Exploring Freud’s Resistance to The Oceanic Feeling

Abstract

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.