A Cognitive Psychology of Mystical and Altered-State Experience

Abstract

Traditional approaches to the psychology of religious-mystical and altered-state experience have divided between more psychoanalytic and psychiatric views that associate such experience with “schizophrenia,” “regression,” and “primitivity” and the more intuitive Jungian and transpersonal-humanistic assertions of a “higher” path of development (“self-actualization”). By considering the full range of empirical reports from mystical-meditational, psychedelic, and schizophrenic settings, a “positive” cognitive psychology of the abstract symbolic processes underlying such states is developed—potentially reconciling those divergent approaches, explaining the place of these states at the center of culture in “primitive” and classical societies, and casting a unique light on the normally masked core of semantic processes. Features of the abstract, recombinatory, cross-modal operations posited by Neisser, Arnheim, Mead, and Geschwind as criterial for human symbolic capacity are located within the varieties of altered-state report and Rudolf Otto's phenemonology of the numinous. However, such an analysis only becomes powerful when the ostensibly “primitive,” “negative,” or “withdrawn” aspects of such experience—its association with phylogenetically primitive and defensive “tonic immobility,” the subjective “death” or “annihilation” experience of catatonic schizophrenia, and the “white light of the void realization” in deep meditation—are also shown to be consequences of a specifically human creative capacity based on cross-modal translation between touch, vision, and audition. Religious-mystical experience is a full exteriorization and completion of our cross-modal synaesthetic capacity. Entailing an inherent “abstract” stress, it is defensively impacted in paranoid and chronic schizophrenia. Of the traditional “developmental” models suggesting that religious-mystical experience is a regression to fetal, phylogenetic, or normally masked, ultra-rapid microgenetic/iconic stages, only the latter, as demonstrated by a reinterpretation of classical introspectionist research, is consistent with the abstract cognitive features of such experience and the view that all higher mental processes involve a disassembling and reuse of microgenetically preliminary perceptual and affective patterns. The more “primitive” the sensory quality, the more abstract its potential reference when synaesthetically embodied. Accordingly, the “reality status” of mystical experience is addressed.