Jones, J.W. (2001). Hans Loewald: The Psychoanalyst as Mystic. Psychoanal. Rev., 88:793-809.       

(2001). Psychoanalytic Review, 88:793-809

Hans Loewald: The Psychoanalyst as Mystic

James W. Jones, PsyD, Ph.D.

In the recent discussion of psychoanalysis and religion, the work of Hans

Loewald has played an increasing role (Finn, 1992; Jones, 1991; Leavy, 1988;

Rothenberg, 1997). While agreeing that Loewald's theories have much to

contribute to the psychoanalytic understanding of religion, this article will argue

that, at a deeper level, Loewald's psychoanalytic theorizing has profound

structural affinities with a fundamentally mystical vision of life and that Loewald's

metapsychology represents a (conscious or unconscious) translation of a mystical

attitude toward life into traditional psychoanalytic language.

Hans Loewald was born in Germany in 1906. His father died while his mother

was carrying him, so he never knew his father. His mother, a gifted musician,

consoled herself by playing Beethoven on the piano with Hans in the crib next to

her. Thus he grew up in a world surrounded by the sound of the classical music.

He studied philosophy–his “first love” he called it–at the university. He worked

with Martin Heidegger and then irrevocably repudiated him when Heidegger allied

himself with the Nazi party. Still, the influence of Heidegger was enormous.

Heidegger had developed his own philosophy of language that focused on the

evocative power of words–their sound and the lineage of associations that follow

them–rather than only on the denotative function of language as Anglo-American

philosophy had done. Heidegger spoke of language as “the house of being”

(quoted in Robinson, 1963). Approached correctly, language disclosed a

transcendental realm of Dasein, the ground of human

—————————————

I wish to thank James Dittes, Anne H. Smith, and Elizabeth Loewald for their

encouragement of this project.

existence1. We might translate Heidegger's dictum and say that for Loewald,

language is the house of the unconscious, for again and again he recapitulates

the structure of Heidegger's arguments with the unconscious put in the place of

Dasein.

Loewald came to the United States in the 1940s. He did not know Freud, but

he asserted that through his writings Freud was to him “a living presence,”

perhaps much as Loewald's father became a living presence to him through his

mother's words about him (Mitchell, 1998). Loewald saw himself as an

interpreter of Freud and not an innovator. He did not seek to coin a new

psychoanalytic terminology, as did Winnicott or Kohut, for example. Rather, he

used Freud's terms but gave them radically new meanings. Thus a superficial

reading of Loewald might make him appear to be a very traditional Freudian, but

a careful reading discloses a radical reinterpreter (examples of this interpretative

issue can be found in Fogel, 1991; Kaywin, 1993). Nowhere is that clearer than

in his psychoanalytic approach to religion and mysticism.

For example, Loewald addresses one of the most basic distinctions in the

Freudian vocabulary–between the unconscious and consciousness–by saying that

etymologically “consciousness means being in a self–reflecting and self-reflected

state. Reflection is a conscire, a knowing together” (1978, p. 13). Rather than the

radical opposition of consciousness and the unconscious, we have a “knowing

together.” But such a “knowing together” of the conscious and the unconscious

demands that the unconscious not simply be chaotic and irrational but rather that

“the id or the dynamic unconscious. I have said is … a mode of experience or

mentation” (1978, p. 15). Here the id becomes a way of knowing, a form of

mentation: It is “a scire, a form of knowing or ‘minding’ (1978, p. 17).

Out of this older and more primary way of knowing develops the ego and the

conscious life, not in opposition to the unconscious but as the realization of

potentials and possibilities latent within the unconscious. Writes Loewald.

If ego and (conscient life mean higher mental organization, in the sense of evolving, then id

would be ego in statu nascendi. The coming into being of higher organization, of a more

complex,

richer mentality, seen as the realization of a potentiality, seems ordained, as it were, by the

laws of evolution. (1978, P. 19)

We mature not by conquering the id but by a “continuous appropriation of the

unconscious levels of functioning” (1978, p. 19).

This leads to a striking reversal of Freud's basic dictum “Wo Es war, soll Ich

werden,” which Loewald translates as “where id was, there shall ego come into

being.” Then he adds, “Too easily and too often ego is equated with rigid,

unmodulated and unyielding rationality. So today we are bound to add: where ego

is, there shall id come into being again to renew the life of ego and of reason”

(1978, p. 16). So in typical Loewald fashion we begin from a classic statement of

Freud's and end, by an etymological restatement, with a meaning that is precisely

the opposite of Freud's. Rather than the ego dominating the id, for Loewald the

“primary process” must remain available to us “to renew the life of ego and of

reason.” Loewald asserts,

It would not do justice, however, to the complexity and richness of human life experience, if

one only stressed the movement toward consciousness and over-looked or neglected the fact

that we are dealing rather with a circularity or interplay between different levels of mentation.

Formulated in terms of appropriation, it looks as if there is a need for conscient appropriation

of unconscious experience as well as a need for re-appropriating conscient modes (and the

corresponding mental contents into unconscious mental activity)-and back again toward

consciousness. What counts is this live communication, a mutual shaping, a reciprocal

conforming, of levels of mentation. The richer a person's mental life is, the more he

experiences on several levels of mentation, the more translation occurs back and forth

between unconscious and conscious experience. To make the unconscious conscious is

onesided. It is the transference between them that makes a human life, that makes life human.

(1978, p. 31)

As opposed to Freud's attempt to keep id and ego, instinct and reason, in

hermetically sealed compartments so that the purity of reason would not be

contaminated by the irrationality of instinct, Loewald insists:

There is no one way street from id to ego. Not only do irrational forces overtake us again and

again; in trying to lose them we

would be lost. The id, the unconscious modes and contents of human experience, should

remain available. If they are in danger of being unavailable–no matter what state of

perfection our “intellect” may have reached–or if there is a danger of no longer responding

to them … [we must find] a way back to them so they can be transformed, and away from a

frozen ego. (1978, p. 22)

This cycle of mental development, arising out of the unconscious and

returning to it again, reveals that the id, or what Loewald calls “the dynamic

unconscious,” is not, as it was for Freud, primarily chaotic and the source of

neurosis. As “a form of knowing, or ‘minding.’” (1978, p. 17) the unconscious has

a rationality all its own. Loewald connects this need for a continual, reciprocal

openness between the conscious and the unconscious, the knowing of the ego

and the knowings of the id, to mysticism and religion when he specifically

mentions mysticism in the context of his discussion of the nature of the id, saying

that

Freud was not a religious man and certainly not a mystic. But one does not have to be a

mystic to remain open to the mysteries of life and human individuality, to the enigmas that

remain beyond all the elucidations of scientific explanation and interpretations. (1978, p. 25)

For both Freud and Loewald, religious experience arises out of the id. This

means that, for Loewald, religious experience carries the potential for a renewal

of a civilization that has grown too rigidly rationalistic and is in need of “a new

level of consciousness, of conscire” (1978, p. 65).

The “minding” of the unconscious displays two characteristics, according to

Loewald. The first is a sense of unity. This begins, of course, from the infant-

caretaker bond that Loewald sees as existing before the establishment of ego-

boundaries. Later, the capacity to make distinctions develops, but all the

dichotomies that make up rational life, such as between inner and outer

experience, or “a host of other distinctions (among them, between past and

present, here and there, physical and psychical) gradually evolves from a kind of

unitary, global experience. This unitary experience may best be called being”

(1978, pp. 35-36). The Heideggerian echoes in this last comment are clear.

He also echoes Hegel, and before Hegel, the voice of Plotinus and the mystical

tradition of the West with its vision of a

primal unity that divides into duality and diversity, which then makes possible

new and more complex levels of individuation, knowing, and reconciliation.

Loewald clearly stands in this tradition when he writes,

the development of preconscious or conscient mentation is based upon a similar splitting

whereby a unitary, unconscious, mental process differentiates so that a mutual responding, an

inner conscire may result…. Splitting, duality, and multiplicity make possible a conscire, a

knowing together. (1978, p. 41)

Loewald follows Freud in calling this primordial, unitary state narcissism, but

again he gives the term a meaning opposite to that of Freud.

Narcissism–to sum up–in my discussion does not refer primarily to love of self in contrast to

love of others, but to that primordial love–mentation which does not structure or divide reality

into poles of inner and outer, subject and object, self and other. (1978, p. 42)

Thus we must “acknowledge the undifferentiating unconscious as a genuine

form of mentation which underlies and unfolds into secondary process mentation

(and remains extant together with it, although concealed by it)” (1978, p. 64). For

Loewald, then, undifferentiated and symbiotic experiences are “genuine forms of

mentation” and not signs of infantilism or psychosis.

The second characteristic of the knowing evoked by the primary process–

besides a sense of unity–is a sense of timelessness. In moments of aesthetic,

sexual, or religious ecstasy, our ordinary, linear sense of time is “overshadowed

or pervaded by the timelessness of the unconscious or primary process” (1978, p.

67). Such “transtemporal” experiences point to a way of knowing that is

“structured or centered differently, that beginning, and ending, temporal

succession and simultaneity, are not a part [of such experiences]. They are

transtemporal in their inner fabric” (1978, p. 68). Loewald goes on to say:

Similar forms of mentation are known to us from ethnopsychological research and studies in

comparative and developmental psychology. They have, among other non-differentiating

features, an atemporal, ahistorical character, as though what we call history and historicity,

as distinguished from myth, begins or is connected

with the differentiated, hierarchical structuring of complex forms of mentation. (1978, p. 37)

Here again Loewald echoes a position articulated by Heidegger: that our sense

of being temporal, historical beings is derived from a more primary nontemporal

and nonhistorical source. As opposed to our common, Western sense of ourselves

as historical beings (a sense probably derived from our Jewish and Christian

heritage), Heidegger (who was more attracted to the Greek than to the Hebrew

side of our Western heritage) argued that the human sense of historicity was a

projection of a more fundamental and timeless ground of existence (Dasein). Here

again Loewald takes over and rearticulates a position of Heidegger's by

substituting the psychoanalytic category of the dynamic unconscious for the

metaphysical category of Dasein, or “being” (Leavy, 1989).

Human existence starts from this timeless, undifferentiated state. Loewald is

critical of Winnicott's developmental model in which the infant is seen as moving

from pure subjectivity into a world of objectivity. “The journey does not start from

the subjective,” Loewald (1988) writes, “it is a journey from a state prior to the

differentiation of subjectivity and objectivity to a state when subjectivity and

objectivity come into being” (p. 72). Loewald describes the infant's world as a

unique state of consciousness that exists prior to either subjectivity or objectivity.

Thus it is “indeterminate” and “ineffable” (1988, p. 72); it is before and beyond

language. (This difference between Loewald and Winnicott is discussed in more

depth in Jones, 1991, and Mitchell, 1998.)

This, then, is Loewald's fundamental vision: not the conquest of the id by the

ego, but rather an ongoing, mutual interpenetration between levels of the mind–

conscious and unconscious, ego and id–which are not inherently antagonistic, but

rather are different ways of knowing.

If, we acknowledge the undifferentiating unconscious as a genuine form of mentation which

underlies and unfolds into secondary process mentation (and remains extant together with it,

although concealed by it), then we regain a more comprehensive perspective–no doubt with

its limitations yet unknown. Such a perspective betokens a new level of consciousness, of

conscire, on

which primary and secondary modes of mentation may be known together. (1978, pp. 64-65)

An echo of this basic theme, here developed more fully in his 1978 Freud

lectures at Yale University, can be found in Loewald's earlier writings. In an

address he gave in 1949, shortly after he came to the United States, he concluded

by saying,

It would seem that the more alive people are (though not necessarily more stable), the

broader their range of ego-reality levels is. Perhaps the so-called fully developed, mature ego

is not one that has become fixated at the presumably highest or latest stage of development,

having left the others behind it, but is an ego that integrates its reality in such a way that the

earlier and deeper levels of ego-reality integration remain alive as dynamic sources of higher

organization. (1980, p. 20)

His is a very rich, complex, and nonreductive understanding of mental life.

In the last of his 1978 lectures (published under the title Psychoanalysis and

the History of the Individual, 1978) Loewald applies this model of the mind

directly to religious experience. He begins in typical fashion with an exegesis of a

text of Freud's, in this case the passage about the “oceanic feeling” from

Civilization and Its Discontents, focusing on Freud's claim that this oceanic

consciousness exists “side by side” with more developed forms of rationality.

Loewald concentrates on this “coexistence” of levels of the mind and, as usual,

comes to a conclusion diametrically opposed to Freud's own.

The range and richness of human life is directly proportional to the mutual responsiveness

between these various mental phases and levels…. While [objective rationality is] a later

development, it limits and impoverishes … the perspective, understanding, and range of

human action, feeling, and thought, unless it is brought back into coordination and

communication with those modes of experience that remain their living source, and perhaps

their ultimate destination. It is not a foregone conclusion that man's objectifying mentation is,

or should be, an ultimate end rather than a component and intermediate phase…. (1978, p.

61)

Conscious reason “limits and impoverishes” existence unless it has access to

the more unitive and intuitive forms of knowing

grounded in the dynamic unconscious. The primary process with its

complementary forms of rationality should be accessible even to the most highly

developed intellect. Sanity consists not in renouncing the primary process but in

remaining open to it.

In arguing thus, Loewald rushes in where Freud refused to go–into the

preoedipal period. In an earlier paper, Loewald staked out this territory in contrast

to Freud and referred back to Freud's Civilization:

In a significant passage in Civilization and its Discontents … Freud confessed his

unwillingness to plunge into the depths of primordial, buried psychological levels of primary

narcissistic or related stages, and investigate them. Much in contrast to the proud and

rebellious motto of The Interpretation of Dreams–Flectere si nequeo superos, Archeronts

movebo-here he exclaims “Let him rejoice who breathes the rosy light of day.” (1980, p. 9)

As we have seen, Loewald dives deeply into the preoedipal narcissistic depths

and returns with a pluralistic vision of many ways of knowing and being. He

follows Romain Rolland in linking religious experience to the oceanic feeling and

misstates Freud's position in the process. Freud, Loewald says, “did not deny

Rolland's claim, which to me is valid, that such an ego feeling … may be the root

of religious experience” (1978, p. 68). But Freud (1930) said clearly that

Rolland's claim “does not seem compelling…. The derivation of religious needs

from the infant's helplessness and longing for the father aroused by it seems to

me incontrovertible…. The part played by the oceanic feeling … is ousted from a

place in the foreground” (S.E. 21, p. 72). Loewald had even quoted this passage

in his 1949, lecture but seems to have forgotten it in 1978 in his drive to derive

his position from Freud's.

The primary reality, then, parallels Rolland's idea of the oceanic feeling.

(Loewald repeatedly cites the preceding passage from Civilization and Its

Discontents; beside the passages cited, see also Loewald, 1988, pp. 76-79.)

Loewald envisions the oceanic consciousness as the source of positive and

potentially corrective experiences. Religious experience, then, keeps us open to

ways

of knowing and being rooted in the primary process with its unitary and timeless

sensibility.

If we are willing to admit that instinctual life and religious life both betoken forms of

experience that underlie and go beyond conscious and personalized forms of mentation–

beyond those forms of mental life, of ordering our world, on which we stake so much–then we

may be at a point where psychoanalysis can begin to contribute in its own way to the

understanding of religious experience, instead of ignoring or rejecting its genuine validity or

treating it as a mark of human immaturity. (1978, p. 73)

In these lectures on Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual, Loewald

describes how conscious rationality arises out from but must remain in contact

with the dynamic unconscious. Religious experience is here affirmed as a carrier

of these primal and necessary encounters with the realm of unity and

timelessness. Ten years later, Loewald wrote his book on sublimation where he

again returned to this theme that runs throughout his published writings from

beginning to end. As in his first published American lecture, he cites Freud's

discussion of Rolland's oceanic consciousness and goes on to argue that religious

experiences are not simply unstructured eruptions of the unconscious for “the

experience of unity [with the primary process] is restored, or at least evoked, in

the form of symbolic linkage” (1988, p. 45). This is possible because the dynamic

unconscious is structured and religious symbols can carry or express this

structure of timelessness and unity. If the primary process was simply chaotic, it

could not be symbolized. Thus the dynamic unconscious gives rise to symbols and

ritual actions that can express this structure in the conscious world.

For Loewald, encounters with the dynamic unconscious are not unstructured

eruptions of psychic chaos that disrupt for better (in the case of Julia Kristeva) or

worse (in the case of Freud) the neat processes of linear reason. Like Loewald,

Kristeva has a two-level theory of mind: what she calls the “semiotic” and the

“symbolic.” The “symbolic order” (a term shared with Jacques Lacan) is the

domain of morality and culture. Paralleling Freud's view of civilization, the

“symbolic order” is the social world that demands the renunciation of desire as

the price of belonging. It

is the patriarchal system built around the law of the father and his prohibitions.

Beneath the “symbolic order” lies the “semiotic”: a prelinguistic reality having

its origin in the infant's relationship to the mother and her body. The semiotic

breaks forth in emotional states, dreams, and religious experience to disrupt the

tidy world of patriarchal rationality (Kristeva, 1987). Such interruptions can

represent psychosis and horrific distortions of life but they can also make space

for creativity and art, as well as mystical enlightenment. For Freud, of course, the

intrusion of the unconscious is also disruptive, but, for Freud, that can only lead to

psycho-pathology.

By contrast, for Loewald, the dynamic unconscious is not unstructured or

necessarily disruptive, unless the forms of rational consciousness are too rigid, as

they often are in modern, excessively rational, individuals.

This primordial type of experience is not unique to the mother-infant matrix. It, or its direct

derivatives, are encountered in various forms in adult experience. But there they are

ordinarily over-shadowed by more highly organized forms of experience and are often denied

or broken off due to the development of anxiety. Such experiences are often felt as threats to

individuality, to the ego's cohesion and stability, but they may also lead to blissful exaltation.

They seem to be involved in truly creative work. (1978, p. 37)

Because the dynamic unconscious has its own structure, encounters with it

are, in William James's words, “noetic,” bringing with them an authentic way of

knowing the self and the world distinct from the knowledge gained by formal

reasoning. Religious experience (for example) is, for Loewald, a genuine form of

knowledge.

Through symbols, ritual gestures and other forms of expression, religion

evokes a connection with the primary process in a way that differentiation is not

lost. We experience our relationship to the primary process in moments of

timelessness and unity in such a way that we do not lose our capacity for

secondary process (1988, chapter 4). Religious symbols and experiences are

neither purely the product of the unconscious (like a dream) or of objective

consciousness, but rather are influenced by both

levels of the mind. Loewald is advocating neither living entirely out of the primary

process, a “spaced out” (as my students used to say) life of continual merger, nor

a life of frozen rationality alone, but rather a life in which the “early magic of

thought, gesture, world, image, emotion, fantasy” become united with ordinary

experience. The life of religion in which symbols, rituals, altered states of

consciousness exist within institutions, philosophical systems, and moral

teachings can exemplify this delicate dialectic: “a new level of consciousness, of

conscire, on which primary and secondary modes of mentation may be known

together” (1978, p. 65). Religious experience, then, can, in the concluding words

of the book on sublimation, carry our

return, on a higher level of organization, to the early magic of thought, gesture, word, image,

emotion, fantasy, as they become united again with what in ordinary nonmagical experience

they only reflect, recollect, represent or symbolize…. a mourning of lost original oneness and

a celebration of oneness regained. (1988, p. 81)

Reformulating the primary process in positive terms enables Loewald to speak

for “the general validity or importance in human life of the different spheres and

forms of experience” (1978, p. 71). Thus he can appreciate religious experience in

ways that Freud–with his negative view of the primary process–never could. For

Loewald, religious experience is transformative in part because it enables us to

know ourselves and the world in a new way–a way characterized by a sense of

unity and timelessness in which our ordinary distinctions, differentiations, and

sense of time disappear. This way of knowing is implicit in our nature but is

seldom realized in our ordinary experience, especially in modern culture, which

Loewald sees as being too much under the hegemony of linear reasoning.

This critique of an overly objectifying approach to human life (another

Heideggerian theme) runs throughout Loewald's writings. He notes that

psychoanalysis grew from the soil of scientific empiricism, but comments that

The mechanistic view of nature in scientific materialism carries objectivism to an extreme

whereby subjectivity… is entirely eliminated from the world. Psychoanalytic theory still

struggles with

this heritage but is in the forefront of efforts to break the hegemony of the modern scientific

natura naturata interpretation of reality. (1988, p. 79)

He also insists that we must “remain open to the mysteries of life and human

individuality, to the enigmas that remain beyond all the elucidations of scientific

explanation and interpretation” (1978, p. 25). And in a striking comment he goes

beyond simply pointing out the disciplinary limits of mechanistic science to hint at

a direct affirmation of the religious form of life: “I believe it is timely to question

the assumption, handed down to us from the nineteenth century, that the

scientific approach to the world and the self represents a higher and more mature

evolutionary stage of man than the religious way of life” (1980, p. 228).

In Loewald, then, we have an essentially mystical vision expressed in

psychoanalytic terms. He has found a way to speak psychoanalytically of the

timeless, spaceless, unitary ground of existence, beyond language, from which

the individual emerges and to which he or she returns. This ground of existence

cannot be spoken of or known about in a subject–object way. But it can be

experienced in states that go beyond the subject–object dichotomy.

Philosophers and theologians have spoken of the nunc slans, the abiding now, the instant that

knows no temporal articulation, where distinctions between now, earlier, and later have fallen

away or have not arisen … unique and matchless, complete in themselves and somehow

containing all there is in experience. As experience augments and grows in an individual's life

course, these instants, in time but not of time, contain more and more meaning which is

poured into the nunc stans in such a way that temporal and other articulating differentiations

are dissolved or become condensed into oneness. What was lived through earlier and later,

and the mental categories of secondary process mentation–all fall away, collapsing into an

instant, into that one experience which then stands for all experience, although only “for one

instant.” (1978, p. 65)

In writing so powerfully of this “eternal now,” it is hard to believe that Loewald

was not writing from his own experience. (Loewald made a similar point, quoting

scholastic philosophy on

the nunc stans and Freud on the oceanic feeling in an earlier paper from 1971;

see 1980, pp. 141-142.)

Religious experience for Loewald is valued not simply as a supplement to

rational living or as a momentary aesthetic release from the world of objectivity

(as Winnicott sometimes seems to imply). Like William James, Loewald sees

religious experience as “noetic,” that is, it gives us authentic knowledge of reality.

Not simply a feeling, it is rather a way of knowing. For Loewald, religious

experience is a way of knowing ourselves and the world under the rubric of unity

and timelessness. Neither a transitory peak experience (as described by James or

Maslow) nor a continuing metaphysical insight into what is ultimately real,

mysticism, rather, represents an ongoing reciprocal interaction between the

timeless and unifying realm of the unconscious and the realm of ordinary

perception. Reason itself must be transformed by continual reconnections with

the dynamic unconscious and the forms of knowing found there. (For more on the

epistemological transformation of contemporary psychoanalysis, see Jones, 1996,

1992.)

Loewald's way of making psychoanalysis more open to religion by

reconceptualizing the unconscious has a long history in the psychology of religion.

It goes back at least as far as William James (1982), who writes in The Varieties

of Religious Experience that “we have in the fact that the conscious person is

continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive

content of religious experience which, it seems to me is literally and objectively

true as far as it goes” (p. 515).

The major proponent of this baptism of the unconscious, of course, was Carl

Jung, with his doctrine of the collective unconscious and the universality of

archetypes. For Jung, like James, the unconscious is greater than the individual

ego and we do not know its boundaries. The unconscious, according to this line of

thought, might very well be infinite and could easily represent the infinite to

which religion often points.

Loewald does not go as far as Jung in transforming metapsychology into

metaphysics, but like Jung he both roots religious experience in the unconscious

and reframes the unconscious into something positive and “higher” (in some

sense) so that

what emerges from the unconscious is a new way of knowing: self and world

experienced as unified and timeless.

The first move, rooting religion in the unconscious, goes back to Freud as well

as James. In the critique of religion under-taken by Freud and other classical

analysts, religion is simultaneously debunked and also transformed into a kind of

psychology, that is, made into another window on the unconscious. For example,

for Freud, in The Future of an Illusion, religious beliefs provide the analyst with

insight into the nature of infantile narcissism and its refusal to accept the realities

of death, nature, and social constraint. This revisioning of religion into a tacit form

of psychology is possible for Freud because of the close connection between

religion and the unconscious or id.

The difference as to religion between Freud on one hand and Loewald and

Jung on the other derives not from a theoretical rooting of religion in the

unconscious (a move they all share), but rather from their radically different

understandings of the unconscious. For Freud, the unconscious is a cauldron of

antisocial drives and infantile wishes. For Jung, on the other hand, the

unconscious is a source of greater wisdom and healing, and for Loewald it is the

source of a crucial mode of knowing the world. So for Jung and Loewald, religion,

with its connection to the unconscious, represents a major mode of healing and a

vehicle for authentic and transformative knowledge.

Such an approach has the advantage, as James points out, of remaining in

continuity with a recognized element in psychoanalytic theory–the unconscious–

while conceiving of it in rather untraditional ways. But James and Jung create a

kind of psychological ontology in which the unconsciousness becomes the

universal ground from which individual selfhood emerges. We have here a

theology in psychological dress.

James's and Jung's model is structurally like a theology in that it claims there

is a power transcending the individual ego which brings healing and wholeness,

that we cannot transform ourselves by reliance on ego rationality alone and, in

addition, this model offers new objects of belief (like the Jung's collective

unconscious or James's higher mind). When Jung and James propose new objects

of belief that might compete with the contents of more traditional religious

creeds, they create something

that is neither a religion nor a psychology as traditionally conceived, but is more

like a type of synthesis of both. It is a kind of psychotheology.

Loewald (and Winnicott) do not go as far as James and Jung in this

psychotheological direction. Rather, they stay more narrowly focused on the

immediacies of religious experience. Both emphasize that human life is

impoverished if it is lived wholly in the realm of “objectifying mentation.” Linear

rationality alone constricts life. Episodes that transcend objectivity are necessary

for “the fully human life.”

Loewald moves away from Freud's sole reliance on linear rationality and looks

positively on the potentially transforming impact of ecstatic religious experience

like that described by traditional mystical literature. He provides psychoanalysis

and religion with a way, more in continuity with the language (if not the meaning)

of Freud's work, to affirm that the fully human life requires that discursive reason

be supplemented and complemented by more ecstatic, unitive, and ineffable

ways of knowing.

Freud claimed that psychoanalysis had no philosophical assumptions except

those shared with all the sciences–a claim that Oskar Pfister (Meng & Freud,

1963) challenged even in Freud's own time. Freud's claim resulted in

psychoanalysis being linked to a positivistic philosophy of science for most of its

history. Loewald demonstrates that a Freudian metapsychology can, however,

coexist with a much more metaphysical quasi-Hegelian or Heidegarian

philosophy, one much more open to the spiritual dimension of human life.

Beyond that, the deep structure of Loewald's thought parallels a classical

mystical vision. Conscious life emerges from a unitary and timeless source,

individuates itself, and then returns to union with its source at that higher and

more complex level of relatedness we call love. Early in his American career, in

1952, Loewald expressed precisely this vision in a talk given at a conference on

“Christianity and Psychoanalysis” in Washington, DC. Toward the end of his talk

on “Psychoanalysis and Modern Views on Human Existence and Religious

Experience,” Loewald (1953) said, in words that are a fitting conclusion to this

paper:

As the unconscious becomes transformed into ego-freedom … the images and concepts of this

relatedness [to the dynamic unconscious] also change into higher forms. The deepest inner

knowledge of such relatedness is the experience of relation to a universal being…. The mature

individual, being able to reach back into his deep origins and roots of being, finds in himself

the oneness from where he stems, and understands this in his freedom as his bond of love with

God. (p. 13)

Note

1 The German word Dasein is virtually impossible to translate. A compound of sein,

meaning “being” and da, meaning “there,” it is a central category in Heidegger's

philosophy. His goal was to distinguish the realm of Dasein, which stands for the domain of

human experience with its consciousness and intentionality, from the realm of inert

physical objects. But Dasein not only represents the domain of human existence as

distinguished from stones and tables, it also points to a transcendental ground or source of

these uniquely human characteristics that is referred to as simply “being.”

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