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The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism
"This work is of importance for psychoanalysts and scholars of the psychology of religion. Kakar makes a scholarly and significant contribution to the objectification of what psychoanalysis and Hindu mystical tradition have in common."—Ana Maria Rizzuto, Tufts University
- GenresPsychologySocial Science
91 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1992
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About the author
Sudhir Kakar
56 books84 followersSudhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst and writer who lives in Goa, India.
Kakar took his Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Gujarat University, his Master’s degree (Diplom-Kaufmann) in business economics from Mannheim in Germany and his doctorate in economics from Vienna before beginning his training in psychoanalysis at the Sigmund-Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany in 1971. Between 1966 and 1971, Sudhir Kakar was a Lecturer in General Education at Harvard University, Research Associate at Harvard Business School and Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
After returning to India in 1975 , Dr. Kakar set up a practice as a psychoanalyst in Delhi where he was also the Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology. He has been 40th Anniversary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard (2001-02), a visiting professor at the universities of Chicago (1989-93), McGill (1976-77), Melbourne (1981), Hawaii (1998) and Vienna (1974-75), INSEAD, France (1994-2013). He has been a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute of Advanced Study), Berlin, Centre for Advanced Study of Humanities, University of Cologne and is Honorary Professor, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam.
A leading figure in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, as well as a novelist, Dr. Kakar’s person and work have been profiled in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Die Zeit and Le Nouvel Observateur, which listed him as one of the world's 25 major thinkers while the German weekly Die Zeit portrayed Sudhir Kakar as one of the 21 important thinkers for the 21st century. Dr. Kakar's many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany ’s Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Residency, McArthur Fellowship Bhabha, Nehru and ICSSR National Fellowships and Distinguished Service Award of Indo-American Psychiatric Association. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Board of Sigmund Freud Archives in the Library of Congress, Washington and the Academie Universelle des Culture, France. In February 2012, he was conferred the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country's highest civilian order.
Sudhir Kakar’s twenty books of non-fiction and six of fiction, include The Inner World (now in its 16th printing since its first publication in 1978), Shamans, Mystics and Doctors , (with J.M. Ross ) Tales of Love, Sex and Danger,Intimate Relations, The Analyst and the Mystic, The Colors of Violence,Culture and Psyche, (with K.Kakar) The Indians: Portrait of a People, (with Wendy Doniger), a new translation of the Kamasutra for Oxford world Classics, Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern world and Young Tagore: The makings of a genius. His fifth novel, The Devil Take Love will be published by Penguin-Viking in August 2015.
Sudhir with Katharina Poggendorf Kakar
Sudhir Kakar is married to Katharina, a writer and a scholar of comparative religions and artist. He has two children, a son Rahul who is in financial services, and a daughter Shveta, a lawyer, both in New York.
Kakar took his Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Gujarat University, his Master’s degree (Diplom-Kaufmann) in business economics from Mannheim in Germany and his doctorate in economics from Vienna before beginning his training in psychoanalysis at the Sigmund-Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany in 1971. Between 1966 and 1971, Sudhir Kakar was a Lecturer in General Education at Harvard University, Research Associate at Harvard Business School and Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
After returning to India in 1975 , Dr. Kakar set up a practice as a psychoanalyst in Delhi where he was also the Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology. He has been 40th Anniversary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard (2001-02), a visiting professor at the universities of Chicago (1989-93), McGill (1976-77), Melbourne (1981), Hawaii (1998) and Vienna (1974-75), INSEAD, France (1994-2013). He has been a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute of Advanced Study), Berlin, Centre for Advanced Study of Humanities, University of Cologne and is Honorary Professor, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam.
A leading figure in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, as well as a novelist, Dr. Kakar’s person and work have been profiled in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Die Zeit and Le Nouvel Observateur, which listed him as one of the world's 25 major thinkers while the German weekly Die Zeit portrayed Sudhir Kakar as one of the 21 important thinkers for the 21st century. Dr. Kakar's many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany ’s Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Residency, McArthur Fellowship Bhabha, Nehru and ICSSR National Fellowships and Distinguished Service Award of Indo-American Psychiatric Association. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Board of Sigmund Freud Archives in the Library of Congress, Washington and the Academie Universelle des Culture, France. In February 2012, he was conferred the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country's highest civilian order.
Sudhir Kakar’s twenty books of non-fiction and six of fiction, include The Inner World (now in its 16th printing since its first publication in 1978), Shamans, Mystics and Doctors , (with J.M. Ross ) Tales of Love, Sex and Danger,Intimate Relations, The Analyst and the Mystic, The Colors of Violence,Culture and Psyche, (with K.Kakar) The Indians: Portrait of a People, (with Wendy Doniger), a new translation of the Kamasutra for Oxford world Classics, Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern world and Young Tagore: The makings of a genius. His fifth novel, The Devil Take Love will be published by Penguin-Viking in August 2015.
Sudhir with Katharina Poggendorf Kakar
Sudhir Kakar is married to Katharina, a writer and a scholar of comparative religions and artist. He has two children, a son Rahul who is in financial services, and a daughter Shveta, a lawyer, both in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 18, 2018
Sigmund Freud had a hostile view on religion, believing its various aspects to be an expression of the infantile in mental life. Freudian psychoanalysis saw religious ideas as reflecting the child’s helplessness in a threatening world and as the child’s ambivalent feelings towards a father who is both a protector and one to be feared. Freudians saw religious rituals and practices as the self-imposed restrictions of the obsessive neurotic and Mystical experience as a regression to the primary narcissism of the infant united at the mother’s breast. Wilhelm Reich even saw mysticism as distorted sexuality which blocked sexual excitement and prevented orgiastic release. However, there have been other views on religion in the psychoanalytic tradition from Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, which are more conciliatory. They saw a convergence between the two with their common goal lying in the healing of man’s soul. This view made Fromm look at religions as humanist as well as authoritarian. Humanist religions are those which aim at the fullest self-realization and the achievement of greatest inner strength. Authoritarian religions want man to submit and surrender to a transcendant power. They extol obedience, reverence and worship of a higher entity. Author Sudhir Kakar brings his experience from his Indian cultural background and applies the Hindu-Buddhist tradition to bear on this relationship between religion, mysticism and psychoanalysis. He sees a parallel in psychoanalytic practice with the Guru-Shishya (master-disciple) relationship in India, which aims for the personal transformation of the disciple as the goal. We can see the therapy sessions as ‘joint meditation’ by the analyst and patient instead of the solitary one in the Hindu-Buddhist practice. In some ways, we can see psychoanalysis as the ‘secular Western counterpart to Tantric practice’. The Indian may even see psychoanalysis as a specific and elaborate theory of Karma with its emphasis on the influence of the past on the present.
This book’s main focus however, is on mysticism. Mysticism by its nature lies beyond scientific understanding due to its non-rational element. Kakar says that a psychoanalytic perspective on religion and mysticism is possible only when we leave the Western bias of regarding anything non-rational as irrational. He approaches a mystic as a ‘psychoanalyst approaches a subject in a clinical encounter - with empathy, respect and a sense of the complexity and wonder of human life’. Kakar’s thesis is that mystical experiences actually transcend the irrational. To quote his words, “mysticism becomes the preeminent way of uncovering the vein of creativity that runs deep in all of us". For him, the mystical path chosen by saints is a way of recapturing and cultivating ideal, creative experiencing. Much of this is supported by his analysis of the life experiences of the late 19th century Indian saint, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. A whole chapter is devoted to Ramakrishna, his mystical experiences and their inter-relationship with sexuality.
Classical psychoanalysis was harsh in characterizing Ramakrishna’s cross-dressing as a woman as perversions and repressed sexuality. His other bodily forms at other times of his life were condemned similarly. But Kakar brings fresh insight into it by delving deep into his knowledge and experience with Hinduism. Kakar says that Ramakrishna’s mysticism can be understood by how he described his passionate love for God through his many ‘Bhava’s. A Bhava is a feeling or mood. It is a state of mind and body pervaded with a particular emotion. So, when Ramakrishna felt like expressing romantic and passionate feelings towards God, he assumed he was the ‘gopika’ (cowherd girl) Radha and the God was Krishna. He dressed, behaved and lived like a girl for six months. He experienced it as ‘madhurya bhava’ or the romantic state of mind. At another time, when he felt the mood of surrender and submission to God, he assumed the ‘dasya bhava’ of Hanuman and attached an artificial tail to his posterior in an effort to resemble the monkey god who was devoted to Rama. If he felt the mood of motherly love towards God, he assumed the image of mother Yashoda towards Krishna. He would have one of his disciples who felt like a child towards him, lean against his lap as if suckling at his breast. In this way, Kakar says that Mysticism uncovers the creative experience in the Indian tradition.
The chapter on ‘Guru as Healer’ has many interesting insights. Kakar says that the devotee (or disciple) comes to the Guru just as patients do to the analyst, in a conflicted state. It is a relationship which is an extension of the parent-child relationship and so constitutes a second chance for the integration and cohesion of the self. Surrender of the disciple’s self is central in this relationship. Conflict causes anguish and suffering. Surrender with equanimity and understanding fills the heart and removes emptiness that existed before. In this context, Kakar makes a fascinating and original contribution in the understanding of ‘religious healing’ that takes place between the Guru and the disciple through ‘darshan’. ‘Darshan’ is defined as the silent looking at each other as the most important form of interaction between the Guru and the disciple. Kakar contrasts this silent interaction with what happens in psychoanalysis. In classic analysis, verbalization through words is the carrier of knowledge that heals and silence is interpreted as resistance and defensive inhibition. In the silent ‘looking’ of ‘darshan’, the disciple internalizes the Guru as a benign figure who is different from his bad inner objects. This leads to strong emotional ties with the Gurus resulting in possibilities of healing effects which are deeper and longer-lasting than what psychoanalysis is able to achieve.
As one reflects on this, the vulgarization and commercialization of the Guru-disciple relationship in contemporary India rises jarringly in one’s mind. Kakar does not dodge this subject. In fact, he takes it all the way to its culmination. Just like some therapists, he says that there are Gurus who regress to an omnipotent grandiosity and even retreat into sexual perversion. Gurus have been known to spy voyeuristically on their teenaged female disciples undressing in their quarters. Kakar makes bold to say that these sexual aberrations may actually be facilitated by the way the fundamentals of healing are conceptualized in the Guru-disciple encounter. Given the specific kind of intimacy of this encounter, except for cultural disapproval, there is no reason why it should not proceed towards the most intimate encounter of all, which is a merger of the two souls through their bodies and eventually, the transformation through the Guru’s purest and innermost substance - his semen.
The book is insightful and brings together an integration of Eastern and Western thoughts with great clarity. Contrary to what a positivist would think, psychoanalysis, religion and mysticism seem to have much in common, if only one has empathy towards these disciplines. The book is an enjoyable read and is accessible to the general reader. Dr. Kakar’s elucidations are clear and to the point.
Reading this short monograph of barely a hundred pages is time well worth spent on it.
This book’s main focus however, is on mysticism. Mysticism by its nature lies beyond scientific understanding due to its non-rational element. Kakar says that a psychoanalytic perspective on religion and mysticism is possible only when we leave the Western bias of regarding anything non-rational as irrational. He approaches a mystic as a ‘psychoanalyst approaches a subject in a clinical encounter - with empathy, respect and a sense of the complexity and wonder of human life’. Kakar’s thesis is that mystical experiences actually transcend the irrational. To quote his words, “mysticism becomes the preeminent way of uncovering the vein of creativity that runs deep in all of us". For him, the mystical path chosen by saints is a way of recapturing and cultivating ideal, creative experiencing. Much of this is supported by his analysis of the life experiences of the late 19th century Indian saint, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. A whole chapter is devoted to Ramakrishna, his mystical experiences and their inter-relationship with sexuality.
Classical psychoanalysis was harsh in characterizing Ramakrishna’s cross-dressing as a woman as perversions and repressed sexuality. His other bodily forms at other times of his life were condemned similarly. But Kakar brings fresh insight into it by delving deep into his knowledge and experience with Hinduism. Kakar says that Ramakrishna’s mysticism can be understood by how he described his passionate love for God through his many ‘Bhava’s. A Bhava is a feeling or mood. It is a state of mind and body pervaded with a particular emotion. So, when Ramakrishna felt like expressing romantic and passionate feelings towards God, he assumed he was the ‘gopika’ (cowherd girl) Radha and the God was Krishna. He dressed, behaved and lived like a girl for six months. He experienced it as ‘madhurya bhava’ or the romantic state of mind. At another time, when he felt the mood of surrender and submission to God, he assumed the ‘dasya bhava’ of Hanuman and attached an artificial tail to his posterior in an effort to resemble the monkey god who was devoted to Rama. If he felt the mood of motherly love towards God, he assumed the image of mother Yashoda towards Krishna. He would have one of his disciples who felt like a child towards him, lean against his lap as if suckling at his breast. In this way, Kakar says that Mysticism uncovers the creative experience in the Indian tradition.
The chapter on ‘Guru as Healer’ has many interesting insights. Kakar says that the devotee (or disciple) comes to the Guru just as patients do to the analyst, in a conflicted state. It is a relationship which is an extension of the parent-child relationship and so constitutes a second chance for the integration and cohesion of the self. Surrender of the disciple’s self is central in this relationship. Conflict causes anguish and suffering. Surrender with equanimity and understanding fills the heart and removes emptiness that existed before. In this context, Kakar makes a fascinating and original contribution in the understanding of ‘religious healing’ that takes place between the Guru and the disciple through ‘darshan’. ‘Darshan’ is defined as the silent looking at each other as the most important form of interaction between the Guru and the disciple. Kakar contrasts this silent interaction with what happens in psychoanalysis. In classic analysis, verbalization through words is the carrier of knowledge that heals and silence is interpreted as resistance and defensive inhibition. In the silent ‘looking’ of ‘darshan’, the disciple internalizes the Guru as a benign figure who is different from his bad inner objects. This leads to strong emotional ties with the Gurus resulting in possibilities of healing effects which are deeper and longer-lasting than what psychoanalysis is able to achieve.
As one reflects on this, the vulgarization and commercialization of the Guru-disciple relationship in contemporary India rises jarringly in one’s mind. Kakar does not dodge this subject. In fact, he takes it all the way to its culmination. Just like some therapists, he says that there are Gurus who regress to an omnipotent grandiosity and even retreat into sexual perversion. Gurus have been known to spy voyeuristically on their teenaged female disciples undressing in their quarters. Kakar makes bold to say that these sexual aberrations may actually be facilitated by the way the fundamentals of healing are conceptualized in the Guru-disciple encounter. Given the specific kind of intimacy of this encounter, except for cultural disapproval, there is no reason why it should not proceed towards the most intimate encounter of all, which is a merger of the two souls through their bodies and eventually, the transformation through the Guru’s purest and innermost substance - his semen.
The book is insightful and brings together an integration of Eastern and Western thoughts with great clarity. Contrary to what a positivist would think, psychoanalysis, religion and mysticism seem to have much in common, if only one has empathy towards these disciplines. The book is an enjoyable read and is accessible to the general reader. Dr. Kakar’s elucidations are clear and to the point.
Reading this short monograph of barely a hundred pages is time well worth spent on it.
July 10, 2016
Today the world is troubled with "Terrorism" which has its origin in the 'Chaos' theory.Only this so called 'terrorism' have the potential to destroy our entire universe in a fraction of a second.Sudhir Kakkar who is an IIT engineer and now lives in Goa has touched a subject so diverse from his practising field that it is unbelievable.He describes about how a common god fearing person could carry on to become one of the living legends of his time by simply allowing religion to dominate the whole proceedings and thus following "Ma Kali"thus sow the fruits of love and peace for the future generations to follow.It was a beautiful synergy that existed between Ramakrishna's demographics-- he was born when his father was above 60 and his mother 45 years of old...at a time when average age of a person was 30 years[Ramakrishna's disciple Swami Vivekananda himself lived upto 39 years] and --- the hardest will to survive by lunaatic/fanatic person as called by the present British culture.It shows that a form of relatiionship exists between relegion and analysis....as how Ramakrishna unfdolded mysteries which western educated people at that time couldnot.
April 27, 2020
Though I was extremely intrigued by the topic of the book, felt disappointed by the end of it. Expected that the writer would spend more time regarding Ramakrishna Paramhansa however felt it only covered about a third of the entire book. The remaining portion mostly spoke about Freud. However there are some interesting facts which you wouldn’t come across otherwise.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews