Abstract
In Legacies of the Occult, Marsha Aileen Hewitt combines her clinical experience as a psychoanalyst with her scholarly study of both primary and secondary literatures to explore the range and scope of ‘spiritual or mystical psychoanalysis” (xiii). The terms are used interchangeably. Her intent is to provide a psychoanalytic understanding of significant strains of American psychoanalysis that are compatible with mystical forms of religion and with paranormal science. The result is a critical study of “parapsychoanalysis’ (xii).
Psychoanalysis itself has long been exiled from American psychological science that seeks to cut any lingering tie to Freud or acknowledge him as a scientist. Hewitt reminds the reader that psychoanalysis has moved well beyond Freud’s founding views. Oedipus Rex is a form of psycho-mythology providing meaningful insights into our shared humanity (6–7). Her systematic effort throughout the text is to use psychoanalysis itself to articulate the psychic processes that give rise to experience, whether of patients or theorists rather than to accept or reject the ontological status of the object of the experience (90). Psychoanalysis and religion share in trying to understand our common humanity through second order discourse, once removed from the experience (xii). Hewitt refers to Jeffrey Kepal’s wide body of work placing parapsychology within religious studies. Contrary to views of secularization, we are becoming not less religious but differently religious (125). How different is explored in terms of two incommensurate views of the nature of consciousness: Freud’s and Meyers and James’s.
Freud’s unconscious is qualitatively different from what Hewitt notes is the Frederick Meyers-William James subconsciousness that influenced Carl Jung and is integral to the many versions of New Age spirituality along with spiritually oriented healers (19–21). It is widely known that Freud was committed to the view that psychoanalysis was a science incompatible with religion in any form. Hewitt notes that Freud is better viewed as “irreligious” rather than as an atheist (10). His conception of the unconscious was purely within the boundaries of natural science. It contains both repressed desires of the individual and phylogenetic memories of the past—all that could be conscious. Some repressed individual desires can be made conscious through psychoanalysis. However, Freud was aware that Meyers believed in a subconscious or subliminal consciousness for which phrases such as “field subjectivities, extended minds, and unseen worlds” (22) pair with phrases such as “the eternal life of the external mind” (30) making the Meyers-James subconscious a truly mystical psychology. (Hewitt notes how Freud had already rejected this view of Jung’s collective consciousness, heavily influenced by Meyers- James. Jung used analytic psychology rather than psychoanalytics to distinguish what both Freud and Jung wanted to be known as distinct psychologies (11–16). Freud refused to give any credence to religious ontological claims; Jung, influenced by Meyers-James, endorsed them.
This would be no major issue of compromise here except for one, telepathy.
Telepathy or the transmission of thoughts from one person to another had ontological implications for both Meyers and James. If persons could be shown to communicate telepathically then perhaps so could the dead with the living. Freud’s interest in telepathy was more basic and physical. His metaphor was to find the equivalent to the telephone wire to explain how individuals could communicate at a distance. He sought the psychic equivalent of the pre-cellular telephone (28). However, mystical psychoanalysts sought to focus on such things as telepathic “presencing,” a term coined by Ofra Eshel for the potential that lies deep within the analyst/patient interaction and can manifest itself telepathically (164). No phone needed.
Hewitt’s often brief but profound summary of select mystical psychoanalysts is where her book becomes a roadmap to otherwise hidden territories too vast to cover in depth. Her analysis of James Grotsetin’s Bion as the “Messiah” of spiritual psychoanalysis gives but a peek behind a dark curtain and suggests the experience of the noetic, ineffable, and transformative power Wilfred Bion coined as “O.” It is a term “notoriously difficult to define” (161). Only mystics come close to O. It can never be fully known but is essential for both science and religion (81–85). Wilfred Bion became Grotstetin’s analyst. Grotstein’s idealized view of Bion led him to view mystical psychoanalysis to seek the realization of O as the achievement of the transcendent position (79–87). Mystical psychoanalysis ends in the facilitation of the experience of O.
Efforts to provide scientific proof for psychoanalysis are at the base of American psychological science and its rejection of Freud. Scientific support for spiritual psychoanalysis comes from two major sources:
First, there is paranormal science. Hewitt does a good job summarizing the work of Elizabeth Mayer, the psychoanalyst who had her own paranormal experience, and arguably presents the strongest case documenting the scientific evidence for parapsychology (95–102). (Psychoanalysts can have a field day with Mayer’s defense of Meyers! Throughout Hewitt’s text, brilliant but brief psychoanalytic analyses are provided that enliven conceptual analyses being discussed.)
Second, spiritual psychoanalysts are fond of quoting results from quantum physics to defend a quantum psychoanalysis (75–77). Hewitt rightly notes this appeal to quantum physics is largely a metaphorical defense, done by those unlikely to know the depth of the theories nor how to do the math. Psychoanalysts seeking quantum explanations for unconscious thought transference are reminded of the quantum physicist John Bell’s tongue in cheek reference to a person who always wears one pink and one green sock. “If you see a foot with a green sock, you know the other foot has a pink sock. But no signal passes from one foot to the other” (113). Hewitt suggests that spiritual psychoanalysts need to step back from providing scientific proofs for its intuitions and instead see where it stands in the history of the religious psychology of religion (xii–xiv, her italics).
Among psychological scientists who dismiss Freud’s commitment to science, there is time for reconsideration. James was an active member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR); Freud was an honorary member. When Freud decided to present his view of the unconscious as opposed to the subconscious of Meyers-James, he deliberately accepted an invitation from SPR to deliver an address to be published in its Proceedings for the Society of Psychical Research. This was to distinguish the unconscious of natural science from any mystical linkage to the subconscious and the mysticisms of Jung and Meyers-James (24–26). However, the irony is that in accepting telepathy, or unconscious communication, Freud was hoisted on his own petard. Resolutely irreligious and refusing any ontological status to the object of religious beliefs, telepathy provided the necessary bridge to psychoanalysis as a modern psychological spirituality (xiii) and the continued rejection by American psychological science of not only Freud, but also any claim that psychoanalysis is a scientific psychology.
Neither psychology nor any of its versions has ever been able to distance itself from religion. Those who believe they have risk are ignoring Bion’s O that applies to science and religion equally. Hewitt makes fleeting reference to the Frankfurt school, and the dialectic at the heart of Enlightenment reason they shared with Freud. The appeal to Enlightenment reason masks a terror that consumes itself in “heartless expansion of instrumental reason driven by fantasies of mastery over nature and freedom from irrationality” (5). This may not be progress, but a mass psychotic delusion that “increased domination and thanatological reason hold the promise of freedom” (5).
Hewitt reveals a depth of experience based upon listening to real persons and a breadth of reading in both psychological science and psychoanalysis that is full of wisdom. This is a brief book, which provides lasting and pleasantly lingering thoughts. In the end, we are all using stories, myths, science, and religions to seek an understanding of a common humanity in which our own uniqueness is embedded. In this, we are not alone in dreaming our dreams or thinking our thoughts. Our stories may be more than sufficient. Are they true? Yes. No need to not ask how.
