacting with anima resentments. Spiritual teachings warn the initiate so often about introspective broodings, about jealousy, spite, and pettiness, about attachments to sensations and memories. These cautions present an accurate phenomenology of how the soul feels when the spirit bids farewell. (81)

Hillman is concerned with what happens when the spiritual impulse transcends soulful qualities of being, and he concludes that the soul sours. This scenario is evident in all kinds of spiritual and religious pursuits, especially those that put perfection, purity, and piety far above the ordinarily human. Soul and spirit are then in conflict, and when this conflict isn’t consciously endured, a dissociation results that corrupts the deeper reaches of being—shadowy sexual compulsions in the face of spiritual aspirations being one enduring example. But it is precisely this form of

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dissociation that the most enduring and celebrated expressions of mystical experience overcome—sometimes to the point of realizing a complete human-divine coexistence. Teresa of Avila wrote, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours” (in Harvey 1996, 206). Meister Eckhart (2009) declared “My eye and God’s eye is one eye” (298), elsewhere stating, “God is known by God in the soul; she discerns with his wisdom both herself and all things” (70, emphasis added).1 Angelus Silenius puts it most decidedly: “I know that God cannot live one instant without me;/Were I to become nothing, He must give up the ghost” (in Avens 1984, 111). Mystical experiences do often begin with impressive moments of transcendence, the character of which is thoroughly spiritual and often totally ecstatic. It is at this point that a vision of the oneness of creation and sense of divine unity is also impressed upon the initiate. Unity, by character, belongs to the spiritual impulse, as it requires leaving the great diversity and particularity of the phenomenal world behind, even if momentarily. At the same time, multiple factors suggest a soul perspective takes precedence, even in the face of these overtly spiritual themes, and some overviews of mysticism reflect this. Harvey (1996) collects “the most precious testimonies to this ‘eternal world of the soul’” (xi), and he backs up the emphasis on soul by referring to the “sacred feminine” and the consolidating notion “that we have come to this earth…to embrace it fully, not to ‘transcend’ it but to arrive here in full presence, gratitude and love” (xiii). Harvey opines “that it is through what the Tao Te Ching calls the valley spirit…that the deepest realization is attained” (17; italics added). Hillman’s archetypal approach offers us several pathways into this correlation between mysticism and the feminine soul or what has been called the “lunar mind” (Avens 1984, 125).

Mundus Imaginalis and Deus Absconditus Around the time of writing “Peaks and Vales,” Hillman (1997) instigated an offshoot of classical Jungian thought, applying the name “archetypal psychology.” And whereas he described Jung as “the first immediate father” (10) of this approach, “the second immediate father” is recorded as “the French scholar, philosopher and mystic, principally known for his interpretation of Islamic thought,” Henry Corbin (11;

1 Sermons

57 and 6, respectively.

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italics added). Although Hillman’s Jungian roots had impressed on him the role of the imagination as a means of contacting the archetypal patterns of the psyche, and Hillman had taken Jung’s (1967) pithy phrase, “image is psyche” (¶75) to be “a maxim … to mean that the soul is constituted of images” (Hillman 1997, 14), it is from Corbin that Hillman takes “the idea that the mundus archetypalis (‘alam al-mithal) is also the mundus imaginalis” (11). And armed with Corbin’s notion of the mundus imaginalis, Hillman substantiated “a distinct field of imaginal realities requiring methods and perceptual faculties different from the spiritual world beyond it or the empirical world of usual sense perception and naïve formulation” (11). The mundus imaginalis, which Corbin derived from his study of Islamic mysticism, provided Hillman with “a valuative and cosmic grounding” (12) for what he describes as “a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image … a poetic basis of mind” (Hillman 1975, xvii). The prominence given to image and imagination in Hillman’s approach can only be properly comprehended when we realize that a psychic image is not necessarily visual. The image is the primary means by which the psyche digests and apprehends all forms of stimuli—including sounds, sensations, and emotions. As Jung (1969) puts it, “even physical pain is a psychic image” (¶680). Images are textured with feeling and have a quality of agency, which is why Hillman sometimes compared them to animals; their psychic significance is given largely by their emotional register. The salience of an image, its body and gravity for the soul, thus comes largely with its appearance and is not reliant on ensuing interpretations. Even perceptions of Nothingness, Emptiness, and Void, which feature prominently in many mystical accounts and descriptions of divinity, must still be considered psychic images—absence itself being the imaginal state within which one feels in touch with ultimate reality. In most instances, such states of emptiness pertain to the clearing of space for the divine presence that lies on the other side of humanistic or ego preoccupations. In relation to the Sufi understanding of “the ‘passing away’ of the self,” Sells (1996) puts it thusly: “To become empty of self, to pass away, is to become like a polished mirror reflecting the divine image and to become one with the divine in that image” (87). The Flemish mystic, John Ruusbroec, wrote, “with these three—eye, mirror, and image—we are like God and united with him…The union of the image in the mirror is, however, so great and so noble that the soul is called the image of God” (in Harvey 1996, 200).

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In their attempts to describe the essence of mysticism, writers like McGinn (1996) and Dupré (1996) prefer the theme of presence to that of unity. As McGinn (1996) puts it, this presence always remains hidden, but notes, “when that hidden presence becomes the subject of some form of ‘immediate experience,’ we can begin to speak of mysticism in the proper sense of the term” (59). Dupré (1996) describes “a ‘sense’ of the divine that if properly developed enables the believer to ‘taste’ (sapere) God and all that relates to him” (4). This “hidden presence” takes us quite close to the focus on soul and imagination in Hillman’s psychology, and also toward an understanding of how mysticism is seated in today’s religious zeitgeist. The hidden character of the divine is one that must be imagined into, for this hiddenness is not complete or absolute; it implies divinity must be cloaked in order to be apprehended— as the mystics’ turn to metaphor and poetry aptly demonstrates. The movement Hillman (1975) refers to as “seeing through” is central to the soul-making process and its apprehension of “ultimate hidden value … can also be called the hidden God (deus absconditus), who appears only in concealment” (140). The presence indicates the direct feeling encounter and resulting psychological impact, but according to Jung and Hillman, feelings and emotions—even the sense of the numinous—enter awareness in the form of psychic images. With his comparative study of Heideggerian phenomenology and Hillman’s psychology, the philosopher Roberts Avens (1984) may well provide us with the most critical reflections on this intersection of hidden presence and imagination: “Corbin’s mundus imaginalis is the necessary mediatrix (theologically conceived as Deus revelatus, revealed God) between the hidden Deity (Deus absconditus) and man’s world. It is the world of the soul or psyche which in the Platonic and esoteric tradition is called Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World” (3). With such formulations, Avens (1984) has little difficulty describing a “Corbinian-Hillmanian mysticism” (116), showing us the confluence between Corbin’s imaginal world, “where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual” (106), Hillman’s archetypal world, where “human individuality is not human at all, but more a gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service” (124), and the mystical world, where we find a “polytheistic style of consciousness that sees soul in each thing” (127). For Avens then, “it is precisely because ‘the divine God’ is hidden and concealed that it demands a multiplicity of forms (images)” (126), and that the “mystical core” of archetypal psychology “rests on the insight that wholeness or unity is in the image” (120).

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Anima Mundi and Non-dualism Mysticism is not only defined by mystical events, but also pertains to the ongoing, altered consciousness and philosophy of life that stems from these events, concerned with how the world of diverse things reveals divine immanence. Hillman (1975) argues that soul is itself a perspective, not a substance (xvi), and from Casey he borrows the parallel formulation, “that an image is not what one sees but the way in which one sees. An image is given by the imagining perspective and can only be perceived as an act of imagining” (Hillman 1997, 15). The ground common to mysticism and archetypal psychology that converges around these notions is most apparent in Hillman’s (1993) return to the Platonic world soul, the anima mundi, where “soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the streets” (101). This psychological retrieval of an ensouled world, which is an idea Hillman (1975) notes is variously present to a wide stream of Western thought, including “Jewish and Christian mystics,” and is evident “ever and again in the great poets…Yeats and Rilke and Wallace Stevens” (127–28), becomes a rather natural extension of his call for psychology to recover “a poetic basis of mind” (xvii) and release soul from its literalized interiority. In an echo of the same essential idea, responding to the question of where mysticism might be present to the modern world, Cupitt (1998) suggests, “the mystical is the way poetic language streams over, forms, and enfolds the entire empirical world” (140). The overlap between mysticism and soul-making thus belongs to the way subject and object divisions collapse in a perceptive mode that displays a simultaneous loving, knowing, and imagining. This mode is perhaps most apparent in the mystic’s reach for erotic imagery in the attempt to express the union with God, but it is present to the archetypal sense of soul generated when subjectivity returns to things of the world, forming an erotic field between the individual and the now reanimated other. When that other is imagined in divine terms, not only subject and object, but also the binaries of self and world, inner and outer, human and divine, all undergo radical reconfiguring. Mystical non-dualism finds its most pristine expression in unio mystica. As McGinn (1996) puts it, “the classic schools of mystical authors in the Western Church from the twelfth through the sixteenth century used the language of union with God as the favored way of characterizing the goal of their beliefs and practices” (60). More specifically, McGinn addresses the way love, knowledge, and mystical union form

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a triad of core mystical values that are rooted in “Greek religious and philosophical thought” (61). He writes, “Although Plato defined the goal of the true lover of wisdom mostly in terms of contemplation (theoria) rather than union, his analyses of the roles of both knowing and loving in the ascent to the vision of the Good anticipate much that is later found in Christian mystical theory” (61). Discussing the teaching of William of Saint-Thierry, McGinn says it “might best be described as an intelligentia amoris … a mutual penetration of love and knowledge on a higher level” (64). Specifying the connection between Greek and Christian mysticism, McGinn offers the following: Of major significance for Christian mysticism was the thought of the greatest Greek mystic, Plotinus (204-270 C.E.), who made union (henosis) understood as merging or essential identity central to his teaching. Plotinus absorbed the Neo-aristotelian notion of intellectual union with Pure Thought and Being (nous); but, since nous itself as the second hypostasis is dependent on the primal hypostasis of the One (to hen), the ultimate goal of the mystic is the return of absolute union with the One through the power of love (eros), or “loving intellect” (nous eron). (61)

Throughout his writings, Hillman (1972) emphasizes eros and the primary role it plays in soul-making, building on an early move to place the myth of Eros and Psyche at the core of depth psychology. There he argued that eros “engenders psyche” (54) and later that the personifying mode of perceiving divine presence is “an epistemology of the heart” (Hillman 1975, 15). He also held Plotinus as a foundational figure in the soul-centered approach, building on the Neoplatonic tradition, and describes “the thought of the heart” as a mode of perception crucial to both soul-making and the restoration of anima mundi. In an essay dedicated to the theme, Hillman (1993) ties loving and knowing, as well as imagining, which together form a perspective in which the typical dualistic sense of mind and world collapse: “This intelligence takes place by means of images which are the third possibility between mind and world…the interpenetration of consciousness and world…This imaginal intelligence resides in the heart: ‘intelligence of the heart’ connotes a simultaneous knowing and loving by means of imagining” (7). Hillman (1993) quotes Corbin’s description of this mystical perspective at the start: “This power of the heart is what is specifically designated by the himma, a word whose content is perhaps best suggested by the Greek

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word enthymesis, which signifies the act of meditating, conceiving, imagining, projecting, ardently desiring…” (5).

A Note on Postmodernism and Myth William James (1902) proposed the two primary characteristics of mysticism to be “ineffability” and a “noetic quality” (380). Whereas we might argue ineffability inevitably succumbs to a combination of psychic and then poetic images—such as clouds and dark nights—the essential character and function of the via negativa cannot be overlooked. Not only does it appear to empty the ego of worldly attachments and notions of identity, it also ushers the mystical seeker into a kind of knowing that avoids positing any idea or understanding of the divine. That is, the ineffability is paradoxically woven into the noetic quality. Along such lines, at the close of this discussion, I’m compelled to consider the fertile if unexpected ground for contemplating mysticism’s contemporary significance in postmodern thought and the associated prioritizing of myth in the approach to religious experience, both of which underscore the descent from spirit to soul. Mark C. Taylor (1999) points out, “virtual culture realizes Nietzsche’s vision of a world in which every ostensible transcendental signified is apprehended as a signifier caught in an endless labyrinth of signifiers” (26). The death of God is essentially the death of a perceptual mode in which the direct understanding of a transcendent God, the ultimate signifier, seems possible. In absence of this perceptual mode, we’re left with an “endless labyrinth” of competing signs that fail to connect us to any ultimate reality. Taylor continues: … death does not discredit God but is actually the climax of divine self-realization. Through a kenoic process, God’s transcendence becomes an immanence in which the divine is totally present in the here and now. The death of the transcendent signified effectively divinizes the web of images and simulacra that constitute postmodern culture. When there is nothing beyond the sign, image is all. (26)

However, here we find ourselves at a fork in the road of cultural interpretations. Whereas one path leads to deconstructive dogma and a post-structural death of depth and meaning, the other path offers the imagination itself as a realm of fluid meanings, without the need for

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direct ties to essences, structures, and metaphysical anchors. Traversing this other path, deconstruction “seem(s) not so much a threat as a promise if it will tutor us in a more satisfying metaphoring of the whole complex of knowledge and its application—a sort of ‘athletics of the psyche’” (Doty 1986, 237). Such athletics may well allow the hidden God of mysticism to come into its own. Working from Wallace Stevens’ formulation, “God and the imagination are one,” Taylor (1999) offers: “If the point of contact between God and self is the imagination, then divine creativity is, in effect, displaced onto human creativity” (208). This is the shift that Hillman also offers, focusing not on archetypes in order to promote the timeless and universal pedigree of psycho-spiritual experiences, but on an archetypal way of seeing, which responds to and cultivates those images and metaphors that carry divine presence in their very immediacy. As he indicates, “archetypal” points to value, and “the universality of an archetypal image means also that the response to the image implies more than personal consequences” (Hillman 1997, 20). It is the cultivation of such images that allows us to navigate Taylor’s “endless labyrinth of signifiers”—cultivation through loving engagement, contemplation, and deepening, through qualities of consciousness rather than speculations about what that consciousness perceives. Postmodernism places before us the task of imaginal discernment—the capacity to tell the difference between hidden God(s) and an anarchy of signs and stimuli. In this postmodern swirl of meaning and meaninglessness, the mode of thought that best accomplishes this task is myth. Myth provides an architecture of the sacred without needing to concretize its fictional forms. As Cupitt (1998) asserts: “All religious belief, including belief in God and life after death, is mythological” (2). Such a mythic view of religion is conversant with what he calls “the mysticism of secondariness,” which “actively rejoices in and affirms all the features of the postmodern condition” (3). Secondariness is taken from the Aristotelean distinction between primary and secondary substances and designates a philosophical stance in which “nothing is primary. There is no specially privileged and secure starting point, first principle or foundation” (7). Cupitt proposes this “new postmodern mysticism can be seen as a continuation and a radicalization of the older tradition” (3). It is a “mysticism minus metaphysics, mysticism minus any claim to special or privileged knowledge, and mysticism without any other world than this one” (8). Writing of the contemporary significance of myth, Doty

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(1986) offers: “There are no guarantees from an extracosmic Source, yet we go on fictionalizing the possibility of such Sources and living from out of our fictions, a fragmentary holding patterns within the sweep of universal history” (247–48). Hillman (1975) writes: “religious questions as separate theological perplexities tend to fall away when one sticks closely to the soul… The theological reality of the Gods no longer seems paramount, as they become more psychologically evident in the images and myths of our lives” (168). In such a way, Hillman is able to “admit that archetypal psychology is theophanic” (228). Yet, this is so only because “the primary rhetoric of archetypal psychology is myth,” “myths are themselves metaphors” and “myths do not ground, they open” (Hillman 1997, 28–29). Quoting Friedländer, Hillman writes (1975), “we meet archetypal reality through the perspective of myths, since ‘fading into uncertainty belongs to the very nature of myth’” (157). The mystic may well feel certain of a divine presence, but uncertainty and mystery simultaneously permeate everything about this presence, and that uncertainty is imbedded in the mythopoesis of mystical experience. When the mystic’s vision of the divine is conveyed and understood by means of imagination and myth, that vision becomes a soul concern far more than a spiritual one. To this extent, Hillman’s soul-focused, depth psychology of religion appears most useful.

References Avens, Roberts. 1984. The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. Capra, Fritjof. 1975. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Boston: Shambala Publications. Cupitt, Don. 1998. Mysticism After Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Doty, William G. 1986. Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Dupré, Louis. 1996. “Unio mystica: The State and the Experience.” In Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, edited by Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn, 3–23. New York: Continuum. Eckhart, Meister. 2009. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. Translated by Maurice O’C Walshe. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Gellert, Michael. 1994. Modern Mysticism: Jung, Zen and the Still Good Hand of God. York Beach, ME: Nicholas-Hays Inc.

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Goswami, Amit. 1993. The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. New York: Penguin Putnam. Harvey, Andrew. 1996. The Essential Mystics. San Francisco: Harper. Hillman, James. 1964. Suicide and the Soul. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1972. The Myth of Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1975. Re-visioning Psychology. New York: HarperCollins. ———. [1976] 2005. “Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences Between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline.” In Senex and Puer, edited and introduced by Glen Slater, Uniform Edition, vol. 3. Thompson, CT: Spring Publications. ———. 1993. The Thought of the Heart & the Soul of the World. Dallas: Spring Publications. ———. 1997. Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publication. Hunt, Harry. 2003. Lives in Spirit: Precursors and Dilemmas of a Secular Western Mysticism. Albany: State University of New York Press. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. Jung, C. G. 1967. Alchemical Studies. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 13. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1968. Psychology and Alchemy. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 12. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1969. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 8. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1970. Civilization in Transition. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 13. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McGinn, Bernard. 1996. “Love, Knowledge and Unio mystica in the Western Christian Tradition.” In Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, edited by Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn, 59–86. New York: Continuum. Sells, Michael. 1996. “Bewildered Tongue: The Semantics of Mystical Union in Islam.” In Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, edited by Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn, 87–124. New York: Continuum. Taylor, Mark C. 1999. About Religion: Economies of Faith in a Virtual Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Underhill, Evelyn. 1914. Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People. New York: J. M. Dent & Sons. Zukav, Gary. 1979. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. New York: HarperCollins.

PART III

Self and No-Self, Knowing and Unknowing in Depth Psychology & Mysticism

CHAPTER 12

Apophasis and Psychoanalysis David Henderson

The debate about the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge has been a perennial theme in psychoanalytic writing. This includes discussions about the scientific status of psychoanalysis, the aims of analysis, the nature of interpretation, the relationship between fantasy and reality, and so on. The “talking cure” places a premium on insight and putting things into words. “Where id was there ego shall be,” said Freud (2001). A strong implication is that where ignorance was there knowledge shall be. This chapter focuses however not on psychoanalytic knowledge, but on psychoanalytic ignorance and the disciplined learned ignorance of the analyst, in Jung’s depth psychology. In the realm of practice, if not always in that of theory, psychotherapists are very preoccupied with not knowing. While it is not officially in the prospectus, an important element of any training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is developing the capacity to bear long stretches of time when you do not know and cannot know what is happening in the session or in the analysis. Grinberg (1969) observed that, “In spite of its tremendous impact on mankind, paradoxically enough, it has not yet been possible to place and classify psychoanalysis within any of the existing fields of knowledge” D. Henderson (*)  Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, London, UK © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_12

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(517). Wilfred Bion (1988) argued that the focus of the psychoanalyst must be on “the unknown and unknowable” (27). Ricoeur (1970) associated psychoanalysis with the hermeneutics of suspicion. Karlsson (2000) speculated that: One of the reasons that psychoanalysis as a science struggles with difficult epistemological problems is that its subject matter – the unconscious – is constituted in terms of negativity. What other science investigates something which is defined by the prefix un-?! The only resembling discipline, in this sense, may be the so-called “negative theology,” which claims that an understanding of God can only be reached by stating what God is not. (4)

These views contribute to an appreciation of the problematic of unknowing in psychoanalysis, pointing toward the conclusion that psychoanalysis is a contemporary site for apophasis. Sells (1994) translates apophasis as “unsaying.” He distinguishes between apophatic theory and apophatic discourse. Apophatic theory “affirms the ultimate ineffability of the transcendent” (3). Apophatic discourse consists of “writings in which unnameability is not only asserted but performed” (3). This echoes the distinction often employed in psychotherapy between psychic content and psychic process. Psychoanalysis is both a theory and a performance. The varieties of apophasis have been classified in a number of ways. Milem (2007) identifies four types of apophasis under the headings: metaphysical, desire, experience, and renunciation. Rorem (2008) writes about progressive apophatic, complete apophatic, and incarnational apophatic. McGinn (2009) claims that apophasis can be subjective or objective— there being three varieties of relative subjective apophasis. Franke (2007) speaks of the silent matrix of the unmanifest and inexpressible. Pseudo-Dionysius (hereafter Dionysius) uses a range of concepts that carry what Sells calls apophatic intensity, including: apophasis (unsaying, denial, negation), aphaeresis (abstraction), hoion (as it were, so to speak), hyper (above, beyond, super), exaireou (to be removed from, transcend), epekeina (transcendent, beyond), exaiphnes (sudden, suddenly), ekstasis (ecstasy, ecstatic), apeiron (infinite, unlimited), agnousia (unknowing, unknowable, undetectable), henousis (unity, union), and theousis (deification, divinization). The point is that there simply is no such thing as the apophatic. Apophasis is not one but many—opening the door to many interpretive possibilities.

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Psychoanalytic theory and practice are saturated with apophatic maneuvers. The intuition of apophasis at work in each of the traditions of psychoanalysis (Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, Existential, etc.) accounts for their family resemblance. We recognize the clinical style and theoretical formulations of the disparate schools of analysis as analysis precisely because of the apophatic element. This chapter uses Cusa’s (1997) concept of the coincidence of opposites, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) theories of the Body Without Organs and becoming, and Derrida’s (1992) notion of space to illuminate distinct features of apophasis in the work of C. G. Jung.

Coincidence of Opposites The coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) is one of the fundamental organizing principles in Jung’s thought. Key concepts such as the self, the god image, the collective unconscious, wholeness, and synchronicity are instances of the coincidence of opposites. In 1931, in his first use of the term, Jung (1981a) describes the practice of psychology as a kind of performance of the coincidence of opposites: “The modern psychologist occupies neither the one position nor the other, but finds himself between the two, dangerously committed to ‘this as well as that’… it is no longer possible for the modern psychologist to take his stand exclusively on the physical aspect of reality once he has given the spiritual aspect its due” (¶679). Here Jung is holding the physical and spiritual to be a coincidence of opposites and is arguing that a modern psychology must accommodate both. Coincidence here refers to simultaneity, not to chance or randomness. Two phenomena coincide when they occupy the same space, be it logical, imaginative, or material space. Jung’s lifelong preoccupation with the coincidence of opposites is a preoccupation with trying to understand the simultaneous appearance of apparently incompatible phenomena, events, or situations. We are reminded here of Sells’ (1994) description of apophatic discourse: Classical Western apophasis shares three key features: (1) the metaphor of overflowing or ‘emanation’ which is often in creative tension with the language of intentional, demiurgic creation; (2) dis-ontological discursive effort to avoid reifying the transcendent as an ‘entity’ or ‘being’ or ‘thing’; (3) a distinctive dialectic of transcendence and immanence in which the utterly transcendent is revealed as the utterly immanent. (6)

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Sells seems to be describing three instances of the coincidence of opposites: overflowing/intentional (emanation/creation), dis-ontological/reifying, and transcendence/immanence. Jung (1976) cites Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) as his source for the term. He asserts that the often “tortuous language” associated with the discussion of the union of opposites “cannot be called abstruse since it has universal validity, from the tao of Lao-tzu to the coincidentia oppositorum of Cusanus” (¶200). Along with the infinite disproportion between the finite and the infinite, and learned ignorance, the coincidence of opposites is one of the three central doctrines of Cusa’s thought. Ideas of the coincidence of opposites predate Cusa, but he is the first to develop the concept systematically and to make it a lynchpin of his philosophy and theology. For Cusa, the coincidence of opposites is a methodology. As Bond (1997) describes it: At infinity thoroughgoing coincidence occurs… at true infinity there is one only and all are one. The coincidence of opposites provides a method that resolves contradictions without violating the integrity of the contrary elements and without diminishing the reality or the force of their contradiction. It is not a question of seeing unity where there is no real contrariety, nor is it a question of forcing harmony by synthesizing resistant parties. Coincidence as a method issues from coincidence as a fact or condition of opposition that is resolved in and by infinity. (22)

In Cusa’s (1440) On Learned Ignorance, the coincidence of opposites is described as one type of union of opposites. It is a “unity in convergence, that is, a ‘falling together’… a unity geometrically conceived, but without quantity… It is a unity of substance without mingling and without obliteration of either party or substance” (Bond 1997, 28). The coincidence of opposites is beyond the reach of discursive reasoning. The coincidence of opposites is a “unity to which neither otherness nor plurality nor multiplicity is opposed” (Bond 1997, 28). According to Bond (1997), Cusa describes the coincidence of opposites as the wall of paradise, beyond which is God: God is beyond the realm of contradictories… there exists an impenetrable barrier to human vision and reason… he intends that the reader understand not so much that God is the coincidence of opposites, but rather that opposites coincide in God… the notion of opposites coinciding

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requires a transcendent vision – seeing beyond particularity and sensibility, a seeing through and beyond the image or symbol, and an antecedent seeing, considering problems in their infinitely simple principle prior to contradiction. (46)

The coincidence of opposites is incomprehensible to human rationality. The encounter with the incomprehensible has a transforming effect on the identity of the searcher. To see coincidence is still not to see God. God, the object of human’s effort to see, however, acts on our seeing as subject so that the searcher and observer discovers oneself searched out, observed, measured, defined. This is one of the more interesting features of Cusa’s treatise – the human as figura, the theologian discovering oneself as symbol; the searcher after the meaning behind symbols becomes oneself a symbol. (Bond 1997, 46–47)

The idea that “the searcher after meaning behind symbols becomes oneself a symbol” resonates with Jung’s (1963) observations at the end of Memories, Dreams, Reflections: When Lao-tzu says: “All are clear, I alone am clouded,” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age… there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself. (359)

There are some parallels between Jung’s late reflections and Cusa’s (1464) last work. Earlier, in 1460 Cusa had used the term possest to name God. As Bond (1997) explains, it is “a play on words, a coincidence of posse (‘can’) and est (‘is’), the Can, the Possibility that at the same time Is, the Can-Is, which only God can be” (58). In On the Summit of Contemplation, Cusa calls God Posse Itself. According to Bond (1997), Cusa is “superseding not only negation and affirmation but also the coincidence of opposites” (59). This echoes Dionysius’ schema of kataphasis, apophasis, ekstasis. Posse Itself is “that without which nothing whatsoever can be, or live, or understand… without posse nothing

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whatsoever can be or can have, can do or can undergo… if it were not presupposed, nothing whatever could be… In its power are necessarily contained those things that are as well as those that are not” (Cusa 1997, 294–96). Seeing that Posse Itself involves neither comprehension nor cognition, Cusa “embraces the negation of knowing and at the same time the affirmation of sight” (Bond 1997, 62). The mind’s capacity to see Posse Itself lies in its own posse. In this sense, the posse of the mind is the image of God, Posse Itself: This posse of the mind to see beyond all comprehensible faculty and power is the mind’s supreme posse. In it Posse Itself manifests itself maximally, and the mind’s supreme posse is not brought to its limit this side of Posse Itself. For the posse to see is directed only to Posse Itself so that the mind can foresee that toward which it tends, just as a traveller foresees one’s journey’s end so that one can direct one’s steps toward the desired goal… For Posse Itself, when it will appear in the glory of majesty, is alone able to satisfy the mind’s longing. For it is that what which is sought. (Cusa 1997, 297–98)

Jung and Cusa share a view that there is a bridge between the human and a greater reality. For Jung, this bridge is the self, and for Cusa, it is the posse of the mind. Jung and Cusa are espousing a negative anthropology that resonates with that of Marion’s (2005) when he states “only the infinite and incomprehensible can comprehend man, and thus tell him of and show him to himself ” (18).

Deleuze The uncanny experience of being reminded of Jung when reading Deleuze is expressed by Zizek (2004) in characteristically pithy fashion: “No wonder, then, that an admiration of Jung is Deleuze’s corpse in the closet; the fact that Deleuze borrowed a key term (rhizome) from Jung is not a mere insignificant accident – rather, it points toward a deeper link” (662). Hallward (2010) observes, “If there is an analogue within the psychoanalytic tradition to Deleuze’s conception of the cosmos-brain it is not Lacan’s unconscious, but Jung’s cosmic consciousness” (48). Davis (2001) links Deleuze explicitly with the tradition of negative theology, but in general little has been made of this kind of connection. It is possible to understand two of Deleuze’s key concepts—“Body without Organs” (BwO) and “becoming”—as carriers of apophatic intensity.

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According to de Gaynesford (2001), “the BwO is defined apophatically, in relation to that which it is not. The same tendency informs the attempts by various theologians to define Christ’s incarnation” (93). The BwO stands in relation to organism. An organism exists as such because its shape has been externally imposed by God or another powerful agency. “We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but that organization of the organs called the organism” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 176). The BwO shares many characteristics of the collective unconscious. In Land’s (2011) words, “The unconscious is not an aspirational unity but an operative swarm, a population of preindividual and prepersonal singularities, a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality… This absence of primordial or privileged relations is the body without organs” (304). We might think of it as an archetypal maelstrom. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert that: Where psychoanalysis says, “Stop, find your self again,” we should say instead, “Let’s go further still, we haven’t found our BwO yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled our self.” Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It’s a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out. (167)

There are some parallels between the dismantling of the organism to uncover or create the BwO and the process of analysis. Seem (1984) compared Deleuze’s recommendation to make a BwO to Laing’s encouragement to “mankind to take a journey, the journey through egoloss” (xix). Jung (1976) observed that, “The self, in its efforts at self-realization, reaches out beyond the ego-personality on all sides; because of its all-encompassing nature it is brighter and darker than the ego, and accordingly confronts it with problems which it would like to avoid… For this reason the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego” (¶778). The creation of the BwO is a practice of unknowing which opens the practitioner to more unrestricted flows of life. Apophatic discourse can move in the direction of origins or in the direction of the future. The emphasis can be on an unknowable beginning or on an unknowable

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destination. The BwO could be seen as an example of a return to an incomprehensible origin. Becoming, a key concept in Deleuze’s work, is concerned to create and accomplish an incomprehensible destiny: “Deleuze’s pragmatic and future-oriented epistemology is oriented toward the creation of concepts ‘for unknown lands,’ as well as meanings and values ‘that are yet to come’” (Semetsky and Delpech-Ramey 2012, 7). The parallels with Jung’s concepts of individuation and the transcendent function are immediately evident: Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,” “being,” “equaling,” or “producing.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 263)

Here becoming is being defined apophatically, by what it is not. Jung (1958) describes the necessity for the analyst to follow the lead of the patient, to not intervene with preconceived attitudes and assumptions in the unfolding of the patient’s self-discovery or self-creation, “which sometimes drives him into complete isolation… It is, moreover, only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures” (¶525). The patient is compelled to pursue a perilous course of action: And though this desire opens the door to the most dangerous possibilities, we cannot help seeing it as a courageous enterprise and giving it some measure of sympathy. It is no reckless adventure, but an effort inspired by deep spiritual distress to bring meaning once more into life on the basis of fresh and unprejudiced experience. Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is best in man—his daring and his aspirations. And should we succeed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable experience which might have given a meaning to life. (Jung 1958, ¶529)

Deleuze (1995) echoes Jung’s call to experience: … one steps outside what’s been thought before, once one ventures outside what’s familiar and reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts

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for unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down and thinking becomes… a “perilous act,” a violence, whose first victim is oneself… Thinking is always experiencing, experimenting… and what we experience, experiment with, is… what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape. (103–4)

The transcendent function, which might be characterized as an apophatic method at the heart of Jung’s work, like becoming, occurs in the between. It is not a repetition but a becoming-other than oneself. The transcendent function produces difference. Differentiation is the engine of individuation: The subject-in-process, that is, as becoming, is always placed between two multiplicities, yet one term does not become the other; the becoming is something between the two, this something called by Deleuze a pure affect. Therefore becoming does not mean becoming the other, but becoming-other… The non-place-in-between acts as a gap, or differentiator, introducing an element of discontinuity in the otherwise continuous process of becoming and allowing the difference to actively intervene. (Semetsky 2006, 6)

The BwO and becoming operate as sites of apophasis within the work of Deleuze, who might be read as the philosopher for Jung’s analytical psychology.

Derrida In his essay, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Derrida (1992) uses the theme of “place” to organize his thoughts: “Figuration and the so-called places (topoi) of rhetoric constitute the very concern of apophatic procedures” (97). He does not present these as steps in a dialectic, because “we are involved in a thinking that is essentially alien to dialectic,” (100) but as “paradigms” or “signs.” He describes these paradigms in architectural terms as a mode that “will surround a resonant space of which nothing, almost nothing, will ever be said” (100). Jung’s theory is often described in terms of architectonics. The theme of place has echoes of Jung’s (1981d) discussion of mandalas. The mandala defines a space—psychic, imaginal, ritual—that provides an orientation toward an ultimately unknowable content: “All that can be ascertained at present about the symbolism of the mandala is that it portrays an autonomous psychic fact… It seems to be a sort of atomic

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nucleus about whose innermost structure and ultimate meaning we know nothing” (¶249). Derrida (1992) observes that the apophasis of Dionysius begins with prayer. Prayer functions as an orientation toward the unknown. The prayer at the beginning of the Mystical Theology is addressed simultaneously to God, to Dionysius’ disciple Timothy, and to the reader: The identity of this place, and hence of this text, and of its reader, comes from the future of what is promised by the promise… the apophasis is brought into motion – it is initiated, in the sense of initiative and initiation – by the event of a revelation which is also a promise… the place that is thus revealed remains the place of waiting, awaiting the realization of the promise. Then it will take place fully. It will be fully a place. (Derrida 1992, 117–18)

This sense of the revelation that is full of promise can be seen in Jung’s attitude toward psychic phenomena. The symbol contains promise of an as yet undisclosed meaning. Jung insisted on the importance of maintaining an open and expectant attitude toward the unconscious—waiting on the images. His texts can be read as addressed simultaneously to the unconscious and to the reader with an expectation of an unknown future. Jung (1981b) recommends a similar attitude of alertness to the unknown in the case of dreams and of individuation. He reminds himself when he hears a dream, “I have no idea what this dream means” (¶533). “Even if one has great experience in these matters, one is again and again obliged, before each dream, to admit one’s ignorance and renouncing all preconceived ideas, to prepare for something entirely unexpected” (¶543). The analyst by accepting his own ignorance is willing to be moved or illuminated by the dream. The dream provides perspective on the personal unconscious and life circumstances, but because personal complexes have roots in archetypal images, dreams are also windows into the collective unconscious. In analysis, Jung (1981c) finds that with some people there comes a time when they have exhausted an exploration of material that is dominated by repetition or family dynamics and the patient is challenged to discover their own individuality in a more radical way. In this situation, the analyst must adopt a stance of absolute openness in relation to the patient’s individuation: A collective attitude enables the individual to fit into society without friction… But the patient’s difficulty consists precisely in the fact that his

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individual problem cannot be fitted without friction into a collective norm; it requires a solution of an individual conflict if the whole of his personality is to remain viable. No rational solution can do justice to this task, and there is absolutely no collective norm that could replace an individual solution without loss. (Jung 1981c, ¶142)

Derrida’s (1995) goal is to penetrate the impossible, rather than pointless repetition of a program. “Going where it is possible to go would not be a displacement or a decision, it would be the irresponsible unfolding of a program. The sole decision possible passes through the madness of the undecidable and the impossible: to go where it is impossible to go” (59). The analytic space is a space set apart. The entrance and exit from the space receives a great deal of attention in psychoanalytic technique, as the integrity of the frame of analysis is considered vital in creating the possibility for the kind of openness that Jung is describing. Derrida (1992) asserts that in the work of Dionysius, “It is necessary to stand or step aside, to find the place proper to the experience of the secret” (89). He suggests that the practitioners of both deconstruction and negative theology appear suspect to outsiders because they seem to belong to secret societies: “‘Negative theologies’ and everything that resembles a form of esoteric sociality have always been infortuitously associated with phenomena of secret society, as if access to the most rigorous apophatic discourse demanded the sharing of a ‘secret’… It is as if divulgence imperilled a revelation promised to apophasis” (88). The stain of the secret, real or imagined, casts its aura over the analytic relationship and analytic institutions. The seal of confidentiality breeds both confidence and suspicion. In alchemy, as Jung (1981d) observes, “The substance that harbours the divine secret is everywhere, including the human body” (¶421). According to Rayment-Pickard (2003), “Derrida argues that discourses of negation are always also affirmative, either echoing or presupposing the positivities they seek to describe by denials” (127). When he writes about the trace, it is possible to hear echoes with a possible interpretation of Jung’s concept of archetype. “The most negative discourse, even beyond all nihilisms and negative dialectics, preserves the trace: The trace of an event older than it or of a ‘taking-place’ to come, the one and the other: there is here neither an alternative nor a contradiction” (Derrida 1992, 97). We could read this as a suggestion that one aspect of the apophatic dynamic at play between the ego and the archetype is

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that for the ego the archetype can represent simultaneously a trace of a primordial event and a trace of an unknown future. This is one way in which the archetype acts as a coincidence of opposites. Bradley (2004) describes Derrida’s method as a questioning of binary oppositions: The binary differences that constitute Western metaphysics are shown to be preceded by a third position that belongs to neither and that allows those differences to appear as oppositional. This unthought space between the transcendental and the empirical is the aporia that – however impossibly – deconstruction attempts to think. (24)

This “unthought space” is the ground on which deconstruction meets the discourse of negative theology. This potential space between the transcendental and the empirical was also the space that Jung was exploring. His description of the work of the alchemists serves as a description of his own work. In it we can hear echoes of Derrida’s (1992) discussion of negative theology—“It situates itself beyond all position” (91): The imaginatio, as the alchemists understand it, is in truth a key that opens the door to the secret of the opus… The place or the medium of realization in neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality which can be adequately only expressed by the symbol. The symbol is neither abstract nor concrete, neither rational nor irrational, neither real nor unreal. It is always both. (Jung 1981d, ¶400)

Derrida and Jung are making and unmaking language in order to think about and imagine the space of individuation.

Conclusion Psychoanalytic theory and practice are sites of apophatic theory and discourse. Jung’s depth psychology is saturated with apophasis. The learned ignorance of the psychoanalyst, which is perfected and deepened over time, opens a space for the client to dwell in his or her subjectivity. The precarious unknowing of the analyst facilitates the emergence of the client’s singularity, which paradoxically is their point of union with the infinite.

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References Bion, W. R. 1988. Attention & Interpretation. London: Karnac. Bond, H. Lawrence. 1997. “Introduction.” In Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, by Nicholas of Cusa, translated by H. Lawrence Bond. New York: Paulist. Bradley, Arthur. 2004. Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy. London: Routledge. Cusa, Nicholas of. 1997. Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, translated by H. Lawrence Bond. New York: Paulist. Davies, Oliver. 2001. “Thinking Difference: A Comparative Study of Gilles Deleuze, Plotinus and Meister Eckhart.” In Deleuze and Religion, edited by Mary Bryden. London: Routledge. de Gaynesford, Maximilian. 2001. “Bodily Organs and Organisation.” In Deleuze and Religion, edited by Mary Bryden. London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations, 1972–1990. Translated by Marin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denial.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by H. Coward and T. Foshay. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. On the Name. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Franke, William. 2007. On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts, Volume I. Classic Formulations. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. “New Introductory Lectures [1933].” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22. London: Vintage. Grinberg, Leon. 1969. “New Ideas: Conflict and Evolution.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50: 517–28. Hallward, Peter. 2010. “You Can’t Have It Both Ways: Deleuze or Lacan.” In Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze’s Debate with Psychoanalysis, edited by Leen de Boole. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Jung. C. G. 1958. “Psychotherapists or the Clergy (1932).” In Psychology and Religion: West and East, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1963. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1976. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 14. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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———. 1981a. “Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology (1933).” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1981b. “On the nature of dreams (1945).” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1981c. “The Transcendent Function (1957).” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1981d. Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 12. London: Routledge. Karlsson, Gunnar. 2000. “The Question of Truth Claims in Psychoanalysis.” The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 23 (1): 3–24. Land, Nick. 2011. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2005. “Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing.” Journal of Religion 85 (1): 1–24. McGinn, Bernard. 2009. “Three Forms of Negativity in Christian Mysticism.” In Knowing the Unknowable: Science and Religions on God and the Universe, edited by J. Bowker. London: Tauris. Milem, Bruce. 2007. “Four Theories of Negative Theology.” Heythrop Journal 48 (2): 187–204. Rayment-Pickard, Hugh. 2003. Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale. Rorem, Paul. 2008. “Negative Theologies and the Cross.” Harvard Theological Review 101 (3–4): 451–64. Seem, Mark. 1984. “Introduction.” In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. London: Continuum. Sells, Michael A. 1994. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Semetsky, Inna. 2006. Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Semetsky, Inna, and J. F. Delpech-Ramey. 2012. “Jung’s Psychology and Deleuze’s Philosophy: The Unconscious in Learning.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 44 (1): 69–81. Zizek, Slavoj. 2004. “Notes on a Debate ‘From Within the People.’” Criticism 46 (4): 661–66.

CHAPTER 13

Divine Darkness and Divine Light: Alchemical Illumination and the Mystical Play Between Knowing and Unknowing Stanton Marlan

The art and alchemy of transformation is a large and complex subject. There are many approaches to understanding the opus alchemicum and its goals of solification and the Philosophers’ Stone. My approach to this work is from the perspective of a Jungian analyst, which means privileging a certain orientation and point of view. It is a point of view that continues to develop within, around, and on the edges of the Jungian tradition, and, for me, it remains an open inquiry that continues to intrigue and surprise me. Like Jung, the alchemists were interested in fundamental and elemental change, classically imagined as the transformation of lead into gold, a base substance into a noble one. Jung’s (1968) revolutionary insight was that the alchemists were not simply concerned with the “material This paper was first presented at the “Ars Alchemica: The Art and Alchemy of Transformation” Conference held at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, August 2017. S. Marlan (*)  Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, Pittsburgh, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_13

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world,” but were speaking in symbols about the soul and were working simultaneously as much with the “imagination” as with the literal substances of their art (Fig. 13.1).

Fig. 13.1  “Dr. Faust”; engraving by Rembrandt (c1652) (Source https:// www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/371738)

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This shift of focus from the literal to the imaginal, from substance to image and imagination, had its roots in the idea that the alchemists were projecting into a mysterious unknown called “matter,” another unknown—the unconscious psyche. Thus, Jung (1968) proclaimed “ignotum per ignotius” (¶345), his attempt to understand the unknown by the greater unknown.1 While knowledge about matter and psyche was both obscure in the deepest sense, using the developing idea of the unconscious psyche to understand alchemy opened a new and creative vista. This opening of a psychological approach allowed Jung to understand the alchemical opus in a new way that both revealed and yet preserved the mysteries of transformation. Jung concluded that the “gold” the alchemists were trying to produce was not simply the common vulgar gold but the aurum non-vulgi or the aurum philosophicum, a philosophical gold. This imaginal, philosophical, and psychic reality was a new category used to understand the mysteries of alchemy. It became clear to Jung that alchemy was interested not just in the perfection of nature, but also in the creation of a higher-level human being, divine salvation, and the transformation of the cosmos, with what Aaron Cheak (2013) calls both “gold-making and god-making” (18). Alchemy then was an opus divinum, a sacred work and far more than simply the protoscience of chemistry. It was also a religious philosophy and a psychological and transformational art. Jung came to see alchemy as a precursor and confirmation of his psychology of the unconscious. The wealth of alchemical symbolism and the complexity of its system of transformation added to the richness and depth of Jung’s psychology. Over the years, many analysts and scholars influenced by Jung’s work have continued to make important contributions to alchemical studies. My own work has been primarily influenced by Marie-Louise von Franz, Edward Edinger, James Hillman, and Wolfgang Giegerich. Each of these thinkers has approached alchemy in different ways. Von Franz and Edinger both amplified and helped others gain access to what they saw as Jung’s fundamental and profound insights. Hillman and Giegerich challenge Jung, are iconoclastic, and offer alternative, if related, ways of imagining and thinking about alchemy. My own perspective is rooted in and responds to the tension of ideas catalyzed by the differing ways of coming to terms with the alchemical 1 For

Giegerich ([1998] 2001), this is merely a mystification (157–68).

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imagination, still unfolding in the Jungian tradition and elsewhere. I once wrote about my perspective using the metaphor of the alchemical stove with its many burners and degrees of heat (Marlan 2006, 3). At the time, I imagined Jung in one alembic on a back burner, cooking over a low and steady heat, with Hillman and Giegerich in differently shaped vessels, boiling up-front, as I was trying to prepare my own concoction utilizing the vapors produced by them and others to further distill and coagulate the essences necessary for the difficult work of understanding and forwarding an alchemical psychology and its elusive and mysterious goal. Since that time, my experiment in understanding alchemy has shifted a bit. Jung’s ideas are back up-front, and I find myself returning to consider his work again and again (Fig. 13.2). Currently, I have been focusing on Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis (1970), his last great work on alchemy. As a book, and as an archetypal idea and image, it is at the core of the alchemical opus and central to Jung’s psychology. The Mysterium Coniunctionis as a book has been described as the “summa of Jungian psychology” (Edinger 1995, 17). Its first chapter, entitled “The Components of the Coniunctio,” describes the overarching theme of the alchemical work. Jung (1970) states: “The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love” (¶1). One way of reading this description is to observe that the archetypal energies of enmity and love are fundamental forces in the eternal play of opposites. These forces are both cosmic and universal, as well as aspects of the human soul. The opus of the alchemists then can be understood as entering into relationship with these energies in an attempt to produce a mysterious conjunction essential to the goal of the work. It is not surprising then that Jung (1970) refers to Karl Kerenyi on the Aegean Festival in Goethe’s Faust and its literary prototype of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz as motivating his writing in the Mysterium. Jung likewise notes that the idea of the “chymical wedding” is “a product of the traditional hierosgamos symbolism of alchemy” (xiii). Hierosgamos is a Greek word for a sacred marriage, often signifying a ritualized sexual union symbolically inclusive of many levels of the coniunctio. It is a union of opposites and a way of opening and linking the deepest recesses of the soul and the cosmos, both human and divine. The Mysterium as a book is the final major statement of Jung’s understanding of the alchemical opus. It is also difficult to read,

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Fig. 13.2  Illustration of a homunculus in a vial by Franz Xaver Simm, 1899 (Source https://www.theepochtimes.com/homunculus-the-alchemical-creationof-little-people-with-great-powers_1344375.html)

understand, and assimilate—some say as difficult as understanding the alchemical texts themselves. Interpretations of the Mysterium are divided, some giving it high praise and profound respect (Edinger 1995), others relativizing its value (Hillman 2010), and still others dismissing it as outdated (Giegerich [1998] 2001; Power 2017). Hillman (2010) tries to avoid “any grand narrative that encompasses alchemy within an explanatory theory, such as Jung’s conjunction of opposites and the realization of the self, eschewing the temptation to give

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meaning by translation into universal symbols and noble metaphysics” (7). Both Giegerich ([1998] 2001) and Power (2017) claim that the Mysterium is no longer relevant to the soul, that it is of historical interest only, and so may be discarded or developed further, i.e., sublated. For Edinger (1995), on the other hand, it is so important that he believes it “will be a major object of study for centuries” (17). I agree with Edinger that the Mysterium is an important text, though I have no prediction of how it will be regarded in the future. It is Jung’s crowning achievement. It describes the opus of alchemy from beginning to end in breathtaking scholarly and psychological depth and is organized around images that illuminate the archetypal psyche. Edinger (1995) demonstrates how Jung guides his readers through over one hundred images that mark the path of alchemical transformation, from the war of opposites through the mercurial and central mystery of the coniunctio, to the emergence of the arcane substance, the Philosophers’ Stone, and the self. While my own style of thinking about alchemy is in many ways closer to Hillman’s Archetypal psychology, I nevertheless find the Mysterium Coniunctionis, both as a book and as the central image of the coniunctio, to be an essential key to understanding the dynamics of psychological transformation (Fig. 13.3). Jung was not always systematic in the way he spoke about the idea of the coniunctio. In a masterful chapter on the opposites, David Henderson (2014) provides a historical and scholarly account of the coniunctio as Jung presents it over the corpus of his Collected Works. Henderson differentiates the coincidentia oppositorum, the complexio oppositorum, the coniunctio oppositorum, and the unity of opposites. For Henderson, these differing descriptions reflect not only subtle differences in the meaning of the coniunctio, but also a progressive development of the idea over time (56–70). I will not reiterate the subtleties that Henderson describes, but in general the coniunctio and the transcendent function are attempts to describe what for Jung is an irrational, instinctual, half bodily/half spiritual, symbolic process of the transformation of opposites/contraries/differences, into some kind of unified transcendence. For Jung, the coniunctio opens toward images of wholeness: the birth of the filius philosophorum (the philosophical child), the Self, and the most famous of all alchemical images, the Philosophers’ Stone, an emergent image of transcendental wholeness. The stone then is the alpha and omega of the process, and, like Mercurius, it is the mediator and the intermediary of the goal of the work and has the power to transform earthly man into an illuminated philosopher (Abraham 1998, 145) (Fig. 13.4).

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Fig. 13.3  Rati-asana (detail). Stone, Khajuraho, Vishvanatha temple, 1059–1087 (Credit Oversnap 471246509/iStock.com)

The Philosophers’ Stone is said to have a thousand names, and yet it is also nameless and ineffable. Gratacolle (1652) mentions “a Dragon, a Serpent, a Toad, the green Lion, the quintessence, … Camelion, … Virgins milke, radicall humidity, unctuous moysture, … urine, … water of wise men,” and other images (67). A number of the images are related to light and illumination: “Gold, Sol, Sun, … lightning, … afternoone light, … a crowne overcoming a cloud, … fire, … the fulle moone, … the light of lights, … our stone Lunare,” but he likewise tells us that the stone is also known as “blacker than black,” and the list goes on and on disseminating itself into a continuing complexity of images (67).

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Fig. 13.4  Stan’s Philosophers’ Stone (Source Photograph by author)

Since the black sun/sol niger is both prima materia and ultima materia, they are equally names of the Philosophers’ Stone, linking light and darkness and other opposites. I have recently added the notion of chaosmos, the unity of chaos and cosmos (Marlan 2013). Each of these images of the Philosophers’ Stone contains a subtle phenomenology that, if followed, opens a unique epiphany, a way into understanding the Stone’s multiplicity. Despite the many names of the Stone, the alchemists stressed that it personified unity and consisted in one thing and one thing only. Morienus wrote: “For it is one Stone, one med’cin, in which consists the whole magistery,” and the Scala philosophorum stated: “The Stone is one: Yet this one is not one in Number, but in kind” (in Abraham 1998, 148). Perhaps what the alchemists had in mind was embodied in the Stone’s most paradoxical and mystical description lithos

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ou lithos, the “stone that is no stone.” In this description, the enigmatic quality of the Stone shines forth—ultimately what Abraham called the “arcanum of all arcana” (145). Is this then the mystery of the great work, the goal of the opus, the mysterious Philosophers’ Stone? Is this then the “med’cin” Morienus wrote about that contains the whole magistery? Does it then carry its self-negation within itself, a via negativa that separates it from literal nature and from any simple positive being or presence? Rather, is it an unknown, an absence, an obscurity, a darkness, or perhaps, more accurately, a fundamental paradox that links all binaries into an expression of the mysterium coniunctionis? If this is so, the “med’cin” is also a pharmacon—a poyson as well as a healing draught. One such pharmacon is sol niger, the black sun, one of the many symbolic expressions of the Stone. As an emergence from the mysterium coniunctionis, it is a conjunction and primal expression of Divine Darkness and Divine Light, unconscious and conscious, knowing and unknowing, ego and self, and the mystical play between these opposing tensions—in general, it reflects a dynamic condensation of the polar character of the archetypal psyche. In the phenomenon of sol niger, one discovers the blacker-than-black aspect of the psyche—the presence of a dark light, a light that Jung and the alchemists called the light of darkness itself, the lumen naturae, the unnatural light of nature. My major focus when writing about the black sun was to explore its darkest aspects, to lean toward the exploration of darkness in its darkest depths (Marlan 2005). But I am also indebted to the study of sol niger for its revelation of an intimate linking between it and the mysterious other that shines in the darkness. At the end of The Black Sun, my interest turned more directly to this other light and my work began to lean in the direction of exploring it as a manifestation of the goal of the alchemical work, the illuminated Philosophers’ Stone. Turning toward illumination is not simply moving beyond darkness, but seeing further into its paradoxical and mercurial complexity, hesitating at the ontological pivot point between presence and absence, inside and outside, consciousness and unconsciousness, knowing and unknowing, relativizing them but leaning toward the illumination that emerged in the deconstruction of these binaries (Fig. 13.5). What is the point, the ontological pivot point? In the “Paradoxa” chapter of the Mysterium, Jung takes up the symbolism of the point, which for him is a creative center where things and beings have their first origin.

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Fig. 13.5  Illuminatio. From ARTIS AURIFERAE, QUAM CHEMIAM VOCANT, VOLVMEN Secundum, QUOD CONTINET, Basel, 1572, p. 345 (Source Photograph by author)

As such, the point is an expression of the divine, which, like Mercurius, appears to be before, beyond, and between binaries. In Mysterium, this point also symbolizes the Godhead, and the light and fire that connect

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the divine to the scintillae, to sparks that shine in the darkness and then are related to the solificatio, illumination, enlightenment, gnosis, and the illuminated body that dwells in the heart of man. As the light of nature, it is also the radical moisture and healing balm that is the gold of wholeness, which Jung called the Self (Edinger 1995, 58). While working on the black sun and the multiple names for the Philosophers’ Stone, I noticed a parallel attempt to describe a supreme principle or archetype of divinity in the work of the mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius (1987), also known as Dionysius the Areopagite, hereafter referred to as Dionysius. In his The Divine Names, he attempts to express and understand God by examining a long list of attributes taken from the Old and New Testament scriptures. Like Gratacolle, with regard to the multiple images of the Philosophers’ Stone, Dionysius (1987) elaborates names associated with God, including: ‘being,’ ‘life,’ ‘light,’ … the ‘truth.’ … good, beautiful, wise, beloved, God of gods, Lord of Lords, Holy of Holies, eternal, existent, Cause of the ages. … source of life, wisdom, mind, word, knower, … powerful, and King of Kings, ancient of days, ancient of days, the unaging and unchanging, salvation, righteousness and sanctification, redemption, greatest of all and yet the one in the still breeze. (55)

The list of positive, affirmative names, referred to as kataphasis is followed by his work The Mystical Theology, often referred to as an apophatic approach, which suggests the limitation of any and all positive attempts to describe God. In The Mystical Theology, the positive attributes are surpassed by introducing the via negativa, which leads to a new level of mystical understanding of darkness and the hyper-essential designations of the reality of the divine. Just as in alchemy, the stone is not a stone, so in mystical theology, God is not God. This image of God as a Divine Darkness is illustrated by Meister Eckhart’s enigmatic prayer to God “that we may be free of God” (in Kroll-Fratoni 2013, 146). The via negativa is elaborated in The Mystical Theology, which begins with the question, “What is Divine Darkness?” In this treatise, Dionysius (1949) gives instructions to an initiate intended to guide him to the: ultimate summit of Thy mystical Lore, most incomprehensible, most luminous and most exalted, where the pure, absolute and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging

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our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty. (9)

The themes of illumination, Divine Darkness and Divine Light, are richly differentiated and amplified in the work of Henri Corbin and in the scholarly, experiential, and vital presentation of his work by Tom Cheetham (2002). Cheetham writes about the via negativa, the emptying God in Christian theology, kenosis, and the Destiny of the West, the hermeneutics of absence, and the faces of darkness, and the Faces of Light. Cheetham differentiates “two kinds of darkness, two sources of bewilderment” (67). He describes a “Darkness that is only Darkness, a darkness that refuses Light and is demonic,” unconscious and evil. He distinguishes this from another kind of darkness “that is not merely black, but is a luminous Night, a dazzling Blackness, a Darkness at the approach to the Pole” (the point?). This is the black light of what Corbin calls supraconsciousness. Cheetham notes that “[t]he appearance of Black Light marks a moment of supreme danger” (67). The black light signals “the annihilation of the ego in the Divine Presence” and its “unknowable origin.” “It announces the Nothing that exists beyond all being, beyond all the subtle matter that mirrors it[s] uncanny light. The Black Light marks the region of the Absolute, the Deus absconditus, the unknown and unknowable God” (67) (Fig. 13.6). How this God’s absence is encountered and experienced makes all the difference and is considered a “moment of the greatest danger”: One can become hopelessly swallowed up in the majesty of demonic darkness Fig. 13.6  Eclipse (Credit Choreograph/ iStock.com)

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or emerge initiated and resurrected in the beauty of theophanic revelation—a man of light perhaps not unlike the solification of the alchemist. Ultimately for Corbin as for Dionysius, Divine Darkness and Divine Light are logically and mystically inseparable and simultaneous, and there is “a constant interplay between the inaccessible Majesty of Beauty and the fascinating beauty of inaccessible Majesty” (Cheetham 2002, 68, quoting Corbin 1994, 103)—what I have called alchemical illumination and the mystical play between Divine Darkness and Divine Light. Cheetham (2002) writes that for Corbin, “this duality is the central feature of all Creation: without the blossoming of Beauty as theophany man could not approach the sublimity of the Deus absconditus” (68, quoting Corbin 1994, 150, n. 64) as “the Light of Glory” (73). Illumination and the resurrection into life requires a step more deeply into the interior of the via negativa, a radical via negativa, described as “the annihilation of annihilation,” (68, quoting Corbin 1994, 117).2 This level of negation “signifies the recognition of the Unknowable in ‘a supreme act of metaphysical renunciation,’ …. the real meaning of [mystical] poverty … darwish” (68). It is of interest to consider a psychoanalytic parallel other than Jung’s to this mystical notion of poverty. In a study of psychoanalysis and mysticism, Mark Kroll-Fratoni (2013) compares the work of Jacques Lacan and Meister Eckhart and concludes that Lacan’s “psychoanalysis and [Eckhart’s] mysticism are guided by a similar logic and structure as they are both oriented around [an emptying of the self and] processes of change” (v). Just as Jung’s idea of the Self required a defeat for the ego, so Lacan, following Freud, recognized that the ego is not “master in its own house” (Kroll-Fratoni 2013, 1, quoting Freud). Along with the idea of the unconscious comes the introduction of the Other into the heart of the Self, which displaces the centrality of the ego. With Lacan, this notion of the Other is radicalized and is a view of the unconscious and unknown, which cannot be “colonized or tamed” (Kroll-Fratoni 2013, 2). For Lacan, the self remains precisely “not-whole, and irreducibly heterogeneous” (Kroll-Fratoni 2013, 2) and decentered. Its “lack” is at the heart of continuous transformation and represents more than “a negative moment” in the dialectic of consciousness. It precludes “any attempt by the ego to constitute itself as a unity” (2). Lacan instead aims 2 This point is strikingly similar to the Madhyamika logic of the Buddhists—the voiding of the void.

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at acceptance of the unconscious as an alien, a radical “otherness” within the self, intrinsically lacking and self-emptying. Kroll-Fratoni goes on to say that, in a parallel way, Eckhart rejects the idea of a unity with a static notion of God as a being and instead seeks a unity with God as an ongoing activity of creation—with the self-­ emptying kenotic process that awaits the “event” of God’s birth in the soul of man (Kroll-Fratoni 2013, 94). Such a birthing process does not create wholeness or fullness, but rather opens an abyss which for Eckhart is the grunt or ground—as “a groundless-ground”—a non-onto-­ theological understanding of God, a mystical view resonant with Lacan’s. Lacan and Eckhart stay close to the via negativa and cast doubt on the via positiva. Any movement toward transcendence that tries to compensate for feelings of anxiety or incompleteness in the face of lack or annihilation is seen as defensively fleeing from the divine and/or finitude. It is a flight from the trauma of the abyss and from our creatureliness. For Eckhart, releasement (Gelassenheit), not defending against the abyss, “means letting go of the need for grounds and living without” a need to even ask the question “why?” (Kroll-Fratoni 2013, 225)—why things occur in the way they do. To let go of this question approaches the nothingness of the via negativa—being close to dying. In this regard, it is interesting to recall the last reported words of Timothy Leary before he passed away.3 It was recorded that at one moment Leary sat straight up in his bed and asked: “Why?” (as if to recognize Eckhart’s point). Then, there was a long, silent pause, and he responded much more softly, a number of times, “Why not? Why not?” At another moment, as though he was describing something he was seeing, he said “Beautiful”—as if intimating something more in the midst of approaching the nothingness of dying. A few days before he passed on, one of his disciples asked him, “Who are we?” He responded, “We are bearers of the light—light bearers.” Another question followed and he was asked, “What is our purpose?” and he responded, “We can shine it to illuminate others.” Such a shine of light is what Corbin captures in his mystical and gnostic vision of illumination. Is this simply a defense against the Abyss of the via negativa illusions that Lacan describes as imaginary? I would claim “no” (Fig. 13.7). 3 This account is based on numerous reports of Leary’s dying moments. For example, refer to Carol Sue Rosin’s “Timothy Leary’s Last Moments,” http://www.earthportals. com/Portal_Ship/rosin.html.

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Fig. 13.7  Nicolas de Locques: Les Rudiments de la Philosophie Naturelle. Paris, 1665, frontispiece (N. Bonnart) (Credit Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

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In an essay, Warren Coleman (2006) makes a distinction between Lacan’s view of the “imaginary” and Corbin’s view of the Imaginal or real imagination. The “imaginary” in Lacan’s sense emerges as a defense against negation and loss and flees from it, creating the kind of fantasy that Kant (1915) called “schwärmen,” a kind of madness and undisciplined metaphysical speculation, a “land of shadows … nursery tales, and monastic miracles” (37). Such fantasies lack depth, substance, and psychic reality. The real, symbolic, and Imaginal are products of the transcendent function rather than of transcendence in Kant’s sense. Jung (1971) notes that the transcendent in “transcendent function” “does not refer to a metaphysical quality but merely to the fact that this function facilitates a transition from one attitude to another” (480). It is a function in which the opposites, like absence and presence, light and dark, conscious and unconscious, are at play, shuttling to and fro in a tension out of which a new attitude emerges and in which the above binaries can be seen to be interpenetrative, a primordial expression of the mysterium coniunctionis. From this perspective, the via negativa is also a via positiva and more. Similarly, in alchemy, the prima materia is also the ultima materia both logically and mystically. Such combinations might as well be spoken of, in the way they are in mystical theology, as hyper-essential or divine. Divine Darkness and Divine Light imply one another; both are supra-abundant illuminations. I believe that this is the kind of illumination of which Corbin speaks. While Lacan and Eckhart resist moving away from the via negativa, they both also recognize that the Abyss carries another potentiality within itself. The revelations that occur within the midst of emptiness and the darkness of the via negativa are expressions of a bipolar archetypal reality, a via negativa intrinsically linked to a via positiva. This bipolarity is at the heart of our finitude and lack. There is considerable similarity between Eckhart’s notion of “wandering joy” (Kroll-Fratoni 2013, 185, quoting R. Schärmann) and Lacan’s idea of jouissance.4 Jouissance is a difficult notion to understand, and Lacan develops its meaning through several of his successive seminars. In simple terms, jouissance describes a kind of ecstatic sexual joy that is released in an acceptance of castration, lack, finitude, and death as fundamental truths of our human limits. 4 For Kroll-Fratoni’s discussion of this similarity, refer to Kroll-Fratoni (2013), pp. 230–31.

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This acceptance is at the same time a release, an “excess of life” and a “superabundant vitality,” that Lacan graphically states “[b]egins with a tickle and ends with blaze of petrol” (in Hewitson 2015). This mystical sexual energy linking pain and pleasure has what Hewitson, referring to Freud, calls a sexual coloring, and which Lacan describes as “the colour of emptiness, suspended in the light of a gap” (in Hewitson 2015). This gap, it would seem, is the space between human limits and divine plentitude. The experiences of both Eckhart and Lacan identify something that exceeds and yet is one with negation, a pleasure in nothingness. The nothing of the ecstatic is also elaborated by Henderson (2014) who shows that in addition to kataphasis (affirmation) and apophasis (negation), Dionysius includes ekstasis (ecstasy) as a third dimension of his mystical theology (13) (Fig. 13.8). It is important to note that the mystical experiences of affirmation and negation are not distinct moments in time, or aspects of a linear process—but are logically and mystically simultaneous. Negation is not the simple opposite of affirmation, but is “at work at the heart of Dionysius’ kataphatic celebrations of the divine” (Henderson 2014, 17). If these mystical and ecstatic experiences occur simultaneously in a moment, it is also the case that we are separated from this moment in the ordinary temporal reality of our lives. We do not live continuously in “wandering joy” (Kroll-Fratoni 2013, 185, quoting R. Schürmann) or in an eternal coniunctio or jouissance. The coniunctio falls apart, and we find ourselves outside of eternality and are mostly unconscious, everyday, all-too-human human beings. How then can we imagine the goals of alchemy, analysis, and mystical theology from our egoist ­position in time, as temporal beings in a process of development, growth, and individuation? Alchemy, psychoanalysis, mystical theology, and gnosis all describe initiatory processes and a phenomenology of a path leading to the goal of their respective disciplines. Comprehensive descriptions of these paths and processes are available in the respective literature and traditions of these disciplines. In all of the above, there are unique and individual variations on an archetypal process. There are no simply accurate cookbooks, and we are all thrown back on our unknowing. We enter analysis or spiritual disciplines for guidance. Dreams, fantasies, and visions give us access to the imaginal life, its images, and symbols that appear to have a telos and which Jung (1971) describes as the best possible expression of an as yet unknown reality. One might

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Fig. 13.8  Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (Credit filipe_lopes/iStockphoto.com)

say that images and symbols stand in the “gap” between the known and the unknown, illuminate us, and point the way to our unique possibilities.

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Illumination is an archetypal expression of the teleological function of symbolic images, as well as a manifestation of the numinosity of consciousness as it discovers its own radiant relationship to its unknown aspects. It is also an expression of conscious life within darkness itself. Dark light and the light of darkness, the lumen naturae, opens us to an uncanny recognition of an autonomous, or at least semi-autonomous, intelligence to whom we are drawn and who is also drawn to us. Recognition of this otherness can play a role in the unfolding of our lives, call us to a beyond, to a purpose that exceeds our own narcissism and opens us to the larger mystery of the anima mundi, or world soul. It is a critical moment in psychic development when we realize that the unconscious and what we thought was our inorganic material world show itself to have a consciousness of its own, a subject that looks back at and responds to us as we look at it. Edinger (1995) writes: “It is a major transition from the discovery of lights shining in the darkness of the unconscious to the discovery of eyes looking at us from within that darkness” (64) (Fig. 13.9).

Fig. 13.9  Peacock eyes (Credit Hypergurl/istockphoto.com)

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Edinger (1995) continues, “The presence of eyes indicates that the light residing in the unconscious has a subject,” and notes that Jung has said, “The eyes indicate that the lapis is in the process of evolution and grows from these ubiquitous eyes” (64; Jung 1970, ¶45). This is indeed an uncanny moment, connected to the archetype of “the eye of God” (65). How we relate to this moment can create considerable anxiety. The archetype of the Eye of God is bipolar: on the one hand, imagined as God looking after us, seeing us, knowing us; on the other hand, of being watched and scrutinized, an experience at the core of paranoia. Edinger suggests that the danger comes when we turn away from this recognition, not looking at or refusing to acknowledge it. When this occurs, “the experience of being looked at is replaced by being nagged by an obsessive complex” (65). Understood properly, this moment speaks to the fact that the unconscious requires attention and indicates that the individual is ready for an important step in individuation, “ready to relate to the unconscious as a light-bringer” and that “the ego is not the sole source of light” (61). I remember Edinger’s once telling me about dreams. After years of looking at them, observing their capacity to point out meaningful insights about the Self, he realized that dreams also look back at us that the unconscious “other” has a subjectivity of its own. Seeing the other as alive can be a truly numinous experience. While working on this paper, I had the following dream: I discover that an animal is living with me. I am in my den, sitting on the couch, and a large, sleek panther or jaguar comes over to me. He has a shining black coat and golden-yellow, intense eyes. I look into his eyes and realize that they don’t seem to have a pupil, but there are fields of yellow gold lying over one another, the way a camera’s aperture opens and shuts when a picture is snapped. His head is large, muscular, and odd shaped. I am frightened, but reach out tentatively petting him, not knowing if he will turn on me instinctually like a wild animal—or if he will befriend me. He seems to like the attention I am giving him. He stays a moment, then walks away and returns as if he wants me to stroke him again. I wonder if he has been in the house all along or if he was ever outside. I wonder about letting him out, but fear he will run away and/or be a danger to others. At one point, I am stroking him with a pen, pushing it into his fur, and he seems to like it and comes back again as if asking me to do it again.

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I suspect that the jaguar, as autonomous psyche, enjoys being written about and so, as I put my pen to this paper, I feel this jaguar—perhaps a totem animal accompanies and supports my effort to express something of the illumination present in the anima mundi (Fig. 13.10). In this presentation, I have explored some of the mutual overlap and goals between certain psychoanalysts, and mystical philosophers and theologians. Relying primarily on Jung, Lacan, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Henri Corbin, I have followed the thread of the via negativa in analysis, alchemy,

Fig. 13.10  Black Jaguar (Credit Ryan Ladbrook/istockphoto.com)

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mystical theology, and in the gnostic imagination. In and through the above traditions, the via negativa plays a central role in the emergence and outcome of an experience of transformation. It is this experience of transformation that psychoanalysis and mysticism share. Many of the images of this outcome have been noted, from the solification of the alchemist to the man of light in gnostic theophanies, accompanied by an excess of life and abundant divinity, “wandering joy,” and Jouissance, an ekstasis that opens to a Divine Darkness and a Divine Light. These experiences of illumination, continuing self-negation, and intrinsic positivity do not lead to any static, ontological fixity, but to an ekstatic, ongoing, vital process in the midst of finitude and temporality. Between finitude and eternity, alchemical and mystical illumination, in light of analysis, does not erase mystery but activate and enliven it, making it conscious and a significant part of psychological transformation. For me, mystery, imagination, and wonder can be like a wild animal, integral to psychological work—at a pivot point between being torn apart and/or a renewed vitality.

References Abraham, Lyndy. 1998. A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheak, Aaron. 2013. “Introduction: Circumambulating the Alchemical Mysterium.” In Alchemical Traditions from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde, edited by Aaron Cheak, 18–43. Melbourne: Numen Books. Cheetham, Tom. 2002. “Within This Darkness: Incarnation, Theophany and the Primordial Revelation.” Esoterica IV: 61–95. Accessed October 4, 2017. http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeIV/Darkness.htm. Coleman, Warren. 2006. “Imagination and the Imaginary.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 51 (1): 21–41. Corbin, Harry. 1994. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Translated by N. Pearson. New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications. Dionysius the Areopagite. 1949. Mystical Theology and the Celestial Hierarchies. Translated by the Editors of the Shrine of Wisdom. Godalming, UK: The Shrine of Wisdom. Edinger, Edward F. 1995. The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C. G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis. Edited by J. Dexter Blackmer. Toronto, CA: Inner City Books. Giegerich, Wolfgang. [1998] 2001. The Soul’s Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology. Frankfurt am Main, DE: Peter Lang.

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Gratacolle, William. 1652. “The Names of the Philosophers Stone.” In Five Treatises of the Philosophers Stone, edited by Henry Pinnell, 65–72. London, UK: Thomas Harper. Henderson, David. 2014. Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis: Pseudo-Dionysius and C. G. Jung. London, UK: Routledge. Hewitson, Owen. 2015. “What Does Lacan Say About … Jouissance.” Accessed October 4, 2017. http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2015/07/ what-does-lacan-say-about-jouissance/. Hillman, James. 2010. Alchemical Psychology, Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, vol. 5. Putnam, CT: Spring. Jung, C. G. 1968. Psychology and Alchemy, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 12. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1970. Mysterium Coniunctionis. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 14. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1971. Psychological Types. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Edited by Gerhard Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull, vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1915. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. London, UK: New-Church Press Limited. Kroll-Fratoni, Mark. 2013. “The Significance of Meister Eckhart’s View of the Self for Psychoanalytic Theories of Subjectivity: A Radical Hermeneutic Study.” PhD diss., Duquesne University. Available online at: https://pqdtopen.proquest. com/doc/1426182497.html?FMT=AI. Marlan, Stanton. 2005. The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. ———. 2006. “From the Black Sun to the Philosopher’s Stone.” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture 74: 1–30. ———. 2013. “The Philosophers’ Stone as Chaosmos: The Self and the Dilemma of Diversity.” Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche 7 (2): 10–23. Power, Pamela. 2017. “‘The Psychological Difference’ in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis.” In Psychology of as the Discipline of Interiority: “The Psychological Difference” in the Work of Wolfgang Giegerich, edited by Jennifer M. Sandoval and John C. Knapp, 43–54. London, UK: Routledge. Pseudo-Dionysius. 1987. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Translated by Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York, NY: Paulist Press.

CHAPTER 14

Nothing Almost Sees Miracles! Self and No-Self in Depth Psychology and Mystical Theology David L. Miller

Introduction Shakespeare has given to the European imagination one of the strongest articulations of the problem of self and no-self. Indeed, “nothing” is a favorite Shakespearean theme. The dramatist uses the word This essay was first given as the Fourth Annual Jim Klee Forum keynote lecture at West Georgia College on May 17, 1993. The author is grateful to James Klee and to the Department of Psychology at West Georgia College for its sponsorship. Other versions of the essay’s argument have been presented to Jung groups in Atlanta, Buffalo, and Montréal, as well as to classes of trainees at the Jung Institute in Zürich and at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. Also, the essay was published in a fuller form earlier as “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles! Self and No-Self in Psychology and Religion,” in The Journal of the Psychology of Religion, Volume IV–V (1995–1996): 1–26. It is used here with the knowledge and permission of the editor of that journal, Dr. Arvind Sharma of McGill University. D. L. Miller (*)  Syracuse University (Emeritus), Syracuse, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_14

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“nothing” 503 times in 36 plays. But the locus classicus is surely King Lear. “Speak,” demands Lear apropos his favorite daughter’s affection. “Nothing,” replies Cordelia, knowing that silence often speaks love more strongly than words. “Nothing?” queries the King. “Nothing, my Lord,” says the daughter, to which the father replies in desperation: “Nothing will come of Nothing” (Shakespeare 1936, 1198). The feeling mimes conventional wisdom. Ex nihilo nihil fit: nothing can be made of nothing. But the wisdom of foolishness knows better, as does the love of the daughter. When Lear reports to his Fool that Cordelia said “…nothing,” the Fool responds: “Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?” Lear—not getting the point, a point that it will take the whole tragedy of his madness to understand—repeats the natural attitude: “Why, no, Boy; nothing can be made out of nothing” (Shakespeare 1936, 1205). Three centuries later, we seem no more able to handle the “self” that experiences itself as no-self of nothingness than was Lear. We have jargon, to be sure: “free-floating depression,” “chronic fatigue syndrome,” “low self-esteem,” and so on, but the fact is that the presenting complaints these phrases mean to name is in our day epidemic and seems resistant to the treatment that one of Freud’s patients called “the talking cure.” We know well the symptoms. “My life has been worth nothing.” “My marriage (or work) is empty.” “Nothing has value or meaning.” “I feel inadequate.” “It’s hopeless.” Sometimes the psyche today seems like the economy and computers: When you need it, it is “down.” As David Loy (1992) has written: “We experience a deep sense of lack as the feeling that something is wrong with me” (152). Attempts have been made to give psychological explanation to this epidemic. It has been called narcissistic character disorder, a core-self crisis or trauma, absence of self-sense. Alfred Adler attributed the condition to a fundamental and universal inferiority complex that he thought is more basic than sexual instincts and complexes. C. G. Jung called it “negative inflation,” knowing that overweening childlike pretensions can never be fulfilled proves to one that one is inferior, thus megalomania brings with it a sense of nothingness (Jung 1959, ¶114; 1971b, ¶304). These explanations may be somewhat helpful, yet the symptoms are nonetheless resistant in the face of such theoretical understandings. Two sorts of problems may account for the poor prognosis in the case of this epidemic. The problems are psychological and theological.

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The psychological problem has to do with a theoretical fantasy regarding depression as a problem to be solved (per Loy, above). A sampling of statements by Jung regarding neurosis will begin to serve to indicate why there is difficulty in this fantasy: … no one has ever thought of seeing in the neurosis an attempt at healing, or, consequentially, of attributing to the neurotic functions a quite special teleological significance … . Psychoanalysis does not conceive the neurosis as anti–natural and in itself pathological, but as having a meaning and a purpose. (1970, ¶415; see 1972, ¶67) A neurosis is by no means a negative thing; it is also something positive. … hidden in the neurosis is a bit of a still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche lacking which a man is condemned to resignation bitterness and everything else that is hostile to life. (1964, ¶355; see ¶359) We should not try to “get rid” of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. We should even learn to be thankful for it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are. A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it – it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him. (1964, ¶361; see 1969, ¶74; 1977, ¶564)

I have cited these comments at length in order to indicate that they are not isolated or idiosyncratic and because they represent a perspective that is very much against the grain of the present natural attitude in our mental health culture.1 If for the moment we intentionally overlook distinctions between neuroses and characterological disorders of other sorts, then together Jung’s statements imply that conventional psychological explanations of the experience of nothingness obscure a fundamental depth psychological insight. By assuming that low self-esteem is a problem to be solved, the perspectives of these explanations do not entertain the possibility that the psyche is a compensatory, autonomous, self-regulating system. The explanations thus miss the possibility of the insight of Lear’s Fool that nothingness may have a purpose.

1 A radically different, but also Jungian, view of neurosis has recently been argued by Wolfgang Giegerich (2013).

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But there is also potentially a second difficulty with the problem-orientation of a sense of emptiness. This second matter is theological, but it may well have very practical therapeutic significance. The majority of mystical theologies in the world’s religious traditions hold as a spiritual goal precisely the nothingness and emptiness about which those who suffer today complain. The spiritual goal in these religious traditions is spoken of in rhetoric that suggests that one not aspire to achieve self-sense, selfhood, or identity, but that one precisely lose these in favor of a sense of no-self. How can this be? How can it be that what is experienced as a psychological problem is precisely the religious solution to the very same problem of selfhood? Is this merely a semantic accident, a sort of slippage of language, so that in fact there are really different “nothings”? Before turning to the psychological questions, I will first treat the theological issue; then, I will return to the question of what this symptom of nothingness—when and if it strikes—wants.

The No-Self of Religion It is customary to think that the goal of emptiness is characteristic of the religions of Asia, or at least of the mystical practices of those religious traditions. To be sure, this is not altogether a false notion. Examples from Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism will make the point. In the Upanishads, there is a well-known passage in which a spiritual teacher responds to a student’s question concerning the nature of the “self” by asking the student to bring a glass of water and to stir some salt into it. On tasting the water, the student reports that it tastes salty, but that he can see nothing in the water. At which point the teacher says: Tat tvam asi, “thou art that,” which is tantamount to observing that the “self” is the nothing—the no-thing—within (Mascaró 1965, 117–18). The “self” is thus neti…neti …“neither this nor that,” that is, neither this some-thing nor that some-thing. This perspective, however, is not only to be found in the esoteric traditions within Hinduism. It also is found in sources of popular piety, as in the case of the Bhagavad Gita. There one finds Arjuna being instructed by Lord Krishna in the nature of nirvana, the goal of piety. Nirvana, Krishna says, is “hoping for nothing, desiring nothing” (Mascaró 1962, 70). Presumably this includes neither hoping nor desiring “self” Indeed, by the time of Nagarjuna (2nd C. CE), the “self,” atman, is described precisely as “no-self,” anatman/anatta (Nagarjuna 1967). In his

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commentary on the Brahma Sutra, Sankara refers to an Upanishad that has since become lost. Bahva, asked by Baskali to expound Brahman, kept silent. The student prayed, “Teach me, Sir.” But the teacher remained silent. When asked by the student a second and a third time, the teacher said, “I am teaching, but you do not follow. The self is silence” (in Coward and Foshay 1992, 220). Similar testimony is to be found in Chinese Taoism. There is the famous 11th poem of The Tao Te Ching, which may date from the fourth century BCE: Thirty spokes share one hub. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the vessel. Cut out doors and windows to make a room. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand and you have the use of the house. What we gain is something, yet it is by virtue of nothing that it can be put to use. (Lao Tzu 1963, 31)

Thus, the author of this classic text writes: “I do my utmost to attain emptiness” (Lao Tzu 1963, 72). If Indian and Chinese traditions possess many rich resources pointing to a perspective of no-self, the Zen ideal of dynamic self-emptying in Japanese spirituality insists centrally on the nothingness of so-called self. The koans of adepts’ questions and roshis’ responses are well-known and delightful: “Who or What am I?” “Search for your self from the top of your head down to your bottom. No matter how hard you search, you’ll never be able to grasp it. That is who you are.” (Ikkyu, 15th C., in Suzuki 1955, 111) “What is it that makes up the self?” “What do you want from me.” “If I don’t ask, how will I find the solution?” “Did you ever lose it?” (Sekito, 8th C., in Suzuki 1955, 109) “What is my self?” “What makes you ask?” (Yentoko of Yentsuin-ji, in Suzuki 1955, 110)

It has been argued by some Western psychologists and religionists that the dynamic self-emptying of the practice of Zen refers, not

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to the emptying of what in Occidental psychology is called the “self,” but rather to what is called by the name “ego.” However, not all Zen philosophers are in agreement with this attempt to soften the radically deconstructive aspect of Zen thought for psychological theory. For example, the comparative philosopher, Toshihiko Izutsu, speaking at Hunter College in New York City in 1975, ironically under the sponsorship of the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York, said at the outset of his presentation that there was a problem in speaking forthrightly about Zen in a Jungian context. The problem is that Zen philosophy asserts that there is no difference between ego and self. Izutsu (1977) said: “One enters into the world of Zen only when one realizes that his [or her] own I has turned into an existential question mark” (65). This refers to the so-called self as much as to the so-called ego. Masao Abe (1992), the Zen philosopher of religion, has put the matter even more strongly, saying that the notion of “self” itself leads to “selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill will, conceit, pride, egoism … .all the evil in the world” (57–58). These are harsh words. Indeed, this matter of questing for self or for no-self is not simple. The difficulty was demonstrated when Hisamatsu Sin’ichi, a Zen teacher of the Kyoto School, went on May 16, 1958, to the home of C. G. Jung to discuss with the depth psychologist whether or not the issue of seeking no-self in Zen and seeking self in the Jungian process of individuation was a semantic or a real difference. As Abe (1992) reports, their meeting was a disaster, a judgment apparently shared by Jung himself, and surely by the guardians of his estate (61n6). One wonders whether the lack of understanding between these two seminal thinkers may not have led to Jung’s outlandish statements: “My attitude toward their [Oriental] philosophy is irreverent” (1967, ¶74). “Eastern Occultism … is a mist of words and ideas that could never have originated in European brains and can never profitably be grafted on them” (1967, ¶3). But the difficulty is not explicable on the basis of a putative split between East and West, because the same view of the “self” as no-self is found as much in Occidental spirituality as in Oriental. The idea does exist in European brains, Jung to the contrary notwithstanding, and it seems to have grown there fruitfully without the benefit of grafting. This is why it is only a partial truth to say that the goal of self-emptiness is characteristic of the religions of Asia.

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In the tradition of mystical Judaism, for example, the Kabbalistic Zohar speaks of the unspeakable Divine by the image of sefiroth, and it declares that the ontological status of this is that of en sof, which is to say “no-thing.” Adam Kadmon, according to a representative text in this tradition, is the archetypal human figure within whom “God dwells [as] in the depths of nothingness,” which each of us is (Scholem 1969, 102). “When the Zaddik [the righteous person] cleaves to naught,” says the Kadishat ha-Levi, “and [then] annihilated, then [alone] he worships the Creator…since no division of…attributes is discernible there at all…. Moses was constantly cleaving to the naught” (in Idel 1988, 72). There is this apophatic side to the Christian tradition as well. Abe (1991) notes parallels to Zen in Christianity (63–67). For example, compare the saying of Lin-chi lu, “If you encounter a Buddha, kill the Buddha; …if you encounter mother or father, kill mother or father; if you encounter a relative, kill the relative—only in this way can you attain liberation and disentanglement from all things, thereby becoming completely unfettered and free” with the saying attributed to Jesus in Luke 14:26, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also—he cannot be my disciple” (Lk. 18:29, 30). There is also the hymn of kenosis in Philippians 2:5–7, a testimony to “emptiness,” as well as the sayings by St. Paul regarding the crucifixion of the “self” for the sake of Christ (Gal. 2:20, II Cor. 4:10, and Gal. 3:27, II Cor. 3:18). Perhaps most compelling are Jesus’s own words, “For whoever would save his life [ten psuchen] will lose it; and whoever loses his life [ten psuchen] … will save it” (Mk. 8:35; Mt. 16:25; Lk. 9:24; Jn. 12:25), words which are especially striking when one notes that the Greek text of the New Testament has the word psyche, meaning “soul” or “self” where the usual translation into English gives “life.” It would seem that the religious goal of not seeking the “self” or some self-esteem or self-identity, but of giving it up and letting-go of the notion of selfhood altogether, is as much a part of Judaism as of Hinduism, of Christianity as of Buddhism. Those who have stressed this apophatic side of the Christian tradition have not been much propagated. Yet the names are well-known: Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Dionysius the Areopagite, John of the Cross, Jacob Boehme, and Meister Eckhart, to

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name only a few. Typical is Eckhart’s sermon, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and the saying of Angelus Silesius (17th C.): No life is more vital than that from which the death of self takes wing….. The emptier I do become, the more delivered from me, the better I understand God’s liberty…. God is sheer nothingness, whatever else he be, he gave it that it might be found in me…. When I am neither you nor me, then I begin to be aware of God–as nothingness…. To become nothing is to become God [nichts werden ist Gott werden]; nothing becomes what is before: if you do not become nothing, never will be you born of eternal light. (Silesius 1985, 122, 130, 140)

Compare this with the words of Marguerite Porete: “And so such a soul, having become nothing, possesses all and yet possesses nought, wishes all and wishes nothing, she knows everything and knows nought” (in Joy 1992, 256). That this apophatic religious perspective stands in positive relation to the psychological experience of emptiness is a case that has been argued by Roman Catholic theologian, Michael Novak, in his book, The Experience of Nothingness. “The experience of nothingness,” Novak (1970) writes, is an incomparably trustful starting place for ethical inquiry. It is a vaccine against the lies upon which every civilization is built… In its dark light, nothing is beyond questioning, sacred immobile… The experience of nothingness arms us against our own puritanism, our addiction to perfection, and our despair at not being free. (1, 115, 117)

Even in Islamic Sufism, one finds similar testimony to the virtue of no-self. It is especially prominent in that portion of Sufism given to ecstatic trance dancing. The spiritual intoxication of the release from “self” has the iconoclastic function and purpose of never mistaking “self” or “spirit” with Allah. Such would, of course, be unforgivable idolatry. This is the same psycho-theological point as that argued by Novak. The testimony is overwhelming and powerful. The question remains whether psychology and religion are really opposed to each other on this matter—as Jung’s disastrous misunderstanding with Shin’ichi-roshi in fact seems to indicate.

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The Self of Psychology Let us stay with Jung as example. In spite of Jung’s talk about “occultism” and “irreverence” in relation to Asian religious traditions, and in spite of the Shin’ichi visit,2 Jung in fact talks at length about figures such as Eckhart and Lao Tzu, and his interest in them is precisely psychological, and positively so. When speaking about such persons and their thought, whether of Asian or European traditions, Jung asserts that the use of the term “nothing” means “does not appear in the world of senses,” and therefore that the term is what from a Kantian point of view would be thought of as a borderline or boundary concept (1960, ¶920–921). In fact, for Jung, “self” is itself a borderline concept. “Since we cannot possibly know the boundaries of something unknown to us,” Jung says, “it follows that we are not in a position to set bounds to the self” (1968, ¶247). This means that for Jung the so-called self is, as he says, a transcendental postulate (1959, ¶115, 124, 264). “Nothing is known regarding the self because it is a transcendental hypothesis,” says Jung (1972, ¶405). To Miguel Serrano (1966), Jung said: “So far I have found no stable or definite center in the unconscious and I don’t believe such a center exists. I believe that the thing I call the self is an ideal center … a dream of totality” (50), and Jung then goes on to compare his notion of the “self” with notions of “no-self” in Asian religious traditions. For Jung, to say that “self” is a borderline concept means that all discourse concerning the so-called self is “hypothetical” (1969, ¶460), because in psychological discourse, the self is both the subject speaking and the object of the speech (1963, ¶502, 503, 505; 1976, ¶277, 279). Jung goes so far as to acknowledge that all psychological theory is in fact “confession” (see 1982, ¶393, 395, 397; 1976, ¶275), and that therefore there can never be a claim by any psychology to universal validity (1982, ¶406; 1971a, ¶8–10). Jung utilizes the saying of alchemy, ignotium per ignotius, “the unknown by the more unknown” (1981, ¶162), to describe the function of psychological explanation. For Jung, the so-called self, which is in principle unknown and unknowable, is described by concepts which have hypothetical status only. 2 It may be worth noting that Jung was not in good health at the time (see Abe 1992, 61n6).

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Jung was definite about this. He spoke of the impossibility of knowledge of archetypes (1969, ¶460), of “ego” (1976, ¶10), and of the “unconscious.” Concerning the latter, he wrote: “The concept of the unconscious posits nothing, it designates my unknowing” (Jung 1973, 411; see 1976, ¶11; 1969, ¶64; 1968, ¶20, 247). The implication of Jung’s post-Kantian observations about the epistemic status of psychological theory has important implication for therapy or, as Jung called it, “individuation,” that is, the becoming of “self.” The implication is that to become “self” is to become nothing, that is, no-thing, not some-thing. Where “ego” is, there let “self” be, means (since the notion of “self” does not have a definite empirical referent) let nothing be. The integration of “self” into “ego’s” life is the integration of nothingness, just like the people in religions say. This is indeed what Jung did say: “If you will contemplate [your nothingness], your lack of fantasy, [lack] of inspiration, and [lack] of inner aliveness which you feel as sheer stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as great a fullness, if you allow it to penetrate into you” (1963, ¶190). Jung (1975) put this practical therapeutic matter in a stunning way during a seminar on Kundalini yoga: Individuation is not that you become an ego; you would then be an individualist. An individualist is a person who did not succeed at individuating; such a one is a philosophically distilled egotist … . Individuating is becoming that which is not the ego, and that is very strange. Nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just what you are not … if you function through your self, you are not yourself–that is what you feel … as if you were a stranger. (31)3

The theoretical and therapeutic implication of this perspectival shift is cognitive humility. This in fact was the effect of the theory on Jung’s life. So, at the end of the autobiography, he says: “There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything

3 This statement by Jung places him close to Freud and Lacan on the matter of the “uncanny” in therapeutic discovery, as well as to Julia Kristeva (1991) on her notion of the experience of unconscious dimensions of the so-called “self” in therapy as being the experience of the “I” as étranger, which is the very word Jung uses to indicate the experience of long-term analysis (182–95).

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really…. When Lao Tzu says: ‘All are clear, I alone am clouded,’ he is expressing what I feel in advanced old age” (Jung 1965, 358–59). When he was 78 years old, Jung wrote to Maud Oakes (1987) something similar: “I don’t know who I am. I am the last person to tell you who I am…. I’m nothing. I’m an old man. I no longer lie. Once perhaps I had to, as a young scientist without a reputation. Now I no longer lie. What I have to say is so simple that it is hard to understand” (15). As one follows Jung’s argument in its philosophical depth and epistemological sophistication, one begins to sense that the “self” of (Jung’s) depth psychology has the same ontological status as the de-substantialized and deconstructed notion of the “no-self” in the apophatic religious traditions. “Self” is no-self.

Deep Calls Out to Deep But if depth psychology’s “self” is tantamount to religion’s “no-self,” then there are ramifications for those in the helping professions who are confronted with persons questing for what they take to be self, for identity, for self-esteem, for a sense of well-being of the “I.” Indeed, there are implications for the epidemic depression with which we are today confronted. These implications return us to the question of what the depression wants, what its purpose or telos is. First, in the light of the epistemological and theological discussion above, it is now possible to observe that the neurosis which presents itself as a feeling of nothingness is not the “nothingness” about which the religious traditions are speaking. The psychological symptom presents itself in the complaint of the person suffering as something, something negative. Though it feels like nothing, it is not yet deeply and truly nothing. It is still something. Martin Heidegger (1961) spoke about this confusion in philosophical discourse, saying that “he who speaks of nothing does not know what he is doing. In speaking of nothing, he makes it into something…. Authentic speaking about nothing always remains extraordinary” (19, 22). The philosophical problem lies in the implicit assumption that nothing has being, not noticing that it is already an onto-theological category-mistake to imagine that being is itself something rather than no-thing. This sort of metaphysics of presence has difficulty in seeing that nothing is not the being of non-being. Nothing is not being nor (the presence of) non-being. Yet, this is just what one who suffers imagines unwittingly. The so-called ego’s experience of so-called nothingness is not yet truly no-thing.

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But this leaves a conundrum. If the experience is not nothing, why then does it present itself as if it were nothing. Why do I say I am nothing when I am not, when I am in fact full of negative something? Why do I say that my life is empty, when in fact it is full of what seems substantial darkness? What is the teleology of this error, this mistaken utterance? What is the psyche’s autonomous “purpose” in this “self-presentation”? Since, in the dark night of the religious soul, this same error is also often made, perhaps there is a clue to the psychological utterance in the apophatic spiritual tradition. Jacques Derrida has called attention to the raison of this psychic irrationality in the writings of Angelus Silesius where the latter speaks of two abysses. One abyss is the nothingness that “I” think that “I” feel (which is not yet nothing, but a negative something). The other is a “deeper no-thing.” And Silesius says: “One abyss calls to another [ein Abgrund rufft den andern]—the abyss of my spirit always invokes with cries the abyss of God—say which may be deeper?” (in Derrida 1992, 315). The mystic is alluding to sayings in the Psalms: “Him who has made the dark his hiding place” (Psalm 18:1), and “deep calls unto deep.” (Ps 42:7; see Job 11:7; I Co. 2:10). The point is that my experience of so-called nothingness may be an initiation into the deeper no-thingness which apophatic religious experience calls (for lack of a word) “God.” It is an invitation to deepen what the “I” takes to be the “nothingness,” to go into it more thoroughly rather than to cure it or to attempt (vainly) to be rid of it. Could it be that the epidemic psychological depression in North America may be a concealed wish for spirituality, but not spirituality in the sense of conventional positive, literalistic religion, nor in the sense of a New Age spiritual transcendence of darkness? Could it be that the malaise so many feel really wants not to be gotten rid of, not healed, but deepened and, like the neurosis, “accepted as our truest and most precious possession”? It is our worst enemy only because it turns deep nothing into something. Due to a wrong or partial attitude of “ego’s” psychologistic perspective, the so-called nothingness is felt as nihilistic and self-destructive only because it is destructive of the “self” which is no-self, replacing it with a fantasy of the “self” as some-thing, worth something, full of itself, attached to itself, i.e., to so-called ego, to “I.” This possibility brings back to mind Jung’s description of neuroses (see above). It implies that our low self-esteem, our sense of victimage, our free-floating depression, our sense of worthlessness and hopelessness

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might be experienced as “positive,” leading to “a new synthesis,” “purposeful,” “a precious possession,” and even our “best friend.” If this were so, then Prozac, New Age remedies, cocaine, martini lunches, counselling, meditation, therapy, religious practice, support and recovery groups, self-help literature—all, if they imagine themselves to be to the purpose of “curing” depression and low self-esteem, may well be not only ill advised, but also even counter-productive, themselves participant in the fantasy and perspectival context which constitute and provoke the symptoms these are designed to remove. That is, if I am taught to value my “self,” then when I cannot feel that way, when I cannot live up to that “ego-ideal,” I will feel “down” ashamed, guilty, and anxious. The refusal of nothing, the “avoiding the void” (Loy 1992), is taught early. We turn on the light when the child cries in the dark. The dark is thereby valanced as some-thing to be rid of. The point of the deep dark nothingness is to correct it, cure it, fix it, and light it up. But what if it is not we who cure it, but—as Jung says—it that cures us of a debilitating perspective. This, for example, seems to be the view of the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who said: “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things” (Rilke 1963, 34, 35).4 Indeed, the poets seem to know the psychological teleology of authentic nothingness.5 For example, Rilke wrote in The Duino Elegies:…das Leere in jene Schwingung geriet, die uns jetzt hinreisst und tröstet und hilft, “…emptiness first felt the vibration that now charms us and comforts and helps” (Rilke 1967, 26, 27). The Japanese poet, Saigyō (1978), puts the matter directly: So, then, it’s the one Who has thrown his self away Who is thought the loser? But he who cannot lose self Is the one who has really lost. (89) 4 Sayings such as this are to be found throughout Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1963), and see also the treatment of this theme in Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties (Mood 1975). 5 Heidegger (1961) has already been cited on the difficulty of speaking authentically about nothingness without making it into a some-thing. In that work, he also noted that science—including the science of psychology—is unable to transcend that difficulty because its language is assumed metalinguistically to be referential. Heidegger then acknowledges that, besides philosophy, poetry speaks nothing in a profound manner (21).

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And, of course, there is Shakespeare, with whom we began. After Richard II has resigned the crown, he says: And straight [I] am nothing. But whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleas’d till he be eas’d With being nothing. (Shakespeare 1936, 539)

Eased with nothing! Imagine that! No wonder that in that other great drama of the deepening of nothing, King Lear, Kent says: “Nothing almost sees miracles!” (Shakespeare 1936, 1212).

References Abe, Masao. 1991. “God, Emptiness, and the True Self.” In The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School. New York: Crossroads. ———. 1992. “The Self in Jung and Zen.” In Self and Liberation, edited by R. Moore. New York: Paulist Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “Post-scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by H. Coward and T. Foshay. New York: State University of New York Press. Foshay, Toby. 1992. “Introduction: Denegation and Resentiment.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by H. Coward and T. Foshay. New York: State University of New York Press. Giegerich, Wolfgang. 2013. Neurosis: The Logic of a Metaphysical Illness. New Orleans: Spring Journal Publications. Heidegger, Martin. 1961. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by R. Manheim. Garden City: Doubleday. Idel, Moshe. 1988. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press. Izutsu, Toshihiko. 1977. “Two Dimensions of Ego-Consciousness.” In Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. Joy, Morny. 1992. “Conclusion: Divine Reservations.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by H. Coward and T. Foshay. New York: State University of New York Press. Jung, C. G. 1959. Aion. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1960. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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———. 1963. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1964. Civilization in Transition. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1965. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by A. Jaffé and translated by R. & C. Winston. New York: Random House. ———. 1967. Alchemical Studies. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1968. Psychology and Alchemy. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1969. Psychology and Religion: West and East. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1970. Freud and Psychoanalysis. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1971a. Psychological Types. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1971b. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1972. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1973. Letters. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1975. “Psychological Commentary on Kundalini Yoga (from the notes of Mary Foote).” In Spring 1975: 1–31. ———. 1976. The Symbolic Life. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1977. The Practice of Psychotherapy. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1981. The Development of Personality. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1982. The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease. Edited by G. Adler and translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lao Tzu. 1963. Tao Te Ching. Translated by D. C. Lau. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Loy, David. 1992. “Avoiding the Void.” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 24 (2): 151–179. Mascaró, Juan, trans. 1962. Bhagavad Gita. Baltimore: Penguin Books. ———, trans. 1965. Upanishads. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Merton, Thomas. 1969. The Way of Chuang Tzu. New York: New Directions. Mood, John. 1975. Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties. New York: Norton and Company.

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Nagarjuna. 1967. “Malamadhyamakakarikas.” In Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, translated by F. Streng. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Novak, Michael. 1970. The Experience of Nothingness. New York: Harper and Row. Oakes, Maud. 1987. The Stone Speaks: The Memoir of a Personal Transformation. Wilmette: Chiron Books. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1963. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by M. D. H. Norton. New York: Norton and Company. ———. 1967. Duino Elegies. Translated by J. B. Leishman and S. Spender. New York: Norton and Company. Saigyō. 1978. Mirror for the Moon. Translated by W. LaFleur. New York: New Directions. Scholem, Gershom. 1969. On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism. Translated by R. Manheim. New York: Schocken Books. Serrano, Miguel. 1966. C. G. Jung and Hemann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships. New York: Schocken Books. Shakespeare, William. 1936. The Complete Works. New York: Ginn and Company. Silesius, Angelus. 1985. The Book of Angelus Silesius. Translated by F. Franck. Santa Fe: Bear and Company. Suzuki, D. T. 1955. Studies in Zen. New York: Philosophical Library.

CHAPTER 15

“In Killing You Changed Death to Life”: Transformation of the Self in St. John of the Cross and Carl Jung June McDaniel

This paper examines the ways that visionary mystical experience acts to transform the self, as described in the writings of St. John of the Cross (often called the most psychological of the mystics) and C. G. Jung (often called the most mystical of the psychologists). While each of these theorists work within a different model of the self, both processes of transformation involve the destruction and remaking of the psyche through experiences which can be understood as mystical. This paper will describe and compare seven stages of transformation for each author. For St. John, the process of the Dark Night of the Soul involves the soul and spirit being purified. The person first enters a state of aridity—a numbness to experience—where all meaning is withdrawn from the world. It is only through entrance into the depths of the spirit, and the death of the old self and the birth of the new, that meaningful

J. McDaniel (*)  Department of Religious Studies, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_15

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transformation can occur. The older self or ‘animal man’ is destroyed, and from this spiritual death a ‘new man’ is formed whose center is God. It is realization of this divine center through direct or infused intellectual vision, formless knowledge which comes through divine grace, which allows the soul to be restructured. For Jung, the process of Individuation involves an entrance into the unconscious, the nekyia or descent into the underworld. He terms this movement ‘regressive introversion.’ It is often triggered by trauma, and the person becomes depressed and numb to the outer world. He or she descends into the unconscious world of symbols, archetypes, and complexes. This process reaches a climax in the destruction of the psyche, which is ideally remade in the vision of the deeper Self, Jung’s Godarchetype. The psyche is no longer centered on trauma, but has instead found a new and powerful creative center. Both of these developmental systems may be understood to have seven stages: 1. ordinary life, equilibrium 2. depression/alienation, the stress of initial indrawing 3. descent into darkness, full introversion 4. destruction or sacrifice of the old self 5. transformative vision, rebirth 6. restructuring of self and 7. return to daily life, new motivation for action in the world. I would note that this is an interpretive schema. Neither writer uses this specific stadial model. Jung does not use stages for the individuation process. St. John uses two different models, one with three stages (purification, illumination, and perfection), and one with four stages (the active and passive nights of sense and spirit). Despite their categorizations (or the lack of them), both writers describe a set of similar developmental stages in their books. While the stages of the process are similar, the goals differ for these writers. For St. John, the goal is a moral one, and the self should conform to the image of God by the Holy Spirit, which he calls the living flame of love. The soul enters a mystical marriage, a permanent relationship with God. For Jung, the goal is more cognitive, with the development of individuality and a greater degree of awareness. While St. John values mystical union through love, Jung values a separation of ego and the Self archetype. In their analyses of the process of inner development,

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both writers are able to describe the ideal experiences and challenges confronted by the individual in the process of spiritual growth.

St. John of the Cross Though John of the Cross was imprisoned and tormented by other members of the Carmelite Order for defending a strict set of rules for monastic life, he was later declared a saint and a Mystical Doctor of the Church. He followed Aquinas’ ideas on the structure of the mind and soul, but added original concepts of the vision of God and spiritual marriage. These ideas are primarily described in his books, The Ascent of Mount Carmel (1958) and the Dark Night of the Soul (1990). John was born in Spain in 1542, and he entered the Carmelite monastery in Medina del Campo. After being ordained as a priest he met Teresa of Avila, who had begun a reform movement, and he joined it. In 1577, while working as a confessor and spiritual director at St. Teresa’s convent, he was kidnapped by friars who opposed the reform and imprisoned at Toledo. He was kept in a dark cell and treated brutally, and during this period he wrote mystical poetry. After months of torment, he escaped and went south to Andalusia, where he supported the growing reform and acted as spiritual director, until he died in 1591. St. John believed in an intelligible realm, a divine world which is echoed in the physical world of shadow. They are separated by a chasm, a dark realm which must be traversed. This is done by rejecting the “animal man” or “natural man” who must be expelled (John of the Cross 1958, 124).1 Only after that can the spiritual man emerge: “In killing You changed death to life” and by God’s annihilation of the old self, the new one is born (John of the Cross 1962, 30). The Ascent of Mt. Carmel stresses human actions to reach God, beginning with mortification of the senses which results in the Active Night of Sense. Faith guides the soul in the Active Night of Spirit, which cleanses the intellect as hope empties the memory and charity cleanses the will of attraction to all that is not God. As the Active Nights stress the person’s self-emptying, the Passive Nights of Sense and Spirit emphasize God’s actions: illumining the soul, making it aware of God’s glory and its own inferiority, and binding and purifying the faculties. This is the 1 “… no form can be introduced unless the preceding, contrary form is first expelled from the subject” (John of the Cross 1958, 124).

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Dark Night of the Soul, when the soul is emptied through darkness and pain, and the light of God can then enter it. The process itself involves ridding the soul of impurities: animal passions, desires and temptations, hidden dark impulses. During this process, the outer world appears dead and meaningless, a mass of pain and aridity, and this allows the soul to leave it more easily. The ultimate goal of this process is described in two other books by John, the Spiritual Canticle (1961) and the Living Flame of Love (1962). The Spiritual Canticle describes the soul’s search and eventual spiritual marriage, while the Living Flame of Love shows the actions of the Holy Spirit in purifying and transforming the soul. Due to the fall from Eden, the soul lost its conformity to the image of God, and through spiritual transformation may regain it. John’s model of the self has two parts: the soul or lower sensory area, and the spirit or higher intellectual area. The soul contains the external bodily senses, the natural desires and passions, the feelings, and the interior bodily senses of imagination and fantasy. The soul must turn away from the world of creatures, passing through the realms of memory, intellect, and will, and pass through the darkness of faith to supernatural transformation. Here, the sensory appetites are purged, and the soul and body are mortified, unable to enjoy life or to feel satisfaction in anything. As John (1958) states of the process, “For in order that one may attain supernatural transformation, it is clear that he must be plunged into darkness and carried far away from all contained in his nature that is sensual and rational” (172). The soul must be purified, so that it becomes dominated not by the ‘inferior powers of animal life,’ but by such spiritual qualities as reason, intelligence, and judgment. Its highest state is the apex of spirit, its center and substance, which gains direct or infused knowledge of God through the Intellectual Light. The dark night process reaches its climax in the ‘spiritual death’: The Divine assails the soul in order to renew it and thus make it Divine; and stripping it of the habitual affections and attachments of the old man, to which it is very closely united, knit together and conformed, destroys and consumes its spiritual substance, and absorbs it in deep and profound darkness. As a result of this, the soul feels itself to be perishing and melting away … in a cruel spiritual death, even as if it had been swallowed by a beast and felt itself being devoured in the darkness of its belly, suffering

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such anguish as was endured by Jonas in the belly of that beast of the sea. For in this sepulchre of dark death it must needs abide until the spiritual resurrection for which it hopes. (John of the Cross 1990, 104)

In the Biblical Book of Jonah, the prophet describes calling out from Sheol, the realm of death, and states that God brought him up alive from the pit (Jonah 2:3–6). For John (1990), this experience of death is often so vivid that the soul sees the underworld and describes these people as ones who “go down into hell alive” (107), living in the shadow of death, undergoing purgatory on earth instead of after death. But he understands it to be a necessary stage, and essentially Christian: “The journey, then, does not consist in recreations, experiences, and spiritual feelings, but in the living, sensory and spiritual, exterior and interior death of the cross” (John of the Cross 1958, 193). Thus, the death and resurrection of the Dark Night process is a microcosm of the cosmic death and resurrection of Christ. It is not due to individual effort or asceticism. As John Welch (1990) notes, for St. John mysticism precedes asceticism (49).2 This process results from divine action: God makes the soul die to all that He is not, so that when it is stripped and flayed of its old skin, He may clothe it anew. Its youth is renewed like the eagle’s (Ps. 102.5), clothed in the new man which is created, as the Apostle says, according to God. (John of the Cross 1990, 146)

The Dark Night requires the process of mortification, where the soul’s loves are shifted from the physical world to the divine one. Mortification of desire is important because a desire creates a likeness between the person and what he desires, as love effects a likeness between the lover and the object loved. This spiritual death and descent into hell is followed by the divine vision and spiritual union. He uses many metaphors for this goal: essential knowledge, divine fire, light shining in the darkness, filling voids and caverns with light, spiritual marriage. It heals the person of the deformity of the world:

2 Welch (1990) notes that John argues against the idea that spiritual growth comes from the outside to the inside. Instead, the senses must be put aside, and activity is irrelevant. Spirituality flows outward from its inward origins, and not the reverse.

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Reveal Your presence And may the vision of Your beauty be my death. For the sickness of love Is not cured Except by Your very presence and image. (John of the Cross 1961, 292)

In this visionary experience, God appears as a light which fills the person with joy. The soul becomes transparent, with only a thin veil remaining to keep the soul from merging into the light: “The spiritual marriage… is a total transformation in the Beloved in which each surrenders the entire possession of the self to the other with a certain consummation of the union of love. The soul thereby becomes divine, becomes God through participation, insofar as is possible in this life” (John of the Cross 1961, 272). The light carries transformative powers, and “… she [the soul] knows that at the instant she sees this beauty she will be carried away by it, and absorbed in this very beauty, and made beautiful like this beauty itself, and enriched and provided for like this very beauty” (John of the Cross 1961, 298). However, this mystical experience of conformity has its limitations: Although transformation in this life can be what it was in St. Paul, it still cannot be perfect and complete, even though the soul reaches such transformation of love as is found in the spiritual marriage, the highest state attainable in this life. Everything can be called a sketch of love in comparison with that perfect image, the transformation in glory. (John of the Cross 1961, 304)

The goal is not to fully merge the person and God, but to move him toward his true, divine center of identity. It has a powerful pull: “Accordingly she is drawn and carried toward this good more forcibly that any material object is pulled toward the center by gravity” (John of the Cross 1961, 294). When the person reaches this true center of identity, his or her inner life is changed. The transformed self is the ‘new man’ who has returned to conformity with the image of God. World, flesh, and the devil are overcome, and the soul enters a ‘habitual union of love.’ It is the beginning glimpse of the beatific vision, attained in fullness only after death. The person can then return to the world to help others, as Christ encouraged people to do. The ideal life is inner love of God, and outward service to humanity, based on the mystical marriage of the soul and the divine Bridegroom.

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C. G. Jung Carl Gustav Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875. He studied medicine at the University of Basel, and after he completed his medical degree, he worked at the Burghoelzli Clinic in Zurich, with Eugen Bleuler. In 1905, Jung joined the faculty at the University of Zurich. Jung had a complex relationship with his mentor Sigmund Freud; Jung agreed with Freud’s theory of the personal unconscious, but Jung also believed in the existence of a deeper collective unconscious containing universal archetypes. Jung later developed Analytical Psychology, which included such ideas as the collective unconscious as a universal cultural repository; dream analysis and the interpretation of dream symbols from the collective unconscious; extroversion and introversion; psychological complexes as clusters of behaviors, memories, and emotions grouped around common themes; an emphasis on spirituality; individuation as the integration of dual aspects of personality to achieve psychic wholeness; and synchronicity or meaningful coincidences. He died in 1961. Like St. John, Jung spoke of a descent into darkness for the sake of transformation. His interpretation of spiritual development was based on an expanded psychoanalytic model of the mind. Jung (1956) was interested in the evolution of the human psyche, especially its historical origins: The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things. (xxiv)

The evolution of the psyche is influenced by the processes of progression and regression. Progression is its adaptation to outer conditions and the physical environment, while regression is the adaptation to the inner environment and subjective feelings and memories. These are both transformations of psychic energy, which balance the person’s relationships to inner and outer worlds. While there are many transformations of energy for Jung, the focus here is upon the descent into the unconscious as a part of the individuation process. This descent is not generally voluntary, but rather a potential result of stress. The person’s values move from an emphasis on the social world, to a regressive introversion into the unconscious. The outer world

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becomes deadened to feeling, flat, and sterile, as well as ‘shadowy and unreal.’ The self or psyche moves inwards through the personal unconscious with its memories and complexes, into the mythic themes and symbols of the collective unconscious. When the psyche has been fragmented or damaged, this descent allows it to be reorganized and healed. The individuation process is the evolution of the self and often involves a ‘drawing inwards’ of libido or psychic energy. This is experienced as a ‘magnetic pull’ which draws the psyche back to its origins. There it may be overwhelmed and thrown into crisis. The result of this crisis could be psychosis. However, if an archetypal symbol (especially the Self archetype) emerges, the old self is let go, and a new one is born—the psyche ‘plunges into the fountain of youth,’ and the hero metaphorically recreates himself by his self-sacrifice. The ego is not merged with the numinous God symbol, or there would be the danger of inflation (with the ego identified with the God). The Self must become a separate center of meaning and inspiration (see Jung 1956). For Jung, regression does not have the negative connotation that it did for Freud. It is not merely a retreat to a physical or psychological childhood, but a process which encourages spiritual growth. According to Jung (2014), this pathway inwards has been described in world mythologies: Another variation of the motif of the Hero and the Dragon is the katabasis, the Descent into the Cave, the Nekyia. You remember in the Odyssey where Ulysses descends ad infernos to consult Tiresias, the seer. This motif of the Nekyia is found everywhere in antiquity and practically all over the world. It expresses the psychological mechanism of introversion of the conscious mind into the deeper layers of the unconscious psyche. (¶80)

Jung used the term ‘psyche’ to include the totality of all psychic processes. The conscious mind contains both the ego and the persona, while the unconscious has both a personal dimension, which includes material which has been forgotten, repressed or subliminally perceived, structured into ‘feeling-toned complexes’; and a collective dimension, which holds mythic themes, archetypes, and symbols. Jung’s ideas on the collective unconscious changed over the course of his writings—he has described the collective unconscious according to biological, genetic, and psychological models. His definitions of archetypes have also changed, though

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here we might generally call them ‘primordial patterns,’ the underlying and invisible ordering processes of the psyche, which take on symbolic coverings to manifest to the conscious mind. Jung called the process of psycho-spiritual development Individuation, and one important aspect of this maturation is the process of visionary transformation. As he notes, visions are important, for the psyche consists essentially of images, and “every psychic process is an image” (Jung 1958, ¶889). Visionary experience often comes through introversion, potentially as a response to trauma which involves an initial deadening of affect toward the world. The person feels empty, and the world becomes a flat and sterile place. As Jung ([1953] 1972) describes the process, people who experience it see the world as shadowy and unreal, they move in “a wan, two-dimensional, phantasmal world where everything vital and creative dies” (¶119). It involves a detachment of libido from objects, which causes a liberation of psychic energy which had been bound up in projections into the world. This is followed by the emergence of the contents of the personal unconscious. It includes fantasies, obsessions, the “slime” of the rejected remnants of everyday life, and the rejected “animal tendencies,” which are also germs of new life (Jung 1960b, ¶63). The unconscious first manifests as a ‘magnetic pull’ on the conscious mind, as a recurrent idea or image, or as an autonomous complex that can temporarily obsess the person. This can be so ‘swollen’ with libido or psychic energy that it can act as a second ego in conflict with the conscious one, and the process may be understood as an inward war. The complex may overpower the ego, which is then possessed by it, or it may attract the psyche to its archetypal core. Complexes may be formed around different archetypes, but the most important of these is the archetype of the Self. This is the archetype which causes the most important transformation of the psyche, and encounter with it is the transforming visionary experience—the Jungian vision of God, which leads to a reorientation of meaning toward a center greater than the ego. For Jung, archetypes are not only ‘structural elements’ of the psyche, they are living psychic forces which cause growth or, when neglected, neurotic and psychotic disorders. The ego only becomes aware of archetypal activity through images, seen as it is pulled inwards: Often it drives with unexampled passion and remorseless logic towards its goal and draws the subject under its spell, from which despite the most

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desperate resistance he is unable, and finally no longer even willing, to break free, because the experience brings with it a depth and fullness of meaning that was unthinkable before. (Jung 1960a, ¶405)

Indeed, Jung ([1961] 1989) speaks of experiencing this archetypal pull himself in his autobiography: I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force. (xi)

As the archetypal force is exerted, the psyche is brought back to its origins, when terrifying dreams are important, and supernatural images hold their greatest power. The personality structure may be on the edge of disintegration, echoing the ‘loss of soul’ found in tribal traditions. If there is no symbol to cling to and no faith to grasp, the organization of internal meaning may be shattered, and the person becomes disoriented and possibly psychotic: When the libido leaves the bright upper world… it sinks back into its own depths, into the source from which it originally flowed…This is the dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life. For if the libido gets stuck in the wonderland of this inner world, then for the upper world man is nothing but a shadow, he is already moribund or at least seriously ill. But if the libido manages to tear itself loose and force its way up again, something like a miracle happens: the journey to the underworld was a plunge into the fountain of youth, and the libido apparently dead, wakes to renewed fruitfulness. (Jung 1956, ¶449)

If the Self archetype is directly encountered, we have sacrifice instead of disintegration. The old ego dies, and the psyche is transformed into a new state, with the ‘power of the gods.’ It brings the vision of eternal life, and the person goes forward into the unknown. This sacrifice of the old ego is symbolized by the battle with the dragon in the cave, and the descent into hell. The psyche can then encounter symbols of the Self archetype: the mandala (the ‘atomic nucleus’ of the psyche), the jewel, the child, the hermaphrodite. It must be more than simply a personal breakthrough, for “authentic individuation must ultimately extend to the universal” (in Gibson et al. 1991, 3). The Self is experienced as the source of life for the ego, as an authoritative presence and the axis around which it revolves. Though the Self

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becomes the center of the personality, it is not identical to the ego. As Jung ([1953] 1972) notes, “The Self has as much to do with the ego as the sun with the earth. They are not interchangeable” (¶400). The Self appears as a God-figure, and the encounter with it is often understood as a mystical experience. This occurs temporarily in the vision of wholeness, when the consciousness is fused with the archetype of the Self and its structures are reconfigured to fit the archetypal pattern. As Jung (1939) notes, “In this way conscious and unconscious are interfused, and a decided change of consciousness is brought about. This is why I call this a process of transformation” (91). He compares this process to Christ’s descent into hell: The three-days descent into hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness. (Jung 1958, ¶149)

While this fusion is positive in small doses, bringing a ‘regressive restoration’ which helps the psyche, Jung is unwilling to defend it for long periods of time. He finds mysticism of this type too dangerous, especially for the Western mind, and encourages the return to ego-consciousness as soon as possible. Both the ego and the Self must be healthy for the person to be able to function in the world. Jung avoided theological claims and discussed religious experience from a phenomenological viewpoint. He dealt only with psychic contents, not with any absolutes which they might symbolize or represent: “An absolute God… does not concern us in the least, whereas a ‘psychological’ God would be real” (Jung [1953] 1972, ¶394n). He describes the God-image as a psychic fact, which patients repeatedly describe. This does not prove the existence of a God separate from the person’s mind; it only shows that the person has an image that recurs. Thus, Jung liked Kant’s ideas, which supported his interpretation of these images as reflections of underlying unknowable realities. Jung felt that all neuroses expressed a disturbance of the religious function of the psyche, and the acting-out of a loss of psychic balance and sufferings compel the person to come to terms with the foundations of being and the world. This reaches a climax in the transformational vision, the direct encounter with or emergence of the archetypal symbol of the Self: “With the birth of the symbol, the regression of libido into the unconscious ceases. Regression changes into progression, blockage

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gives way to flowing, and the pull of the primordial abyss is broken” (Jung 1923, 325). The goal of such mystical experience is a return to the world as a healthy and psychologically balanced person. Without such experience, psychic energy can assume negative forms, leading at the social level to war, genocide, holocaust, and other disasters. At the personal level, it brings a life that is deadened, without purpose, causing the person to struggle with despair, suicidal impulses, and addiction. Thus, religious and mystical experiences hold an important place for Jung, for they are an important means of psychological healing.

Catholic Mysticism and Depth Psychology We see in this comparison a similar dynamic in writers who use different models of the self. For St. John of the Cross, the Dark Night brings despair, retreat from the world and an entrance into supernatural darkness. The soul travels to the realm of the spirit, where it encounters the Divine Bridegroom, is transformed by the experience, sheds the old man and becomes the new man, whose center is God. The person is then healed of the darkness, and becoming more devoted and loving. For Jung, the Individuation process begins in introversion, retreat from the world and an entrance into the unconscious. The psyche travels into the depths, where it encounters the Self or God-archetype, is transformed by the experience, and becomes whole, in contact with the Self. The person is healed of trauma and fragmentation and becomes more capable of both love and work. Both St. John and Jung have been described as mystical writers. However, in both cases, we have the problem of ‘allowable mysticism.’ How closely can the individual unite with infinity? When is merger too much merger? Both writers were limited by larger institutional systems— St. John within Catholic theology, and Carl Jung within the medicine and psychology of his day. Neither St. John nor Jung accepted a sort of mysticism which involved union with the Infinite. For Jung, it showed the danger of inflation, when the human ego was overwhelmed by the Self or God archetype. He saw this as insanity, especially in institutionalized patients claiming to be deities or to have supernatural powers. Possession by an archetype, even that of God, was a form of insanity. Infinite consciousness held the threat of emotional instability—and he had dealt with such states in his medical practice. Inflation, possession by an archetype, brought madness.

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For John, union with God was not insanity, but rather heresy. The Trinity was already occupied by its three persons, and there is no room for a fourth. To equate yourself with God is to claim a status for the soul that violates Church teachings, a creature claiming equality with its Creator. Claims of identity with God made the soul ‘puffed up’ with vanity, and blind to truth. However, both men could be said to accept a relational form of mysticism, in which the soul was in conversation with Infinity rather than united with it. For Jung, this is the individuated state, where the psyche and the Self have a stable relationship, allowing the person to recognize depths without being overwhelmed by them. For John, the human soul ideally enters a state of eternal love and service, especially focused on Christ as the bridegroom of the soul. The soul cannot become one with God, but can be in an intense love relationship of bridal mysticism. Jung avoided being called a mystic and defined himself as “an empiricist who moved within the limits of a natural empirical science” (Dunne 2000, 61). He was careful about entering the depths of the psyche: It is under all conditions a most advisable thing to keep to the conscious and rational side, i.e. to maintain that side. One never should lose sight of it. It is the safeguard without which you would lose yourself on unknown seas. You would invite illness, indeed, if you should give up your conscious and rational orientation. (Jung 1972a, 108–9)3

However, he was himself pulled toward the unconscious and the irrational. He has described his experiences after a heart attack in 1944, when he had visions of the mystic marriage: as a Kabbalistic union, as the Christian marriage of the Lamb, as the hieros gamos of All-father Zeus and Hera. He experienced these in an ecstatic state, which he described as a dissolution of time-bound form into eternity (Jung [1961] 1989). He had many visions, and some can be found in his Red Book. But he saw problems in institutional religion, which he referred to as “God-awful legalistic religion” (in Dunne 2000, 152). He noted that over-reliance on faith acted as a way to avoid direct experience, thus motivating his well-known line, “Religion is a defense against religious experience” (152). He had trouble dealing with his own experiences:

3 Letter

to Anonymous (Mrs. N., 1932).

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I know these moments of liberation come flashing out the process, but I shun them because I always feel at such a moment that I have thrown off the burden of being human and that it will fall back on me with redoubled weight. (Jung 1972b, 238)4

Yet his depth psychology allowed study of religious and ecstatic experiences which arise during various psychological states: vision, dream, symptom, fantasy, and imagination. It allows for revelatory religious experiences not limited by the dogmas of institutional religion. For those who found traditional religious symbols to be dead or meaningless, it allowed for new personal symbols to be generated and enlivened. Jung described the dynamic role of living symbols as facilitating fundamental change, which he described as the transcendent function of symbols. This is the psyche’s symbol-making capacity, showing its creative powers of psychic renewal. The incorporation of the shadow or dark side in Jung’s mystical ideas has come under criticism from both Christian writers and Jungians. As Jungian Henry Elkin (1991) notes, “The Shadow is perhaps Jung’s greatest, most useful single working concept. But reducing it ultimately to this ‘archetypal shadow’ serves to justify the acceptance and practice of one’s own evil, under the guise of achieving Divine ‘wholeness’” (117). While Jung can incorporate evil into his understanding of the ultimate as the union of opposites, the Devil has no place in mystical Christian goals. Jung has also been criticized for speaking more of the experience of God than the existence of God. This is a major critique we see in writers on Christian contemplation who wish to make use of Jungian theory. But this non-specificity allows his theory to be used outside of Christian theology, not only toward other Western religions, but toward both Eastern religions and more idiosyncratic ecstatic experiences which do not fit within known religions. The therapeutic understanding of mysticism changes the God-image, turning it to a symptom rather than an ontological truth. As Jung ([1931] 1999) stated: We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus 4 Letter

to Pater Lucas Menz, 1955.

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no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world. (113)

As noted in the beginning, both writers describe the initial state of ordinary life, an equilibrium which is broken by depression and alienation, and the stress of the initial indrawing which leads to a descent into darkness. At the climax of this descent, the old self is destroyed or sacrificed, in a symbolic death which leads to a transformative vision and rebirth of the self in a new and better form. This restructuring of self brings the person back into harmony, and he or she is able to return to daily life. It is extraordinary that they come from such different times, fields of study, and systems of belief, yet have such a similar process of development. Both of these writers come from a Western perspective, which usually assumes that the person is different from God, the creation from the creator. However, a Western perspective does not necessitate spiritual distance. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, a person may merge with the energies of love that radiate from the Trinity, and gain union with God through participation, in the process of theosis or deification. Some years back, I spoke informally with a Catholic priest. He said that he considered the ritual of the mass to be only foreplay—it was theosis that was full union. For him, Orthodoxy had a fuller understanding of mystical union than Catholicism. For St. John, religious doctrine and ritual were important as ways to achieve a mystical relationship with God. He accepted the Trinity and the separate soul. However, for Jung, these were symbols, merely ways of protecting the soul from the intensity of divine presence. Religious symbols were techniques of translating theophany into a bearable form. Neither writer was willing to go over the boundaries of individual human identity, and reach toward the cosmic union described in religions like Hindu Vedanta, Vajrayana Buddhism, and alchemical Daoism. They are mystical writers who step back from the brink.

References Dunne, Claire. 2000. Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul. New York: Parabola Books. Elkin, Henry, and E. Mark Stern. 1991. “Toward a Freud-Jung Reconciliation.” In Carl Jung and Soul Psychology, edited by Karen Gibson, Donald Lathrop, and E. Mark Stern. New York: Harrington Park Press.

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Gibson, Karen, Donald Lathrop, and E. Mark Stern, eds. 1991. Carl Jung and Soul Psychology. New York: Harrington Park Press. John of the Cross. 1958. Ascent of Mount Carmel. Translated by E. A. Peers. Garden City: Image Books. ———. 1961. Spiritual Canticle. Translated by E. A. Peers. Garden City: Image Books. ———. 1962. Living Flame of Love. Translated by E. A. Peers. Garden City: Image Books. ———. 1990. Dark Night of the Soul. Translated by E. A. Peers. New York: Image Books. Jung, C. G. 1923. Psychological Types. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6. London: K. Paul, Trench and Trubner Co. ———. [1931] 1999. Commentary to the Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life. Translated by Richard Wilhelm. New York: Routledge. ———. 1939. The Integration of the Personality. New York: Farrar and Rinehart. ———. [1953] 1972. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1956. Symbols of Transformation. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1958. Psychology and Religion, West and East. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1960a. “On the Nature of the Psyche”. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1960b. “On Psychic Energy”. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. [1961] 1989. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1972a. Letters, Vol. 1: 1906–1950. Edited by Gerhard Adler. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1972b. Letters, Vol. 2: 1951–1961. Edited by Gerhard Adler. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2014. The Symbolic Life, Miscellaneous Writings. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Welch, John. 1990. When Gods Die: An Introduction to John of the Cross. New York: Paulist Press.

CHAPTER 16

The Buddhist Unconscious (Alaya-vijnana) and Jung’s Collective Unconscious: What Does It Mean to Be Liberated from the Self? Polly Young-Eisendrath

In a 1958 dialogue between Carl G. Jung and Zen master Shinichi Hisamatsu that took place at Jung’s home in Switzerland, there was a surprising exchange: CGJ: If someone is caught in the ten thousand things, it is because that person is also caught in the collective unconscious. A person is liberated only when freed from both. One person may be driven more by the unconscious and another by things. One has to take the person to the point where he is free from the compulsion to either run after things or be driven by the unconscious. What is needed for both compulsions is basically the same: nirdvanda [freedom from the opposites]. SH: From what you have said about the collective unconscious, might I infer that one can be liberated from it? CGJ: Yes! (Young-Eisendrath and Muramoto 2002, 116) P. Young-Eisendrath (*)  University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA © The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_16

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Jung’s answer—that we can become liberated from the collective unconscious—might surprise most Jungian readers. It is easy to believe that Jung might have been speaking in confusion because neither he nor Hisamatsu spoke the other’s language (they had interpreters) and because Jung said this on only one occasion (as far as we know) and it is not backed up by anything else in his work or correspondence. Moreover, freedom from a ubiquitous collective unconscious seems confusing. How would that look? What could it mean? As a twenty-first-century citizen and Jungian psychoanalyst and psychologist, I bear witness every day to the pain, suffering, and confusion caused by our implicit collective assumptions about the identity of “self” and “other”: assumptions about sex, race, gender, body, political, and other social alliances. If it were possible to be liberated from our unconscious hyper-sensitive identities and their hidden assumptions, even to know what all that means, it would be very valuable at both an individual and collective level. And so, in this chapter I dig into the answer that Jung gave Hisamatsu. Before I begin, however, I want to comment on the nature of the answer: I think Jung’s reply was an “emergent property” of the dialogue. In other words, I think his answer was a surprising discovery or product of the particular context and moment in which he spoke it and the contact he had with Hisamatsu. I don’t know if Jung ever consciously understood the implications of his answer, and since he did not want the conversation published, I assume that he did not. Moreover, Jung’s answer sounds different to me now than it did back in 2002, when I edited the book that contains the conversation. Now, I see Jung’s reply in the context of a Buddhist theory of the collective unconscious, one that originated in India from the third to the fifth century. Then, I was trying to understand Jung’s answer principally from the perspective of his own theory. Throughout the dialogue, Hisamatsu advocates liberation from the subject–object split. Implicitly, he challenges the idea that the archetype of self creates a natural division between self and other, self and world. He claims that all suffering could be stopped if we could pull up by the roots our tendencies to form rigid and defensive identities—narratives and histories—about ourselves and what surrounds us, feeling that we are inherently and authentically vindicated primarily by what is “inside” us. When I first studied Hisamatsu’s challenges and Jung’s responses, I thought their positions were like “ships in the night,” passing each other

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by without laying down any interpenetrating threads. Now I see a new fabric that weaves together an ancient contemplative theory of mind with a modern psychoanalytic theory of mind.

Jung’s Collective Unconscious and the Freedom from Opposites Let us begin with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. It concerns itself primarily with the link between self and world. How are human experiences arising unconsciously in such a way that allows us consciously to encounter a consensual world on an ongoing basis? Jung, like Kant, believed there had to be mental structures or forms that compel and constrain our perceptions and allow us to discover a consensual world all together and all at once. Jung’s collective unconscious is structured by “archetypes”—universal templates that shape our perception, cognition, and embodiment in ways that lead to some degree of consensus about all that we take to be mundane reality “out there.” According to Jung, the collective unconscious, constitutes in its totality a sort of timeless and eternal world-image which counterbalances our conscious, momentary picture of the world. It means nothing less than another world, a mirror-world if you will. But, unlike a mirror-image, the unconscious image possesses an energy peculiar to itself, independent of consciousness. (Jung 1969, ¶729)

Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious is distinct from his concept of a “personal unconscious” which is structured by “psychological complexes” arising from the emotional imprints and traumas of our early relationships as they are filtered through collective archetypes. The collective unconscious is impersonal, and cannot be analyzed or interpreted like the personal unconscious can be. According to Jung ([1916] 1969), it must be approached more contemplatively or intuitively through an attitude he called the “transcendent function”. This attitude involves waiting and be willing to find a new synthesis, not an interpretation. In fact, Jung says that too much analysis of the collective unconscious (imposing the personal mind on the impersonal mind) may result in “[a] dissociation between conscious and unconscious…usually felt as very unpleasant, for it takes the form of an inner, unconscious fixation which expresses itself only symptomatically” (Jung 1969, ¶724).

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Jung’s collective unconscious is the membrane between the personal (self or subjectivity) and the collective (world). Liberation from the collective unconscious means gradually waking up and stepping back from automatically and habitually perceiving the self and the world in rigid ways based on one’s own defenses. As we become more flexible in our perceptions of what we take to be “self,” we also have more flexibility in our grasping onto the “world” of the ten thousand things. To quote Jung: “Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves” (¶737). Let us now unpack the Sanskrit term nirdvanda—freedom from opposites or non-dualism—that Jung uses to introduce the idea of liberation. This term is largely unknown to Westerners (even many practitioners of Asian religions) and was mistranslated as nirvana in an earlier published version (Meckel and Moore 1992) of the conversation between Jung and Hisamatsu. This technical term is entirely relevant to the question being posed by Hisamatsu. Whether or not Jung knew exactly what Hisamatsu was asking him, I believe that Jung’s reply was accurate within that moment of their conversation. In an intuitive way, Jung makes sense of his claim that one can be liberated from the collective unconscious by using the Sanskrit term. Moreover, Jung often says that the process of individuation or psychological maturity depends on a “freedom from opposites” and so, the Sanskrit term makes sense in a larger way than the immediate conversation. Non-duality or freedom from opposites means that we become aware of the meaning of our human condition of radical interdependence or comingling of what conventionally appears to be opposites: life/death, self/world, good/bad, and self/no-self. To deeply and fully realize this view leads to spiritual liberation, as well as greater ease in living and dying. When these opposites are split apart and held to be entirely separate, especially when only one side of the equation is consciously valued and validated over the other (e.g., life over death), we remain symptomatic, defensive, and aggressive in regard to our identities and what we perceive to be unfavorably imposed on us by others and the world.

Abhidharma and Buddhist Teachings of Karma In this chapter, I aim to expand and clarify the meaning of the collective unconscious by drawing not only on Jung’s ideas about it, but also on the much more ancient and comprehensive model of a collective

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unconscious from Yogacara Buddhism that originated and developed in the third to the fifth centuries in India. This model was a response to the earlier Buddhist psychology of the Abhidharma, which mapped momentby-moment awareness. The Abhidharma was initially recorded from the earliest oral traditions among the monks who preserved the Buddha’s teachings by memorizing them.1 I am not a scholar of Buddhism although I have studied it over decades, but I am a Buddhist practitioner for more than forty years of Zen, Vipassana, and of Phowa in Tibetan Buddhism, and I feel competent to talk about some psychological aspects of early Buddhist theory and their later developments. I draw generously here on Waldron’s (2002, 2003) contributions to the contemporary study of early Buddhism and Yogacara. His expertise on the theory of the alaya-vijnana, the collective unconscious from early Buddhism, has proven especially helpful in illuminating Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious in ways that are clinically and culturally relevant. The entirety of my knowledge of Yogacara comes through Waldron’s translations and interpretations, both through reading and extensive conversations. The historical Buddha lived and taught approximately 2500 years ago, and his teachings were memorized by his followers and then written down, approximately 454 years after he died. The Abhidharma is one of the first recorded texts of his original teachings: Abhi means higher or meta, and dharma refers to universal spiritual laws about the nature of reality, as well as the applications of these laws to our experience. The Abhidharma avers that truth/reality arises and passes away, moment by moment, in nanosecond units of conscious action called cittas. The act of consciousness is immediate awareness that comes into being at the membrane between subjectivity and objectivity. A citta is a discrete instance of conscious activity that we can imagine as a kind of disturbance or disruption that signals contact between a perceiving “subject” and an “object.” Neither subject nor object exists independently from this contact. The subject is not “perceiving” an object nor is the object “resisting” a subject. Contact initiates awareness of both subject and object. Subject (self) and object (world) are only potentials until they make contact.

1 For

a brief and practical summary of Abhidharma, see Jacobs (2017).

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To perceive or act in the exact present moment, unhabituated, is liberation from karma. There are some unprogrammed cittas (fractions of a second) that arise with each new perception, and if we can become conscious of them, we reach liberation from past and future. If we can actualize this liberation, we are also free from what we regard as time and space, even though we are still on the plane of mundane existence. Karma—meaning here “intentional action” and its consequences—is a central psychological and moral theme in early Buddhism. Becoming “liberated” from its imprisoning effects involves awakening to the simultaneity of the creation of self and world at the membrane of contact. As we will see, this awareness frees one from the ten thousand things and from the collective unconscious. Much of early and later Buddhism teaches meditative and analytic practices to develop sensitivity to non-dualism in perception and cognition—sensitizing oneself to the momentary unfolding of experience. As Buddhism develops over time, two kinds of discourses evolve with its practices. One discourse involves conventional truths that help us to function as persons in the everyday world. For example, our collective mental health dictates that we perceive the sky as “above” and the ground as “below,” distinguish past and future, and share a sense of self as “in here” while the world is “out there.” A practical Buddhist teaching about mundane reality is not to take yourself too seriously and just “chop wood and carry water,” or “don’t get too mixed up in the drama of the self.” Much of the deeper Buddhist teachings address, on the other hand, ultimate truth that disavows the reality of any and all thingness of subject, object, in-here, out-there, sky, and ground. This dharma shows exactly how self/other, life/death, good/bad, and other existential opposites can never be separated because they are co-creating each other. Of course, it is accompanied by practices that teach us how to experience this ultimate reality ourselves. Conventional and ultimate discourses can seem at odds with each other, especially for those who are not familiar with Buddhism. For example, how can “I” be liberated if I don’t exist? Who suffers if there is no self? Some of this confusion comes from mixing personal discourses about subjective states (such as “self”) with impersonal discourses about objective embodiment (such as “person”). A self and a person are not equivalent or interchangeable. A person seems, for example, singular and solid and unified, but a self is a discontinuous and unclear state of mind

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that constantly changes. The Abhidharma is primarily a methodology for freeing us from subjective states that motivate us to create a consensually validated self with which we habitually and automatically (i.e., unconsciously) identify, and on which we fixate our ideals and narratives. It wants to help us perceive the self and the world as delusions, and to free us from grasping at them for happiness or security. On the other hand, Abhidharma also emphasizes that a person is an autonomous agent of intentional actions. A person (someone with an identity and a body that can be publicly witnessed) is also the consequence of intentional actions from the past that have resulted in a particular being with a particular form. And so, our embodiment, as we collectively experience it, is not an accident, but rather a meaningful expression of karma from other lifetimes and other beings. As intentional actors, we shape our future karma of self/world, as we engage with the membrane of contact on a moment-to-moment basis. In the Buddha’s description of his own awakening (Thanissaro 2011), he makes clear the way karma is created. He penetrates the reality of all of his own karma and becomes a witness to its many different forms (animal, human, and deity). He also sees how collective existences are shaped through habit and adaptation. In his ultimate awakening, the Buddha witnesses the arising and passing away of the entire cosmos and how it is connected to karma through a principle called “Dependent Arising.” This principle illustrates how we are always embedded within a dynamic field of self/world and subject/object. We arise within this field, never apart from it. And yet, from the perspective of conventional reality, individuals are acting for themselves and move from perception into action, from past into the future. Such movement is also undergirded by fixed mental dispositions—called samskaras in Sanskrit—that are remarkably similar to Jung’s archetype: deep mental structures that motivate us to create repetitive templates in our feelings, thoughts, and actions. An individual “self” is such a template. While both self and body have no actual continuity and are unreal, the Buddha instructs us to be alert to how we sustain a sense of self through implicit assumptions such as “this is the kind of person I am.” Self and world arise together and are co-created at the membrane of their contact. The reason we need to contemplate our unreal self is that we are always creating consequences through our actions and intentions.

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The ways in which we perceive, speak, and act impact our ongoing surroundings through influences we cannot even fathom. These karmic implications have special significance in our primary human relationships (the ones that take place on an ongoing basis in our families, communities, and partnerships) in which the consequences of our speech and actions can readily create emotional and psychological realities that persist over generations, always shaping or molding the future. Karmic implications play out habitually in public and social realms, as well, in which we fixate on certain identity meanings and create consequence from these fixations. But if each individual’s world (the perceptual domain of an organism that has come about through recurrent interaction with natural and social environments) is largely determined by previous intentional actions in this and other lifetimes, then how do our worlds have anything at all in common? What leads to coherence between individuals’ experiences of self/world? In a sense, the early Buddhist teachings provoke the question: If awareness occurs only through momentary conscious individual perception, how can we experience a consensual world? Eventually, a new model of mind develops to respond to this question, one which finally produces a theory of a collective unconscious, remarkably similar to Jung’s.

Buddhist Unconscious: Alaya-vijnana The new model from Yogacara Buddhism, beginning in roughly third-century India, posits a substrate consciousness that consists of predispositions that condition our collective conceptual and linguistic images, names, and categories of thought. This substrate evolves through multiple lifetimes, is sensitive to cultural and biological influences, and also arises in a moment-to-moment way, mixed with all of our perceptions. This is also the consciousness that transcends the “death” of the body. It is called alaya-vijnana—a term that means roughly “home consciousness” or “storehouse consciousness.” The six traditional modes of awareness (five senses plus mental functions) now do not arise solely within subject–object contact, but now they are shaped or supported by this alaya awareness. Sensory cognitive awareness is no longer simply dependent on the present moment, but is influenced by subliminal predispositions, collective images, and linguistic categories that flow from the karmic past for each organism.

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This streaming substrate consciousness, of which we are typically unaware, is both an intentional and active consciousness, and can be witnessed consciously. As Waldron (2006) writes: Alaya-vijnana is said to be accompanied by the same five ‘mental factors’ that accompany every other moment of mind (citta) in the Yogacara tradition: attention, sensation, feeling, perception, and intention. (90)

And so, when we perceive our embodiment and world, we depend on subtle conditioning factors that promote “an outward perception of the receptacle world whose aspects are indistinct” (95). As long as we remain constrained by the unconscious schemas or archetypes (to use Jung’s language) that underlie ordinary perceptions and cognitions, we will be motivated to experience “I am” inside “this body” while “others” and the “world” are outside. And this disposition carries many emotional marks and psychological meanings that compel us to create more consequential actions that will keep us entrenched in a cyclical habituated set of identities. The view “I am” is the afflictive root of our karma and until we “pull it up” we will be captured, as Jung says, by the ten thousand things and the collective unconscious.

Alaya-vijnana and Jung’s Collective Unconscious Over many years of being steeped in both psychoanalysis and Buddhism, I have been and remain convinced that the two disciplines have much to learn from each other because they are both dedicated to subjective freedom, but they shine their lights on somewhat different foci. The primary focus of Buddhism is the individual and the world or community (sometimes together and sometimes separately). The focus of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is the dyad—a two-person field of contact—in which inquiries and developments are sorted out through a mutual discovery process. Both of these practices rely on a reflective and concentrated, but neutral, state of mind. Confusions arise, however, in translating some concepts back and forth between the two disciplines, perhaps because of the different foci. Some Buddhist theorists assume that psychoanalysts are always convinced of the fundamental reality of an autonomous self because analysts are often describing personal (two-person or one-person) processes in a way that highlights autonomy and individuality; the “world” of

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psychoanalysis, while it is intersubjective and intrasubjective, is typically described in terms of persons doing and thinking things—not points of awareness arising. For example, Waldron (2006) notes that Jung writes about unconscious process that sounds remarkably similar to the Yogacara model of the unconscious: Seemingly similar, Jung also claims that unconscious processes replicate conscious ones in that they include ‘perception, thinking, feeling, volition, and intention just as though a subject were present.’ (90)

But then Waldron assumes that Jung attributes a subtle but distinct “subject” in these experiences whereas Buddhists reject any enduring subject as the locus of action in both the conscious and unconscious minds. I disagree with Waldron. I believe Jung precisely agrees with the Buddhist view of impersonal causal factors in the collective unconscious. In Waldron’s description of Jung, Jung refers to the characteristics of psychological complexes, sub-personalities that organize the personal unconscious, and not to the archetypes that organize the collective unconscious. Jung’s later theory of the collective unconscious does not have even a whiff of the attribution of subjectivity, but is a model of unconscious forces or predispositions. For example, Jung ([1955] 1977) writes of archetype: This term is [meant to denote] an inherited mode of psychic functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a ‘pattern of behavior.’ This aspect of the archetype, the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology. (¶1228)

Jung sees archetypes as triggered by “situational patterns” where they motivate and compel the activation and development, within the individual, of habitual complexes or fixed configurations of affect, image, idea, and action that cause us to see–hear–feel self and others in highly repetitive and driven ways. Unconscious archetypes are the motivating forces that predispose the organization of personality, defenses, and reactivity. These complexes, like our karma, can carry over unconsciously from generation to generation in family life so that individuals are entirely unaware of how and why

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they may repeatedly carry out traumatic enactments, through the collective unconscious, from previous generations. Jung’s theory of archetypes (collective unconscious) and complexes (personal unconscious) is wholly analogous to the classical way the early Buddhists describe our condition of self/world: “When this is, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this is not, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases” (Waldron 2006, 90). Identity complexes (persona, ego, and shadow)—as theorized in Jungian psychology—organize the human personality and carry language and cultural implications. At the core of each personal complex is an archetype. For example, the “ego complex” is organized around the archetype of self—the collective predisposition to become an individual human subject, cohering in a body, having individual agency, forming a narrative that supports an identity existing over time and space, and being dependent on attachment relationships. The archetype of self allows us to move through transitions and transformations from one age or stage to another, over the arc of a lifetime, as though we were the “same” person even though all of our cells and all of our chemistry changes. Understanding Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious in relation to Yogacara Buddhism, we discover new insights and meanings through the implications of the alaya-vijnana and earlier Abhidharma psychology. These models of mind allow us to open a new window onto the unconscious difficulties of human relationships, particularly in the mix and the mess of perceiving self/other.

Liberation from the Archetype of Self: What Does It Mean? Early Buddhists saw and taught how subject and object arise together. Yogacara Buddhists also saw how alaya-vijnana (substrate consciousness) is habitually shaping certain kinds of perception, feeling, thinking, volition, and intentions to create and sustain experiences of separation and defense of the self. From a psychoanalytic point of view, we can also see that individuals in a dyad—especially a significant dyad like a couple—create their own inherent tendencies to see/feel/hear each other in a static repetition of emotional and identity themes. These are not “cognitive distortions” or simply mental habits, but entire and complete perceptions of

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apparently “objective reality.” When one person is “triggered” to see and feel the other person as the “enemy” or the “problem,” at that moment a dynamic field of relating comes into being in which each person sees/ hears/smells/tastes/feels/cognizes the other as threatening. As soon as this dynamic field is fully activated, the two people arise together at the membrane of contact, co-creating self and other in habituated and emotionally threatening ways. If, from a Buddhist view, we can see that self/other and self/world depend on contact at a moment-to-moment membrane, then we can begin to appreciate how entangled we are at this point of contact. When we recognize what is at stake—creating consequences that tend to fixate into endless anguished repetitions—we may bring to our relationships a more dedicated desire to correct a rigid misperception of “I am.” Similarly, we can also recognize spontaneous creativity and liberation that can emerge from non-fixated contact as, for instance, the Jung–Hisamatsu conversation demonstrates. Ordinary human beings are unlikely to be able to perceive freedom in the nanosecond cittas of awareness, even through meditation. Instead, for most of us, we have only the freedom to correct our misperceptions or destructive actions or speech after we have expressed them. We can step back and examine our blind spots and implicit unconscious associations. We can act to repair what we may have done to increase suffering or threat at the membrane of contact. If we cultivate a compassionate awareness of our habituated blind spots, acknowledging the force of a collective unconsciousness in predisposing us to create enemies and narratives of self-protection, then we can recognize that we always need a deeper inquiry and a mutual discovery process. We need others in order to know anything about ourselves in the non-duality of self/other. This awareness opens new opportunities and possibilities in applying both psychological and Buddhist teachings in intervening with couples, families, race and gender relations, and other identity conflicts. The Buddhist notion of a substrate consciousness that passes from death to life and life to death, always propelling us to make the mistakes of “I am in here” and “you are out there,” returning us to repetitive ignorance of non-duality, awakens a deep yearning for liberation. It also shows us that we are all flawed, all caught in identity protections and unconscious projections. Complexities of the “past,” from a Buddhist perspective, also include contingencies that we do not know about. For example, our current

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identity, gender, or skin color has evolved through conditions that fall far outside our current life and become meaningful as a path to liberation from self/other splits, and oppositions. Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious, on the other hand, also points out the projection of our own face onto the world through a kind of mirror image. In other words, we are always looking through our own eyes to see “the world,” and we need to keep that fact in mind because it teaches us greater modesty about what we supposedly “know” on an “objective basis.” If we can imagine how the self is a fiction played out symptomatically by a person who is fundamentally unconscious of the forces of karma and the collective unconsciousness as they are working through time and circumstances, we may begin to loosen our grip on personal identity. When our complexes are taken more lightly, then we may become more acutely aware of how instantaneously we create both an ego-driven “self” and a dubiously motivated “other,” how they are bound together at the membrane of consciousness. Moreover, if we can also see that liberation is not simply insight into non-duality or a moment of deconstruction of subject/object, but instead is an invitation to see again and again that there is no enemy, there is no “other,” but only the contact in which subject and object come into being, perhaps we will understand how to live more ethically, respectfully, and lovingly. As human beings, we can become reflective about our actions and our speech: We have intelligence that other animals do not have. We can correct ourselves after the fact of doing or saying something damaging or destructive. Being liberated from the constraints of the collective unconscious and the archetype of self means that we commit ourselves to our natural self/other being, both prospectively in our theories and ideas, and retrospectively in our actions. I believe this is the only hope for happiness and coexistence for such unconsciously limited and profoundly interdependent beings as we are.

References Bhikkhu, Thanissaro. 2011. Wings to Awakening: An Anthology from the Pali Canon. Retrieved from https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/wings/index.htmlR. Jacobs, Beth. 2017. The Original Buddhist Psychology: What the Abhidharma Tells Us About How We Think, Feel, and Experience Life. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

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Jung, Carl G. [1916] 1969. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed., vol. 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1977. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings. Edited by G. Adler and R. Hull, vol. 18. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meckel, Daniel J., and Robert. L. Moore. 1992. Self and Liberation: The JungBuddhism Dialogue. Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press. Waldron, William. 2002. “Buddhist Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Thinking About ‘Thoughts Without a Thinker’.” Eastern Buddhist XXIV (1): 1–52. ———. 2003. The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijnana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought. London and New York: Routledge-Curzon. ———. 2006. “On Selves and Selfless Discourse.” In Buddhism and Psychotherapy Across Cultures: Essays on Theories and Practices, edited by M. Unno, 87–104. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications. Young-Eisendrath, Polly, and James Hall. 1991. Jung’s Self Psychology: A Constructivist Perspective. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Young-Eisendrath, Polly, and Shoji Muramoto, eds. 2002. Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy. East Sussex, England: Brunner-Routledge.

Index

A Abhidharma, 15, 272, 273, 275, 279 Active Night of the Soul, 255 Alaya-vijnana, 15, 273, 276, 277, 279 Alchemy, 14, 112, 209, 213, 215– 218, 223, 228, 229, 233, 245 Alexander, Franz, 136, 137 Alexandrian, 10, 19, 20, 22, 24, 34 Allegory, 10, 23, 24 Analytical Psychology, 90, 91, 207, 259 Andreas-Salome, Lou, 154 Angel, 29, 30, 32 Angst (fear), 26, 32 Anima Mundi, 190–192, 231, 233 Antiochean, 10, 22 Apophasis, Apophatic, 14, 178, 200, 201, 203–205, 207–210, 223, 229, 243, 244, 247, 248 Archetype, Archetypal, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 20, 27–30, 32–34, 37–39, 42, 44, 45, 60, 72, 74–76, 108, 142, 143, 168–174, 176, 178–180, 185, 188–191, 194, 195, 205, 208–210, 216, 218,

221, 223, 228, 229, 231, 232, 243, 246, 254, 259–264, 266, 270, 271, 275, 277–279, 281 B Bachofen, J.J., 156 Bakan, David, 159, 160 Becoming, 14, 28, 201, 204, 206, 207, 243, 246, 264, 274 Bhagavad Gita, 240 Blackstone, Judith, 12, 108, 110, 123 Body, 9, 11, 31, 39, 41, 42, 50, 71, 87, 91, 109, 110, 122, 124, 133, 138, 146, 167, 185, 188–190, 201, 204, 205, 209, 223, 256, 270, 275–277, 279 Body without organs (BwO), 204–207 Book of Revelation, 32, 33 Borderline concept, 245 Buber, Martin, 161, 179 Buddhism, 52, 53, 92, 93, 109, 112, 116, 119, 122, 133, 135, 137, 139, 144, 240, 243, 267, 273, 274, 276, 277, 279

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 T. Cattoi and D. M. Odorisio (eds.), Depth Psychology and Mysticism, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1

283

284  Index C Citta, 273, 277 Coincidence of opposites, 201–203, 210 Collective unconscious, 4, 5, 7, 15, 142, 168, 178, 201, 205, 208, 259, 260, 269–274, 276–279, 281 Complex, 9, 11, 12, 15, 50, 60, 140, 145, 159, 194, 213, 232, 238, 259, 261, 279 Coniunctio, 216, 218, 229 Consciousness, 3, 4, 9, 15, 20, 30, 33, 38, 40–42, 44–46, 51, 54, 56, 60, 86, 109, 111, 113, 116–118, 128, 129, 133, 136, 143–146, 154, 160, 170, 172, 174–176, 184, 190–192, 194, 204, 221, 225, 231, 259, 263, 264, 271, 273, 276, 277, 279–281 Constructivism, 68, 69, 72, 94, 144 Corbin, Henri, 14, 37, 224, 233

Description, 82–85, 88, 89, 94–96, 101, 145, 153, 168, 171, 192, 201, 210, 216, 220, 221, 248, 275, 278 Deus absconditus, 190, 224, 225 Developmental Theory, 112–114 The Diamond Approach, 111–113, 115, 118, 124 Dionysus, Dionysian, 10, 38, 39, 41–46 Disenchantment, 11, 88–92, 141 Divine Darkness, 14, 221, 223–225, 228, 234 Divine Light, 14, 221, 224, 225, 228, 234 Dreams, 11, 13, 15, 26, 32, 49–62, 100, 130, 142, 156, 157, 159, 172, 174, 203, 208, 229, 232, 262 Drewermann, Eugen, 10, 19, 20, 25–34

D Dark Night of the Soul, 253, 255, 256 Data mining, 61 Death, 15, 28, 31, 34, 52, 54, 90, 123, 136, 156, 157, 162–164, 174, 186, 193, 194, 205, 228, 244, 246, 253, 255, 257, 258, 263, 267, 272, 274, 276, 280 Death drive, 13, 155, 162 Deleuze, Gilles, 201, 204–207 Depression, Psychological, 248 De Principiis (On First Principles), 20 Depth Psychology, 3–15, 19, 26, 28, 29, 37, 39, 50, 57, 58, 62, 67, 107–109, 112, 114–119, 122–124, 185, 192, 195, 199, 210, 247, 264, 266 Derrida, Jacques, 248

E Eckhart, Meister, 168, 188, 223, 225, 243 Ego, 33, 46, 59, 107, 113, 114, 117, 123, 137, 153, 168–170, 173–175, 177, 179, 189, 193, 199, 205, 209, 210, 221, 224, 225, 232, 239, 242, 246–249, 254, 260–264, 279, 281 Eigen, Michael, 86, 90 Embodied spirituality, 108, 115, 122 Embodiment, 10, 42, 45, 93, 108, 109, 112, 115, 116, 120, 122, 123, 271, 274, 275, 277 Emotion, 10, 187 Emptiness, 10, 113, 116, 135, 170, 174, 183, 189, 228, 229, 240–244, 246, 249 Engaged Spirituality, 122

Index

Engler, Jack, 135, 144 Eros, 39, 155, 162, 163, 186, 192 Evolutionary Theory, 57 Exegesis, 10, 13, 19–26, 90 F Father god, 159 Feminine, 39–42, 113, 174, 176, 185, 188 Ferrer, Jorge N., 66, 73, 74 Flying, 52, 53 Fragmentation, 111, 142, 264 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 50, 83, 143, 259 Fromm, Erich, 89 Fundamentalism, 184 G Gnosis, 45, 170, 223, 229 God, 2–6, 20, 22, 25, 27–32, 38, 39, 43, 89, 128–130, 137, 146, 156, 159–161, 163, 168, 170–173, 175–180, 183, 186, 188–191, 193, 194, 200, 202–205, 208, 215, 223, 224, 226, 232, 243, 244, 248, 254–258, 260–267 God-image, 176, 177, 179, 201, 263, 266 Gospel of Luke, 27, 29, 30, 33 Guru scandals, 119 H Hasidism, 161 Hermeneutics, 8, 10, 20, 26, 44, 50, 135, 159, 200, 224 Hillman, James, 10, 13, 37, 74, 76, 185, 215 Hisamatsu, Shinichi, 269 Holy, 31, 159, 171, 180, 223, 254, 256

  285

I Illusion, 91, 92, 152–155, 157, 158 Image, 29, 33, 38, 41, 44, 74, 172, 173, 176, 178–180, 189–191, 193, 194, 203, 204, 215, 216, 218, 223, 243, 254, 256, 258, 261, 263, 271, 278, 281 Imagination, 13, 27, 28, 45, 55, 57, 130, 131, 133, 136, 154, 160, 162, 174, 180, 183, 185, 186, 189, 190, 193, 194, 214–216, 228, 234, 237, 256, 266 Immanence, 185, 191, 193, 201, 202 Individuation, 15, 42, 74, 84, 87, 108, 113, 114, 116, 119, 139, 142, 144, 178, 206–208, 210, 229, 232, 242, 246, 254, 259–262, 264, 272 Ineffable, 171, 219 Infancy narratives (Gospels), 10, 27, 29, 33 Interpretation, 9–13, 21, 22, 30, 33, 34, 40, 43, 57, 61, 72, 75, 84, 85, 98, 100, 101, 120, 131, 136, 139, 156, 159, 160, 188, 199, 205, 209, 259, 263, 271 J James, William, 7, 50, 51, 83, 85, 97, 121, 130, 171, 184, 193 John of the Cross, St., 15, 253, 255, 264 Jouissance, 14, 228, 229, 234 Jung, Carl G., 269 K Kabbalah, 161 Kakar, Sudhir, 135

286  Index Karma, 139, 272, 274, 275, 277, 278, 281 Kripal, Jeffrey J., 9, 44, 96, 98 L Lacan, Jacques, 225 Lack, 74, 98, 116, 123, 138, 180, 225, 226, 228, 238, 242, 246, 248, 254 Learned ignorance, 199, 202, 210 lectio divina, 19, 24 M Mandala, 46, 207, 262 Merkur, Daniel, 86–88, 94, 95 Metacognition, 56 Methodology, 10, 11, 13, 38–40, 46, 115, 202, 275 Midrash, 13 Mother goddess, 156, 163 Motivation, 70–72, 75, 135, 254 Mundus imaginalis, 175, 189, 190 Mysterium Coniunctionis, 216, 218, 221, 228 Mysterium tremendum, 216–218, 221, 222 Mystical Experience, 7–10, 13, 50, 51, 61, 82–86, 88–90, 92–94, 99, 101, 107, 120, 122, 128, 138, 144, 167–173, 176–180, 183, 186, 188, 195, 253, 258, 263, 264 Mystical marriage, 172, 254, 258 Mystical theology, 14, 128, 129, 192, 208, 223, 228, 229, 234, 240 Mystical traditions, 13, 114, 116 Mysticism, 9–14, 38, 45, 46, 51, 54, 82–91, 93–99, 107–109, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119–124,

127–131, 134–137, 139, 141, 143–146, 151, 155, 156, 159–164, 168, 169, 172, 175, 177, 178, 183–186, 188–194, 225, 234, 257, 263–266 Mysticism, Catholic, 264 Mysticism, Definition of, 51, 86, 95 Mystics, 3, 14, 22, 86, 87, 97–100, 120, 129, 160, 168–170, 172– 178, 180, 190, 191, 253 Myth, 4, 27–29, 38, 39, 42, 43, 91, 92, 161, 179, 186, 192–195 Mythology, Greek, 4, 5, 167, 185 N Narcissism, 13, 137, 153, 154, 162, 231 Neuroscience, 56, 57 Nicholas of Cusa, 202 Nightmares, 52, 56, 58 Nirdvanda, 269, 272 Noetic, 22, 152, 171, 193 Non-duality, non-dual, 191, 272, 274, 280, 281 No-self, 10, 13–15, 135, 137, 237, 238, 240–242, 244, 245, 247, 248, 272 Nothingness, 14, 189, 226, 229, 238–241, 243, 244, 246–249 Numinous, Numinosum, 2, 3, 7, 44, 87, 91, 93, 143, 167–172, 174, 178, 179, 190, 232, 260 O Object Relations Theory, 67 Oceanic feeling, 84, 136, 143, 151, 154, 157, 158 Origen, 5, 10, 19–23 Otto, Rudolph, 143, 171

Index

P Participatory Theory, 72 Passive Night of the Soul, 256 Philosophers’ Stone, 213, 218–221, 223 Place, topoi, 207 Pluralism, 11, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76 posse, 203, 204 Postmodernism, 194 Prayer, 164, 208, 223 Pre-Oedipal, 136, 156 Prescription, 59, 85, 88, 91, 94–97, 130 Presence, 82, 87, 120, 129, 130, 157, 161, 163, 170, 171, 174, 187– 190, 192, 194, 195, 221, 224, 228, 232, 247, 258, 262, 267 Pseudo-Dionysius, Dionysius the Areopagite, 223, 243 Psyche, 3, 5, 27, 28, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 58, 59, 62, 131, 141, 167–174, 176–180, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 194, 215, 218, 221, 233, 238, 239, 243, 248, 253, 254, 259–266 Psychoanalysis, 11, 14, 26, 27, 29, 39–41, 50, 66–70, 83, 88–91, 96–99, 115, 133, 137, 139–141, 143, 146, 153, 154, 199–201, 205, 225, 229, 234, 239, 277, 278 Psychologia perennis, 87, 88 Psychology, Archetypal, 37, 38, 188, 190, 191, 195, 218 Psychology-Comparativist Dialogue, 132, 133 Psychology of religion, 10, 84, 107, 130–134, 185, 195, 237 Psychology and religion movement, 12, 130, 135, 140 Psychology-theology dialogue, 132

  287

Psychospirituality, 132, 134, 138, 142 R Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph, 24, 25, 28, 34 Regressive Introversion, 254, 259 Relational psychoanalysis, 69, 76 Religion, 5–11, 34, 44–46, 57, 65, 72, 82–84, 86, 88–90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 117, 118, 121, 129–134, 137, 140, 142, 143, 151, 152, 156, 158, 159, 161, 172, 176, 184, 185, 194, 237, 240, 242, 244, 247, 248, 265, 266 Religion in America, 91, 108, 119, 248 Religion, American, 52 Religion, Definition of, 7 Religious Experience, Visionary, 183, 258, 261, 266 Religious Function of the Psyche, 263 Religious Studies, 7, 9, 11, 38, 45, 46, 82–88, 93–95, 98, 99, 101 Religious Studies, Discipline of, 10, 38, 45, 82 Repression, 31, 39, 117, 135, 156, 164 Ricoeur, Paul, 49, 50, 57 Rolland, Romain, 143, 152 Rubin, Jeffrey, 135 S Samskaras, 108, 275 Scholem, Gershom, 160 Secularization, 88, 89, 91–93, 118, 120, 142 Self, 3, 4, 7–11, 13–15, 20, 25, 29, 30, 32, 33, 42, 43, 46, 50, 51, 56, 61, 62, 68, 72, 74, 75,

288  Index 86, 87, 89, 90, 108, 110–114, 117, 118, 129, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 142, 143, 145, 152–155, 158, 161, 162, 164, 170, 173–179, 183, 189, 191, 193, 194, 201, 204–206, 217, 218, 221, 223, 225, 226, 232, 234, 237–249, 253–256, 258, 260–265, 267, 270–281 Self, Archetype of, 270, 279, 281 Self, liberation from, 281 Sells, Michael, 189, 200–202 Senses, Active Night of, 255 Senses, Passive Night of, 254, 255 Sleep, 49, 53–56, 58–61, 138 Soul, 4, 6, 13, 24, 29, 30, 37, 39, 43, 45, 72, 113, 114, 124, 155, 163, 170–173, 175, 185–193, 195, 214, 216, 218, 226, 231, 243, 244, 248, 253–258, 262, 264, 265, 267 Soul-making, 41, 186, 187, 190–192 Spirit, 11, 13, 27, 31, 34, 50, 65, 72, 90, 91, 114, 128, 129, 160, 175, 180, 183, 185–188, 193, 244, 248, 253–256, 264 Spirit, Active Night of, 255 Spirit, Passive Night of, 254, 255 Spiritual But Not Religious, 92 Spiritual Bypassing, 119, 125 Spiritual death, 254, 256, 257 Spirituality, 11, 12, 65–67, 69, 70, 72–75, 108, 114, 120–122, 127–129, 137, 143, 171, 184, 186, 241, 242, 248, 257 T Tao Te Ching, 188, 241 Technology, 51, 58, 60, 61

Theology, Apophatic, 200, 210 Theology, Mystical, 14, 128, 129, 208, 223, 228, 229, 234 Transformation, 15, 20, 32, 34, 45, 62, 101, 213, 215, 218, 225, 234, 253, 254, 256, 258, 259, 261, 263 Transformational, 12, 14, 37, 38, 42–44, 51, 107, 138, 139, 144, 215, 263 Transformation, Visionary, 261 Transient, 171 Transpersonal psychology, 11, 66, 115 Tropological, 10, 19, 21–23, 34 U Uncanny, 86, 157, 204, 224, 231, 232, 246 Unconscious, 4, 5, 7, 9, 15, 37, 40, 43, 57–59, 66, 89, 100, 107, 110, 113, 114, 117, 119–121, 123–125, 141, 142, 146, 153, 154, 157, 168–176, 178, 200, 204, 205, 208, 215, 221, 224– 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 245, 246, 254, 259–261, 263–265, 269–271, 276–281 Unknowing, unknown, 10, 13, 14, 157, 162, 163, 171, 172, 177, 178, 183, 200, 205, 215, 221, 224, 225, 229, 246 V Vale of soul-making, Keats, 187 Via Negativa, 178, 193, 221, 223– 226, 228, 233, 234 Via Positiva, 178, 226, 228

Index

W Wandering Joy, 228, 229, 234 Wapnick, Kenneth, 136 Y Yogacara, 15, 273, 276–279

  289

Z Zaleski, Carol, 136 Zen, 109, 116, 119, 135, 137, 143, 241–243, 269, 273 Zohar, 160, 243