Nonduality in Freud
I’m currently neck deep in writing my research thesis for school. I’m writing a kind of exegetical study of Freud’s last note: “Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id” (1938, p. 300).
This has always struck me as a private vindication of mysticism in his last days. But after further study, I am uncertain whether this last note differs at all from his typical derision towards mysticism, the “enemy of the future;” his self-same and lifelong critique of the religious mind. Here is one such exemplary zinger, from a letter to Fliess dated December 12, 1897, “The dim inner perception of one's own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond. Immortality, retribution, the entire beyond are all reflections of our psychic internal [world]. Meschugge? Psycho-mythology” (1897, p. 286).
But even this smacks of certain kind of mystical insight… Not so dissimilar from a fragment by 13th century zen master Dōgen: “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.”
I had originally read Freud’s last last note under the auspices of nonduality; as a definition of mysticism close to what one might find in classical Hinduism: the obscure self-perception of the realm outside duality, of nonduality. The letter can be read likewise in this manner: the dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus, which is outside.
The practice of nonduality is ancient and typically eastern, as exemplified by Shaivism, Daoism and Buddhism, but it may also be found at the mystical fringes of western thought, Plotinus, Kabbalah, William Blake. It is, in the most basic terms, the dissolution or suspension of that binary so fundamental to western thinking, the binary subject/object. Far from being a philosophical position, it is my belief that this dissolution is a special mental state; a kind of uncanny ground zero of the psyche; what the Buddhists call nirvana, what Romain Rolland called oceanic feeling; and what a psychoanalyst of a certain generation might call unmentalized experience.
While I had originally been naïve enough to hope that I could pull nonduality whole cloth out of Freud, I am now well-aware, after reading the Standard Edition hither and yawn, that Freud is (usually) about as far away as you can get from nondual thinking. Ever the scientist, his entire apparatus of thought rests upon the subject/object binary—the wishes of fantasy vs the “exigencies of life.” While it may be argued that he has moments of dialectical thinking (a kind of cheap western form of nondual thinking) duality is his principle mode and redoubt.
And yet, he defines the unconscious along the terms of what may as well be nonduality. The features of the unconscious, as described in the eponymous essay are: “exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality” (1915, p. 187). We may revise this last bit to say: the replacement of duality by nondual reality.
This is why it is rather frustrating to see him limit oceanic feeling to the ego, as opposed to it being the feeling of primary process. Closing the chapter on oceanic feeling by quoting a Schiller poem (about a diver who ends up drowning), he hints that it is apprehension of what he might find that makes him dismiss oceanic feeling: “Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light!” (1930, p.73).
Nevertheless it is clear that the long arc of psychoanalysis, from Lacan to Bion to Field Theory, trends towards nonduality and the non-contradiction of subject/object. The unconscious has moved from inside and down—in the topographical model of depth-psychology—to the mobius strip continuum of inside/outside and everywhere; (not so different from the '“psycho-mythology” in the Fliess letter…).
A mirror will be set at the location of this unconscious, revealing on the one hand, Freud’s great discovery from its original scientific standpoint, a view, following upon his argument of animism in Totem and Taboo (1913), where the nondual experience of emptiness and “the One” may be located, or diagnosed, as a particular relation to the unconscious—or as Freud names it: endopsychic perception. Nonduality is here converted into metapsychology.
On the other hand, falling through our looking glass, the old nondual position of Mind which is outside and everywhere, is revealed as a discovery of the Freudian unconscious, avant la lettre, 2500 years ago in the ancient civilizations of the east. Metapsychology is now converted into nonduality (if you may pardon the anachronism).
Freud, S. (1897) Letter from Freud to Fliess, December 12, 1897. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 42:285-287
Freud, S. (1915) The Unconscious. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14:159-215
Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 21:57-146
Freud, S. (1938) Findings, Ideas, Problems. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 23:299-300
