In the opening of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud makes reference to a ‘peculiar feeling’ which many have identified as the true source of religious sentiments. It is a feeling that one might call ‘a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, “oceanic”’ (PFL 12, 251). Freud suggests that the ‘oneness with the universe’ which constitutes the...