Oceanic Feeling

Nov 22

For better or worse it was the concept oceanic feeling that pulled me into the psychoanalytic gravity well way back in 2018 when I read Michael Pollen’s How To Change Your Mind (2018) (I guess this book was something of a lightning rod for getting people turnt). Worse because the oceanic feeling is hardly a concept, more like pseudo concept, a sentiment, and that warrants mention in the literature only to be tossed off as irrelevant or misguided. Better, because the oceanic is a rather extraordinary metaphor; an image that scales from the womb to our home world. Just as life formed in the oceans, and we were formed in the womb, so all belief is formed in that cultic dynamo that is oceanic feeling. At least that’s the idea.

The 1960s counter culture, coming of age in the space race, replaced oceanic feeling for feelings more cosmic. Cosmic feeling is fine in its own right and shows just how susceptible ecstatic experience is to contemporary metaphor, nevertheless it seems to me that, just as we are faced with rising seas and acidifying oceans, the oceanic is even more relevant today than it was 100 years ago and carries with it a very real sense of mortality, a life and an annihilation that is entirely immanent and local and yet totally hostile and alien.

In regards to a theory of mind, the oceanic probably gets dismissed because Freud dismissed it first. It is a feeling that he himself had never experienced. In a letter to Romain Rolland, the poet of our metaphor, Freud admits that “mysticism is just as closed a book as music.” It is Freud’s right to dismiss mysticism, a topic towards which he is far more ambivalent than he is letting on here, but, my god, how can he close the book on music? This will remain one of those peculiar details that gives depth and perplexity to biography. Anyways, in as much as the power of music is self-evident regardless of whether or not Freud likes it, we may assume the same for oceanic feeling. If the feeling were real, Freud concedes, its origin lies in the mother/infant dyad; in other words, oceanic feeling is a repetition—more than that, it is an emanation.

And why shouldn’t a baby be given the largest of all feelings? Lacking any language with which to organize their world, nor any ability to flee, the infant is subjected to currents of sensation that we adults could scarcely tolerate. So our oldest of impressions, those of early childhood, have the greatest effect upon us—they are least remembered, because so intense. Psychoanalysis was ahead of the curve on this one, for it was not until 1987 that the medical establishment agreed that babies had any feelings at all whatsoever. Indeed, feelings, can be a somewhat touchy subject in today’s hegemonic brain-science; why have feelings when you can have an SSRI?

I would go so far as to say that feeling itself is oceanic, like when we say that we are moved by a feeling—circadian, tidal, capricious and enveloping, flowing in giant currents that come from who-knows-where. It is as if, at times, we were still suspended in that medium we floated in as children and are still moved by every ripple and every wave. It’s that same wave that Proust’s narrator surfs on after eating his madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea; the retroaction of unknown mnemic recoil overwhelming the present.

For a long time whenever I would hear certain Christmas songs, such as Frank Sinatra singing Hark the Harold Angels Sing I would suffer just absolutely hair-raising feelings, as if I were being lowered into hot wax. An unholy mixture of sadness, FOMO, bodily heat and chills, forlorn and ecstatic longing…for what? I am no great fan of Christmas, nor do I go out of my way to listen to Christmas music, so why this hellacious feeling-state? The feeling is overwhelming, all consuming, disruptive-to-thought and action and also, somehow, highly enjoyable, as if I were hitting a bong. It has come to my attention only recently, after analysis, that these feelings are not necessarily mine…

A magic door to the world of the other, like in the Keats poem: “magic casements, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” I wonder at times if we don’t seek out ecstatic experience, whether induced by whiskey, or weed, by fasting or automatic writing, in order to put ourselves in the way of these baroque waves of feeling that have no name. Which makes me think of Keats again, exclaiming: “O for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts!”

Keats’s desire helps to locate this whole situation historically, in which oceanic feeling is finally Romantic. The unconscious, as an historical idea, finds (some of) its origin in the exultation and mysticism of nature in the 18th century, for our purposes exemplified by Schopenhauer’s image of the little boat of idea, floating on a vast sea of will.

Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual human calmly sits, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis.

This principium is the principle of sufficient philosophy: otherwise known as the ego. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), after formulating the death drive and opposing it to the life-instincts, Freud finds it curious that he had “steered our course into the harbor of Schopenhauer’s philosophy,” where eros becomes the need for conceptual, ideological unity, and the death drive is the implacable will to die.

But if Schopenhauer is not entirely romantic, his follower adept Friedrich Nietzsche is romantic and it’s not for nothing that he quotes the above ocean and boat passage at the beginning of his career in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). It strikes me, just now pretty much, that the oceanic is really Nietzsche’s concept, even if Romain Rolland coined it after the fact. In Nietzsche it is otherwise known as the Dionysian; music, dancing, intoxication; the witch’s brew; a sympathy for the abyss…

Sabina Spielrein, first theorizer of the death-drive as sexuality itself, and who viciously pegged Nietzsche as an infant unable to give up the breast, likewise imagined the unconscious in this oceanic register, in which the mother is the sea—the dark problem into which the subject advances. The idea here being that your mother’s libido emanates throughout your life. Freud never deploys overt oceanic imagery to describe the unconscious, and yet the primary process may be read as a repurposed Dionysianism, and so the dynamics of the unconscious, as he tells it—condensation and displacement, lack of negativity, lack of contradiction, continuous and timeless—all seem rather oceanic in retrospect.

Clearly, in an age when the sea is rising up to devastate coastal civilization, we have not left behind Schopenhauer’s sentiment but only find it ever more antagonizing and confrontational. So it is a bit ironic that in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933) Freud betrays his own biases when, in ego-psychology mode, he follows his famous proverb: “Where id was, there ego shall be,” immediately with the proviso that: “it is a work of culture—not unlike draining the Zuider Zee;” this is a reference to what was then the greatest geo-engineering project ever undertaken, conducted by the Dutch in the reclamation of the ocean for farmland. Ergo: the curative project of adaptation by ego-psychology is like trying to… drain the ocean?

Freud’s late turn to ego-psychology makes another puzzle for the biographer. But that the efforts of civilization to suppress or contain nature/the unconscious result in the collapse of the habitable environment is a fate as tragically ironic as any ancient Greek drama, and one that Freud, finally, could not have anticipated.

Does a repressed oceanic feeling return as a category five hurricane…?