by Sudhir Kakar
Parts of this book have been presented at different forums in condensed versions. Chapters 2 and 3 were originally delivered as the George De Vos Lectures at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. Chapter 2 also formed the basis of a talk at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. Chapter 6 was presented in the Social Science Seminar at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, and the Department of Political Science, Cornell University. I also wish to thank my friend John Ross for his comments and suggestions. Chapter 7 was presented at the Conference on Human Development, University of Chicago, the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society, Zurich, and the Second International Psychoanalytic Symposium at Delphi. It was published under the title ‘The Maternal-Feminine in Indian Psychoanalysis.’ in the International Review of Psychoanalysis 16(3), 1989, and I am grateful to the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London for their pemission to reprint. Finally, I wish to thank Jayashree and R. Shankar at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies for their help in the preparation of this typescript.
The Analyst and the Mystic
Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism
Contents
Dedication
Preface
1 Ramakrishna and the Mystical Experience
2 The Guru as Healer
3 Psychoanalysis and Religion Revisited
For
Wendy Doniger
in friendship and admiration
Preface
Two years ago, I was invited by the Divinity School of the University of Chicago to deliver its Haskell Lectures in the area of comparative religion. I accepted this invitation with alacrity. It encouraged me to return to a field which I had reconnoitered in an earlier work on the healing function of religion and of such religious ‘functionaries’ as shamans and mystics. After a decade-long intellectual exploration into the vagaries of sexual love, I welcomed the chance to once again engage with this other major area of human transcendence.
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the focus of these lectures would be ecstatic mysticism, which signifies both a continuity with the departure from my preceeding preoccupation with eroticism. Like the lover, the emotional mystic too strives for the transcendence of personal boundaries in an ineffable union with the other, though in the case of the latter the other is spelled with a capital “O”. The fervour of erotic passion, we know, only recognizes the spontaneity of religious passion as its equal and, in some cultures and at certain historical periods, even as its superior. I thus came to ecstatic, emotional mysticism with a curious sense of familiarity which I hoped would permit me access to its strangeness.
Mysticism for me is not something that lies outside the vast spaces of the human mind. Its insights, experiences, and yearnings are a heritage of our condition as human beings, they are a part of our humanity. Shorn of religious trappings, the mystical quest is not apart from the dailiness of life but pervades and informs life in its deepest layers.
I have approached the mystic as a psychoanalyst approaches a subject in the clinical encounter, with empathy, respect, and a sense of the complexity and wonder of human life. My intention has not been to pursue any reductionistic agenda, to ‘shrink’ the mystic, but rather to expand our understanding of his mystery and, ultimately, of the working of our own selves. Of course, given the nature of my discipline, the understanding of mysticism and mystical experiences I aim for is necessarily in a psychological mode. The psychological understanding, I hope, complements other kinds of understanding, it does not replace them. A psychological appropriation of mysticism is certainly not the intention of these reflections. Yet, if my endeavour, like those of the analyst before me, brings the mystic down from the level of ‘divine’ to that of human, I console myself with the thought that it may also help in raising the rest of us by making us more aware of our own sensuous and psychic potentials.
Traditionally, psychoanalysis has viewed art and science as valuable sublimatory creations. On the other hand, it has often seen in mysticism in particular and religion in general a regressive return to the protective beings (and being) of infancy and early childhood. Mysticism, I try to show in this book, is a radical enhancement of the capacity for creative experiencing, of the ability to experience ‘with all one’s heart, all one’s soul, and all one’s might.’ It requires that the mystic undergo a creative immersion in the deepest layers of his or her psyche, with its potential risk of phases of chaos and lack of integration. The mystical regression is akin to that of the analysand, an absorbing and at times painful process at the service of psychic transformation. It differs from most analyses in that the regression is deeper. Where the mystical ability to experience profoundly is sought to be enhanced within a master-disciple relationship, as in most schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism, the potential mystic may be better placed than the analysand to connect with—and perhaps correct—the depressive core at the base of human life which lies beyond language. Psychically, he or she is also more endangered. Mystical techniques in the master-disciple relationship, compared to those of psychoanalysis, are thus designed to foster radical regression, and the role of the master—guru, pir, roshi—is better understood by taking recourse to the concepts of the more ‘relational’ analysts such as Donald Winnicott and Heinz Kohut, rather than by remaining within the paradigm of classical psychoanalytic theory with its motivational emphasis on drives and defences.
The illustrative examples for my arguments are preeminently drawn from the Hindu religious tradition. Following a time-honored psychoanalytic usage where one strives for an in-depth understanding of a single case history in the hope that it may later prove to be representative for a host of other similar cases, I have tried to organize my observations and understanding of mysticism around the person of a single mystic, the 19-century Hindu saint, Shri Ramakrishna. I have sought to discuss in detail three interacting factors in his story—particular life historical experiences, the presence of a specific artistic or creative gift, and a facilitating cultural environment—which I believe may well go into the making of a mystic, at least of the ecstatic variety.
The first chapter of this book was also presented as an invited talk to the Canadian Psychoanalytic Association in Montreal. The comments of my Canadian colleagues were most helpful. I am especially thankful to the discussant of the paper, Dr Eva Lester, for her helpful input which I have incorporated gratefully into the text.
1
Ramakrishna and the Mystical Experience
Of the many ways of inner transformation known to man, the mystical path is perhaps one of the most ancient, universal, and highly regarded, even when its practitioners have often lived in an uneasy truce, if not in frank antagonism, with the established religions of their societies.
The mystical path may be one but has many forks. Scholars of religion have distinguished them in various ways. Nathan Söderblom talks of ‘mysticism of the infinite,’ an elevation of awareness where the unifying experience with the suprahuman eliminates perception of the concrete and abstract elements from the sensate world. He contrasts this to ‘mysticism of personal life’ where the experience is not rooted in ecstatic rapture, but in a meeting with God in the midst of life’s problems and struggles, a meeting experienced at a deep level of faith within normal waking consciousness.1 Martin Buber and John of the Cross would be two exemplars of Söderblom’s mysticism of personal life. Of course, such distinctions are more sign posts rather than sharp dividers since shades of both ‘infinity’ and ‘personality’ will exist in every mystic.
Mysticism of the ‘infinite’, my own focus of interest, has also been variously categorized—nature mysticism, theistic mysticism, and monistic or soul mysticism—although it is doubtful whether the categories are any different at the level of inner experience. Yet another distinction is the one made by William James between sporadic and cultivated mysticism, which corresponds to Arthur Deikman’s separa
tion between untrained-sensate and trained-sensate mystical experiences.2 Ramakrishna was of course, a ‘career’ mystic, and though his initial forays into mysticism may have been sporadic and untrained, the latter half of his life was marked by regular and frequent mystical experiences of the cultivated, trained-sensate kind.
A mystical experience may be mild, such as a contact with a ‘sense of Beyond’ among completely normal people, or it may be extreme with ecstasies and visions. We know from survey studies that more or less mild mystical experiences are widespread, even in countries without an active mystical tradition and where the intellectual climate is not particularly conducive to mystical thought. In the United States, for instance, 35 per cent of the respondents in a large sample study by Andrew Greeley in 1975 reported having mystical experiences, a finding which has been since confirmed by other, comparable studies. It is significant that those who had such experiences were more educated than the national average and in ‘a state of psychological well-being’ unmarked by any obvious neurotic difficulties.3
My focus here, though, is mysticism of the extreme variety and especially ecstatic mysticism. Most dramatically manifested in visions and trances, psychologically it is characterized by an expansion of the inner world, by a consciousness suffusing the whole of the body from inside. The expanding consciousness also fills the external world which appears to be pervaded by a oneness of existence.
The overwhelming feeling is of the object of consciousness, the world, having at last become transparent and more real than its conventional reality. All of this is accompanied by heightened intrapsychic and bodily sensations, culminating in a great feeling of pleasure which eliminates or absorbs all other experience.4 Variously called cosmic consciousness, peak experience (Maslow), mahabhava, ecstatic mystical experience seems to differ from one where consciousness and its object, the world, become one and subject-object differentiations vanish. The samadhi of the Hindus, satori of Zen masters, and fana of the Sufis are some of the terms for this particular mystical experience. Again these distinctions are not either/or categories, the former often leading to the latter, as in the case of Ramakrishna, though not all mystics need to have spanned the whole gamut of mystical experience, each with its specific degree of ineffability and noesis—the conviction of knowing.
We must also remember that Ramakrishna was an heir to the Hindu mystical tradition which in spite of many similarities to the mysticism of other religious faiths, also has its own unique context. First, mysticism is the mainstream of Hindu religiosity, and thus Hindu mystics are generally without the restraints of their counterparts in monotheistic religious traditions such as Judaism, Islam, and to a lesser extent, Christianity, where mystical experiences and insights must generally be interpreted against a given dogmatic theology.5 A Hindu mystic is thus normally quite uninhibited in expressing his views and does not have to be on his guard lest these views run counter to the officially interpreted orthodoxy. Second, God as conceived in the monotheistic religions does not have the same significance in two major schools of Hindu mysticism. Upanishadic mysticism, for instance, is a quest for spiritual illumination wherein a person’s deepest essence is discovered to be identical with the common source of all other animate and inanimate beings. Yogic mysticism strives to realize the immortality of the human soul outside time, space, and matter. Through intensive introspection and practice of disciplines that lead to mastery of senses and mental processes, it seeks to realize the experience of one’s ‘soul’ as an unconditioned, eternal being, distinct from the ‘illusory’ consciousness of the conditioned being. In both Upanishadic and Yogic mysticism there is no trace of love of or yearning for communion with God, which is considered the highest manifestation of the mystical mood in both Christian and Islamic traditions and without which no unio mystica is conceivable. In these two Hindu schools, mystical liberation is achieved entirely through the mystic’s own efforts and without the intervention of divine grace. It is only in bhakti or devotional mysticism—Ramakrishna’s preferred form—where love for the Deity creeps in, where the mystic’s soul or ‘self is finally united with God (or Goddess) in an ecstatic surrender, that Hindu mysticism exhibits a strong family resemblance to the mysticism of monotheistic faiths.
Let me state at the outset that given the theoretical uncertainties in contemporary psychoanalysis which threaten its basic paradigm, the earlier equation of the mystical state with a devalued, if not pathological, regression comparable to a psychotic episode is ripe for radical revision. Many analysts interested in the phenomenon would now agree that in spite of superficial resemblances, the mystical retreat is neither as complete nor as compelling and obligatory as psychotic regression. Moreover, in contrast to the psychotic, the mystic’s ability to maintain affectionate ties remains unimpaired when it does not actually get enhanced. Given the analyst’s commitment to Freud’s dictum that the capacity ‘to love and work’ is perhaps the best outer criterium for mental health, then the mystic’s performance on both counts is impressive—that is, if one can succeed in emancipating one’s self from a circumscription of the notions of love and work dictated by convention. In short, the full force of the current flowing through the psyche that leads to short circuit in the psychotic may, and indeed does, illuminate the mystic.
Some of the more recent work in psychoanalysis recognizes that mystical states lead to more rather than less integration of the person.6 The mystics insight into the workings of his or her self is more rather than less acute. Although consciousness during the mystical trance may be characterized by ‘de-differentiation’ (to use Anton Ehrenzweig’s concept)7, that is, by the suspension of many kinds of boundaries and distinctions in both the inner and outer worlds, its final outcome is often an increase in the mystic’s ability to make ever-finer perceptual differentiations. In other words, the point is not the chaotic nature of the mystical experience, if it is indeed chaotic, but the mystic’s ability to create supreme order out of the apparent chaos. In fact, what I would like to do here is address the question Romain Rolland, in writing of Ramakrishna’s initial trances, posed for ‘physicians both of the body and of the mind,’ namely, ‘There is no difficulty in proving the apparent destruction of his whole mental structure, and the disintegration of its elements. But how were they reassembled into a synthetic entity of the highest order?’8 To put it differently, how does the mystic become master of his madness and of his reason alike whereas the schizophrenic remains their slave?
The timing of my attempt to formulate some kind of answers to these questions is not inopportune. Today, psychoanalysis is in a relatively better position of adequatio (adequateness) in relation to mystical phenomena as well as other states of altered consciousness, such as the possession trance. The adequatio principle, of course, states that the same phenomenon may hold entirely different sets of meaning for different observers.9 To a dog, a book belongs to a class of object which can be played with but not eaten. To the illiterate, it may be just a book, ink markings on paper he cannot decipher. To the average educated adult, the book is an impenetrable scientific tome. To the physicist, the volume is a brilliant treatise on relativity which makes him question some of the ways he looks at the universe. In each case the level of meaning is a function of the adequatio of the observer. As far as mysticism is concerned, psychoanalysts today are neither dogs nor even illiterates but are, perhaps, just moving beyond the stage of the average educated adult.
The increase in the level of analytical adequatio has not come about because of any analyst’s personal experience of training in the mystical disciplines (as far as I know). In part, this higher adequatio is due to the increased availability of analytically relevant information which is no longer limited to the writings or biographical and autobiographical accounts of a few Western mystics such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. In the last 15 years, we have had access to psychodynamic ally informed interviews with members of mystical cults who have travelled varied distances on the mystical
path and have experienced various states of altered consciousness, including the ecstatic trance.10 In addition, we have at least two detailed case histories of intensive psychoanalytic therapy with patients who had both mystical proclivities and trance experiences.11
More than the availability of additional information, the greater adequatio of psychoanalysis in relation to mysticism stems from the work of many writers—Erik Erikson, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Jacques Lacan come immediately to my mind—who, in spite of their very different theoretical concerns, pursued a common antireductionistic agenda. The cumulative effect of their writings has been to allow the adoption of what Winnicott, in talking of transitional phenomena, called ‘a particular quality in attitude’, with which I believe mystical states should also be observed. In other words, my own enhanced feeling of adequatio reflects the presence of an unstated project in contemporary psychoanalysis in which the copresence of different orders of experience is tolerated and no attempts are undertaken to explain one in terms of the other without reciprocity. As we shall see later, in their separate efforts to develop a phenomenology of creative experiencing, Winnicott, Lacan, and Bion are directly relevant for a reevaluation and reinterpretation of mystical phenomena.12 Of the three, whereas Winnicott was more the poet, Lacan and Bion, in their explicit concern with questions of ultimate reality, its evolution and reflection in psychic life, may fairly be described as the mystics of psychoanalysis. (As someone who spent his childhood in India, it is quite appropriate than Bion is radically sincere in his approach to ‘O’, his symbol for ultimate reality, whereas Lacan, I like to think, as befitting a Frenchman talking of the Real, is more an ironic mystic.)
