Primordial Fantasies of Oceanic Feeling
What was once a physical reality in the ancient past—our oceanic origin—becomes a psychical reality in our unconscious. When Sylvia Plath says “a far sea moves in my ear,” we know what she means. It is a fantasy inasmuch as it is dreamt, it is primordial in that it is the oldest memory we have. The impulse to withdraw, to hibernate, the retreat to calm, to quiet, to remain at home, to contain, to stay under the covers, under weighted blankets, to shut out the world, reducing stimulation to near zero: these are needs that proceed from the pressurized support of the oceanic womb; that of our mother and that of the literal ocean at once. The need to sleep is the need to withdraw into the Oceanic; a zone of suspended animation where the mind goes liquid in the currents of dream. And yet the Oceanic is also the deeper need to dissolve, to assimilate, to be annihilated, to return to the One. Sabina Spielrein, a founder of psychoanalysis whose ideas were reappropriated by Freud, has this to say on the Oceanic: "The sea (the 'Mother') into which the subject advances is the dark problem, the condition in which there is no time, no place, no opposites (above and below). It is undifferentiated, potentially creative, and, hence, an eternal living entity.”
