Psychoanalytic Psychology Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association

2006, Vol. 23, No. 1, 128 –142 0736-9735/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0736-9735.23.1.128

THE OCEANIC FEELING AND A

SEA CHANGE
Historical Challenges to Reductionist Attitudes to
Religion and Spirit From Within Psychoanalysis

Janette Graetz Simmonds, PhD

Monash University

Three waves of challenges may be perceived from within psychoanalysis to its

reductionist attitude to religion and spirit. These historical challenges from
within psychoanalysis are an important context for reading the many papers now
being published on spirituality and psychotherapy, and increasingly, spirituality
and psychoanalysis. The 1st wave began with some of Freud’s contemporaries,
among them his friend, the psychoanalyst and pastor Oscar Pfister; the Nobel
Laureate Romain Rolland, and the poet T. S. Eliot. Challenges continued after
Freud’s death: In Britain from psychoanalysts such as Rickman and Guntrip,
and in America initially by the European immigrants, Erikson and Fromm.
British independent psychoanalysts initiated what may be considered to be the
3rd wave, whose momentum is now swelling to a sea change.

Keywords: reductionism, spirituality, oceanic, health, change

I . . . desire to reconcile, if it is possible, the two antithetical forms of spirit for which the West
and the East are wrongly supposed to stand—reason and faith— or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say, the diverse forms of reason and faith; for the West and the East share them
almost equally although few suspect it. (Romain Rolland, 1929, p. 4)

In a field which numbers among it claim that “psychoanalysis is a method of research, an

impartial instrument” (Freud, 1961/1927, p. 37), the continuation of reductionist attitudes
toward the many and varied forms and uses of religion and spiritual interests and practices
was incongruous. Beginning with Freud, psychoanalysis tended to interpret all religious
and spiritual experience, as in social anthropologist Geertz’ phrase (1973) “primitive,
regressive, or psychotic,” in the same way that different cultural experience had previ-

Janette Graetz Simmonds, PhD, Institute of Human Development and Counseling, Monash Uni-
versity, Melbourne, Australia.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Janette Graetz Simmonds,
Psychology Department, Faculty of Education, Building 6, Monash University, Melbourne, Aus-
tralia 3800. E-mail: janette.simmonds@education.monash.edu.au

128
 OCEANIC FEELING AND A SEA CHANGE 129

ously been labeled by anthropology. Although the rejection of superstitious and politically
coercive misuses of religion is very intelligible, what is much more difficult to understand
is why an all-encompassing reductionist attitude, amounting to prejudice, toward all
spirituality should have persisted in psychoanalysis. It becomes clearer through an
examination of the literature that what seems to have been projected onto mysticism and
religion was the irrational, unknowable aspects— undesirable because they were unknow-
able, and what was projected onto science was reason, order, progress, and knowability.
Spirituality had projected onto it characteristics that scientific psychoanalysis, we could
now say scientistic psychoanalysis, wanted to avoid. There was a danger of confusion
between psychoanalysis and spiritualism, which Ernest Jones (1957) was particularly
chary about, given Freud’s belief in telepathy. However, also very pertinent, is increasing
historical evidence concerning Freud’s leadership tactics with considerable pressure put to
bear to maintain an orthodox “line.” There are numerous instances of intolerance of
dissenting opinions and expulsion of various psychoanalysts, including, of course, Jung,
and a continuation of pressures to orthodoxy up to and including the present time (as
documented, e.g., by Breger, 2000; and Kirsner, 2000, 2001).
In this paper, I trace some important historical challenges to reductionist attitudes to
religion and spirit from within psychoanalysis which may be perceived as arising in 3
“waves.” I have given consideration here primarily to the 1st 2 waves since they are
relatively neglected in current discussions concerning psychoanalysis and spirituality. I
have also paid particular attention to the neglected writings of the British psychoanalysts
on this subject. What Freud actually said regarding religion, and especially what he called
the “vague abstractions” of spirituality, is often misrecalled and warrants revisiting.

Freud’s Attitude

Freud put his uncompromising attitude toward religion succinctly as “The whole thing is
so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to
humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise
above this view of life . . .” (1930, p. 74). His major thesis was that religion was “the
universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it
arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father” (1961/1927, p. 43) with
his evidence coming from his use of anthropological research: “. . . comparative research
has been struck by the fatal resemblance between the religious ideas which we revere and
the mental products of primitive peoples and times” (p. 38).1

Challenges From Freud’s Contemporaries

Interestingly, when writing both The Future of an Illusion (1961/1927), and Civilization
and Its Discontents (1930), Freud appeared to have in mind particular friends who had
knowledgeable opinions very different from his own. From Freud’s correspondences with
the Lutheran pastor and psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister, who remained a close friend for 30
years, and the pacifist, poet, and scholar of Indian mysticism, Romain Rolland, it can be

1
His use of anthropological data has been much critiqued. For example, see Freeman (1970)
Totem and Taboo: A Reappraisal, and Wallace, (1983) Freud and Anthropology: A History and
Reappraisal.
130 SIMMONDS

seen that the former was written with Pfister in mind, and the beginning chapters of the
latter were addressed to objections Rolland made to Freud’s neglect of what Rolland
considered to be “the true source of religious feeling,” namely the oceanic feeling. Freud
sent both friends copies of The Future of an Illusion. Pfister wrote a detailed response, The
Illusion of a Future, which was published in German a year after Freud’s work, but not
in English until 1993 (Pfister & Roazen, 1993). Pfister, always extremely respectful,2
emphasized as his major point: “When Freud reproaches religion for its hallucinatory
confusion, he is undoubtedly correct for some, indeed for many, of its forms. But . . . the
great master seems to have very specific forms in mind and to be generalizing from them”
(1993, p. 567). In a letter to Freud thanking him for an early copy of The Future of an
Illusion, Pfister reminded Freud that science also dealt in uncertainties:

. . . you know better than I do how natural laws have been uprooted by present-day physics.
In my view there can be no such thing as a pure empiricist, and a man who sticks rigidly to
the data is like a heart specialist who ignores the organism as a whole and its invisible laws,
divisions of function, etc. Thus I have to find a place for the unconscious in mental life as a
whole, and for the latter in society, the universe, and its trans-empirical realities . . . . (Pfister
to Freud, 24th November, 1927, in Parsons, 1999, pp. 114 –115)

In their exchange of correspondence, Pfister also remarked:

Our difference derives chiefly from the fact that you grew up in proximity to pathological
forms of religion and regard these as “religion,” while I had the good fortune of being able to
turn to a free form of religion . . . . (Pfister to Freud, 20th February, 1928, in Parsons, 1999,
p. 122)

Freud dismissed Pfister’s remarks but may have had him in mind in Civilization and
Its Discontents when he referred to those “who think they can rescue the God of religion
by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle” and the wish Freud
said he had to tell them, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!”
(1930, p. 74).
Freud had begun a correspondence in 1923 with the Nobel Prize winning novelist,
poet, and scholar of Indian mysticism, Romain Rolland, whom he admired for his writing
and for his courageous opposition to World War I. Rolland sent Freud the book he had
written on Gandhi, and Freud sent Rolland The Future of an Illusion. Rolland responded
with his well-known “oceanic feeling” letter (5th December 1927), in which he suggested
that Freud give attention to the true source of “religious feeling”:

I would have liked to see you doing an analysis of spontaneous religious sentiment or, more
exactly, of religious feeling, which is wholly different from religions in the strict sense of the
word, and much more durable . . . . I myself am familiar with this sensation. All through my
life, it has never failed me; and I have always found in it a source of vital renewal . . . as I have
recognized it to be identical (with multiple nuances) in a large number of living souls, it has
helped me to understand that this was the true subterranean source of religious energy which,
subsequently, has been collected, canalized and dried up by the Churches, to the extent that
one could say that it is inside the Churches (whichever they may be) that true “religious”
sentiment is least available. (in Parsons, 1999, pp. 173–174)

Freud wrote back (on the 14th July 1929) to Rolland that the letter “containing your

2
Unlike Jung; the key to the longevity of Pfister’s friendship with Freud?
 OCEANIC FEELING AND A SEA CHANGE 131

remarks about a feeling you describe as ‘oceanic’ has left me no peace” and asked if he
could use parts of Rolland’s letter in the new book that he was writing, a request to which
Rolland readily agreed. Freud did indeed use much of it at the beginning of Civilization
and Its Discontents. Freud declared the oceanic feeling to be “vestigial” and rejected it as
“the true source of religious feeling.” He prioritized the father’s role in childhood in his
rationale:

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection. Thus
the part played by the oceanic feeling, which might seek something like the restoration of
limitless narcissism, is ousted from a place in the foreground. (1930, p. 72)

Freud explained, later critics would say “explained away,” the oceanic feeling, as
follows:

An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source
of the sensations flowing in upon him. He gradually learns to do so, in response to various
promptings . . . . Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world
from itself. Our present ego-feeling, is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more
inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond
between that ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in
whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or lesser degree, it would
exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of
maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it
would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe—the same ideas
with which my friend elucidated the “oceanic” feeling. (1930, p. 66 – 68)

Freud’s dismissal of the oceanic feeling has been notably critiqued by Erikson
(1962/1958); Werman (1977, 1986), and Kovel (1983/1976, 1988/1985). (I note here a
theoretical observation of my own: Freud’s position on the “oceanic feeling” relies on an
early nondifferentiated ego, a notion that was revised by Melanie Klein. Klein, 1932,
reiterated in detail in 1952, argued that a separate ego existed from birth, and for
Kleinians, this has the unintended theoretical consequence of undoing Freud’s argument
on this point.)
Freud dismissed Pfister’s gentle arguments concerning his unfortunate and limited
view of religious experience. He pathologized Rolland’s concept of an “oceanic feeling,”
based on his own spiritual experience, interpreting it as seeking “something like the
restoration of limitless narcissism” and continued to insist that religious feeling must
involve “the mighty personality of religious doctrines.” He showed considerable displea-
sure at varying beliefs. In a letter to Marie Bonaparte in 1928, he remarked on “the most
varied drinks being offered under the name of religion, with a minimal percentage of
alcohol—really nonalcoholic, but they still get drunk on it. The old drinkers were after all
a respectable body, but to get tipsy on pomerit (apple juice) is really ridiculous” (19th
March, 1928, p. 447 in Jones, 1957).
By the time that Freud was completing Moses and Monotheism (written over a period
of at least 5 years but completed in 1938 and published in 1939), he was using terminology
such as “Supreme Being,” “Great Spirit,” and “Divine Spirit” (S.E. 23, p. 122), but still
in the sense of a father God, which was intrinsic to his argument concerning the
monotheistic “religion of Moses” that it allowed for people to “take a share in the grandeur
of a new idea of God” (p. 123).
132 SIMMONDS

Freud’s Worldview

Freud famously adopted the scientific “weltanschauung” or worldview which he described

as asserting, “there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual
working-over of carefully scrutinized observations—in other words, what we call re-
search—and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition, or divina-
tion” (1964/1933, p. 196). Freud had previously emphasized at the conclusion of The
Future of an Illusion (1927) “our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to
suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere” (p. 56). In his review of
The Future of an Illusion in 1929, T. S. Eliot (1989/1929) noted that Freud’s statement
itself was a belief, and Eliot raised the issue, still currently debated, of the standing of
psychoanalysis itself as a science.
Freud’s assumption of the paradigm of logical positivism for psychoanalysis, recog-
nized at the time by Eliot and Pfister as also itself a belief system, precluded an unbiased
study of religious and spiritual phenomena. Freud was able to retain a more open mind
regarding telepathic phenomena, which he referred to as “thought transference” because
he believed that it might be able to be demonstrated “scientifically.” His papers Dreams
and Telepathy (1922) and The Occult Significance of Dreams (1925), in which, according
to Ernest Jones, “he pretty plainly indicated his acceptance of telepathy,” were published
in 1921 despite Jones’ attempts to dissuade him from publishing them. In 1932, regarding
the cases he had discussed in his lecture on Dreams and the Occult, Freud remarked: “Not
every case, of course, is equally convincing and in not every case is it equally possible to
exclude more rational explanations; but, taking them as a whole, there remains a strong
balance of probability in favor of thought-transference as a fact” (1964, Lecture XXX, p.
45). In a letter written in the same year to the psychoanalyst Eduardo Weiss, Freud
confided, “I am, it is true, prepared to believe that behind all so-called occult phenomena
lies something new and very important: the fact of thought-transference, i.e., the trans-
ferring of psychical processes through space to other people. I know of proofs of this from
observations made in daylight and am thinking of expressing my opinion publicly about
it” (1964/1932, p. 453– 454).
In another of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud played with the
idea of an overlap or relationship between psychoanalysis and “certain mystical practices”
in “widening the perception.” Unlike the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (who
considered that mystics “have probably approximated most closely to expression of
experience of O,” or “absolute truth,” 1988/1970, p. 30), Freud dismissed the possibility
of such practices being of use in discovering “ultimate truths.” In a discussion of the lack
of sharply defined “frontiers” between the ego, superego, and id, Freud remarked, “certain
mystical practices may succeed in upsetting the normal relationships between the different
regions of the mind, so that, for instance, perception may be able to grasp happenings in
the depth 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. Its intention is, indeed, to
strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of
perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id”
(Freud, 1964/1933, p. 80). In the 1933 Weltanschauung lecture referred to above, Freud
also categorically reaffirmed his attitude toward religion as infantile and neurotic, saying,
“If we attempt to assign the place of religion in the evolution of mankind, it appears not
 OCEANIC FEELING AND A SEA CHANGE 133

as a permanent acquisition but as a counterpart to the neurosis which individual civilized

men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity” (p. 168).
This highly reductionist attitude to religious and spiritual matters was continued by
Freud’s followers, with a number of papers using “this means that” reductionist psycho-
analytic interpretations of a variety of religious festivals, for example, Abraham on the
Jewish “Day of Atonement” (1927), Jekels on the psychology of the festival of Christmas
(1936), and Schnier (1957) on the Tibetan Lamaist ritual of Chod. An exception to some
extent was a paper by John Rickman, who had been brought up a Quaker. Rickman, a
British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was analyzed by Freud and Klein, and worked with
Freud in Vienna in 1920, and later with Jones, Ferenczi, and Klein. He was the analyst and
later a coworker with Bion on their innovative leaderless groups at Northfield (Payne,
1957; King, 1991).3 Rickman contributed a paper in 1938 to the 15th International
Psycho-Analytical Congress on the Need for Belief in God (this paper was not published
until 1957, and even then tucked away as an appendix in Rickman’s Selected Contribu-
tions to Psychoanalysis). In the paper, Rickman made a psychoanalytic study of Quaker
practices and beliefs, pointing out the absence of a father figure and the practice of waiting
on the “Inner Light” or “life-giver,” which “enables the individual to become confluent
with ‘the ocean of divine love’ which fills the universe” (p. 386). Rickman argued that the
need for God “corresponds closely” with Klein’s depressive position, and rather than
being “a regressive flight to a psychotic condition,” “constructive or restitutive phantasies”
need also to be taken into account (p. 388), observing that Quakerism “focuses its
attention on the good object that is permanently within” (p. 390).
Also in Britain and within object relations, Marjorie Brierley had in 1947 (and in an
expansion and minor revision of essentially the same paper in 1952) argued for a wider
understanding of religious symbolism and motivation, but was herself unwittingly ethno-
centrically biased toward Christianity.4 The dissenting papers written up to this point by
British psychoanalysts in the 1940s made many concessions to the prevailing reductionist
view. The tenor of the departures was to diffidently point out some specific exceptions to
Freud’s thesis.

Later Psychoanalytic Challenges

The next challenges to comprehensive reductionism from within psychoanalysis were

from 2 psychoanalysts who had emigrated from Europe to America. Erich Fromm, a
Marxist and psychoanalyst, who later gave himself the freedom to rethink orthodoxies in
both ideologies (discussed by him in Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 1962), published a
book in 1950 on Psychoanalysis and Religion. In that volume, Fromm distinguished
between authoritarian and humanistic religions, describing the essential element in au-
thoritarian religion as being “submission to a powerful authority” (p. 35). He noted that
there were authoritarian secular religions which followed the same principle, and he

3
During World War II. Both Rickman and Bion decided that the analysis interrupted by the
war could not be resumed after their work together, and Bion had further analysis with Klein.
4
One instance of this is in her discussion of mysticism, which remained unchanged in her 1952
revision of the paper. She remarked, “Oriental mysticism, however, frequently though not invariably
repudiates life and seeks peace in the annihilation of individuality over and above the surrender of
personal self-will. Thus, the attainment of Nirvana seems to a psycho-analyst to involve the
profoundest possible regression to pre-natal primary identification. In striking contrast, the main line
of Christian mysticism is active rather than quietist” (p. 72).
134 SIMMONDS

contrasted both with humanistic religion, which he described as “centered around man and
his strength.” He observed that “religious experience in this kind of religion is the
experience of oneness with the All, based on one’s relatedness to the world as it is grasped
with thought and love” (p. 37). In humanistic religion, virtue is “self-realization” rather
than obedience, and faith is based on one’s own experiences of “thought and feeling,” with
joy, rather than “sorrow and guilt” as the accompanying mood (p. 37).
Erik Erikson’s seminal book Identity and the Life Cycle (1980/1959) is often cited in
the developmental literature relating to children’s and adolescents’ spirituality. I wonder
if it had some influence in a resurgence of interest in the psychology of religion around
1960, which Donelson (1999, p. 188) documents. Reviewing the psychology of religion
as it related to the psychology of adolescence, Donelson noted an early psychological
interest in religion from the turn of the century, and its decline to “dormancy” between
1930 and 1960, which she attributes to “Freudianism and behaviorism,” with psychoanal-
ysis seen as “antireligious, atheistic, and hostile to religion.” Donelson traced a subsequent
resurgence from about 1960, particularly noting the establishment of journals relating to
the research of religion. I note that Erikson’s book, Young Man Luther: A Study in
Psychoanalysis and History, published in 1958, one year earlier than Identity and the Life
Cycle, and not discussed by Donelson, was one of the 1st popular books by a psychoan-
alyst to contribute to a less automatically reductive response to spiritual issues. In that
study, Erikson took care to point out the healing and creative potential of religions, noting
that they “keep alive the common symbols of integrity distilled by the generations. If this
is partial regression it is a regression which, in retracing firmly established pathways,
returns to the present amplified and clarified” (1962/1958, p. 264). Erikson offered a
comparison between the usage of dreams and religious symbols, observing that Freud
“convincingly demonstrated the affinity of some religious ways of thought with those of
neurosis. But we regress in our dreams, too, and the inner structures of many dreams
correspond to many symptoms. Yet dreaming itself is a healthy activity and a necessary
one . . . . Religions try to use mechanisms analogous to dreamlife, reinforced at times by
a collective genius of poetry and artistry, to offer ceremonial dreams of great recuperative
value” (p. 265).
The American philosopher and psychoanalyst Herbert Fingarette’s book The Self in
Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and the Life of the Spirit was published in
1963. His challenge, and those to follow, raised even more essential objections, similar to
those made originally by Pfister and Rolland, although the detailed arguments of Freud’s 2
contemporaries were unlikely to have been known to many people. Pfister’s book was
initially published in German, and as noted above, was not published in English until little
more than a decade ago. In considering the psychoanalytic study of spirit, Fingarette
identified several dangers, including “psychologising the spiritual life (‘reducing’ it to
psychology with nothing left over)”; and “mistaking widespread, popular perversions of
the spiritual life for the real thing, thus often providing insightful analyses of something
which is familiar though incorrectly labeled” (1963, p. 7).
In Britain, the challenges in the 1960s also became more candid. Guntrip’s forthright
paper, given initially as a memorial lecture in 1968 (presumably to a receptive audience),
was published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in1969 (not the International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, as was Brierley’s). Guntrip’s former analysand and the editor
of his collected papers, Hazell, tells us that Guntrip was a Congregational minister and had
a prior affiliation with the Salvation Army (Hazell, 1994, pp. 2, 4,). Guntrip argued:
“If . . . we dismiss all religion because there is such a thing as neurotic religion, we are on
dangerous ground, for there are also neurotic forms of politics, of art, of marriage . . . . We
 OCEANIC FEELING AND A SEA CHANGE 135

cannot dismiss everything because it can be neurotic” and “If religion can express neurotic
dependence, atheism can express equally neurotic independence” (p. 323).
Guntrip critiqued Bertrand Russell’s position concerning the nonexistence of intrinsic
meaning and value, and suggested that religious experience, broadly defined, is similar in
type but different in range to the experience of human relating. He argued that both assist
in developing further “personal integration” or “wholeness” in relation to others and to the
universe (p. 329), and discussed Winnicott’s (1971/1967) notion of the cultural nature of
the transitional object, emphasizing its importance to “a sense of belonging” and an
“experience of our environing universe as not depersonalising us, a world in which
‘persons’ can feel at home” (p. 330). Guntrip drew as his conclusion: “What I believe to
be a psychological fact, and the one full answer to alienation, is the basic religious
experience of the universe as not alien to our nature as ‘persons,’ a sense of oneness with
ultimate reality akin to the experience of human love” (p. 332). He maintained that, as in
other relationships, it is this experience, rather than faith, which is important.
Within British object relations, other important work came from Marion Milner (1942,
1952, 1985, 1985/1952, 1988/1952, 1957, 1987c), on symbolism and altered states and
foci of consciousness, and her own experiments and experiences, earlier published under
the pseudonym of Joanna Field (1986/1934, 1937). Milner’s writings on spiritual matters
declined and then surged again in the 1970s and 1980s (1973, 1978, 1987a, 1987b).
Winnicott’s5 concept of transitional phenomena allowing a potential space to religion has
been of great importance in rethinking the nature of religion and spirituality (Milner’s and
Winnicott’s somewhat interrelated work is discussed by Milner in her 1988 collection of
papers). R. D. Laing’s work drawing on (but quite often not crediting) the notions of his
psychoanalytic training supervisors, Milner and Winnicott, and with the addition of his
own observations and twists (Laing, 1978/1960, 1973a/1967, 1973b/1967, 1976, 1982,
1982) can also be considered to be a maverick particle of this wave. Bion’s work
concerning mysticism and knowability, often misunderstood as merely stretching satu-
rated language, has also been significant (see Simmonds, 2005, for a discussion of Bion’s
work in this regard).

A Brief Look at Some Recent Challenges

The swelling wave of the many current psychoanalytic challenges to reductionist views of
religion is rather complicated by Symington’s claim that psychoanalysis itself is a mature
religion, a claim that may be considered to be an appropriation of religion. Many writers,
including Rieff (1966); Lasch (1979) and Szasz (1988/1977), have argued that psycho-
therapy is the religion of the formerly irreligious and have commented on psychoanalysis
being used as a religion, being “made into a religion” in a cultic way, and some have
voiced their concern about the religiose nature of psychoanalytic schools. Bion wrote
extensively about the “religion” of psychoanalysis in his 3-part novel, A Memoir of the
Future (1975). The title refers both to Freud’s 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion, and
Bion’s maxim of listening “without memory and desire” (1988/1967), which if not
heeded, engages the therapist in the past and the future rather than what is occurring in the
present. Bion wryly has his characters of a priest and a psychoanalyst discuss the cultic

5
Guntrip had his 2nd analysis with Winnicott, an account of which is recorded in his paper
Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott: (How complete a result does psycho-analytic therapy
achieve?), 1975.
136 SIMMONDS

nature of psychoanalysis, with the priest referring to the “saints of psychoanalysis” (1975).
The debate concerning whether psychoanalysis is itself a religion, and other issues in this
wave were brought to prominence in Britain through some landmark essays. In 1993, in
response to questions frequently asked by student visitors, the London Freud Museum
commissioned and published a small book entitled Is Psychoanalysis Another Religion?
Contemporary Essays on Spirit, Faith and Morality in Psychoanalysis, with the contrib-
utors including Symington, Coltart, Kovel, and Black. (These 4 psychoanalysts have been
important contributors to the literature on psychoanalysis and spirituality.)
Black commented in his contribution:

Freud’s uncompromising rejection of religion was formative for the general attitude of early
psychoanalysis. A general assumption was accepted that psychoanalysis was by its very nature
antithetical to religious belief, and analysts such as Ernest Jones and Melanie Klein prided
themselves on their repudiation of religion . . . To be religious in any way was tantamount to
being neurotic in public. (1993, p. 615).

Coltart’s contribution to the Freud Museum essays was confined to a discussion of the
parallels between psychoanalysis and Buddhism, but in another publication in the same
year (1993b, p. 108) she observed: “Some of us feel the need to develop a moral
philosophy or even a religious discipline alongside the practice of psychotherapy, espe-
cially if we are to avoid the trap of investing psychoanalysis with philosophical or
religious significance.” In later work, she noted that psychoanalysts “shy away in some-
thing very like terror if religion is so much as mentioned. The fact that some of them
display an extraordinarily religious devotion, even fanaticism, to some of their doctrines,
and even to some of their leading figures, is a fascinating subject” (Coltart, 1996, p.
130 –131).
In his essay for the Museum and in later work (1994, 1996a, 1999, 2001, 2001),
Symington asserted that psychoanalysis itself is a “natural” as distinct from “revealed”
religion.6 In the following quotation from the Freud Museum essay, Symington argued
that moral scrutiny, resulting in awareness of doing wrong, “changes psychoanalysis from
being a morality into a spirituality.” He also argued that psychoanalysis is a religion:

It is the elaborated ethical philosophy that establishes a spirituality as a religion . . . . You may
want to claim that morality can stand on its own quite independently of religion, but morality
is always rooted in an inner action pattern and this action pattern which will have symbolical
expression is what I am terming here a natural religion . . . . It is however the conviction of
this author that psychoanalysis is a natural religion in the making and that when this is
recognized it will be a considerable enrichment to psychoanalysis and society. (1993, pp.
54 –55)

In his controversial book Emotion and Spirit published a year later, he addressed
criticisms he had received regarding a conflation between “moral” and “religious” with a
different line of reasoning from that offered above, remarking:

It may be argued that this is a moral and not a religious view of the individual, but I believe
this judgment to be made from the Judaeo-Christian perspective. The thesis upheld in this

6
Natural theology is concerned with “reason” as distinct from “revealed truth” (Matthews,
1973/1964, p. 428). Advocates of natural theology include Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas,
Descartes, Liebniz, and John Locke (Davies, 1993, p. 9).
 OCEANIC FEELING AND A SEA CHANGE 137

book is that the moral perspective is a religious one. The reason for defining it as moral and
not religious is that the latter assumes the existence of God, which I believe to be an incorrect
view because, on the one hand, belief in the existence of God is compatible with irreligion,
and on the other, the denial of God’s existence is compatible with religion. (1994, p. 88)

There is agreement in the comparative religion literature (see, e.g., Smart, 1984) with
the assertion that Symington makes that “the denial of God”s existence is compatible with
religion,” that is, that it is possible to have a nontheistic religion. However, Symington’s
claim that the moral is necessarily religious is very contentious indeed, as is his assertion,
that “a person is spiritual when he examines his motives with the goal of purifying them.”
Moral conduct and well motivated self examination are generally considered to be
necessary but not sufficient conditions for “mature” religion and spirituality. However,
Symington has continued to espouse his position (1993, 1996, 1999) arguing that psy-
choanalysis occupies the same space, is the proper “mature” occupier of spiritual space,
and is the “spirit of sanity” (2001).
In contradistinction to Symington, but in common with most other writers on com-
parative religion, Kovel has insisted on a transcendent dimension to spirituality and
religion, and a limit to the therapeutic endeavor, commenting “The spiritual question . . . is
not about the content of the self, but about the existence of a ‘nonself’ to which the self
relates—a ‘beyondness’ to being which does not invalidate psychological propositions yet
sets their limit” (1991, p. 71). In the Museum essays, Kovel also offered a definition of
religion: “Religion may be considered as the historical binding of spirituality, that is, as
the way spirituality is organized in a social project” (p. 18).
Kovel had previously succinctly defined religion as “the historical systemization of
spirituality”(1988/1985, p. 326), and in his book length study History and Spirit, he noted
that “there is much more to spirituality than religion,” and that “each religion is an
institutionalisation of spirit, which means that it is less than fully spiritual” (1991, p. 5).
The 3rd wave of challenges to persistent reductionist attitudes to spirit and its
historical systemization as religion (Kovel, 1988/1985) includes characteristics of the 1st 2
waves with the Eastern religion component of the 1st, begun in Romain Rolland’s
influences and arguments, continuing. In the 2nd wave, Fromm’s collaborative work with
D.T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1970/1960, 1960) presaged an
expanding Buddhist component, especially with the work of Coltart in Britain, and Eigen
(e.g., 1993, 1998, 1998) and Epstein (e.g., 1990, 1995, 1995) in America. Further Eastern,
and especially Indian/Hindu, influence is present in differing ways in the work of Kakar
(1982/1978, 1984, 1991, 1991), Kurtz (1992), and Roland (1989/1988, 1996). Kovel, like
Fromm in the 2nd wave, previously a psychoanalyst and Marxist, contributed some major
work to the groundswell of the current wave. The dual training of psychoanalysis and
Christian religious ministries, seen in Pfister in the 1st wave and Guntrip as a Congrega-
tional minister in the 2nd, is represented among others in the 3rd by especially Symington,
a former priest, and Meissner, who remains a Catholic priest.
Ana-Maria Rizzuto, known especially for her empirical work on the god concept
(1981/1979), has thrown further light on Freud’s stand on religion through her use of
previously inaccessible archives (Rizzuto, 1998). As part of a larger nonempirical project,
Meissner (1984) extended Rizzuto’s work using Erikson’s 1958 terminology, also later
taken up by Symington (1993), of “primitive” and “mature” religions. Meissner added a
Judaeo-Christian “sketch” of stages of religious development. Meissner’s differentiation
between the use of beliefs as a part of individual psychopathology, and “pathogenicity in
belief systems” themselves (1992, 1996, 1996) echoes and extends Pfisters’ 1928 concept
138 SIMMONDS

of “pathological forms of religion” in a way which is clinically useful (see Simmonds,

2004, 2005). Meissner also provided a careful consideration of Freud’s usage of the
concepts of delusion and illusion, noting that Freud used illusion to refer to “derivation
from wishes” and specifies how Freud blurred this distinction when he discussed religious
illusions (1996, p. 246).
The historical challenges to a routinely reductive view of spirituality and religion from
within psychoanalysis are an important context for reading the many papers now being
published on religion and spirituality and health, spirituality and psychotherapy, and
increasingly, spirituality and psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalysis took an avid part
in espousing a scientistic worldview and contributed to the denigration of spiritual
interests, and in that way, the growth of a materialistic mind-set, it can be seen that
throughout its history there have been thoughtful dissenting voices from within psycho-
analysis forming 3 waves of challenge. Freud’s unremittingly reductionist attitude in his
attempts to circumscribe what can be regarded as religious and spiritual, and his polar-
ization of psychoanalysis and religion was challenged directly by some of his friends and
contemporaries. The reductionist attitude was then disputed by some of the British
psychoanalysts, as discussed above, and by some notable European immigrants to Amer-
ica, before the current wave, whose momentum is swelling to a sea change.7

7
The word “seachange” is usually taken to mean a major transformation or fundamental
change.

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