Pioneer Works | A Cabanel/Metropolitan Museum of Art
As one of those people who only feel well by the ocean, I’ve long followed the trail of oceanic feelings—that sense of eternity or limitlessness, the connection to something larger—and been perplexed by Freud’s confession that he could find none of this in himself. Oceanic feeling was as closed to him as music. He admitted this in a letter to his friend Romain Rolland, whose reflections inspired the term and prompted the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud wrestles with the idea that an “oceanic feeling” binds people to religion through a lived sense of something immeasurably greater than themselves.