Freud’s Nirvana
In The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling, William B. Parsons’ 1999 study of Freud’s mysticism, Parsons unearths a rare moment in which Freud speaks of the nirvana of classical hinduism. This was in 1904 in the treatment of a young Swiss poet named Bruno Goetz. Goetz transcribed these meetings verbatim in letter form and would later publish them as a book. Here is Freud speaking of nirvana, from the Goetz transcription:
The Bhagavad Gita is a great and profound poem with awful depths. "And still it lay beneath me hidden deep in purple darkness there," says Schiller's diver, who never returns from his second brave attempt. If, however, without the aid of a clear intellect you become immersed in the world of the Bhagavad Gita, where nothing seems constant and where everything melts into everything else, then you are suddenly confronted by nothingness. Do you know what it means to be confronted by nothingness? Do you know what that means? And yet this very nothingness is simply a European misconception: The Hindu Nirvana is not nothingness, it is that which transcends all contradictions. It is not, as Europeans commonly take it to he, a sensual enjoyment, but the ultimate in superhuman understanding, an ice-cold, all-comprehending yet scarcely comprehensible insight. Or, if misunderstood, it is madness. What do these European would-be mystics know about the profundity of the East? They rave on, but they know nothing. And then they are surprised when they lose their heads and are not infrequently driven mad by it—literally driven out of their minds. . . . The most sensible thing to do is to keep on asking questions. At the moment you are interested in the Hindu philosophers. They often went so far as to express their answers in the form of questions. They knew why.
A number of points are of interest here.
The flip between mysticism and psychosis.
Adding veracity to the account is the reference to the Schiller poem, the very same poem that Freud will conclude his oceanic feeling chapter in Civilization and its Discontents, when, after speculating upon the “mental modifications” that may be brought about by yoga, he writes—as if he were relieved to be done with the topic: “But I am moved to exclaim in the words of Schiller's diver: ‘Iet him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light’!” This ‘roseate light’ is, in other words, the “bright world'“ of science.
When describing the awful depths of the Gita, “where nothing seems constant and where everything melts into everything else,” and a Nirvana that “transcends all contradictions,” Freud may as well be speaking of the unconscious, as he would later define it in the eponymous essay of 1915…
