The Sense of Eternity

Abstract

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 ideational content of this feeling sounds like a first attempt at a religious consolation, perhaps a way of disavowing the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the outside world. Distrustful of this feeling and equally sceptical of related discourses of mystical revelations, trances and ecstasies, he claims that a feeling can only be a source of energy if it is the expression of a strong need. According to Freud, the sensation of boundlessness is itself bound by a pre-existent form – the desire for the restitution of a ‘limitless narcissism’. In translating this affect into a sense of lack, he dismisses the oceanic feeling as nostalgic and infantile, its joy concealing a need for security and a fear of helplessness.