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After [[reading ]] The [[Future ]] of an [[Illusion ]] (1927c), in a [[letter ]] dated December 5, 1927, Romain Rolland wrote to [[Freud]]: "By [[religious ]] [[feeling]], what I mean—altogether independently of any dogma, any Credo, any organization of the [[Church]], any Holy Scripture, any hope for personal salvation, etc.—the simple and direct fact of a feeling of 'the eternal' (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and as if oceanic). This feeling is in [[truth ]] [[subjective ]] in [[nature]]. It is a contact." (Vermorel and Vermorel, 1993, p. 304)

The [[notion ]] of an oceanic feeling derives on the one hand from the writings of Baruch [[Spinoza]], who criticized [[religion ]] but, with his "[[third ]] degree of [[knowledge]]," retained "the [[intellectual ]] [[love ]] of God," and on the [[other ]] hand from Rolland's studies on Indian [[mysticism]]: The [[Life ]] of Ramakrishna (1929/1931) and The Life of Vivekananda and the [[Universal ]] Gospel (1930/1947). He sent these works to Freud, providing him with a [[name ]] for a [[concept ]] hitherto [[latent ]] in his [[thinking]].

In the first chapter of [[Civilization ]] and Its Discontents (1930a [1929]) Freud located the oceanic feeling within the [[primitive ]] ego—more precisely, within primary [[narcissism ]] and the ego ideal—which is later reduced to a "shrunken residue" (p. 68) under the influence of [[reality]]. Freud compared that ego to the vestiges of ancient Rome lying beneath the constructions of later centuries; and Rolland, perhaps unsurprisingly for a man whose writings are so immersed in the universal [[Mother ]] that the [[role ]] of the [[father ]] in the [[Oedipus ]] [[complex ]] is circumvented, sensed that Freud's reference to the Eternal City, to Rome and the Romans, betokened a [[primal ]] [[maternal ]] [[transference]].

Upon receiving Rolland's letter, Freud experienced a mixture of excitement ("your letter has [[left ]] me without any rest") and, it would seem, paralyzing shock, for it took him two years to write a response to Roll-and's letter and [[another ]] two years to send it—which might be [[interpreted ]] as a transferential reliving of the [[trauma ]] of the premature [[death ]] of his [[baby ]] brother Julius when he himself was two years old. There was an [[unconscious ]] complicity between Freud and Rolland, who had also been wounded by grief in [[childhood]]: Rolland's Journey Within (1942/1947), begun immediately after his visit to Freud, started with this [[event ]] and was mirrored by Freud's "A [[Disturbance ]] of [[Memory ]] on the Acropolis (An Open Letter to Romain Rolland on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday)," addressed to Rolland in 1936, which was the ultimate [[self]]-[[analysis ]] of his relations with his father and also with the "[[dead ]] mother."

Freud later acknowledged that he had not done justice to religion and its "historical truth." In response to Rolland, "one of the twelve men upon whom rests the destiny of the [[world]]," he gave free rein to his [[fantasy ]] of [[being ]] the [[Moses ]] of [[psychoanalysis]]; in retrospect, his trajectory can be considered as an approach, within the [[individual ]] unconscious, to the sacred, where he had taken refuge after the "death of God."

# [[Freud, Sigmund]]. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21: 1-56.

# ——. (1939a [1934-38]). Moses and [[monotheism]]: [[Three ]] essays. SE, 23: 1-137.# ——. (1931). The Life of Ramakrishna (E. F. Malcolm-Smith, Trans.). Mayavati, Almora, Himalayas: Advaita Ashrama. (Original [[work ]] published 1929) ——. (1947). The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel (E. F. Malcolm-Smith, Trans.). Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. (Original work published 1930)# ——. (1947). Journey within (Elsie Pell, Trans.). New York: [[Philosophical ]] [[Library]]. (Original work published 1942)