Monday, January 2, 2017

Dan Merkur

Explorations of the Psychoanalytic Mystics (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies), by Dan MerkurRodopi, 2010 (accessible via fju)


https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5viXpvvYMYETHl6S0IxbDh0RzQ?usp=sharing



The roster of psychoanalyst mystics nevertheless includes eminent analysts from several major schools within psychoanalysis: Otto Rank (1884-1939), Erich Fromm (1900-1980), Marion Milner (1900-1998), D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971), Heinz Kohut (1913-1981), Hans W. Loewald (1906-1993), Wilfred R. Bion (1897-1979), and, among living writers, James S. Grotstein, Neville Symington, and Michael Eigen. (Merkur, 2012, preface)

After twenty years as an academic student of religion who was interested in applied psychoanalysis, I trained as a clinician in 2000-2005. One result of entering clinical practice has been a radical re-orientation to psychoanalytic literature. 

As an academic I appreciated the literature as a body of theories. Now I read the same texts as efforts to verbalize clinical observations that anyone may confirm (or disconfirm) independently. I no longer read psychoanalytic theorists only for their internal coherence. I now read them also for their correspondence to my experiences with my patients. (ibid, preface)

Recent cross-cultural studies count as mystical not only the unitive and nothingness experiences of Christian contemplatives, Jewish Kabbalists, Muslim Sufis, Hindu yogins, and Buddhist meditators, but also the interior dialogues of prophets, the visionary states of vision questers, shamans, Taoists, and others, and the motor compulsions of spirit mediums and the possessed. (ibid, p. 1)  




所以道釋在此

宋明理學在此乎
洗碗工在此乎

我知只有清醒(sobriety)
是多麼大的貧困

但只願清醒面對
不願打坐玄妙涅槃
這算不算mystic

意思是說洗碗洗多了
應該起碼可以變成
神秘的洗碗工罷