Faithworks: In the maelstrom of grief, there’s a glimpse through the windows to another place; Freud, Carl Jung; Arthur Koestler

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In the maelstrom of grief, there’s a glimpse through the windows to another place

Richard Castles Contributor September 7, 2025 — 5.30am Advertisement

Soon after my wife died last year, I had a vision of her so vivid I couldn’t help but wonder if she was in the bardo – the state between life and death, according to Buddhism. Sigmund Freud regarded such hallucinations as wishful psychoses, images that arise from the profound difficulty accepting that a loved one is gone. The vulnerability of grief makes us ripe for delusion.

But what if he had it back to front? What if it is precisely at these times, when the ego is fragile, that we experience a different state of consciousness that is closer to reality?

Sigmund Freud: what wo