ABSTRACT
This chapter touches on a few variations from world spiritual traditions as they interact with conceptualizations derived from psychoanalytic experience. The well can function as an infinite void, a gateway to the abyss from which life forms. The emptiness of the abyss or the fullness of the well convey their own multiple meanings, frequently contradictory, depending on where one stands in shifting moments in which either the mystical or the medical model occupies the experiential foreground. The tension between the life and death functions of the well influences levels of contact and relatedness during the psychoanalytic encounter. From the Zen perspectives, Dogen frequently uses the image of the ocean to represent the infinite, the absolute, and at-one-ment. Well as hallucination fills the same psychic space where an object might have been but has disappeared. Symbol formation is crucial to healthy psychic development and central to the psychoanalytic free-associative inquiry.
