Explorations of the Psychoanalytic Mystics (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies)

All approached psychoanalysis from one or another mystical perspective and emphasized issues of importance to mystics. They also modified their clinical procedures in keeping with their mysticism. All conceptualized the mystical not as a regression to earliest infancy that can be ignored for most practical purposes, but as a developmental line that is central to human psychology throughout life. They attended to processes of ego synthesis, individuation, and the integration or cohesion of the total psyche. Where Rank and Fromm regarded their mysticism as adjuncts to psychoanalysis, Loewald argued that therapeutic change consiss precisely of psychic integration. Bion drew additionally on mystical language to illuminate aspects of an otherwise conventional practice of clinical psychoanalysis, while Grotstein, Symington, and Eigen are currently elaborating the fusion of psychoanalysis and mysticism in original ways.