Women as Ritual Experts,The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (Book)

Mystics, religionists, and psychologists have posited a causal link between experi- ences of ecstatic unity and transformations in moral sensibility. This study demon- strates that various functions attributed by psychoanalysis to the positive superego play a prominent role in alternate states of consciousness. Several heuristic and phenomenological categories are formulated based on self-reports of religious ec- stasy: directives and values, truth and perfection, imperative urgency, presence, moral transformation, and bliss. The transformative potential of ecstasy is attribut- able to the way in which alternate states provide uniquely powerful avenues of accessibility to unconscious superego materials, some of which may have been previously unavailable for conscious use due to fixation and defense.