Fog on moorland
While reading about Grotstein’s work quoted in last week’s post, I came across this interesting dream that he had – a dream that changed the course of his life, and opened him to an interest in mysticism and psychoanalysis, and to the work of Wilfred Bion.
When Grotstein was a second-year medical student he had a dream the night before his final exam in pharmacology. The setting was a bleak moorland in the Scottish Highlands and there was a dense fog.
‘A small portion of the fog slowly cleared and an angel appeared surrealistically asking “where is James Grotstein?” The voice was solemn and litanical. The fog slowly re-enveloped her form as if she had never existed or spoken. Then, as if part of a pre-arranged pageant, the fog cleared again, but now some distance away, at a higher promontory where a rocky crag appeared from the cloud bank revealing another angel who, in response to the first angel’s question, answered as follows: “He is aloft, contemplating the dosage of sorrow upon the Earth”.
Grotstein, like others who have had similar powerful spiritual dreams, knew that the experience came from beyond him. He wrote:
‘I was deeply impressed, mystified and bewildered. I knew that I had experienced the dream, but I did not know who wrote it. I wanted desperately to be introduced to the writer who could write those lines.’
He saw the dream as a revelation – an expression of creative intelligence, and choose to see it as a messenger offering guidance. Years later, having become an analyst he thought:
‘The task of psychoanalysis is not the attainment of insight, but rather, the use of insight to attain transcendence over oneself, one’s masks and disguises, to become one’s supraordinate* subject. This task involves a transcendent reunion with one’s ineffable subject.’
Grotstein used the word ‘numinous’ to describe experiences like his dream. He’s using the term given by the German philosopher Rudolf Otto, who defined the encounter with the numinous as a unique, non-rational and ‘wholly other’ mystery that is both terrifying and fascinating. Otto thought this awe-inspiring feeling lay at the heart of all true religion.
For Grotstein it was a ‘sense of awe and wonder and inward journey (into the self) associated with the mystical and meditative contact with this ineffable’. For him, God as a supreme Being, and, the Godhead as the essence or divine nature working in unity, is ineffable and inscrutable. The experience of the ineffable as numinous is both an internal presence apart from oneself (in analytic jargon an internal object), and also oneself (an internal subject).
Grotstein turned to the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and to the work of Bion to further his thinking. In his own work on ‘Bion’s concept of ‘O’, Grotstein came to distinguish one form of O as nearer to the essence/Godhead and so as something ultimately unknowable, and that was different from a more knowable essence of O based on human experiences.
Interestingly when Bion spent time in the US, Grotstein sought out Bion as a supervisor for his work with patients, but found that didn’t seem to work, so instead Grotstein entered into analysis with Bion.
* Here supraordinate sometimes spelt superordinate means a higher part of ourself – in Jungian psychology it is an aspect of the psyche that transcends the ego.