Oceanic Feeling

From The SpiritWiki

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

Enhanced Affective Response > Breakthrough, Caring Moment, Dissonance, Forgiveness of Sins, Improved Relationships, Love, Moksha, Mukti, Oceanic Feeling, Spiritual Emergence

List of Connection Outcomes

Connection Outcome > Connection Pathology, Déjà vu, Emotional Cleansing, Emotional Satisfaction, Enlightenment, Existential Terrors, Healing, Liberation, Perfect Connection, Perfected Connection, Perfection, Physical Sensations, Psychotic Mysticism, Realization of Self, Ritambharapragya, Spontaneous Alignment, The Unity, Transformation, Union

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]

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.

Enhanced Affective Response