Reprinted from www.psychologytoday.com moral landscapes blog
Feeling oceanic connectedness is part of normal human nature.
Maturity According to Freud
Freud argued that "growing up" had to do with ridding ourselves of the "oceanic feeling" of connectedness to the universe, that feeling "of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole" that we first felt with our mother (Freud, 1961, p. 13). Several environmental activists have argued that the loss of the oceanic feeling of connection has led to the diminished sense of attachment to and care for the rest of the natural world, affecting behavior toward it (e.g., Berry, 2013).
Freud admitted he found the oceanic feeling incomprehensible and interpreted it as a narcissistic symbiosis with Mother. It did not fit with his ego-centered psychology theory. And so, he argued, we should forfeit "the intimate sense of interconnection with the world and a plenitude of vital feeling" in order to gain the egocentric, dualistic feeling of self and other (Keller, 1986, pp. 99-100).
Ego Consciousness
Like Freud, Western scholars generally have tended to think of consciousness as the kind of everyday conscious awareness most of us experience-ego consciousness. Moreover, with its built-in child undercare and trauma-inducing practices, civilization builds a separative ego whose best defense is domination, an "age-old alternative to connection" (Keller, 1986, p. 200).
With the splitting of self from world, nature is outside the self and personality is inside, a feature concomitant with Western civilization. The historical consciousness of Western civilization, emphasizing unique linear progress towards promised abundance, pulls humanity away from the rest of nature and away from the feeling of oceanic oneness that nature evokes. In defending a society of separative egos, one only becomes "poorer, emptier, simpler, more resentful and destructive for the effort" (Keller, 1986, p. 202).
The more typical view is found among foraging peoples, who represent 95-99% of human existence. They perceive, conceive, and experience the world differently. Whereas modern thought tries to simplify the world through categorization and sorting, ancestral thought diversifies in response to the complexity and discontinuity of the world (Levi-Strauss, 1966). Foragers interact with the rest of the natural world subjectively and dynamically, embedded in a mystical, symbiotic relational web of interacting consciousnesses (Shepard, 1998).
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