Abstract
This essay considers, first, how late nineteenth-century psychology and psychopathology seeks to distinguish between mystical experience and mental breakdown, as both are instances of a radical break in normal consciousness, and both can result in similar symptoms of dissociation and denial of everyday reality. Late nineteenth-century mystics and historians of mysticism claim that mystical experience is internal and self-validating and yet, as they increasingly reject any dogmatic interpretation, they also face a similar dilemma. In a variety of texts by psychologists and mystical thinkers, I show how narrative cohesion, seen as the outward, linguistic expression of an inner existential or even moral order, emerges as a possible criterion for distinguishing between “insanity” and “true insight.” The second part of the essay investigates how fiction about mystical experience and insanity questions this notion of narrative cohesion, foregrounding self-deception and the historical, received, external quality of language and narratives of the self. I argue then that for fiction writers, the truth of mystical experience is neither purely internal nor objectively verifiable, but lies in constant inter-subjective communication, questioning, and reinvention.