Despair, impatience, horror at myself, in time delivered me -- even while I was trying sometimes to find once again the bewildering path of ecstasy, sometimes to be done with it, to go resolutely to bed, to sleep. Suddenly, I stood up and I was completely taken. As I had earlier become a tree, but the tree was still myself -- and what I became differed no less than on of the "objects" which I had just possessed-- so I became a flame. But I say "flame' only by comparison. When I had become the tree, I had in mind, clearly and distinctly, an idea of a woody plant. Whereas the new chance experience answered to nothing which one could have evoked in advance. The upper part of my body -- above the solar plexus--had disappeared, or at least no longer gave rise to sensations that could be isolated. Only my legs -- which kept me standing upright, connected what I had become to the floor--kept a link to what I had been: the rest was an inflamed gushing forth, overpowering, even free of its own convulsion. ( p 127, Inner Experience)
This temporary ego loss in the paranoid-shizoid position is what is at the heart of shamanism. Bataille sees a shamanistic motif and manner of seeing in Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" idea. But there is always a return to the depressive position. So, Bataille sees a Hegelian dialectic in this shamanistic movement back and forth, and Anton Ehrenzweig sees the movement between Ps--->D and back and forth as the manner in which art is created.
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