Civilization And Its Discontents

A famous writer corresponds with Freud about religion, insisting that the central force behind spiritual sentiment is an “oceanic” feeling, “a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded" (3). Freud can find no such feeling within himself; he guesses that it must be “a feeling of indissoluble connection, of belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole” (4).

Normally, a person’s sense of self, or ego, feels “sharply outlined” (5), though there is one important exception: “At its height, the state of being in love threatens to obliterate the boundaries between ego and object” (5). People in love often feel they are one with their beloved. Other situations also may cause this blurring, “cases in which parts of a man’s own body, even component parts of his own mind, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, appear to him alien and not belonging to himself” (5).

An infant at first has no sense of self and other but soon learns that some things “become temporarily out of his reach—amongst these what he wants most of all, his mother’s breast—and reappear only as a result of his cries for help” (6). By the workings of the “pleasure-principle” (6), we learn to push away things that cause pain, distinguish between internal and external sources of pain and pleasure, and manipulate our surroundings according to the “reality-principle” (6).