The Many Faces of the Subject-Object-Merge

The notion of a subject-object-merge shows up in many places under many different names. I present here a few samples.

Hystorian of consciousness, Morris Berman, speculates on early human consciousness being predominantly of the subject-object-merge type, calling it "participating consciousness".

A member of this cosmos was not an alienated observer of it but a direct participant in its drama. His personal destiny was bound up with its destiny, and this relationship gave meaning to his life. This type of consciousness - what I shall refer to in this book as "participating consciousness" - involves a merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene.
(Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p.16)

Another word for it: MIMESIS

MIMESIS: Greek word for imitation, and the root of English words such as "mime" and "mimicry." More broadly, submitting to the spell of a performer, or becomimg immersed in events; the state of consciousness in which the subject/object dichotomy breaks down and the person feels identified with what he or she is perceiving.
(Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p.346)

I suspect Zen is larglely based on the subject-object-merge also:

The term Zen comes from 'ch'an-na' which in the Chinese transliteration of a Sanskrit word 'dhy�na'. It signifies the mystical experience in which God and man are one or in which subjectivity and objectivity merge.
(Sohaku Ogata, Zen for the West, p.11)

Finally, the subject-object-merge is a recognized physchological phenomenon, of which Freud's notorious "oceanic feeling" is a developmental residue:

... originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive - indeed, an all-embracing - feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity [individuated consciousness], like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe - the same ideas with which my friend elucidated the 'oceanic' feeling.
(Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p.15-16)

And since then others have described it under many other names:

Preconscious unity with the environment, a state of "symbiosis" that has been called by many names - "cosmic anonymity" (Erich Neumann), "infant-world unity" (Kurt Goldstein) - has been taken by psychoanalytic theory as a given of early human life.
(Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses, p.25)

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