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Oceanic Feeling

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Oceanic Feeling

Oceanic Feeling, a term coined by Romain Rolland,[1] is a feeling and sensation of eternity, "a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded, something oceanic."a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded, something oceanic." [2]

Examples

List of Connection Outcomes

Notes

Freud dismisses this feeling as psychopathology, as a return to "limitless narcissism" and an "early stage in ego-feeling," and an expression of a "child's feeling of helplessness," as a regression to pre-Oedipal feeling of unity, and infantile feeling of helplessness. [3]

Numerous scholars have criticized Freud's view as reductive and inaccurate.[4]

In a letter to Freud dated December 5, 1927, Romain Rolland states the Oceanic Feeling is "totally independent of all dogma, all credo, all Church organization. . . . the true subterranean source of religious energy which . . . has been collected, canalized and dried up by the Churches to the extent that one could say that it is inside the Churches."" [5]

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Footnotes

  1. Maharaj, Ayon. “The Challenge of the Oceanic Feeling: Romain Rolland’s Mystical Critique of Psychoanalysis and His Call for a ‘New Science of the Mind’.” History of European Ideas 43, no. 5 (July 2017): 474–93.
  2. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961.
  3. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961.
  4. Maharaj, Ayon. “The Challenge of the Oceanic Feeling: Romain Rolland’s Mystical Critique of Psychoanalysis and His Call for a ‘New Science of the Mind’.” History of European Ideas 43, no. 5 (July 2017): 474–93.
  5. Romain Rolland quoted in Parsons, William B. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 1999.p. 9.

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