Nonduality in Freud (Long Version)
Abstract
The author makes an exegetical study of Freud’s (1938) last note: “Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id” (p. 300). It is a study that traverses over the whole of Freud’s work in the attempt to consider the four main parts of this note: defining the ego as a scientist; an examination of Freud’s fraught and ambivalent relationship to mysticism; the function of the neglected concept of endopsychic perception as it pertains to turning metaphysics into metapsychology, allowing for an obscure perception of the hidden structures of the unconscious; and finally exploring the realm of the id and detailing these peculiar structures of the unconscious as they relate in particular to the mystical notion of nonduality generally and nirvana in particular.
Keywords: mysticism, nonduality, nirvana, Freud, unconscious, primary process
Freud’s Last Note
Of the last things Freud wrote were fragments and notes written in London over the summer of 1938; he had just narrowly escaped the Anschluss; Europe was on the verge of war; he was slowly dying of cancer. The notes were hand-written on a single sheet of paper, later found on his Maresfield Gardens desk and published posthumously in volume XXIII of the Standard Edition under the title Findings, Ideas, Problems (1938). The last entry of this text reads as follows: “August 22- Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id” (p.300).
This has always struck me as a private vindication of mysticism in his last days. Ever watchful of occultism, spiritualisms and religious superstitions, Freud had meticulously developed the public persona of the man of science and “destroyer of illusions” (Parsons, 1999, p. 171); and yet privately he was rather more circumspect and open to the topic, becoming yet even more sympathetic in old age. Is it now possible to read this note then as a kind of rehabilitation of the mystic in his thought? It is the weird nature of last words that they may revise retroactively all of the preceding work. One might read this note and begin again at the beginning of the standard edition with this “obscure self-perception” in mind.
Nonduality
I had always read this last note under the auspices of nonduality. That is, to paraphrase:
Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside of duality, of nonduality.
But what is nonduality?
If nonduality is a narrower subset of the category mysticism, it is in itself, like its broader heading, a large sprawling collection of old and diverse traditions found all over the world and as such, any pat definition must be dubious and inadequate. One of the definitions of nonduality, is that it cannot, properly speaking, be defined. Nevertheless we will attempt to formulate a basic understanding of this curious practice and mode of thought.
The origin of the name nonduality is found in the classical Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta, where Advaita means, literally, non-twoness (Loy, 2019). While the mystical practice of nonduality is ancient and typically eastern, as exemplified by Shaivism, Daoism and Buddhism, it may also be found at the mystical fringes of western thought, from Plotinus, to the Kabbalah, to Meister Eckhart, to William Blake. Nonduality is at once a way of thinking—or perhaps a way of non-thinking—a practice that is indifferent to thinking and, ultimately, as with the mystical, it may only be experienced.
If our known everyday reality is based upon duality,—that is binary oppositions, language and predicates— a reality that is stripped of these binaries, language and predicates—the reality of nonduality—would be unknowable and probably unthinkable. This unthinkable reality is what the mystics encounter.
A definition of nonduality in the most basic terms, useful to us here in the west, is that it is the dissolution of a binary so fundamental to western thinking, the binary subject/object. (Loy, 2019, p. xvi); or, me/not me. More poetically Plotinus describes the nonduality of seer and seen. “There were not two; beholder was one with beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended” (Plotinus, 1952, cited in Loy, 2019, p. xv).
What interests me about nonduality is less the metaphysical claims than its psychological implications. That this idea appears to show up all around the world and throughout history, as Aldous Huxley claims in The Perennial Philosophy (2009), would seem to indicate a profound clue to the interiority of humankind. While the east has explored this interiority from time immemorial, exemplified by the notion of nirvana, the west is no stranger to nonduality and we can find the dissolution of the binary me/not me at the esoteric margins of its religions and its philosophy (Huxley, 2009).
If the structure of nonduality is common to human experience may this not provide insight into the psyche? Even a map of psyche, depicting a limit between what is thinkable and what is unthinkable—or if you prefer, what is conscious and what unconscious? I suggest that a recent map exists of the psychic structure of nonduality and this map belongs to Freud.
And yet, as everyone knows Freud is fundamentally a dualist thinker. He himself admits to this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Our views have from the very first been dualistic, and to-day they are even more definitely dualistic than before” (1920, p. 53). The binary subject/object is strong in Freud; his science demands nothing less. Duality is his principle mode of thinking, characterized by the many pairs that populate his work; the pleasure/reality principles, the dual drives, primary and secondary process and so on.
This paper will be an attempt to demonstrate Freud’s nonduality, where his discovery of the unconscious, a nondual entity par excellence, subtly subverts and ultimately overturns his otherwise scientific duality.
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; applying the logic of the unconscious to convert the old notion of nonduality into metapsychology.
On the other hand, falling through our looking glass, the old nondual position of mind which is everywhere and everything, is revealed as a discovery of the Freudian unconscious, avant la lettre, 2500 years ago in the ancient civilizations of the east; metapsychology is converted into nonduality.
Because nonduality is only found in the margins in the west, its western history is one of incursions, discrete points in culture where the nondual appears and begins to dissolve the subject/object binary, only to be reacted against by the greater society and returned once more to duality. In my view psychoanalysis is one of the more recent and successful incursions of nonduality into western thought: it remains to be seen how long such an incursion will last.
This paper will advance through the labyrinth of Freud’s thought, making an exegetical study of this last note and proceeding, with various stops in between, from the Ego, to Mysticism, to “obscure self-perception,” and finally to the Realm of the Id.
The Ego’s Scientist
I view Freud’s concept of ego as if the ego were a scientist. This is following upon his notion of development of both history and psyche. The stages of history, as laid out in Totem and Taboo (1913), follow those outlined by Lord James Frazer, author of the 15 volume The Golden Bough (1959), proceeding from magic—or animism—to religion and finally to the modern age of science and reason. So faithful was Freud to the promises of modern science that one might paraphrase Freud’s famous dictum “where id was there ego shall be” as instead, “where primitive was there modern shall be.”
Freud deploys the study of phylogenetics to transpose the procession of historical development (as conceived by 19th century anthropology) onto human development, where the phase of magic is preverbal, the religious phase is an identification with the parents, and the phase of the mature ego is finally a scientific phase, in which the ego has subdued the impulses of fantasy, abdicated parental identity, and brought about proper reality testing in the service of adaptation. From Totem and Taboo:
The animistic phase would correspond to narcissism both chronologically and in its content; the religious phase would correspond to the stage of object-choice of which the characteristic is a child's attachment to his parents; while the scientific phase would have an exact counterpart in the stage at which an individual has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted himself to reality and turned to the external world for the object of his desires (1913, p. 90).
To further elaborate upon the ego-as-scientist compare the twin function of certainty in the following two passages: “Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego” (Freud, 1930, p. 65): and: “Only patient, persevering (scientific) research, in which everything is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually bring about a change” (Freud, 1926, p. 96). Is not the certainty of the scientist likewise the same certainty of the mature ego adapting to the exigencies of life? The certainty of a measurable reality?
This ego-as-scientist is Freud in his ego-psychology mode; that peculiar and popular mode of a curative psychoanalysis whose goal is the strengthening of the ego. If, as Freud (1917) says “the ego is not (currently) master in his own house” (p. 295) with the correct application of patient and persevering research towards ever greater certainty, it soon will be.
As with the scientist, reality testing is the principle means by which this certainty is brought about. From the beginning Freud struggled with the rather wicked problem of how one is able to tell the difference between a fantasy and a perception. External reality, existing independently of whatever we may wish it to be, is the great teacher: “Life takes us under its strict discipline” (Freud, 1933, p. 33). These are the famous exigencies of life that Freud is always citing throughout his work (1895, 1900, 1917, 1938); the needs, or demands of existence, that we must meet but against which we are always struggling: “a resistance stirs within us against the relentlessness and monotony of the laws of thought and against the demands of reality-testing” (Freud, 1933 p. 33). The scientist has a dream or a wish—his hypothesis—but it is only evidence provided by reality that will decide the results.
It is a wish deferred. In the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911) Freud claims that the “reality-ego” gives up immediate satisfaction for a pleasure in the future and that it is likewise “science that comes nearest to succeeding in that conquest” of the pleasure principle (p.223).
One may only replace “ego” with “scientist,” in this passage from the New Introductory Lectures, to further illustrate their basic identity.
The ego must observe the external world, must lay down an accurate picture of it in the memory-traces of its perceptions, and by its exercise of the function of ‘reality-testing’ must put aside whatever in this picture of the external world is an addition derived from internal sources of excitation. The ego controls the approaches to motility under the id's orders; but between a need and an action it has interposed a postponement in the form of the activity of thought, during which it makes use of the mnemic residues of experience. In that way it has dethroned the pleasure principle which dominates the course of events in the id without any restriction and has replaced it by the reality principle, which promises more certainty and greater success (p. 75ff).
Thought here is rationality, and the mnemic residues of experience are science fact. Certainty, of course, remains the same. And so one of the main dualities of Freud’s thought comes into view: that dual between the pleasure principle and the reality principle; a dual that becomes the central conflict in the psychic life of the individual. It is a dual that thinking (that is science rationalism) is meant to win. Thinking, or as Freud will also name it, judgment (1895, 1925), is the means by which the mature ego will parse between what is memory (and ostensibly phantasy) and what is a true perception of reality. It is this act of judgement that will separate what is subjective, from what is objective. In a rare moment Freud mentions this fundamental binary, subject/object, in a discussion of judgement in the essay on Negation (1925):
The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the first. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there (p. 237).
While on the one hand this would seem to throw a wrench into the whole enterprise of parsing phantasy and reality—for does this not reveal how they are intimately entangled? On the other hand, is this not precisely what a scientist does? That is, the scientist must observe repeated phenomena (refind their data) in order to justify their thesis? Or, better, a thesis that can produce data that another scientist can refind.
In any case here we find in the above quoted passage perhaps what is the true task of the ego, that through the act of thinking and of re-presentation, the binary subject/object is maintained, kept separate and divided. In short, the psychical apparatus known as the ego is precisely that agency tasked with maintaining duality.
This act of division is the principle motive of the most primary of psychical binaries: that of the pleasure/unpleasure series. It is by this means that the real world becomes external. “The ego owes its origin as well as the most important of its acquired characteristics to its relation to the real external world,” (Freud, 1940, p. 78). It is of utmost importance to recall here that at first the world that is divided by the ego and made external is not entirely real; it is a world made up of equal parts wishing and repression. The precocious ego of the child, tasked with organizing what is pleasurable from what is not, divides away the external world from themselves and places there everything that is unpleasurable (Freud, 1911). This comprises the institution of that famous mental facility known to us as projection (Freud, 1920). One of the basic premises of this paper is that projection reveals the very structure of psyche; a structure that appears to us outside. The projection outward of an external world, whether by scientist, or child, is a means of defense against an indeterminate psychical reality that would otherwise remain incomprehensible.
While the ego-as-scientist may assume that through persevering research they have encountered a true reality that is free of projection, the reality known by science is, on the contrary, always already contaminated by the projections of science, that is, in particular, the ego-ideal of objectivity. For example: it is precisely the binary of subject/object that breaks down in the study of quantum physics. The ideal of a laboratory objectivity separate from an observing subjectivity collapses in the observation of quantum phenomena, in which the observation itself changes the results.
Science vs. Mysticism
Now, if nondual mysticism is that experience in which subject and object are indistinguishable, (Loy, 2019) then we can see how both an ego invested in parsing subjectivity from an external reality and a science dedicated to establishing objectivity, would necessarily be opposed to the mystical.
This opposition between science and mysticism is strong in Freud. Indeed, mysticism, can appear throughout his work as a kind of bogeyman constantly haunting the margins of the new science of psychoanalysis; for Freud the credibility of psychoanalysis will be maintained by science alone.
Nowhere does the opposition between science and mysticism become more vehement than after the breakup with Jung. Jung becomes in effect the bogeyman of mystical psychoanalysis and represents every mystical temptation offered up by an unconscious that must be inferred, that is de facto resistant to objectivity.
Freud, for his part, is consistent in maintaining sober distance, if not a vocal disdain for mysticism and the mystical. I can count at least two occasions, in the years following the break with Jung, where Freud will claim all innocence in regards to dealings with mysticism and the occult—never mind his superstitious fascination of certain numbers, like the number 61 (Freud, 1909), or his well-known interests in thought transference (Pierri, 2023); in The Question of Lay Analysis (1926) he says: “I am beyond suspicion of having much belief in what are known as ‘occult phenomena’” (p. 237). And again in a letter in 1930: “No one has so far reproached me with ‘mystical leanings’” (Freud, 1930, p. 394).
Only in late life, and in particular, after his correspondence with Romain Rolland, does this opposition begin to waiver in Freud, and finally, if the last note is any indication, to recede altogether.
But while Freud is highly interested in thought transference, perhaps even to the point of believing in it, he will always keep his interests in the occult within the boundaries made by science. “It shows no great confidence in science if one does not think it capable of assimilating and working over whatever may perhaps turn out to be true in the assertions of occultists” (Freud, 1933, p 55). Though there may be differences between mysticism and the occult these differences tend to be moot. Mysticism, occultism and spiritualism are often interchangeable in Freud; they are all opposed equally—at least in his public writings.
Despite all of his outward incredulity towards the mystical, he was rather more circumspect in private, having even a fascination for the paranormal. Jones (1957) reports in the biography certain late-night conversations between himself and Freud in which Freud would regale him with stories of strange and unexplained phenomena such as clairvoyance and visitations from the dead. When Jones would “protest at some of the taller stories Freud was wont to reply with his favorite quotation: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy’” (p. 381). But Jones wanted to draw a line in the sand, “where such beliefs could halt: if one could believe in mental processes floating in the air, one could go on to a belief in angels. He (Freud) closed the discussion at this point (about three in the morning!) with the remark: “Quite so, even der liebe Gott” (Jones, 1957, p. 381).
The drift of speculation in this anecdote, from ghosts to angels to the good Lord, is indicative of, at the very least, an openness in Freud of a world that lies outside of the dualities of science.
Freud (1933) speaks of this world in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and offers us a valuable clue for this exegesis:
Mysticism, occultism—what is meant by these words? You must not expect me to make any attempt at embracing this ill-circumscribed region with definitions. We all know in a general and indefinite manner what the words imply to us. They refer to some sort of ‘other world’, lying beyond the bright world governed by relentless laws which has been constructed for us by science.
Occultism asserts that there are in fact ‘more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’ (p. 31).
The nonduality of the last note is prefigured here. The ‘other world’ (the unconscious) is that which lies beyond the “bright” domain of science and the ego—in short, of philosophy. The ‘relentless laws’ of course, are what we have referred to as duality. If there is a fundamental conflict at the level of the subject between what is conscious and what is unconscious then this same conflict may be scaled up, isomorphically, to the level of society where the conflict becomes, at least in our context, that between the other world of mysticism and the bright world of science. Just as the smaller conflict of the psyche originates in the ego, so too does the larger conflict originate in science; for it is science that decides the borders of its bright world. This is what Freud means by the ”relentless laws constructed by science.”
Again we have another fundamental dualism in the Freudian cosmology. Ever the scientist, Freud would oppose the mystical as a threat to psychoanalysis. This is due probably to the critical slander leveled against his own newfound method, in particular, that of dream interpretation. Following the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud notes in a letter to Fleiss two bad reviews. The letter’s translator Jeffrey Masson footnotes an excerpt from one: “the unacceptability of this kind of dream interpretation as a scientific method must be emphatically stressed, for the danger is great that uncritical minds might take pleasure in this interesting fantasy game and thereby drag us into complete mysticism and chaotic arbitrariness — one can then prove anything with anything” (W. Stern quoted in footnote in Freud, 1902, p. 454).
One can imagine that Freud took this accusation to heart, for he seems to echo it in mocking fashion some dozen years later in The Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916): “to concern oneself with dreams is not merely unpractical and uncalled-for, it is positively disgraceful. It brings with it the odium of being unscientific and rouses the suspicion of a personal inclination to mysticism” (p. 84).
The Enemy of the Future
On December 9th, 1928 at one of the Wednesday society meetings—held on Wednesday evenings at Freud’s home with a select group of psychoanalysts—the topic of Weltanschauung was discussed at length by Freud. Freud (1933) would later define this concept, in the final lecture of The New Introductory Lectures thus: “A weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place” (p. 158). By contrast the scientific weltanschauung is incomplete, the fulfilment of its promise is “relegated to the future” (p. 159).
One R.F. Sterba (1979) was present during the discussion of welanschauung that December Wednesday and reconstructed the evening from notes. Freud said that evening “The scientific Weltanschauung is fragmentary and incomplete, but it is able to grow and to change. He who occupies himself with science arrives at agnosticism…it is not possible to know more than we do. Beyond this, everything is unknown. This is the reason why the scientific Weltanschauung is of such a negative, incomplete, defective character” (p. 178 ff). But despite its defective character, the scientific Weltanschuung is “honest” (p. 179).
It is opposed, of course, by the mystic Weltanschuung upon which Freud is conclusively critical: “This one is the real enemy of the future. Our science is powerless against it. It is based on the belief in the irrational. People have a need to preserve a piece of mystic Weltanschauung. Parapsychologists try to transform the scientific into the mystic Weltanschauung” (Sterba, 1979, p. 180). It would be no surprise to anyone were this enemy and parapsychologist none other than C.G. Jung.
Freud’s break with Jung, as Freud himself might have said, is overdetermined. There are too many factors to find any one ultimate cause. But the principle antipathy that I will focus on here is that of a schism between mysticism and science. Or to be more precise: mysticism and sexuality.
If at one time an admiring Freud (1910) had called Jung “the man of the future” (p. 246), after the break he will come to represent everything that is dangerous and counter-to-science in the mystic Weltanschauung—that “enemy of the future.” According to Maria Pierri (2020) in her book Occultism and the Origins of Psychoanalysis, Jung meant to “detach the psyche from the body and from sexuality—the very reality to which Freud, by contrast, needed to anchor it—and to locate its roots in antiquity, in a spiritual and impersonal ‘collective unconscious’” (Pierri, 2020, p. 147).
Jones (1955) reports in his Freud biography that Jung startled him (Jones) “by saying that he found it unnecessary to go into details of unsavory topics (sex) with his patients; it was disagreeable when one met them at dinner socially later on” (p. 139).
In a letter to Ernest Jones at this time Freud is unequivocal regarding this excision of sex from his theory: “anyone who promises to mankind liberation from hardship of sex will be hailed as a hero, let him talk whatever nonsense he chooses” (Jones, 1955, p. 151). And again some twelve years later Freud (1926) looks back on the schism with this to say: “A few of those who had at that time been my followers gave in to the need to free human society from the yoke of sexuality which psycho-analysis was seeking to impose on it. One of them (Jung) explained that what is sexual does not mean sexuality at all, but something else, something abstract and mystical” (p. 208).
Later on in the century, when Wilhelm Reich argues in his book Character Analysis (1950) that mysticism is just repressed sexual feeling, we can well imagine that he had Jung in mind. Far be it from me to drag out what is repressed in Jung, in any case there was something in Freud’s Sexualtheorie that he just didn’t like; I dare say most people don’t like it; that’s why we have repression.
Lecturing on psychoanalysis in America in 1912 Jung would excise psychosexuality to make psychoanalysis more palatable; Makari notes in Revolution in Mind (2008) that Jung “returned to Zurich triumphantly. He bluntly told Freud: ‘my version of psa. won over many people who until now had been put off by the problem of sexuality in neurosis’” (p. 277).
According to Jones (1955) regarding this same triumph, “Freud tersely replied that he could find nothing clever in that; all one had to do was to leave out more still and it would become still more acceptable” (p. 144).
Slowly over the course of lectures and publications, Jung would remake psychoanalysis, scrubbing out the oedipal, infantile sexuality and castration, and turning libido into a cosmic and mystical lifeforce, as opposed to the emanating forces of the sexual drive. The unconscious becomes archetypal and collective, cleaned of any sort of repression. Dreams become prophetic and teleological, beckoning towards a future perfection.
As Freud will note in his On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914a), it is at this time that “Jung is in full retreat from psycho-analysis.”
In a now famous meeting between Jung and Freud at Freud’s home in Vienna, Jung attempted to convince Freud of the existence of the paranormal by predicting accurately that the book shelf would bang. Jones (1955) recounts how “Freud admitted having been very much impressed by this feat and tried to imitate it after Jung’s departure. He then found, however, obvious physical reasons for any faint noises to be observed, and he remarked that his credulousness had vanished together with the magic of Jung’s personality” (p. 384).
Jung (1961) recounts a later visit—in his memoir Dreams, Memories, Reflections—how Freud, speaking of his sexual theory, “became urgent, almost anxious… a strange deeply moved expression came over his face… ‘My dear Jung,’ Freud, said, ‘promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark…. Against the black tide of mud’—and here he hesitated for a moment, then added— ‘Of occultism.’” (p. 150).
Jung continues to theorize in his memoir that for Freud psychosexuality is itself a kind of occultism, a “numinosum” (p. 150); "’sexual libido’ took over the role of a deus dbsconditus, a hidden or concealed god. The advantage of this transformation for Freud was, apparently, that he was able to regard the new numinous principle as scientifically irreproachable and free from all religious taint” (p. 151); the sexualtheorie is Freud’s “daimon” (p. 153).
That Jung, of course, is rather obtuse about his own demons will not be lost on anyone and when he claims in the famous scathing and penultimate letter of the break-up, that he is “not in the least neurotic!” (Paskaukas, 1988, p. 13), Freud will patiently reply in his break-up letter that “It is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own bit of neurosis. But one who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness” (Paskaukas, 1988, p. 14).
So Jung would finally exile himself and his Zurich colleagues and form his own school, one scrubbed of all psychosexuality, and that he would soon call Analytic Psychology, but, with its insistence on the psychical stratification of mythology, it may as well be called Archetypal Psychology.
Freud for his part, not wishing that Jung would own all of mythology, would soon take up his great work of speculative anthropology Totem and Taboo (1913), to act as a direct response to Jung and the new Zurich school. As Makari (2008) notes, Freud hoped that the book: “would separate the Zurich contingent from the others, the ‘way an acid does salt,’ thereby serving to ‘cut us off cleanly from all Aryan religiousness” (p. 284).
The Enigma of Oceanic Feeling
Perhaps the most famous intersection between mysticism and Freud’s work is that of oceanic feeling as taken up in the opening chapter of Civilization and its Discontents (1930). It is worth noting at the outset that Freud dismisses oceanic feeling out of hand as something past his reckoning. “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself… it is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings” (p. 65). He concludes the chapter in a kind of exasperation: “it is very difficult for me to work with these almost intangible qualities” (p. 72).
The implication, put forwards by William B. Parsons in his rigorous study of the Rolland/Freud Correspondence, The Enigma of Oceanic Feeling, (1999), is that Freud remained puzzled by—or hostile to—mysticism, because he had never had a mystical experience. “Mysticism is just as closed a book as music,” Freud tells Rolland in a letter in 1929 (Parsons, 1999, p. 174). Parsons interprets Freud’s incredulity to all things mystical because his “psyche was primarily structured along Oedipal lines” (Parsons, 1999, p. 58); Freud is just too much of a dad. This makes sense with a close reading of the oceanic feeling chapter where, aside from the mention of the breast, the mother is conspicuously absent. The contemporary reader may be a bit shocked, or annoyed, to read here Freud’s blanket assumption: “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection” (Freud, 1930, p. 72). Really?
In the further developments of psychoanalytic theory after Freud, the mother will gain her full status, becoming that one who provides the possibility of oceanic feeling in the first place. Julie Kristeva, for example, names the exclusive and magic zone between mother and child, the Khora, “a space before space, a nurturer-and-devourer at once, prior to the One, the Father, the word, and even the syllable,” (Kristeva, 2014, p. 72). Is not Freud’s dismissal of oceanic feeling, and by extension mysticism, an implicit dismissal of the mother in general? Only Freud’s analyst knows for sure. Josie Oppenheim (2014) claims that “the many schools of thought in psychoanalysis are neither a sign of fragmentation nor of pluralism but have sprung up naturally as a corrective to Freud’s idiosyncratic… disappearing of the mother” (p. 608).
The closest Freud gets to a mystical experience in the written record, at least according to Parsons, is his 1904 visit to the acropolis recounted in an open letter addressed to Rolland, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis (1936); but even this amounts to a kind of stupefaction in the face of a long held wish made real (although this may well be as good a definition of mystical experience as any). The strong feeling of “derealization” that Freud encountered on the Acropolis, his inability to accept what he was experiencing as real—"by the evidence of my senses I am now standing on the Acropolis, but I cannot believe it” (Freud, 1936, p. 243)—is a failure of the ego’s old defensive network against a wish formed so long ago under the repressive eye of Freud’s narrowminded father, who had only just died, and who did not care about traveling or history. It is closer to a feeling of uncanny separation than to one of unity, as described by Rolland’s oceanic feeling.
Parsons (1999) makes the rather unwarranted claim that this derealization discussed by Freud is his attempt to explain and disprove the eastern doctrine of maya (p. 84); Freud makes no mention of this doctrine in his own text, or ever.
But it is worthwhile to point out that for all of the mystical impotence Parson’s finds in Freud, he is neglecting the fundamental rule of psychoanalytic technique as Freud conceived it: the freier einfall of free association and its counterpart, evenly suspended attention (Freud, 1912b). Both of these quasi-mystical techniques are reliant upon the unconscious in order to function: that is, in my view, they are reliant upon an exigent nonduality.
In any case, not only does Parsons find Freud resistant to mystical experience due to his oedipality, but Parsons also argues, convincingly I believe, that Freud maintained a certain amount of cautious restraint, if not trepidation, towards mystical experience in general, and oceanic feeling in particular, as evidenced by his ending the chapter in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) by quoting Schiller’s 1797 poem The Diver: “Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light!” (p. 73). The poem is the story of a young diver who attempts to swim into a whirlpool in order to recover a golden goblet, tossed there by a king, and so marry the king’s daughter. The diver does not survive the second dive into the pool. Freud, for whom—at times—the unconscious is “a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations,” (Freud, 1933, p. 73) is all too glad to stay up here in the rosy bright world of the ego and science.
Parsons reveals an intriguing link between Freud’s reservation towards oceanic feeling as indicated by this poem, and a conversation he unearths between Freud and one Swiss poet Bruno Geotz in 1904 where Freud quotes the same poem, this time deployed to express reservation towards the Bhagavad Gita and the dangers of nirvana. Goetz would later recount this conversation in a series of published letters. Here is the pertinent section quoted by Parsons, where Freud warns the young man of the wisdom of the east:
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 bis 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 be, a sensual enjoyment, but the ultimate in superhuman understanding, an ice-cold, all-comprehending yet scarcely comprehensible insight. Or, if misunderstood, it is madness (Freud quoted in Parsons, 1999, p 48).
Parsons goes on to claim that “the realm which transcends all contradictions,” that Freud is describing here, is “not some metaphysical or transcendent reality but…that of the unconscious” (p. 49); the unconscious = nirvana.
To put this in psychoanalytic terms we may speculate that Freud has a resistance to mystical experience and—not wishing to exhume his psyche—we will say that this resistance is made from science alone. To use the parlance of this paper, Freud is resistant to nonduality because he is an inveterate dualist, as his science demands. Like the animists that populate his speculative anthropology “he has no other way of thinking. It is natural to him, something innate, as it were” (Freud, 1927, p 27).
To Rolland Freud says this in a letter dated January 19 1930: “We seem to diverge rather far in the role we assign to intuition. Your mystics rely on it to teach them how to solve the riddle of the universe; we believe that it cannot reveal to us anything but primitive, instinctual impulses and attitudes — highly valuable for an embryology of the soul when correctly interpreted, but worthless for orientation in the alien, external world” (Freud quoted in Parsons 1999, p 177). An alien, external world revealed, no doubt, by the relentless laws of the ego-scientist.
Nevertheless, when asked by Rolland to apply psycho-analysis to his own notion of oceanic feeling, a feeling that grounds all religion, and that Rolland is “never without,” Freud (1930) concocts what amounts to a vision of nonduality grounded in the pre-oedipal experience of the child. “It is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (p. 65). This is a primitive ego-feeling and it is genetic to the ego certainty we have cited above; it is a feeling exemplified by an infant at the breast “who does not yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him” (p. 66). For in the beginning the ego “includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself” (p. 68). Oceanic feeling is “limitless narcissism” (p.72).
Parsons finds that this reply to Rolland’s prompt reduces “Rolland’s love for humanity to a residue of an early phase of ego-feeling, an interpretation that renders his achievements unexceptional and basically aesthetic, the result of a kind of psychological appendix” (Parsons, 1999, p. 42).
And yet while Freud demeans the mystic as a narcissist, he raises the child. The child, in effect, becomes the original mystic: having privileged access to that special mental state that so many adults, later on in life, will undertake risk and great works of discipline in order to re-attain. It is with this re-attainment in mind that so much psychoanalytic thought, following Freud, condemns the mystic to mere regression.
But this is only half of Freud’s position on mysticism, as Parsons diligently reminds us, for it is only three years later where he will describe the insight gained by the mystic as similar to that gained by psycho-analysis:
Certain mystical practices may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for instance, perception may be able to grasp happenings in the depths of the ego and in the id which were otherwise inaccessible to it. It may safely be doubted, however, whether this road will lead us to the ultimate truths from which salvation is to be expected. Nevertheless it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis have chosen a similar line of approach. (Freud, 1933, p 79ff, emphasis mine).
This passage, granting the mystic a certain validity, prefigures Freud’s last note in clear language. Somehow a change has happened, even while the correspondence with Rolland seemed to result in a dead end—the difficulty, for Freud, of these “intangible quantities”—the figure of the mystic has changed from being “the enemy of the future” in 1928, to becoming in 1933 Schiller’s brave diver, diving into the depths of psyche to in order to gain insight. It is no doubt an insight gained through obscure self-perception.
Obscure Self-Perception
The term obscure self-perception is something of a refrain in Freud. It is no new phrase, but has appeared before in various guises from the beginning. Examining these earlier instances will show that Freud’s last note is a reworking of an older concept that appears now and again throughout his early to middle period: this neglected concept is that of endopsychic perception.
What is endopsychic perception?
Curiously enough this concept receives no direct attention, no individual entry, in Laplanche and Pontalis’s comprehensive encyclopedia of Freud’s thought The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973). This is a curious omission because the concept Functional Phenomena, as conceived by the early psychonaut Herbert Silberer, and that is closely related to endopsychic perception, is given its own entry. In my opinion the omission of endopsychic perception from this encyclopedia is a grave error and so I will attempt to amend it here. The following will be a definition of this most neglected of Freud’s concepts, written in a pastiche of the famous encyclopedia’s style.
Endopsychic Perception
Deutsch: Endopsychische Wahrnehmungen
The obscure recognition of what would otherwise be unconscious. A perception of psychical reality that finds its expression in projections cast upon the external world. From the beginning of Freud’s thought the reflection of certain features of the interior world may be discovered in the superstitions of religion and in mythologies, dreams, phantasy and delusions.
Endopsychic Perception arrives fully formed, as if it had been plucked from out of the thin air, in an amusing letter to Fliess, dated December 12, 1897. The passage reads as follows:
Can you imagine what “endopsychic myths” are? The latest product of my mental labor. 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 (Freud, 1897, p. 286).
While perception is the key feature of this concept, Freud is consistent in qualifying such perception as “dim”, “dark”, or “obscure,” for consciousness is no requirement for this perceptual feedback. If a certain amount of puzzlement or even a quasi-mystical language creeps into Freud’s use of this concept, it is little wonder for it amounts to the paradoxical notion of unconscious perception.
Freud does not fail to deploy his nascent science of the unconscious to make direct and devastating attacks upon the superstition world of the believer. The concept endopsychic perception is never far away from such critique for it is his principle tool by which metaphysics are transformed into metapsychology. From The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901): “A large part of the mythological view of the world…is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition (the endopsychic perception, as it were) of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored…in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious… to transform metaphysics into metapsychology” (p. 258-259).
Projection is closely related to endopsychic perception, being the means of its expression, while revealing its basic shape of specular circularity: the innermost stuff of the psyche, its structure and processes, become by projection the mirroring representations of the world itself. Both projection and endopsychic perception are thus non-pathological, and rather more like facilities of mind, permanent features of Freud’s psychical apparatus, like memory, or judgment. “But projection was not created for the purpose of defence; it also occurs where there is no conflict. The projection outwards of internal perceptions is a primitive mechanism, to which, for instance, our sense perceptions are subject, and which therefore normally plays a very large part in determining the form taken by our external world” (Freud, 1913, p. 63). The external world, of course, “the great teacher,” also takes a large part in determining the forms taken by psychical reality. Thus we find a reciprocity, at the heart of Freud’s work, between internal and external; outside and inside; a reciprocity that becomes difficult to disentangle, even for all his scientific belief in objective “reality.”
It fits well with the program of endopsychic perception that we can see this same circular structure in the nondual insights of certain Zen practitioners, for example, 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” (Dogen quoted in Loy, 2019, p. 13). Were we to apply Freud’s logic of endopsychic perception to this Zen insight we will find that it expresses certain peculiarities of the unconscious; that is, as Dogen realizes the nonduality between himself and the external world, the perspicacious reader may realize, in the Zen monk’s realization, certain features of the unconscious: lack of contradiction, presumption of reality and so on.
If endopsychic perception recedes in Freud’s work from 1913 onward, the concept is not so much abandoned as integrated into the entire metapsychological project and, finally, makes a triumphant return, under the guise of its synonym, at the end of Freud’s life with his last note observing that “mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id” (Freud, 1938, p. 300). It is a refrain echoing his admission in 1933 that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis share with certain mystical practices insights into the unconscious that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Animism
A better understanding of endopsychic perception will be gained by examining its bedfellow projection. For the purpose of this paper, no better passage in Freud presents itself than that of the animism chapter in his great work of speculative anthropology Totem and Taboo (1913). Indeed, Freud’s animism can be read as a kind of nonduality, even a synonym of that mode, where there is no hard distinction between what is animate and what inanimate. That this mode of thinking, or developmental phase, as Freud so describes it, is given not only to “savages” but also to children and to neurotics (the subtitle of Totem and Taboo is Some points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics) is a clue that we are in close proximity to the unconscious.
Freud ends up wearing his Victorian biases right on his face by referring to all those who do not belong to, or who predate civilization, as savages. Using a questionable concoction of 19th century anthropology, evolutionary theory, phylogenetics and his own psychoanalysis, Freud lofts a theory of isometric human development that would seem to be still very much the rule in much of psychoanalysis today, in which the term “primitive” is the principle signifier of instinctual impulse, infantile behavior and psychosis.
For the primitive, stuck in their “weltanschauung” of animism, projection is the rule (Freud, 1913, p, 64). It is a rule that Freud will mention again in Future of an Illusion (1927) some 14 years later: “Primitive man has no choice, he has no other way of thinking. It is natural to him, something innate, as it were, to project his existence outwards into the world and to regard every event which he observes as the manifestation of beings who at bottom are like himself. It is his only method of comprehension” (p. 27).
But Freud did not arrive at this position regarding primitive projection alone, for he was borrowing heavily from Lord James Frazer, to whom he grants the great majority of citations in Totem and Taboo. Freud cites Frazer 95 times, P.S. Rivera claims, in his 2017 paper Freud's Speculations in Ethnology, and that Lord Frazer is Freud’s “vademecum,” his main guide book to the savage mind, and anthropology (Rivera, 2017, p. 98). For Freud, along with Frazer, the development of the individual repeats the development of the species; a theory of phylogenesis that Freud expressed as early as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900): “behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood—a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual's development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation influenced by the chance circumstances of life” (p. 548).
In particular Freud (1913) pays special attention to Frazer’s notion of “imitative” or “contagious” magic (p. 81) as a phase that is repeated. He describes this “magic” in spatial terms: “What is believed to be their effective principle is no longer similarity but spatial connection, contiguity, or at least imagined contiguity” (p. 83). This magic consists of “mistaking an ideal connection for a real one,” and Freud will quote Lord Frazer to prove the point: “Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things” (Frazer quoted in Freud, 1913, p. 83). The reader will recognize the similarity between this magic and the “omnipotence of thought,” that Freud (1914b) lays out in On Narcissism (p. 75) only a year later.
This omnipotence is made from the common mental action of projection and is, for Freud, what connects the primitive, the neurotic and the child; it is an omnipotence that makes general conflation between what is inside and what is outside: “Internal perceptions of emotional and thought processes can be projected outwards in the same way as sense perceptions; they are thus employed for building up the external world, though they should by rights remain part of the internal world” (Freud, 1913, p. 64).
Here again we find endopsychic perception; the perception of our innermost psyche projected outwards to form the world itself. Freud will claim here (1913) and later (1920) that the origin of this projection is found in the early mental life of children, in what is known as the pleasure ego, where the first duality the child is subject to, the pleasure/unpleaseure series, is split and projected so that everything pleasurable becomes the child’s ego and everything unpleasurable becomes the external world (Freud, 1920, p. 29). In this we can see how even the pleasure principle becomes subject to endopsychic perception: the monster under the bed is the projected reflection of the child’s internal conflict.
But this is not all fantasy and nightmare, for in Totem and Taboo Freud notes that we underestimate the “the fullness and delicacy of feeling” of the mental lives of children in the same way as we might underestimate primitive humankind (1913, p. 98). Again it is endopsychic perception that gives the “savage” credibility:
The first picture which man formed of the world—animism—was a psychological one… Animism came to primitive man naturally and as a matter of course. He knew what things were like in the world, namely just as he felt himself to be. We are thus prepared to find that primitive man transposed the structural conditions of his own mind (footnote: Which he was aware of by what is known as endopsychic perception) into the external world; and we may attempt to reverse the process and put back into the human mind what animism teaches as to the nature of things (Freud, 1913, p. 91)
The “psychological picture” formed by the power of projection presents us with a shape, a strange mirror where psychical reality and physical reality meet at the point of fantasy.
Freud finds that the main projection by primitive humans are demonic spirits related to the corpses of the dead—just like the child projects the monster under the bed. This is a circular and specular psychical reality produced by the fear of death and moreover, by emotional conflict and ambivalence (Freud, 1913). The ambivalence of the living towards the deceased produces a ghost or demon in the real world, and as Freud says, this is “a first acknowledgment of Ανάγκη, [Necessity], which opposes human narcissism.” The necessity of death causes the primitive human to give up some of the omnipotence of his thought, and hand it over to an autonomous spirit found outside in the external world. So we may conclude that what Freud wishes to put back into the human mind are demons.
Thinking with Demons
Freud confesses in Totem and Taboo that he is “accepting the presence of demons, but not as something ultimate and psychologically unanalysable” (1913, p. 62). That is to say that the demon is real, but of a psychical reality. The figure of the demon appears often and throughout Freud’s work and adds a certain amount of phantasmagoria to his typically staid and formal scientific style. As an acute entity of projection I believe it is worth examining here.
The Interpretations of Dreams (1900) begins, with a bang, by asserting that dreams are daemonic. “We are told (by Aristotle) that dreams are not sent by the gods and are not of a divine character, but that they are ‘daemonic’, since nature is ‘daemonic’ and not divine. Dreams, that is, do not arise from supernatural manifestations but follow the laws of the human spirit” (p. 2). Later on in the dream book Freud will accord “correct psychological insight” to the respect given to dreams by antiquity and that is an “homage paid to the uncontrolled and indestructible forces in the human mind, to the ‘daemonic’ power which produces the dream-wish and which we find at work in our unconscious” (p. 614).
That the unconscious is daemonic is something of a refrain that Freud hits on now and again. Even as early as 1893, Freud remarks, in his essay on Charcot, that the demonic possession of the Middle Ages was, as a solution for the problem of hysterical phenomena, analogous to “the splitting of consciousness” discovered by Charcot’s hypnotist method (p. 20). In other words, it is possible to regard psychoanalysis as a kind of inverted early modern demonology; inverted, no doubt, by endopsychic perception; where the process of exorcism is reversed and the demons are put back into the human mind.
But of course they do not stay there. The advent of the great war marks this turning point in his thinking: the war “let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds” (Freud, 1916, p. 307). It is my view that what had heretofore been daemonic now becomes, after the war, the repetition compulsion and the death drive. From his post-war horror essay The Uncanny (1919):
For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of small children…whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny (p. 238).
The concept of the uncanny, of course, is an example of Freudian nonduality par excellence. The uncanny is a mode of horror with a specific structure, a dynamic circuit between what is most alien and terrifying (the daemonic), and that which is most familiar and intimate, namely, your own behavior. “This uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (Freud, 1919, p. 241). Through a careful philology, Freud shows the peculiar identity shared between the seemingly opposite terms heimlich (homely), and unheimlich (uncanny). “What is heimlich, thus comes to be unheimlich” (Freud, 1919, p. 224).
If the child had been projecting everything unpleasurable into the external world—or as Freud concludes the essay, “the factors of silence solitude and darkness… are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free” (Freud, 1919, p. 252)—then the uncanny—or more specifically, the repetition compulsion—is the point where this projection returns. The external world becomes internal and everything unpleasurable overtakes the pleasure-ego; the original pleasure/unpleasure binary falls apart. In other words, could not the beyond of the pleasure principle, a beyond that so astonished Freud, be precisely the beyond of duality, where pleasure and annihilation become the same?
As Laplanche and Pontalis point out in their entry on the Nirvana Principle, in the Language of Psycho-Analysis (1973), “’Nirvana’ evokes a profound link between pleasure and annihilation: this link always remained problematic for Freud” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 273). See for example The Economic Problem of Masochism (Freud, 1924). Perhaps masochism and nirvana are problematic for Freud precisely because they are a failure of duality.
The daemonic death drive then would be indeed, as Freud (1920) claims, a “a need to restore an earlier state of things” (p. 36); but, as a state that is outside of or immanent to the pleasure/unpleasure series, I would add that this is not just an inanimate state but rather that state in which there is no real difference between animate/inanimate, organic/non-organic: in short, the state of nonduality. Freud mentions this state in passing in an exemplary passage from the essay on Negation (1925), already quoted above, which is worthwhile repeating: “The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the first” (p. 237), but rather comes about by the process of thinking, of matching a thing remembered to a thing perceived. I would conclude then that the daemonic is, properly speaking, unthinkable; it does not think in the way that the ego does, nor can it be thought and yet it is “some daemonic power” (Freud, 1920, p. 34) that lives within us. The wager of this paper is that the force of the death drive is the force of nonduality; the force of a reality, both physical and psychical, that is continually abrading the ego-organization formed by duality.
The “death” of the death drive then, is the death and degradation of the habitual certainties of the ego-scientist. A death that Freud, in 1920, as evidenced by the radical antinomies and sea-change of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, was particularly subject to.
But the dissolution of the inanimate into the animate, and the reverse, is not as strange in Freud as it may first appear—as I suggest. While Freud may be said to be rather confusing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as regards to the death drive, and its relation to the repetition compulsion (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1967), he is fairly clear on the death drive in economic terms. The death drive is that drive towards the zero point, the drive of “freely mobile (primary) processes that press towards discharge” (p.34): or, as Freud makes explicit: “the Nirvana principle…a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts” (Freud, 1920, p. 56).
The Realm of the Id
The metaphor of “realm” is typical in Freud and the unconscious is often described this way, as a realm distinct from that of the ego, one ruled by an altogether different set of laws. “The joke” Freud (1904) says, comes “from the realm of the unconscious” (p.208). Or, as in the pursuit of the transference, one will “have penetrated into the realm of the unconscious” (1912a, p.107).
Or see for example, “the realm of phantasy,” described in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1917) as a “nature preserve… withdrawn from the reality principle” (p. 371) in which the original state of nature (the primal fantasy) has been allowed to flourish. Likewise in Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911), Freud also deploys this analogy: phantasying “was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. Footnote: In the same way, a nation whose wealth rests on the exploitation of the produce of its soil will yet set aside certain areas for reservation in their original state and for protection from the changes brought about by civilization. (E.g. Yellowstone Park)” (p. 222).
This environmental theme is continued in the famous paragraph (already quoted above) from The New Introductory Lectures (1933) in which the intent of psycho-analysis “to strengthen the ego” is how we may “appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee” (Freud, 1933, p. 80). The draining of the Zuider Zee in the Netherlands, being of course one of the largest geo-engineering projects undertaken in Europe during Freud’s lifetime, by which vast territory was reclaimed from the sea and turned into agricultural lands.
From this ecological perspective, the daemonic death drive can be viewed as global warming; the drive not of human greed towards profit at the expense of a livable climate, but rather the incalculable force of nature itself, indifferent to the short-term aspirations of humankind. For, make no mistake, even while this wild zone of “nature” has been drained, fenced off, or separated into a reservation, we all still live there. Earlier in the Introductory Lectures appears the well-known statement that “the ego… is not even master in its own house” (Freud, 1933, p. 285). So we might imagine that the ego has built a house to defend itself against “nature” (the unconscious) and so assumes that nature is outside and over there, neatly fenced into a nature theme-park, when in fact the ego’s house is permeated by “nature” at every point, mold, flies, mice, mites, fungi, bacteria, human animals, flooding, wild fires, and so on. So it is with the two realms of ego and unconscious; they are not neighboring realms, rather the ego is built inside the realm of the id, built as if it were a castle, or bunker, but one whose manifest defenses are illusory—like in the old babysitter horror story: the call is coming from inside the house.
As Freud (1900) concludes in his dream book: “the unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious. Everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage” (p. 612). Freud feels the need to separate these realms into different “psychical localities” because “the scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life” (Freud, 1900, p.536). Such spatial distinctions, metaphorical though they may be, as Freud notes, must be a result of the concept of repression (Freud, 1900, p. 610) where on some fundamental level repression is a border between regions; even perhaps like the U.S./Mexico border, for example, and, in the dream book the critical faculty of reason is described as a gate keeper, keeping out all of those ideas that it does not like. The fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, of free associating, is here prefigured as “a relaxation of the watch upon the gates of Reason, the adoption of an attitude of uncritical self-observation” (Freud, 1900, p. 102, emphasis mine). This passage, with its language of “self-observation,” would appear to make a link between the freier einfall and endopsychic perception… where the hidden forces of the unconscious are revealed in the drift of speech, as the shape of the wind is revealed in the drift of sand dunes.
And yet the words “realm”, “outside”, and “beyond” are all spatial metaphors and are probably inexact when used to describe mental processes. As Freud (1900) makes clear the idea of locality and even topography is “the crudest sense” (p. 610) and thoughts that force their way from the unconscious to consciousness “must be kept carefully free from any idea of a change of locality” (p. 610); that which is perceived within is only ever “virtual” (p. 611).
But if “space” and “realm” are crude metaphors for the unconscious, even poetic descriptors, they too will dissolve in Freud’s work into something far stranger.
Psyche is Extended
A rather large clue for our exegetical study of Freud’s last note appears just above it in his second to last note, written the same day, August 22 1938. This second to last note has long baffled readers, philosophers and psychoanalysts alike, presenting an idea that appears to be new in Freud’s work but, as I suggest, is perhaps nothing more than the furthest logical extrapolation of endopsychic perception.
The note reads as follows: “Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it” (Freud, 1938, p. 300).
What are we to make of this?
A recent paper by Paolo Carignani (2018) has made the convincing claim that rather than instead of Kant, Freud is in fact confirming Kant’s notion of the a priori intuitive mental categories, time and space. It is perhaps no coincidence that Carignani describes Freud’s conception of mind/body as “non-dualistic,” for, as a close reading of the psyche is extended note makes clear, Freud is here overturning the common mind/body dualism proposed by René Descartes and common to modernity (Carignani, 2018, p. 668).
Carignani claims that Freud is collapsing the common philosophical distinction between mind and body, claiming in effect that the mental coordinate “space” begins as the feeling of psyche extended throughout the body. Whereas cartesian dualism posits two basic modes of the human: res cogitans—the ephemeral thought-stuff of the psyche/soul—and res extensa (Carignani, 2018, p. 668)—the extended material stuff of the body/machine—Freud, following Kant, is tossing this old philosophical dualism in favor of the unconscious, which would seem to have no duality.
While Descartes (1996) would isolate the soul to one location (the pineal gland), Kant, by contrast, finds the soul extended throughout the body. “Where is the place of this human soul in the world of bodies?” Kant asks, (Kant, 1766, quoted in Carignani, 2018, p. 680) “Where I feel, it is there that I am… I am as immediately in my finger-tip as I am in my head. It is I myself whose heel hurts, and whose heart beats with emotion.” The collapse of the mind into the body, has some rather profound implications, not least of which upon the opposition between subject/object—subject becomes object, and object becomes subject—but also upon space itself. Carignani quotes Jacques Derrida on how space is transformed in Freud’s conception of the extended psyche: “the spatiality of space, its exteriority would only be an outside projection of an internal and properly speaking psychical extension. In short, the outside would only be a projection!” (Derrida, 2000, quoted in Carginani, 2018, p. 670).
Projection is, once again, the key term here and offers us a clue so that we might imagine Freud deploying the rule of endopsychic perception to the notion of space itself, so that space—of which we are so certain—when viewed as a projection, reveals in reverse, the very basic internal structure of a psyche extended in soma; in short, the nervous system itself.
Because the psyche “knows nothing about it” (Freud, 1938, p. 300), I will assume that this perception of the interior projected outwards to become the spatiality of space, is a basic feature, perhaps the most basic feature, of an ego function that must remain unconscious of itself as a flesh and blood body, oblivious to how the mental division between inside/outside, me/not me is an essential fiction; oblivious to the uncanny fact of thinking meat. The extended psyche becoming space is a natural result of the structure of an unconscious that must project itself into the world. The most basic feature of what appears to us outside, space itself, has been projected there, without our knowing it.
Carignani (2018) notes in footnote, a letter Freud sent to Georg Groddeck where he describes the unconscious as that which mediates between binaries. “It seems to me as wilful completely to spiritualise nature as radically to despiritualise it. Let’s leave it its extraordinary variety which reaches from the inanimate to the organic and living, from the physical life to the spiritual. Certainly, the unconscious is the proper mediator between the somatic and the mental, perhaps the long-sought ‘missing link’” (Freud, 1917b, quoted in Carignani, 2018, p. 676).
From the perspective of nonduality we would revise this so that the unconscious is not only mediator but is precisely the perception of that ultimate reality where the binary somatic/mental dissolves altogether; even where the distinction of a space designated outside/inside loses all division.
Reading these two last notes together we can well imagine then that the obscure self-perception of the realm outside of our projection of space would be mystical indeed, if not completely incomprehensible.
Timelessness
But if Freud finds recourse to analyze our notion of space, via its projection and the logic of endopsychic perception, to the point where it disappears into the unknown non-space of the unconscious, it is no surprise that he had already done the same to the category of time. In my view, following Carignani, these are moves that express Freud’s Kantian bias; a bias that may be summed up as a belief in the limits of human knowledge and human reason: there are some things which we cannot know, that remain, so to speak, outside of our philosophy—not to mention our science.
Freud often makes recourse to Kant when alluding to the limits of what can be known of both psychical and physical reality, for example in the essay on The Unconscious (1915), Freud likens our inability to directly perceive mental processes to our inability to perceive the external reality with our sense organs:
The psycho-analytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us, on the one hand, as a further expansion of the primitive animism which caused us to see copies of our own consciousness all around us, and, on the other hand, as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant of our views on external perception. Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be (p. 171).
We may not find Freud give a better description of nonduality—and the unconscious—than “seeing copies of our own consciousness all around us;” that is, the displacement of external reality by psychical reality. Freud (1900) had touched upon this limit to what is knowable likewise in the Interpretation of Dreams, there he says that “The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world” (p. 613). So we can recognize the Kantian epistemic division between the phenomena and the noumena, where, as Kant (1998) explains, laboriously, in The Critique of Pure Reason, phenomena are how things appear to us through our senses, and the noumena is how they exist in themselves, regardless of appearance (1998). Kant says “In the end, however, we have no insight into the possibility of such noumena, and the domain outside of the sphere of appearances is empty (for us)” (p. 350). I would argue then that in Freud’s thought, the unconscious becomes the noumena, psyche-in-itself without appearance; operating within us without our express knowledge. It is one of Freud’s virtues, rare among scientists, that he should give the unknown such a privileged position.
So if Freud argues that space and time are projected elements of psyche, as Carignani observes (2018), this, again, reveals the Kantian origins of Freud’s thought. That psychical reality not subject to the organizing mental categories space and time is none other than the unconscious, this “realm” of the unknown and unknowable noumena.
Another name given to the noumena by Kant (1998) is the ding-an-sich, the thing-in-itself (p. 350). May we not assume that Freud’s use of the word thing—as in thing-presentation (1915) and das ding (the thing) (1895)—is a Kantian allusion? Das ding being one of the more obscure references in the Project for Scientific Psychology; appearing in that paper as the unrepresentable thing, that which is unassimilable in the psyche of the infant (Freud,1895, p. 366). The dream book expresses this strange idea in this manner: “What we describe as our ‘character’ is based on the memory-traces of our impressions; and, moreover, the impressions which have had the greatest effect on us—those of our earliest youth—are precisely the ones that scarcely ever become conscious” (Freud, 1900, p. 541).
In other words, that which shapes us the most, but that we are unable to think about or remember, is the thing-in-itself, or as Freud (1896) says famously in an early letter to Fleiss “the prehistoric, unforgettable other person who is never equaled by anyone later” (p. 213); in short, the mother; but the mother perceived without predicate or language. This person is “prehistoric” and “unforgettable” precisely because she resides at the very nucleus of the timeless unconscious, where nothing can ever be destroyed. In my view this person gains their timelessness and their extraordinary power because they had been experienced in a state of nonduality, where there is, properly speaking, no time, no space and no difference between mother and child.
Freud (1920) invokes Kant, again, on the nature of time in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we are to-day in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms of thought’. We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless’ This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them. These are negative characteristics which can only be clearly understood if a comparison is made with conscious mental processes. On the other hand, our abstract idea of time seems to be wholly derived from the method of working of the system Pcpt.-Cs ( p. 27).
The idea that time, as we know it in our work-a-day world, is a function of the system perception-consciousness will be pursued further and perhaps more enigmatically in the essay A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad (1925). There Freud will end the essay, in a kind of metaphysical mic drop, by making the wild speculative claim that the flickering nature of consciousness, its discontinuous “sampling” of the external world, “lies at the bottom of the origin of the concept of time” (p. 231).
Carignani (2018) finds this idea—along with the extended psyche—to be a species of endopsychic perception. He paraphrases the second to last note “Psyche is discontinuous, knows nothing about it” (p. 675). The function of the psychic apparatus, of which we remain unconscious, is projected outward to become the rather all-too-conscious coordinates space and time; or spacetime, as they say in cosmology. But while this sampling and this discontinuity may happen at any moment throughout the waking day, we may infer from Freud that the real discontinuity happens at the moment of sleep: as when, in a footnote to the classic metapsychological paper Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911), Freud says that “the state of sleep is able to re-establish the likeness of mental life as it was before the recognition of reality, because a prerequisite of sleep is a deliberate rejection of reality (the wish to sleep)” (p. 218).
One of the peculiarities of the state of sleep as Freud imagines it, is precisely its lack of time. The dream, like the unconscious, is timeless. Carignani (2018) cites a letter from Freud to Princess Marie Bonapart, with whom he had been having something of an argument regarding Kant, written that summer of 1938: “the attention which we bestow on objects is due to rapid but successive cathexes which might be regarded in a sense as quanta issuing from the ego. Our inner perceptual activity would only later make a continuity of it, and it is here that we find, projected into the outside world, the prototype of time.” Freud will go on to claim that this is why there is no perception of time during sleep (p. 657).
As Freud (1900) says in his dream book, dreams “reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time” (p. 314). We can see here in germ form, what will become for the Chilean psychoanalyst and mathematical theorist of the unconscious, Ignacia Matte-Blanco (1959), symmetrical thinking, as laid out in his paper Expression in Symbolic Logic of the Characteristics of the System Ucs. Matte-Blanco believes the reason that there is no time in the unconscious is because there is no ordination of succession (p.2). Or, as Freud writes in the dream book, there is no “law of causality” in dreams (1900, p. 50). I should note here too, that the dissolution of causality is yet another common feature of nonduality (Loy, 1999, p. 236).
But while Freud’s speculations upon time would seem to have metaphysical effects as far reaching as anything in the theory of general relativity, Freud will always come up short before this cliff edge, as in this typical refrain from the New Introductory Lectures (1933): “Again and again I have had the impression that we have made too little theoretical use of this fact, established beyond any doubt, of the unalterability by time of the repressed. This seems to offer an approach to the most profound discoveries. Nor, unfortunately, have I myself made any progress here” (p. 74).
The Unconscious in its Nondual Aspect
We have seen in the last two sections how Freud has used the logic of endopsychic perception in order to turn the very notions of space and time inside out, thus revealing to us just how far the unconscious resides beyond the limits of sense.
Matte-Blanco, perhaps more than anyone, has traced out the peculiar non-logic of the Freudian unconscious, and so has come near to our thesis that the unconscious is nonduality. He points out that of all Freud’s work, Freud was most proud of his work on the unconscious, in particular that unconscious that is inferred by the logic of dreams. Matte-Blanco (1959) calls this logic “symmetrical” (p 3), in which, according to the dictates of symbolic logic, what had once been opposed becomes the same. “This principle represents the most formidable deviation from the logic on which all the scientific and philosophic thinking of mankind has been based.” (p. 2). To translate into the terms of this paper, the scientific and philosophical thinking of mankind, and that Matte-Blanco calls Aristotelian logic, I call duality.
The characteristics of the system unconscious that Matte-Blanco focuses on are those laid out in Freud’s 1915 essay The Unconscious. These are summed up by Freud as: “Exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexis), timelessness, and replacement of external for psychical reality” (p. 187).
I will address each of these features one by one, with Matte-Blanco as my guide, showing how they are exempt from duality. In my view these are all structural features of the unconscious in its nondual aspect.
1. Exemption from mutual contradiction: If systematic contradiction is the basic structure of all duality, as we have seen, what Matte-Blanco (1959) calls asymmetrical thinking (Aristotelian logic) (p. 2), the rational oppositions that ground the very function of science, if not the ego itself—logical contradictions such as subject/object and me/not me—then we can see how a psychical reality that is exempt from mutual contradiction is likewise exempt from duality.
2. Primary Process: Matte-Blanco (1959) breaks down primary process into the dream logic of condensation and displacement, making the claim that displacement in particular is a necessary feature of all projection (p. 2) and subsequently, we might add, all endopsychic perception. As Freud makes clear (1913) projection is not pathological so much as a default function of mind subject to the flows of primary process. It is no great stretch to make the further claim that it is precisely the displacement of mind into the exterior world (and its reversal) that is nirvana itself. Nirvana is what the primary process feels like, given certain parameters. As we shall see, in my view, the Nirvana Principle as pure primary process, is a fair description of classical nirvana, from a metapsychological standpoint.
3. Timelessness: A mysterious quality of the unconscious that, as Freud notes, may reveal profound truths with further investigation. Obviously these truths are not immediately apparent or comprehensible in the relentless machine-time of the work-a-day world. Timelessness is a common feature of nondual experience (Loy, 1998).
4. Substitution of psychical reality for external reality: a feature related to displacement where the projection of mind becomes reality itself and that would seem to be a common feature of mystical experience ,where the external world becomes your innermost interiority, and vice versa, accounting, perhaps, for Rolland’s Oceanic Feeling, and more generally the mystical experience of the One, common to Advaita Vedanta and Neo Platonists alike.
It should be noted, if I have not already made clear, that these are structural features of the unconscious. They depict an unconscious without contents. Such an unconscious can never be, of course, for it would stand to reason that, like William James’ consciousness in his essay Does Consciousness Exist (1904), the unconscious is always unconscious of something. Be that as it may, Freud (1900) will claim that when in the slip stream of the primary process, that process proper to the unconscious, “the content and the proper meaning to which cathexes are attached are treated as of little consequence” (p. 597). In other words, the unconscious little cares for the precious meanings of the ego.
The Nirvana Principle and Nirvana
The thesis of this paper is that Freud’s unconscious is the same as the classical Buddhist notion of nirvana; keeping in mind of course that by nirvana I do not mean anything transcendent or heavenly, but rather a nirvana that is very earthly and immanent, nirvana as the awareness of an obscure reality that is more true and more real. When Freud (1900) claims at the end of The Interpretation of Dreams that “the unconscious is the true psychical reality” (p. 613), he is drawing near to nirvana and to nonduality. If, as I have argued above, that the structural features of the unconscious are nondual, then the “true psychical reality” that is the unconscious coincides with the true psychical reality discovered long ago by eastern mysticism, a reality that is indifferent to binaries, predicates, language and duality—the reality of nonduality. The obscure self-perception of this reality is nirvana.
Thomas Ogden in a 2024 paper entitled Rethinking the Concepts of the Unconscious and Analytic Time, in which he provocatively denies that the unconscious exists, comes close to this notion. “Freud’s unconscious is another world, but it is in this one, in consciousness, not behind it or below it” (p. 282). Nor beyond, nor outside, I might add and would say instead that the unconscious (much like nirvana) is immanent too consciousness—but even this philosophical notion is probably inadequate.
I find Ogden’s vision of the other world in this one to be remarkably similar in language and form to certain eastern conceptions of nonduality and nirvana, particularly that paradoxical notion found in Mahayana Buddhism where nirvana is not liberation from the endless cycles of suffering and death—known as samsara—but rather samsara is nirvana. “There is only one reality—the world right here and now—but this world may be experienced in two different ways,” Buddhist scholar David R. Loy says in his book Nonduality (2019). One way is via samsara in which everything in the world is divided and separate (including me) and the other is this same world, but perceived without division or distinction; that is, perceived via nonduality Loy reiterates this notion with a quote from the first century nondual Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, “There is no discernable difference between nirvana and the everyday world… the limits of the one are the limits of the other” (p. 123).
Freud, for his part, knew of this kind of nirvana and spoke of it with cautious awe, as we have seen from the Goetz correspondence (Parsons, 1999, p. 48), where, in 1904, he described the “awful depths” of the Bhagavad Gita as if he were speaking of the primary process; “where nothing seems constant and where everything melts into everything else… it is that which transcends all contradictions. It is not, as Europeans commonly take it to be, a sensual enjoyment, but the ultimate in superhuman understanding, an ice-cold, all-comprehending yet scarcely comprehensible insight. Or, if misunderstood, it is madness.” So Freud brings us to the knife edge between mysticism and psychosis, and it would seem that, if there is a difference between the mystic and the psychotic, an investigation of this knife edge of difference would yield grave insight into the psyche.
Matte-Blanco (1988), by his observations of schizophrenic patients, has come very close to this knife edge. It is his view that the schizophrenic, once past a certain point of “symmetrization,” become quiet and serene (p. 54). In a remarkable passage very similar to Freud’s speech to Goetz on nirvana, where Matte-Blanco uses the same metaphor of depth, he approaches the very heart of my thesis:
Of course, at certain very deep levels everybody has the peace of the depth. The following characteristics of the unconscious belong to this rather deep stratum: absence of contradiction — a set which contains all affirmations and their corresponding negation, if symmetrized, results in any assertion being equal to its negation: no possibility of contradiction; identity of psychical and external reality, for the same reason. The deepest strata — their mathematical limit: indivisibility. From this point ‘downwards’ the amount of symmetrization is so great that thinking, which requires asymmetrical relations, is greatly impaired. The conceptual end is the pure indivisible mode, where everything is everything else, and where the relations between things are all theoretically contained in any single thing which the intellect can grasp. The endless number of things tend to become, mysteriously, only one thing (p. 54).
One may not find a better description of nonduality, including even its famous peace of mind, for is not this “peace of the depth” the very essence of nirvana?
I will conclude that the “pure indivisible mode, where everything is everything else,” or as Freud says to Goetz of nirvana “where everything melts into everything else” is none other than the primary process, that particular non-logic of the system unconscious, as laid out in chapter VII of the Interpretation of Dreams. As Freud (1900) claims, the primary process is a particular suspension of meaning: “The chief characteristics of this processes is that the whole stress is laid upon making the cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge; the content and the proper meaning of the psychical elements to which the cathexes are attached are treated as of little consequence” (p. 597).
Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) draw this point out regarding Freud’s primary process as revealed by the logic of dreams: “They exhibited a constant sliding of meaning” (p. 339). “The primary process is characterized essentially by unhindered flow”(p.344). And “unconscious processes which, in the last reckoning, imply an unlimited mobility of meanings, or to put this into terms of energy, a completely unfettered discharge of the quantity of excitation” (p. 344).
Were we to find a common link between the nirvana of the far east, and the nirvana principle, this flow of meanings is it.
As I have mentioned earlier that, while the nirvana principle and its relations to the pleasure principle and the death drive are rather confused and confusing when it appears in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and the Economic Problem of Masochism (1924), it becomes rather more lucid and comprehensible when framed in the language of Freud’s economic theory and arguably they (the death drive and nirvana principle) only make sense as features of libidinal economy.
This point upon economy is made clear by Jean Laplanche in his own now classic exegetical study of Freud’s drive theory, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1976). To sum up this point in the most economical form: since the beginning Freud had posited for his economic system two kinds of energy: free and bound. Bound energy is of the secondary process, belongs to the domain of the ego and eros and is ruled by the principle of constancy which trends towards binding. Free energy, on the other hand, is unbound, of the primary process, and belongs to the domain of the unconscious and is ruled by the tendency to zero, unbinding and absolute discharge (Laplanche, 1967, p. 116).
In other words, to reiterate Freud’s claim (1900), bound energy is made of meaning, that is, the contents to which cathexes are attached is the psychical manifestation of duality—one might say that it is meaningful because it is bound. While on the contrary, free and mobile, unbound energy—the energy proper to the unconscious—is by no means meaningless, but is instead that state in which meaning is not fixed into stable binaries but flows indiscriminately from intensity to intensity: this is the state proper to nonduality.
It is this particular unbound energy that makes up the impulse of the drive and in particular the repetition compulsion, which Freud is surprised to find is beyond or indifferent to the pleasure principle but that Laplanche (1973) argues is precisely the pleasure principle “in its most radical form” (p. 117); or, as I have described above, the nirvana principle is immanent to the pleasure/unpleasure series.
Freud (1920) notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that “our consciousness communicates to us feelings from within not only of pleasure and unpleasure but also of a peculiar tension which in its turn can be either pleasurable or unpleasurable” (p.63). What is this peculiar tension if not the tension of meaning itself, the tension between the oppositions of duality? That is, the tension, in its most basic form, between pleasure and unpleasure, me/not me, good/bad, etc. Could not the “tensionlessness” of the death drive and of nirvana, be in fact just this state of free flowing meaning—the state of nonduality? Brian O’Connor makes a similar claim in his 2016 paper Freud on the Death Drive as Existence without Tension. “A tensionless state can be gained by a dynamic release of the individual from the pressures of the ego... it is this that Freud means by death” (p. 424).
If nirvana then is a release from the tensions of the ego and duality, or according to the Buddha, “the realization that that there is no self” (Loy, 2019, p. 201), then the nirvana principle “which expresses the trend of the death instinct,” (Freud, 1924, p. 160) is that continual pressure which would unbind this tension, that would unwind the oppositions between organizational binaries common to the secondary process and the ego; in short, it is a force that drives us towards nonduality; a destructive force to be sure, but also a force capable of creating profound meaning, if not truth itself.
Could not classical nirvana be not only the suspension of duality and of the ego, but the conscious feeling of the primary process, of the current of this unbound libidinal energy—which some have called oceanic—"where nothing seems constant and where everything melts into everything else?”
Conclusion
Freud’s last note offers a means of revisiting his metapsychology from the vantage of the old concept of endopsychic perception. I have attempted to show how this idea may be used as a means to convert metaphysics into metapsychology even to the point where such common and grounding categories of thought such as space and time are turned inside out to reveal hitherto unknown features of psyche. Endopsychic perception may be Freud’s principle means by which he is able to infer an unconscious psychical reality that is “unknown to us” (1900, p. 613). I have suggested that the ancient mystical concept of nonduality bears a remarkable similarity to the structural features of the unconscious and, as I claim, endopsychic perception can operate as a mirror so that a phenomena such as nirvana may reflect backwards into the psyche revealing the very structure upon which all of our mental processes play out; metaphysical nirvana becomes the metapsychological nirvana principle and death drive: the slipstream of flowing meaning of the primary process.
While Freud expressed open disdain and hostility towards mysticism, following his break from Jung, and referring to it, and him, as the “enemy of the future” (Sterba, 1979, p. 78), we can see that only after Freud’s correspondence with the mystic writer Romain Rolland on the topic of oceanic feeling does a detente towards the mystical take place until at last, the embargo is lifted and in his private last notes an opening to mysticism is made: in particular the mysticism of the unconscious, which, as I argue, is essentially nondual.
And yet it is probably the case that we only have arrived at our privileged position of being able to cognize the unconscious at all because of Freud’s strident and scientific duality. It is as if Freud’s strong dualities allowed him to make diving attempts, like Schiller’s brave diver, past the limits of the known and the knowable and into those regions of the mind that are, properly speaking, unthinkable.
The wager of this paper, and of Freud’s great discovery, is that our everyday reality, the work-a-day world, both emerges from and shrouds an obscure reality, the reality of the unconscious, where there is no distinction between you and I. Psychoanalysis shares with mysticism special access to what is imminent to our situation, an obscure perception of a psychical reality that is more true and more real.
References
Carignani, P. (2018) “Psyche is extended”: from Kant to Freud. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 99:665-689
Derrida, J. 2000. Le Toucher. Jean-Luc Nancy [(2005) On touching - Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press]. Paris: Galilée.
Descartes, R. (1996) Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Cambridge University Press
Frazer, J. G. (1959), The New Golden Bough. (edited by Gaster, T. H.) Criterion Books
Freud, S. (1890) Psychical (or Mental) Treatment (1890). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 7:281-302
Freud, S. (1893) Charcot. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 3:7-23
Freud, S. (1896) Letter from Freud to Fliess, December 6, 1896. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 42:207-214
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. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 4:ix-627
Freud, S. (1901) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors (1901). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 6:vii-296
Freud, S. (1902) Letter from Freud to Fliess, January 17, 1902. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 42:454-455
Freud, S. (1905) Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 8:1-247
Freud, S. (1909) Letter from Sigmund Freud to C. G. Jung, April 16, 1909. The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung 41:218-220
Freud, S. (1910) Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, December 29, 1910. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908-1914 25:246-247
Freud, S. (1911) Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 12:213-226
Freud, S. (1912a) The Dynamics of Transference. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 12:97-108
Freud, S. (1912b) Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 12:109-120
Freud, S. (1913) Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913 [1912-13]). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 13:vii-162
Freud, S. (1914a) On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14:1-66
Freud, S. (1914b) On Narcissism: An Introduction. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14:67-102
Freud, S. (1915) The Unconscious. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14:159-215
Freud, S. (1916) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 15:1-240
Freud, S. (1917a) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 16:241-463
Freud, S. (1917b) Letter from Sigmund Freud to Georg Groddeck, June 5, 1917. The Meaning of Illness: Selected Psychoanalytic Writings Including his Correspondence with Sigmund Freud 105:36-38
Freud, S. (1919) The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 17:217-256
Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 18:1-64
Freud, S. (1924) The Economic Problem of Masochism. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 19:155-170
Freud, S. (1925) Negation. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 19:233-240
Freud, S. (1925) A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 19:225-232
Freud, S. (1927) The Future of an Illusion. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 21:1-56
Freud, S. (1928) Dostoevsky and Parricide. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 21:173-194
Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 21:57-146
Freud, S. (1933) New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 22:1-182
Freud, S. (1936) A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 22:237-248
Freud, S. (1938) Findings, Ideas, Problems. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 23:299-300
Freud, S. (1940) An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 21:27-84
Freud, S. (1950) Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950 [1895]). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 1:281-391
Huxley, A. (2009) The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Jones, E. (1955) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Volume II. Years of Maturity 1901-1919. Basic Books
James, W. (1904) Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist? The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 1, No. 18 (Sep. 1, 1904), pp. 477-491
Jones, E. (1957). The life and work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 3. The last phase 1919-1939. Basic Books
Jung, C. G. (1909) Letter from C. G. Jung to Sigmund Freud, April 2, 1909. The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung 41:215-217
Kant, I. 1766. “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics.” In Theoretical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 301–359.
Kant, I. (1998), The Critique of Pure Reason, (trans, Guyer, P., Wood, A.) Cambridge University Press
Kristeva, J. (2014) Reliance, or Maternal Eroticism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 62:69-85
Laplanche, J. (1976). Life and death in psycho-analysis. (Trans J. Mehlman). Johns Hopkins U Press
Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. B. (1973). The language of psycho-analysis. (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith). W. W. Norton.
Loy, D. R., (2019) Nonduality: In Buddhism and Beyond, Wisdom Publications
Makari, G. (2008). Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. HarperCollins Publishers.
Matte-Blanco, I. (1959) Expression in Symbolic Logic of the Characteristics of the System Ucs or the Logic of the System Ucs. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40:1-5
Matte-Blanco, I. (1988) 2 Bi-Logical Structures, the Unconscious, and the Mathematical Infinite. Thinking, Feeling, and Being: Clinical Reflections on the Fundamental Antinomy of Human Beings and World 5:43-69
Ogden, T. H. (2024) Rethinking the Concepts of the Unconscious and Analytic Time. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 105:279-291
Oppenheim, J. (2014) Metaphor and Fields: Common Ground, Common Language, and the Future of Psychoanalysis. Edited by S. Montana Katz with an introduction by Madeleine Baranger. London: Routledge, 2013, 244 pp.. Psychoanalytic Review 101:603-610
Parsons, W. B. (1999). The enigma of the oceanic feeling: Revisioning the psychoanalytic theory of mysticism. Oxford University Press
Paskauskas, R. A. (1988) Freud's break with Jung: the crucial role of Ernest Jones*. Free Associations 1:7-34
Pierri, M. (2022). Occultism and the Origins of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Ferenczi and the Challenge of Thought Transference (A. Elgar, Trans.; 1st ed.). Routledge.
Petrella, F. (1993) Endopsyichic Perception / Functional Phenomenon. Rivista di Psicoanalisi 39:115-134
Plotinus, (1952), The Six Enneads (trans McKenna, S. and Page, B. S.) The Great Books vol. 17 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica)
Rivera, P. S. (2017) ‘Freud's Speculations in Ethnology’: A Reflection on Anthropology's Encounter with Psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 98:755-778
Sterba, R. F. (1978) Discussions of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 47:173-191
