Freud and Rolland: Their Friendship and the Oceanic Feeling
The Friendship Between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland at the turn of the twentieth century, and its role in the French writer’s interior journey and spiritual realization
A fellow pilgrim in this dark continent, a courageous and genius navigator.
Rolland’s friendship with Freud began in 1923 through correspondence and continued until Freud’s death in 1939. Their letters covered a wide range of topics, ranging from contemporary violence and the power and authenticity of human instincts to the coercive nature of the “moral lie” and broader reflections on the nineteenth century. While Freud viewed this period as an age of peace, Rolland regarded it as an era of fear and hypocrisy.
Their literary discussion focused on nineteenth century French and Russian novelists and on the relationship between creative genius and epilepsy. Here Freud would express doubt about Flaubert’s supposed epilepsy and would also argue that Dostoevsky suffered from hysteria rather than epilepsy. Historical figures such as Caesar and Napoleon were also subjects of analysis in their conversations.
Major differences of opinion emerged in their discussions of religious feelings, the unconscious, psychoanalysis, and mysticism. Yet the differences rooted in their origins and cultural backgrounds cemented their friendship. Freud, of Central European and Jewish origin, had an evolutionary and rational outlook. Rolland, who was younger, was French and Catholic. By training, he was a professional historian and musicologist. He was also an artist, a novelist, and a biographer of epic heroes. Their personalities were very different.
Freud expressed this difference in a letter to Rolland :
…I may confess to you that I have rarely experienced that mysterious attraction of one human being for another as vividly as I have with you. It is somehow bound up, perhaps, with the awareness of our being so different.
May, 1931
Intrigued by his work, Rolland visited Freud and his daughter Anna Freud (1895–1982) at their apartment in Vienna in 1924. He was deeply influenced by both of them.
He described Freud’s study room with great amazement :
Filled with small gods, fetishes, amulets, hallucinated projections of the erotic and religious dreams of humanity !
The conversation was concluded with a discussion of Freud’s past and present isolation. Freud was moved by the fact that his book The Interpretation of Dreams, which began to gain recognition in the 1920s, had already been known and read by Rolland 20 years earlier. At that time, Freud believed that his work had received almost no response in France, had been met with hostility in Germany, and had only begun to gain recognition in the United States.
They continued to correspond in letters, and exchanged experiential insights on the challenges of being human — “the driving power of human impulses, access to the unconscious, the ongoing inner conflict between the id, ego, and superego, between the instincts of life and death, and the constraints of moral conduct.” Although Rolland found Freud somewhat pessimistic about the future of humanity, he was moved by Freud’s unparalleled analysis of the unconscious.
He admired Freud both as a person and for the historical significance of his trailblazing discoveries.
Soon after his visit to Freud, Rolland sent Freud a copy of his work on Mahatma Gandhi, expressing his belief in non-violence.
On June 15, 1924, Freud wrote to Rolland, thanking him for the book and recalling the French writer’s recent visit to his home. Rolland’s presence had deeply moved Freud.
June 15, 1924
Dearest Friend
Mahatma Gandhi will accompany me on my vacation which will begin shortly.
When I am alone in my study, I often think of the hour that you gave me and my daughter here, and I imagine you again in the red chair which we set out for you. I am not well. I would gladly end my life, but I must wait for it to unravel.
My cordial wishes for you and your work.
Yours, Freud
Freud shared some of the idealism in Rolland’s anti-war writings. He clung to the “hope” that humanity would learn to channel its hostile impulses into constructive paths. If its destructive instincts not “diverted” , the entire species might be annihilated.
But if this one hope cannot be at least partly realized, if in the course of evolution we don’t learn to divert our instincts from destroying our own kind, if we continue to hate one another for minor differences and kill each other for petty gain, if we go on exploiting the great progress made in control of natural resources for our mutual destruction, what kind of future lies in store for us ?
Rolland later collected his introspective essays in Le Voyage Intérieur. His reflections focused on the vast reservoir of the unconscious and the constant activity of the opposing inner forces, which Freud distinguished as the “id and ego” versus the “superego.”
In his immediate observations, he realized that the violent opposing forces within the human being could erupt at any moment, and that the repression of instinctual needs might overwhelm the psyche. Equilibrium between the structures of the “human agency,” though attainable, was fragile and temporary. It could easily be disrupted.
As an antidote to the excesses in the human psyche, he proposed the following :
The “monstrous” and “abnormal” excesses of temperament can be restrained through conscious, willful effort, particularly through self-imposed duties in the form of “work” and “moral discipline”. One is bound to confront the opposing forces within oneself that create inner conflict. These constitutional forces can erupt suddenly, and their regulation or repression may overwhelm the psyche. Thus, equilibrium is at best fragile.
Rolland used music as a tool to delve into and explore the unconscious self, for he believed that music is the language of the unconscious :
…Alone, without a guide, pushed forward by music – my master and myself.
He linked music to the soul and the soul to eternity. He described the sensation of being one with the “Eternal” and united with the entire universe as the “oceanic feeling.” He described it :
What I mean is a sensation… totally independent of all dogma, all creeds, all church organization, all sacred books, all hope in a personal survival, etc. The simple and direct fact of the feeling of the Eternal… a prolonged intuitive feeling of contact with the Eternal, a feeling of vastness, derived from the same subterranean source. I, myself, am familiar with this sensation. Throughout my whole life, I have never been without it, and I have always found it a source of vital renewal. Thus I carry on simultaneously, freely both a “religious” life (in the sense of this prolonged sensation) and a life of critical reason which is without illusion.
Rolland referred to the experiential self as the “new science of the mind” and emphasized that there is nothing occult in it. It is the vision of the “Self” that permeates all living beings. He described the state of spiritual awareness of this all-permeating presence as the “oceanic feeling,” and he referred to this “Presence” as the “Ocean of Being.”
Duygu Bruce