Abstract
This chapter explores what might seem to be a problem between depth psychological and mystical theological perspectives. A common psychological complaint is that one feels to be without value, that life is meaningless and empty, that the self is inadequate and without hope, in short, that one suffers a sense of nothingness. Yet a great many of the world’s mystical theologies hold out for a spiritual goal of becoming precisely nothing. Mystical spirituality in such religious traditions is spoken of in rhetoric that suggests that a seeker should not aspire to achieve a self-sense, selfhood or identity, but that one precisely ought to lose these in favor of a sense of no-self. Are the psychological and the mystical “nothingnesses” different? Is this a semantic accident, a slippage of language where one word signifies different states? Or are there really different “nothings”? It will be the argument in this chapter that the nothingness of psychology and mysticism in fact is indicating the same “no-self.”
This essay was first given as the Fourth Annual Jim Klee Forum keynote lecture at West Georgia College on May 17, 1993. The author is grateful to James Klee and to the Department of Psychology at West Georgia College for its sponsorship. Other versions of the essay’s argument have been presented to Jung groups in Atlanta, Buffalo, and Montréal, as well as to classes of trainees at the Jung Institute in Zürich and at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. Also, the essay was published in a fuller form earlier as “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles! Self and No-Self in Psychology and Religion,” in The Journal of the Psychology of Religion , Volume IV–V (1995–1996): 1–26. It is used here with the knowledge and permission of the editor of that journal, Dr. Arvind Sharma of McGill University.
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Notes
- 1.
A radically different, but also Jungian, view of neurosis has recently been argued by Wolfgang Giegerich (2013).
- 2.
It may be worth noting that Jung was not in good health at the time (see Abe 1992, 61n6).
- 3.
This statement by Jung places him close to Freud and Lacan on the matter of the “uncanny” in therapeutic discovery, as well as to Julia Kristeva (1991) on her notion of the experience of unconscious dimensions of the so-called “self” in therapy as being the experience of the “I” as étranger, which is the very word Jung uses to indicate the experience of long-term analysis (182–95).
- 4.
- 5.
Heidegger (1961) has already been cited on the difficulty of speaking authentically about nothingness without making it into a some-thing. In that work, he also noted that science—including the science of psychology—is unable to transcend that difficulty because its language is assumed metalinguistically to be referential. Heidegger then acknowledges that, besides philosophy, poetry speaks nothing in a profound manner (21).
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Miller, D.L. (2018). Nothing Almost Sees Miracles! Self and No-Self in Depth Psychology and Mystical Theology. In: Cattoi, T., Odorisio, D. (eds) Depth Psychology and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79096-1_14
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