Judaeo-Christian mystical themes in psychoanalytic developmental psychology: From cosmology to personality

The purpose of this dissertation is to situate contemporary psychoanalytic developmental psychology (ego psychology, object relations theory and self psychology) in a distinctive cultural tradition, a tradition which is, at its root, a religious one. Contemporary Anglo-American psychoanalytic theories of the development of the self and/or the ego are structured in terms of a narrative pattern which is of religious origin. The pattern in question appears to have originated in the Christian mystical narrative of the movement of the soul towards salvation. Over the course of two millennia, this narrative has become increasingly secularized and interiorized (i.e., seen as pertaining to the history of the individual soul, self or mind rather than to the history of the entire race). In this dissertation, the cultural genealogy of this narrative template is traced: narratives drawn from primary texts by Plotinus and early Christian mystics, the Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme, several Romantic thinkers, and the psychoanalyst Margaret S. Mahler are analyzed and compared to one another in order to make explicit both the basic structural and thematic features which they all share and the transformations which the narrative has undergone. Attention is also given to the ways in which Anglo-American psychoanalytic developmental theories evince the influence of American and Northern European radical Protestant cultural values.