Mystical Moments and Unitive Thinking.

GAFFNEY, JAMES

MYSTICAL MOMENTS AND UNITIVE THINKING. By Dan Merkur. Albany: State University of New York, 1999. Pp. xi + 188. $21.95.

Merkur would persuade us that "mystical experiences occur when recent achievements of unconscious unitive thinking manifest (sic) consciously as momentary inspirations" (ix). Readers conversant with the history of Christian spirituality will not share his assumption that "due to the discontinuity of the living practice throughout most of Western Christendom, modern knowledge of traditional Catholic mysticism depends on historical reconstructions" (1). They may also wonder at the absence of even passing reference to psychological analyses of mysticism, abundant, though in another idiom, before the present century. The best histories of mysticism are not used, nor listed in the bibliography.

These observations may suggest that the book is best read as a theoretical essay. The kind of theoretical essay it is will be familiar to readers of Freud and of some of his disciples. The book's foundation is, in fact, psychoanalytic, but it is revisionist and syncretistic, making critical use of cognitive and developmental psychology as remote from Freudian premises as that of Jean Piaget. The eclectisim, which may discredit the book with some readers, will commend it to others.

Broadly speaking, thinking is unitive insofar as it obliterates the separateness or distinctiveness among objects, or between subject and object. In Christian mysticism, it is the worshiper who is united to God, and there are parallels mutatis mutandis in other religions. A sense of being one with nature or with one's immediate environment is often reported. Theological and metaphysical theories often purport to explain how "all things" are, in a more profound sense, one.

M.'s most critical departure from Freud is his rejection of the latter's opinion that unitive experiences, including mystical experiences represent regressions to the infant condition in which self and world are indistinguishable. Remaining within psychoanalytic theory, M. regards unitive thinking as a superego function, sublimating the child's fantasies of fusion with its nurturing mother. Such sublimation does not occur before there is a sense of self, with its moral accompaniments of empathy, guilt, and reparation, as well as the possibility of theism.

Mystics are saints, in the Christian sense, when behavior is directed by the superego, the superego and ego being integrated. Although this is admirable, the psychoanalytic ideal goes a step farther, requiring that the id also be integrated. What spiritual writers have called "consolation and desolation" are states of mind that reflect whether one has embraced or rejected the ego-ideal proposed by the superego.

M. supposes that what are interpreted as miracles are always natural events. Their miraculousness derives from their being interpreted by the superego as a judgment on oneself. By a similar token, revelation occurs when mental contents combine randomly in ways that are novel and meaningful. While conceding that it is difficult to distinguish this from "natural attainments," M. observes that the distinction is of little practical importance when both serve the same ideals.

An effort to bring mysticism within the perspective of modern psychology, this book will be praised as "faith seeking understanding" and denounced as naturalistic reductionism. Neither judgment is entirely false. And some may ask whether M.'s own psychoanalytic premises are not sometimes as indemonstrable and dogmatic as religious doctrines.