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When my wife and I were first married, I sometimes noticed that when I held her it was as if I were holding myself. The normal boundaries separating me from the world around me did not seem to apply. This was not a full merger of selves. I did not think her thoughts, nor she mine. We later went through the usual process of sorting out our respective identities in the marriage. Nonetheless, I had discovered that the "one flesh" described in the Book of Genesis and invoked in marriage ceremonies was more than a charming metaphor.
I now also understand that when two become one flesh, it is not simply the coming together of separate selves to form a matched set. In the creation story, God causes a deep sleep to fall upon the man and creates a woman from his rib. As Adam says, she is "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." Adam and Eve began as one flesh, divided into two beings and then became one again. This process of separating and coming together has continued generation upon generation, from the cellular level on up.
An infant begins life by experiencing himself as one being with his mother and only gradually develops an autonomous self. So the question becomes whether our original sense of oneness with the world or our later separateness is our true condition. This was the crux of the debate between Sigmund Freud and his friend Romain Rolland that Freud described in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud, of course, was an atheist and had sent Rolland a copy of his monograph on religion entitled The Future of an Illusion. That earlier work had characterized religion as a kind of collective Oedipal psychodrama in which mankind’s childish feelings of dependency were assuaged by an omnipotent deity. Rolland told Freud he agreed with his assessment of religion but suggested its true source was in a “peculiar feeling” that he himself was never without, “a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic.’”
Perhaps in deference to his friend, Freud was prepared to accept the validity of this “oceanic feeling,” even though he acknowledged that he had never had such an experience himself. He did not abandon his Oedipal view of religion but added some refinements to account for mystical experience. He regarded the oceanic feeling as a regression to an immature ego state in which an infant has not yet differentiated itself from its mother. Lacking ego boundaries, the infant experiences no sense of separation from the external world. The “restoration of limitless narcissism,” as Freud described it, results in a subjective experience of oneness with the universe when this ego state is reconstituted at a later stage of life.
Freud correctly perceived a connection between Rolland's "oceanic feeling" and the lack of ego boundaries among very young children. However, far from being a "restoration of limitless narcissism," mystical experience is more nearly the opposite. A narcissist views the world solely as a reflection of self, whereas the mystic regards the self as an illusion. To see the world without ego boundaries is to see it unbounded, as a child would. This is why Jesus told his disciples that "whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it."
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Mark 10:13-16
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