Acid Child

French mystic Romain Rolland came up with “oceanic feeling” (une sentiment océanique) out of a concoction of Spinoza, Hindu mysticism and his own weird trance states. His claim is that such feelings of eternity and boundlessness are the ground of all religion; the mystic is overcome by the feeling that they and Spinoza’s universal god-substance are one. Freud, after an exchange of letters with Rolland, ends up refuting oceanic feeling in his scorcher, Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Ever the atheist, Freud claims that he himself has never felt such a feeling. He further debases the oceanic by claiming that it is probably just the feeling of an infant trapped within the omnipotent confines of their primary narcissism. This collapses the mystical universe down to humanity’s smallest and most privileged member: the well-fed baby. This baby, having been lucky enough to be given a great deal of affection and care by mother, feels as if they are the universe; there is no relation in this zone; it may be the purest expression of the old Hindu koan, that art thou. Freud’s implicit argument is that any mystical experience is infantile: a mere recall of an earlier mental state. While this defames the mystic, it raises the child. Psycho-analysis, unlike the dominant medical sciences, has always accepted the infant’s experience as real; in some capacity it is more real than that of the adult; the very future is being inscribed there. This experience is mystical because it takes place at (or beyond) the limits where the lava-flow of the symbolic falls into the oceanic. It is a psychic state that you and I cannot have, at least not without an ascetic discipline, near death experience or a big psychedelic substance; in other words, any baby may as well be on acid. And yet not all is bliss and symbiosis, for as Melanie Klein and Julie Kristeva have observed, the oceanic—like mystical or psychedelic experience—also includes waves of annihilation, terror and psychotic breakdown.