ABSTRACT
This paper began when I became aware of a need to look at psychoanalysts’ ideas about mysticism, partly because of occasionally having patients who practised some form of meditation. This paper is therefore an account of what I found, beginning in the first part with a look at what my own ideas about it had been, both before and after becoming an analyst, and going on, in the second part, to see what has been written about it by other analysts. While writing both parts I have in fact become aware of a process going on; I can think of no better description for it than Bion’s phrase (though it is a formulation that I did not in fact discover till near the end of this study)—‘an idea in search of a thinker’.1
