The oceanic sentiment and beyond

The author starts off with the exchange between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland about the oceanic sentiment that for Rolland could be understood as the foundation of religious faith. He then goes on to examine the presence of this sentiment in the ideas of poets, writers, psychoanalysts and the author himself. He sees resemblances and affinity of the sentiment in question with concepts like enchantment, merging, transactional experience. The article concentrates on some particular aspects of R. Rolland’s concept, aspects that are often described as pathological, but that here are interpreted differently. The article presents the possibility that in the mature person there can be a fruitful cohabitation between separateness and merging, rational spirit and poetic reason. This positive co-presence can bring an expansion of the experience of self. The author also proposes that reality must not be interpreted unilaterally and verified only by logical rational thought. He maintains that reality, thanks to fantasy (no longer conceived exclusively as a defensive flight from reality), and thanks to the creative areas of the mind, can be seen as something that recognizes the different articulations possible within the person’s self, guaranteeing the possibility of new approaches to life, overcoming the fixity of the neurotic schemes of adapting to reality.

Keywords: Oceanic sentiment, religious sentiment, merging, symbiosis

Roberto Campoli, Il sentimento oceanico e dintorni in "RUOLO TERAPEUTICO (IL)" 116/2011, pp 21-33, DOI: 10.3280/RT2011-116004