In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) Sigmund Freud related that a friend of his experienced what he called an ‘oceanic feeling’. Freud was speaking about Romain Rolland, who in 1927 wrote to him and described that feeling after reading Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, which had been published in the same year and discusses the origins of religion, which Freud views as merely an illusion. ‘Oceanic feeling’ was the term Rolland used to describe that sense of awe at everything that fills our hearts and minds when we realize that there exists something eternal, or at least boundless like
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