Beneath the Waves

The Oceanic Feeling and its Relatives.

Jonah Bossewitch

PSY 365

Professor Sugarman

January 10, 1996

In the arena of scientific theories there is a delicate balance between data and explanations. At what point should the theorist stop straining to fit a piece of datum into the framework of an existing theory and develop a new theory that fits the data better? The situation is often complicated by the fact that it is often difficult to describe an observation without using a particular paradigm. This makes it harder to recognize disconfirming cases when they occur. Successfully overthrowing a theory is a process that is so rare and difficult that it is called a revolution1.

Freud was an extraordinary revolutionary thinker and was very sensitive to the pitfalls of getting stuck in a paradigmatic rut. Most memorably, he grappled with this issue in Beyond the Pleasure Principle when he dealt with the baffling case of traumatic dreams. In the end, Freud found this phenomenon to be sufficient grounds for revision of his theory of instincts. However, this was only after repeated attempts to fit the compulsion to repeat into his preexisting theory.

In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud discusses an analogous discovery, the so called 'oceanic' feeling, that could have forced a serious revision of his theory of instincts as well as his map of the mind. He says that this phenomenon "sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is a genetic - explanation of such a feeling." (Civ. and its Dis., p. 12) Unlike the case of traumatic dreams, Freud makes rapid work of this phenomenon and manages to neatly describe it in terms of his preexisting theory. However, the story of the oceanic feeling is not so simple, and deserves a second glance. The feeling that Freud describes seems to have a great deal in common with other feelings that sound very similar. Together, these feelings may prove strange enough to justify a reexamination, if not a revision, of the psychoanalytic theory.

Freud learned of the oceanic feeling in a letter from his friend Romain Rolland dated December 5, 1927. Rolland was writing in response to The Future of Illusion in which Freud argued that religion was nothing more than an illusion. Rolland reported to Freud an important observation relating to Freud's search for the origin of religion. Rolland described "a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people2. It is a feeling he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded-as it were, 'oceanic'." (Civ. and its Dis., p. 11)

Although it is brief, Rolland's description of this oceanic state resonated deeply within me. I associated the primary characteristics of this feeling, (oneness with the Universe, loss of ego, and a sense of infinity) with a variety of other feelings that somehow seem related. They may not be directly involved with the origins of religion, but they are similar enough to the oceanic feeling that they ought to be considered because of their strangeness. They also may teach us a thing or two about the oceanic feeling, by giving us something similar to contrast it with. Had Freud been aware of them3, there is little doubt in my mind that he would have critically investigated them with genuine curiosity, and an eye for their theoretical implications.	The most ancient of these feelings can be traced to the various disciplines of Yoga and Transcendental Meditation. They originated in Eastern religions and also form the core of Jewish Kabbalistic tradition. Some of these schools of thought start with the assumption that reality is best understood as subjective - existing in (or a product of) our own minds. According to this schema reality can initially be divided into three states: waking, dreaming, and sleeping. The goal of many of these school's techniques was to enter a fourth state of consciousness that was somehow beyond (or a union of) these three ordinary states. Some even claimed to travel to other worlds using these techniques, in contradistinction to Christian Grabbe's assertion that "we can not fall out of this world." (Civ. and its Dis., p. 11)

Perhaps as ancient, although only recently studied, are the flow states described in Mihaly Csikszintmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. These states can be entered by engaging in any type of behavior that balances the challenges and skills of the subject. These behaviors may include dancing, painting, reading, rock climbing, playing music just to name a few. The flow state is characterized by a loss of the sense time, and a loss of self. The "loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of self, and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self."4 It is important to note that the flow state seems to be distinct from the fourth state aimed for by mystics.

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe relates how experiences with LSD can approximate the states that it takes yoga masters forty years to attain, and bring about oceanic- style feelings. "But these are words, man! And you couldn't put it into words... the visual stuff was just the decor with LSD. In fact, you might go through the experience without any hallucination. The whole thing was... the experience... this certain indescribable feeling! Indescribable, because words can only jog the memory, and if there is no memory of... The experience of the barrier between the subjective and objective, the personal and the impersonal, the I and the not-I disappearing... and now that your soaring on LSD that feeling is coming on again - only now the creation is of the entire universe-"5

Although LSD appeared after Freud's time, the fact that a chemical high can emulate the feelings of a natural state would not surprise him. It is analogous to the relationship between mania and intoxication of which Freud was well aware. (Civ. and its Dis., p. 28) Freud believed that the only reason that mind altering drugs work, is because they "take you places" that the mind is capable of reaching naturally. In other words, chemicals can only affect you in ways that you're brain is predisposed to reacting. From this, it is easy to see how feelings might be induced deliberately, and do not only occur spontaneously, like the oceanic feeling that Rolland describes. Just as drugs can artificially induce feelings in an individual, feelings might also be artificially induced through a series of natural techniques. After all, natural techniques, like breathing and stretching, cause physiological changes, including neurohormonal ones. Freud's intuition had told him that it would be impossible to characterize the physiological signs of these types of feelings, but, he would have been delighted to learn that his intuition was mistaken.

Indeed, in 1967 the American physiologist Robert Wallace began to conduct experiments on transcendental meditation. Wallace found that after a few minutes "his subjects entered a state of deep relaxation, marked by the appearance of alpha waves in their EEGs, and decreased oxygen consumption... In sleep the drop [of Oxygen levels] is usually less than 16 percent, whereas meditators achieved reductions that momentarily dipped almost twice as low... What this showed was that the subjective feelings reported during meditation - inner silence, peacefulness, and relaxation - had a real physical basis."6 Given the correlation between physiology and subjective experience, this research supports the reality of oceanic-type experiences, and the fact that they can be voluntarily induced.

In addition to these (usually) individual methods for achieving oceanic-type feelings, there are also many ways to experience them in groups. Concerts, dances, and rituals (religious or otherwise) are just a few of the group activities that come to mind. All of these seemingly disparate cases have certain key features in common. They are all characterized by a "loss" of self and a corresponding sense of unity with the world/cosmos/universe. Although the differences can be quite subtle, this loss of self does not seem to be identical in all of these cases. In Freudian terms we can predict three separate scenarios that might account for oceanic feelings: (1) The ego expands infinitely so that it encompasses the entire world (this corresponds to Freud's analysis of oceanic feelings in which the ego is not differentiated from the rest of the world). (2) The attention is so focused on a particular object that the ego effectively shrinks into nothingness, temporarily forgotten. (3) The Psychoanalytic framework can not describe the feeling since the subject has entered a new state that has a different topology than the one described by Freud7.

Freud did not study the family of feelings/states that are closely related to the oceanic feeling. The feeling that is a candidate for the origin of religion, is accounted for by Freud as a result of (1), a state that we all experienced as infants. However, he never gets the chance to explore the alternative two possibilities which might not be reducible to developmentally earlier states. It may turn out that some states are developments of the psyche (as opposed to regressions) and require intensive training for the individual to go beyond anything previously experienced in mental life. Sorting out the psychoanalytic descriptions of the various states described above is beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is not obvious to me that they can all be explained as manifestations of (1), and ought to be rigorously investigated. These examples suggest, that there may be a class of feelings that do not conform to Freud's model of mental life as easily as the original oceanic feeling.

The subject of oceanic-type feelings is wide open to further questions and speculations. What began as inquiry into the source of religion, has blossomed into a topic that has far reaching implications for the entire psychoanalytic framework. Like neurotic symptoms, oceanic-type feelings lie on the boundary of everyday mental life. Freud has taught us the value of studying boundary cases in order to understand everything in between. Freud's discussion of the oceanic feeling can serve as a springboard for the study of some similar feelings, that are very interesting and highly relevant. We are left wondering whether this new data are significant enough to rekindle the revolution that the oceanic feeling almost started.

I pledge my honor, that my super-ego has insured that I obeyed the reality principle, and I have not violated the honor code while writing this paper.

Jonah Bossewitch