On another occasion, he refers to feeling ‘more alive’ than at any other time in his life. Unfortunately, Byrd became ill, poisoned by the fumes of a faulty stove. The latter part of his account is largely concerned with his fight against physical weakness rather than with his oceanic, mystical experience. But in spite of the nearly fatal outcome of his experience, Byrd, four years after his ordeal was over, was able to write:
I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values … Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more peace.7
What Byrd is describing is a mystical experience of unity with the universe which is familiar to those who have read similar accounts furnished by religious adepts. As William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience,
This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.8
In his paper Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud refers to the correspondence which he had with Romain Rolland, to whom he had sent his book dismissing religion, The Future of an Illusion. Rolland complained that Freud had not understood the true source of religious sentiments, which Rolland affirmed to be ‘a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, “oceanic” Freud states that he can find no trace of any such feeling in himself. He goes on to say that what Rolland was describing was ‘a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole’.9
Freud proceeds to compare this feeling with the height of being in love, in which a man may feel that he is one with his beloved. As might be expected, Freud regards the oceanic feeling as a regression to an earlier state: that of the infant at the breast, at a period before the infant has learned to distinguish his ego from the external world. According to Freud, this is a gradual process.
He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time – among them what he desires most of all, his mother’s breast – and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help. In this way, there is for the first time set over against the ego an ‘object’, in the form of something which exists ‘outside’ and which is only forced to appear by a special action.10
Freud is not impressed with Rolland’s claim that the oceanic feeling is the source of religious sentiments. Freud claimed that man’s need for religion originated with the infant’s sense of helplessness: ‘I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.’11 However, he admits that the oceanic feeling may have become connected with religion at a later stage, and surmises that ‘oneness with the universe’ is
a first attempt at a religious consolation, as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the external world.12
Although we are all subject to self-deception and to a variety of wish-fulfilling illusions, Freud’s account of the oceanic feeling and its meaning is less than satisfactory. It seems a more important experience than he admits. Defensive strategies and escapist wish-fulfilments generally appear superficial and partially inauthentic even to those who are employing them. But those who have experienced the states of mind recorded by Byrd and by William James record them as having had a permanent effect upon their perception of themselves and of the world; as being the profoundest moments of their existence. This is true both of those who have felt the sense of unity with the universe and of those who have felt the sense of unity with a beloved person.
Freud was right in seeing a close similarity between these two varieties of unity, but wrong in dismissing them as merely regressive. Such feelings are intensely subjective, and are hardly susceptible of measurement or scientific scrutiny. But to feel totally at one with another person, or totally at one with the universe, are such deep experiences that, although they may be transient, they cannot be dismissed as mere evasions or defences against unwelcome truths.
It is certainly possible that the oceanic feeling may be related to early infantile experience of unity with the mother. Merging of subject and object, of the self with Nature or with a beloved person, may be a reflection of the original unity with the mother with which we all begin life and from which we gradually become differentiated as separate entities. But Freud, perhaps because he himself denies ever having had such an experience, treats it as illusory; whilst those who describe ecstatic feelings of unity usually portray them as more intensely real than any other feelings which they can recall.
Ecstatic experiences of unity are sometimes connected with an acceptance of, or even a wish for, death. Wagner, who idealized erotic passion as the prototype of ecstatic unity, ends The Flying Dutchman with the redemption of the wanderer by Senta’s love and suicide. The original stage directions demand that the transfigured couple shall be seen rising toward heaven in the glow of the setting sun above the wreck of the Dutchman’s ship. Götterdämmerung, the last of the four operas which comprise The Ring of the Nibelung, ends with Brünnhilde mounting her horse and leaping into the flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre to join him in death. Tristan und Isolde ends with the Liebestod; with Isolde expiring in ecstasy on the corpse of Tristan. Wagner himself wrote of this:
one thing alone left living: desire, desire unquenchable, longing forever rehearing itself – a fevered craving; one sole redemption – death, surcease of being, the sleep that knows no waking! … Its power spent, the heart sinks back to pine of its desire – desire without attainment; for each fruition sows the seeds of fresh desire, till in its final lassitude the breaking eye beholds a glimmer of the highest bliss: it is the bliss of quitting life, of being no more, of last redemption into that wondrous realm from which we stray the furthest when we strive to enter it by fiercest force. Shall we call it death? Or is it not night’s wonder world, whence – as the story says – an ivy and a vine sprang up in locked embrace o’er Tristan and Isolde’s grave?13
In his book Beyond Endurance, Glin Bennet describes the oceanic feelings of being at one with oneself and with the universe which accompany solitary journeys. The search for such experiences constitutes one reason for such journeys; but they may carry with them the temptation of suicide. Bennet quotes the case of Frank Mulville, a single-handed sailor who, in the Caribbean, had an overwhelming desire to look back at his beautiful yacht, and let himself over the side in order to do so. The sight so inspired him that he was seriously tempted to let go the rope and merge himself for ever with the sea.14
Bennet gives another example of the same danger which was recorded by Christiane Ritter. She spent a number of days entirely alone in a hut in the north-western part of Spitzbergen, when her husband and his companion were away hunting. She described a variety of illusions and hallucinations, including a feeling that she was somehow identified with the moonlight. She had a dream of water flowing under the ice which seemed to be enticing her. After being alone for nine days, she did not dare venture out of the hut.15
Keats captures both ecstasy and its link with death in his Ode to a Nightingale’.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to the,