ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic understanding of any phenomenon begins with the narrative, with the echoes and reverberations of individual history. The individual I have selected for my own explorations in mysticism is the 19th-century Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna. He is a particularly apt choice for a psychoanalytic study of ecstatic mysticism since Freud's observations on the mystical experience, on what he called the “oceanic feeling,” an omnibus label for all forms of extreme mystical experience, were indirectly occasioned by Ramakrishna's ecstasies.
