A Mystical Therapy?

Here is the Introduction to a new article just published in 'Religions' (2025, 16) edited by Ali Qadir and Zena Zang, both of whom I am extremely grateful to. The full text is available on the Religions website as open access.

Introduction: What is the Mystical?

If we are attempting a ‘re-booting’ of the mystical the first question that arises is, of course, ‘what exactly do you mean by “the mystical”?’ Having read this far in the present journal you will no doubt have a good idea of the many varying approaches and strategies that can be taken to approach this ‘weasel word’. One of my interlocutors for the present paper, the Viennese linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951), once wrote: ‘sometimes an expression has to be taken out of the language and sent to the cleaners. Then it can be re-introduced into circulation’ (Wittgenstein 1993: 8.504).[1] Which, I would contend, is precisely the task when we engage in discourse on the ‘mystical’ as so importantly undertaken in the present journal. Early in my academic career I undertook a survey of the contemporary literature on the subject and came to the following conclusion which is worth quoting:

Our understanding of the contemporary academic discourse on ‘the mystical’ can best be seen as comprising  two over-arching tendencies: that towards evaluating ‘mysticism’ as a quasi-ontological, cross-credal category… and a contemporary academic movement which seeks to concentrate primarily on the form of mystical discourse at the expense of any content, especially psychologistic content, what we shall refer to as ‘constructivist’ approaches.[2] (Tyler 2011: 3)

When we survey contemporary investigations into the ‘mystical’ in psychotherapeutic contexts these two broad trends tend to hold, however, following Freud, the first (and prevenient) category seems to dominate (the second, following the work of Katz et al from the 1970s onwards has taken a little longer to permeate into psychotherapeutic discussions of the subject, see, inter alia Katz 1978, 1983, 1992). Freud himself famously referenced an Ozeanisches Gefühl (Oceanic feeling) in the first chapter of Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (‘Civilisation and its Discontents', translated by Strachey in Freud 1991) in response to a letter from his colleague, the Swiss man of letters Romaine Rolland objecting to the fact that Freud’s earlier book The Future of an Illusion had failed to mention ‘a particular feeling’[3]: ‘a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of “eternity” , a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, “oceanic”.’ Merkur in his excellent 2010 analysis of the evolution of Freud’s thought on the subject stresses the importance of Rank’s 1924 Trauma of Birth ( see Rank 1993) for introducing the idea of an origin for the ‘oceanic feeling’ in a pre-Oedipal, inter-uterine experience, which is more or less what Freud presents in Das Unbehagen as an ‘explanation’ for Rolland’s ‘particular feeling’. Yet, however satisfactory or not we find Freud’s/Rank’s approach to das Mystische it is clear that both theirs, and Rolland’s, approach to the phenomenon lie within our first named category of seeing ‘the mystical’ as a ‘quasi-ontological, cross-credal category’ that underpins all religions and, indeed, is the source of all religion. In this they follow the main architects of what I called in my earlier work ‘modern mysticism’, writers such as Robert Vaughan (1823 – 1857), William James (1842 – 1910), William Ralph Inge (1860 – 1954) and Evelyn Underhill (1875 – 1941) who formed this modern category of talk of das Mystische.[4]

Following Freud, as I have said, many (but not all) contemporary commentators on the subject adopt a similar stance. In so far as he defines the term Michael Eigen, for example, would see ‘the mystical’ as part of a feeling structure that underpins both therapeutic work and world religions, in his case Judaism and Buddhism:

I have not defined mystical feeling because I am unable to. My hope is, if I speak around it, or from it, well enough, something of value will get communicated to the reader and myself. Discussions of mystical awareness tend to undo themselves because of the paradoxical nature of the experiencing involved. (Eigen 1998: 31)

Merkur, again, in common with several modern commentators (see, for example, Merkur 2010) goes further to emphasise the ‘ecstatic’ nature of that feeling, especially if it arises in altered states of consciousness:

Mysticism may be defined as a practice of religious ecstasies (that is, of religious experiences during alternate states of consciousness), together with whatever ideologies, ethics, rites, myths, legends, magics, and so forth, are related to ecstasies (Merkur 2010: 1)

My own approach in this article is to shift the emphasis away from these ‘votaries’ to something perhaps a little more ‘workaday’. In this respect I have been influenced by the pioneering work of authors such as Katz and Jeffrey Kripal (see, for example, Kripal 2001) who have emphasised the ‘structural’ aspects of the phenomenon in contrast to its ontology of ‘feeling’ (Freud, interestingly enough, has the same reservations of analysis of ‘feeling’/ Gefühl in the essay mentioned earlier, see Freud 1991: 252 – 253). However, in contrast to these later ‘constructivists’ I want to retain the transcendent apperception to the phenomenon as developed in my earlier books, especially Tyler 2011 and 2016. To ‘square the circle’ between modern ontological recreations of the mystical (or even ‘oceanic’) ‘feeling’/’ecstasy’ and the (de-)constructivist innovations of recent years I have developed arguments first presented in the philosophical work of the Austrian linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951). One of the over-riding features of Wittgenstein’s approach, especially as he proceeded in his discoveries, was a move away from looking for supposed transcendent entities that ‘lie behind’ ordinary speech and language (the ‘occult’ entities mentioned in Zettel and the Blue and Brown Books). [5] The Austrian, especially in his later work, preferenced a move towards explanation by means of observations of the ‘language games’ (Sprachspiele) embedded in our practices or ways of life and thus revealed by observing the pattern and nature of speech set within the way of life of the speaker. Taking my cue from him I sought early on in my exploration of the literature to find a ‘way of life’ and ‘language game’ that corresponded to the ‘mystical form’ that we began this article with. As a Catholic Christian I decided that rather than search for this language game in other religions (and I have no doubt similar explorations can be undertaken in other so-called ‘mystical’ religious traditions) I would concentrate on that ‘game’ unfolded within my own tradition.[6] In this respect I was able to isolate at least three clear ‘families’ of language games in the Christian tradition. First, the early Christian uses of mūs or mūstikos so well described in the writings of, for example, Louis Bouyer (1981) and Bernard McGinn (1991). Secondly, the ‘modern mysticism’ already alluded to above, beginning roughly in the mid-nineteenth century and still, as we have seen, very much alive today. However, between these two periods I was struck by a sophisticated and well documented medieval language game/form of life which I called in my early works the tradition of  ‘theologia mystica’/’mystical theology’ that stretches, roughly, from the innovations of St Augustine of Hippo via St Bernard of Clairvaux and the Rhineland Mystics ending somewhere around the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries with the final flowering of Spanish mysticism. Initially, my studies have been preoccupied with how this Sprachspiel worked in practice and what, as it were, were the ‘rules’ of this discourse. However, alongside my academic theological work in the area I had developed a private psychotherapeutic practice having trained in the aforesaidmentioned ‘Object Relations’ and transpersonal schools of the late twentieth century here in London. Initially the two threads ran largely parallel to each other, however, as my work has progressed these past few decades I have noticed fascinating synergies between the two approaches which form the basis of the present article.

[1] ‘Man muß manchmal einen Ausdruck aus der Sprache herausziehen, ihn zum Reinigen geben. – und kann ihn dann wieder in den Verkehr einführen’.

[2] For a good recent review of the debates see Christian Mysticism: An Introduction to Contemporary Theoretical Approaches ed.  L. Nelstrop, K. Magill and B. Onishi (2009).

[3] James Strachey, in his usual idiosyncratic fashion, translates Freud’s ‘besonderes Gefühl’ here with the English ‘peculiar feeling’ in the Standard Edition which really misrepresents the thrust of Romain’s phenomenology which expressly points to the fact that the feeling never leaves him – surely a ‘peculiar’ feeling would not come under that category (see Freud 1991: 251 and Freud 1982: 9.197 for the original text).

[4] See, inter alia, Vaughan 1856, Inge 1899, James 1902 and Underhill 1910. For more on the evolution of this category see Tyler 2011.

[5] ‘The idea of thinking as a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space, gives him something occult’. Zettel 606 in Wittgenstein 1967: 105.

[6] Although happy journeys in recent years to the Indian Subcontinent has enabled me to explore some of the comparative similarities in Sprachspiele within the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, see for example Tyler 2024.