In this book I examine these ingredients in detail and attempt to show h o w they appear again and again in the lives of the great and the u n k n o w n. With this instru- ment they can respond to the feverish questions from the astounded members of the seance.
Conan Doyle adds that this theory has been attested to by the spirits themselves and so, w e assume, has increased veracity. In contrast to Conan Doyle, the great Houdini, w h o became a close friend to Conan Doyle and his second wife, mounted a personal campaign to debunk what he felt were false and harmful spiritualist claims.
It follows that the emotional issues that the occult ad- dresses are equal in power to, or even stronger than, the rational abili- ties of the occult devotee. The third clue to the mystery of occult beliefs comes from a consid- eration of the occult mood.
SUMMARY
Our third clue to the mystery of occult experience is the wish implied in this claim. Third, occult experience is tied to a deep sense of oneself, a "self-state." In this self-state an internal process is experienced as if it were an external event.
I believe that occult experience occurs w h e n people feel sud- denly that a hidden, yet vital, connection between themselves and other people is broken. Freud and Jones condemn occult experience as shameful, as some- thing to be shaken off, rejected, and overcome.
If Freud were correct that mature people should show very little narcissism, then these three groups of well-trained and well-raised people should show a predominance of "object love." Most of them should have grown beyond early forms of narcissism. Contrary to the received wis- dom, even these mature and talented patients manifested deep problems with their self-esteem.
A TEST CASE
Many of them had been helped by their previ- ous treatment, yet therapists had overlooked systematically the core is- sue of self-esteem. Because these narcissistic dimensions of their personality remained un- analyzed, their problems with self-esteem remained unsolved.
Eventually the child becomes able to soothe herself or himself, even in the absence of the child's parents. W e conclude that something went awry in the process of the consolidation of their sense of self.
KOHUT'S CLAIMS
Consequently, w e conclude that the child will not require, later in life, everyone in the child's environ- ment to fulfill selfobject functions. During a dream, for example, one cannot walk around a group of trees that appears in the dream.
A s w e will see below, this is a key difference between an occult view of the occult and a psychoanalytic view of the occult. A psychoanalytic view of the occult is an empathic view, neither sympathetic to occult claims nor disdainful of them.
But one can also find persons like my student and Conan Doyle whose sincerity cannot be doubted.
T H E INEXPRESSIBLE
For example, by the middle of the century a n u m b e r of physicists had formulated the essential features of the Second L a w of Thermodynamics. The first and oldest portion of the personality was the id (das Es), the source of instinctual forces.
RELIGION AND THE RETURN OF
The second was the ego (das Ich), and the third the superego (das Uber-Ich). In the middle of a large printed page one might find, literally, a large black spot—the product of efficient censorship.
T H E REPRESSED
But in m o - ments of chaos or instinctual upsurge, the id might gain control of the reins of self-governance. By fulfilling these wishes religion offers a way out of the psychic pain that otherwise seems our c o m m o n lot.
For, again to his credit, Eisenbud realizes that he can find no evidence of repression in his patient's account of the second visitation, by the warbler. T h e psi hypothesis does not reduce the patient's experience merely to the return of the repressed.
THE OCCULT SEQUENCE
A n internal loss remains unrecognized; instead, the patient seeks to locate the source of his suffering in the external world. For personal and cultural reasons, James b e c a m e a public representa- tive in w h o m the intellectual conflicts of the nineteenth century found expression.
AUGUSTINE AND THE READER
In the language developed above, The Confessions prevented frag- mentation anxiety because it provided Augustine with a n e w selfobject relationship. Augustine wrote The Confessions, I will suggest, in part to preserve his relationship to his mother, his primary selfobject.
AS SELFOBJECT
To make these claims clear I discuss portions of The Confessions that deal with occult experience. W e see this directly in Augustine's speculations about hu- m a n development in the first chapters of The Confessions.
Consequently, Freud him- self, the great opponent of irrationalism, often took up its cause in a variety of interests in the occult. More important, they occurred in the lives of brilliant psychologists, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
NONRELIGIOUS OCCULT EXPERIENCE
Does it create a new sense of harmony, balance, and openness?2 Yet not all occult events are religious, nor are all religious experi- ences occult.
W h e n Verdi's eyes fell upon the chorus of the Hebrew exiles, he felt that this chance encounter was actually a direct intervention in his life by God. Part of the work involved in the scan- ning involves assessing, perhaps unconsciously, the degree to which the external signs match internal needs.
FREUD AND THE OCCULT
Finally, Verdi felt compelled to display the opera even though his producer, Merelli, had no place for it in his program, having already established the season's repertoire. Objectively speaking, w e should not expect to find that the opera matches perfectly Verdi's internal state.
This would not be, Freud says, "a psychical phenomenon, but purely a somatic o n e — o n e , it is true, of the first rank in importance."17 It is curious that Freud's rea- soning here and elsewhere about occult matters is so nonanalytic. At times it seemed as if his goal was fusion rather that union."24 Fusion occurs between self and selfobject.
I have just awakened to the glorious beauty of the day, and have a sense of indescribable well-being. Yet there is something poignant about the intensity of these memories of the maid's ear.
Yet the boy's response to this walk- ing nightmare, again, seems idiosyncratic: Jung rushed to the darkest part of the attic and hid there under a beam. Although he does not say so directly, w e m a y suppose that associated with this vision of the gigantic penis was another fantasy of incorporating it into himself, through some body ori- fice.
TWO SECRET SELVES
Not accidentally, Jung's dream is about a sexual part-ob- ject, which defines what a boy is (it proves he is not a girl), yet which is grotesque. T h e gigantic penis is hidden just as Jung hid himself w h e n he per- ceived the real possibility of an evil Jesus-figure w h o manifested an am- bisexual attitude in his clothing.
His parents' separation from one another, and his mother's consequent depression, damaged the boy far more than a simplified oedipal theorem would predict. Jung says directly that the hallucinations of fairies, for example, or his mother as the m o o n "allayed m y fear of suffocation.
SHARED OCCULT MOMENTS
That is, the good- enough mother soothes the child w h e n something seems to scare it, just as later she will reflect to the child the child's basic needs to feel unique, loved, and invincible, that is, not subject to sudden fragmenta- tion. Kohut does not tire of pointing out that, to an outsider, it seems the child (or adult) utilizes the selfobject as if it were an extension of the child's o w n body.
W e also know, however, that Loewald's assessment of Freud's indifference to occult reasoning, that he abhorred occultist beliefs, is overstated.5 In fact, if w e add Kohut's point of view to this interpreta- tion of both men, w e can explain their extreme importance to one an- other and their fascination with the occult. 34;It is strange that on the very same evening when I formally adopted you as eldest son and anointed you—in partibus infidelium [in the land of the unbelievers]—as m y successor and crown prince, you should have divested m e of m y paternal dignity" (Letters, p. 218).
EMOTIONAL AND
The sequence of events linking the loss of Fliess's good will to Freud's "uncanny" experience strongly suggests a typical occult m o - ment. Far less murky and far less debatable is the sequence of events experienced by Freud and Jung that culminated in a famous occult m o m e n t between the two.
I believe that w e should locate it in the inner world of the child's relationship to the child's mother. That answer, or partial answer, relies upon the genetic point of view described in the Introduction.
T h e second dimension is that of the mother whose breasts change (for example, whose breasts are engorged with milk) and w h o needs to nurse, that is, needs to give in order to feel better herself (just as honest therapists need to help). That is, Winnicott strives to convey the texture of the baby's experience using adult language.
In Jung's beautiful account of the manikin w e see the occult object made real, just as the transitional object comes alive in response to the child's love for it. For religionists this question might b e better formulated as, A m I claiming that all religious experience is a variation of the occult.
THE OCCULT MOOD
In the occult m o o d one does not doubt that there is an actual, real person out there. The occult mood recaptures a state of need and locates the solution to that need in the outer world.
GOETHE'S OCCULT ROMANCE
O n hearing of the pastor and his daughters, he had decided to dress as a poor, inconsequential. The Brion family is to be both the butt of the jest and its audience as well.
Following a quarrel with his sister, w h o had devoted herself to him, Goethe arranges a long excursion into the country, "free as to m y reso- lution, but oppressed as to m y feelings—in a condition when the pres- ence of silently living nature is so beneficial to us" (Truth and Fiction, vol. In metaphysical terms the good-enough mother inculcates a sense that "one cannot fall out of the world.".
