Civilizations and its Discontents

The Letter That Started It All

A French novelist wrote Freud a letter. The novelist was Romain Rolland — winner of the Nobel Prize, friend of Gandhi, mystic of a kind Freud distrusted. Rolland had read *The Future of an Illusion*, Freud's 1927 demolition of organized religion, and he wanted to say: you've missed the point. You attacked the doctrines, but doctrines are not where religion lives. Religion lives in a feeling. He called it the oceanic feeling — a sensation of limitless, unbounded oneness with the universe. No belief required. No promise of heaven. Just the felt sense that the self dissolves into something larger and older than itself.

Freud begins his last great book by admitting that he cannot find this feeling anywhere in himself. He is a scientist, and the absence of the datum bothers him; he refuses to fake it. So he does what he always does, which is to ask what such a feeling would mean if it existed.

His answer is one of the most beautiful turns in his work. The infant, Freud says, does not yet know where its body ends and its mother begins. It cries, and food arrives. It is hungry, and warmth comes. There is no edge to the self because there is no self yet — only a smear of sensation and need. Slowly, painfully, the ego learns to draw a line. What is outside it can be lost; what is inside cannot. The infant casts off everything painful and clings to everything pleasurable, and out of this sorting it builds a pure pleasure-ego, surrounded by a hostile not-self that has to be negotiated with from then on.

But the early state, the all-inclusive ego, leaves a residue. Freud's hypothesis is that the oceanic feeling is the survival of this earliest condition, alive underneath the adult mind, occasionally bursting through. The grown-up brain contains the infant brain the way a city contains its older versions.