a shrunken residue of a more inclusive – indeed, an all-embracing – feelingwhich corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it
(ibid, 68; my italics).
This “primary ego-feeling” – associated with a feeling of limitlessness or oneness with the universe, wherein something like an ego is perhaps not discernable at all – Freud describes as oceanic, borrowing the term from a letter written to him by French poet and mystic Romain Rolland in response to The Future of an Illusion. Therein Rolland accepts Freud’s critique of religion and the juvenile nature of prevailing forms of belief but clarifies that Freud’s analysis neglects the “the true source of religious sentiments” which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,’ an experience of the limitless and unbounded – une sentiment oceanique(Vermorel and Vermorel, 1989).
Freud is willing to acknowledge that this ‘oceanic’ feeling exists but finds uncompelling the claim that it might be regarded as the source of religious need, insisting that the motives for religious tendencies lie instead in infantile helplessness, the desire for submission to a superior power, and the narcissistic wish of an ego to endure beyond death. “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself,” Freud (1930, 65) confesses, nor does he feel able to “work with such intangible quantities” (ibid, 72). Classing the ‘oceanic’ as a sensation which defies scientific characterization, Freud concedes that “nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational content most readily associated with the feeling” (ibid). And it is here that I wish to introduce a caveat, namely that the ‘oceanic’ suggests to us the altogether absence, perhaps even the irrelevance, of ideational content as such. In fact, I would argue, this “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (ibid, 65) seems to suggest the very emptying out of the centrifugal circularity of language and subjectivity, those mutually constituted contrivances that provide the “I” its pseudo-stability on the condition of difference and separation.