Exploring Freud’s Resistance to The Oceanic Feeling

Bibliographic Data

ID8336295
AuthorsSarah Ackerman (0000-0002-6833-2402, corresponding author), Mitchell Wilson (0000-0002-8681-136X)
Year2017
Volume65
Issue1
Pages9-31
Publication date2017-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0651 • E-ISSN: 1941-2460
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0003065117690352
PMID28899140
OpenAlexW2586789358
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited3

This paper takes up Romain Rolland’s description of a nearly universal “oceanic feeling” and considers Freud’s avowed disinterest in this concept. Herman Melville elaborates and expands the concept of the oceanic in the text of Moby Dick, juxtaposing Ishmael’s oceanic reverie while up high on the masthead with Ahab’s focused determination to destroy Moby Dick. Melville’s extension of the concept recasts the oceanic as an aspect of Freud’s recommendations about the necessary conditions for psychoanalytic process, inviting a comparison of going to sea with going into analysis. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents allows for further thoughts about the danger Freud recognizes in this feeling, a way that the oceanic feeling may be an expression of the death instinct. Together, these explorations point in the direction both of a centrality of an oceanic experience in psychoanalysis and a recognition of the risks that the oceanic entails, deepening our understanding of the many reasons Freud might have wished to avoid it

Aesthetics · Civilization · Epistemology · Extension (predicate logic) · Feeling · Id, ego and super-ego · Instinct · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Resistance (ecology) · Computer Science · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology · Travel Writing and Literature

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