by Sudhir Kakar
The major focus of the Kohutian psychology of the self is what he called a selfobject.18 One exists as a person, a self, because a significant other, the selfobject, has addressed one as a self and evoked the self experience. Selfobjects, strictly speaking, are not persons but the subjective aspect of a function performed by a relationship. It is thus more apt to speak of selfobject experiences, intrapsychic rather than interpersonal, which evoke, maintain, and give cohesion to the self.19 The very emergence and maintenance of the self as a psychological structure, then, depends on the continued presence of an evoking-sustaining-responding matrix of selfobject experiences. Always needed, from birth to death, the absence of these experiences leads to a sense of fragmentation of the self, including, in extreme states of narcissistic starvation, the terrors of self dissolution.
The mode of needed selfobject experiences, of course, changes with age from the simple to the more complex. In a child, the required selfobject experience occurs primarily, though not exclusively (remember the importance of the glow in the mother’s eye and of the affirmative timbre in her voice), through physical ministrations. In the adult, symbolic selfobject experiences supplied by his culture, such as religious, aesthetic, and group experiences, may replace some of the more concrete modes of infancy and childhood. In the language of self psychology, the guru is the primary cultural selfobject experience for adults in Hindu tradition and society. For everyone whose self was weakened because of faulty selfobject relations during crucial developmental phases or for those who have been forced into defensive postures by the self’s fragility where they are cut off from all normal sustaining and healing selfobject responses, the guru is the culture’s irresistible offer for the redressal of injury and the provision of selfobject experiences needed for the strengthening of the self.
It is the immanence of the healing moment in the guru-disciple relationship which inevitably pushes the guru image toward that of a divine parent and of the disciple toward that of a small child. Western psychiatrists have tended to focus more on the pathology and the malevolent regression unleashed by the psychic shifts in the images of the self and the guru when therapeutic expectations of the disciples take firm hold.20 They have talked of the extreme submissiveness of the disciples, of a denial of strong unconscious hostility, of the devotee’s deepest desire being of oral dependence on the mother, and so on.
I believe the Western psychiatric emphasis on the pathological and regressive—‘bad’ regressive—aspects of the guru-disciple relationship does it injustice. However one may prefer the Enlightenment virtues of reason and ideological egalitarianism, the universal power exercised by what I would call the guru fantasy is not to be denied. By guru fantasy I mean the existence of someone, somewhere, who will heal the wounds suffered in the original parent-child relationship. It is the unconscious longing for the curer of the ‘world-disease,’ a longing which marks all potentially healing encounters whether they are or not officially termed as such. This fantasy invariably exerts its power in changing the self-image of the seeker and of the healing Other in the directions I have described above.
My own profession, psychoanalysis, in its theories of cure has not escaped from the ubiquitous power of this fantasy. Patients, of course, have always approached analysis and analysts with a full-blown guru fantasy. Analysts, on the other hand, tended at first to believe with Freud that healing took place through knowledge and an expansion of conscious awareness. Yet beginning with one of the most original of the first generation of analysts, Sandor Ferenzci, there has been a growing body of opinion which holds the person of the analyst and his interaction with the patient, in which the analyst counteracts the specific pathogenic deficit of the parent-child relationship, as the prime carriers of the healing moment. Franz Alexander was perhaps the most outright advocate of the analyst adopting corrective postures, but the stress on the role of the analyst as someone who makes up in some fashion or other for a deficient nonempathic parent is met with again and again in analytical literature, especially in the school of object relations. Winnicott, for instance, believed that with patients who suffered from not-good-enough early maternal environment, the analytic setting and the analyst, more than his interpretations, provided an opportunity for the development of an ego, for its integration from ego nuclei. Kohut’s self psychology with its stress on the curative powers of the analyst’s empathy moves further in the same direction. As Ernst Wolf states the self psychological position, ‘It is not the content of the information conveyed to the patient, not the substance of the interpretations and interventions made, not the correctness of the therapist’s conjectures, not even the therapist’s compliance with demands to ‘mirror’ the patient or to be his or her ideal that is pivotal: It is decisive for the progress of the therapeutic endeavour that the patient experience an ambience in which he or she feels respected, accepted and at least a little understood…. The person who is the therapist then becomes as crucial a variable as the person who is the patient.’21
Many years earlier, Sacha Nacht had captured this shift in the psychoanalytic view of healing when he said ‘It is of more value from the curative point of view, to have a mediocre interpretation supported by good transference than the reverse.’22 In interviews with devotees, the unconscious expectation that the guru will counteract specific parental deficits becomes manifest in the way an individual selects a particular guru. It seems to be a fact that often the Master who is experienced as an incarnation of the Divine by his own disciples leaves other seekers cold. In the politics of gurudom, reverence and worship by your own devotees does not ensure that you are not a figure of indifference, even of derision and contempt, to other gurus and members of their cults. Let me illustrate.
Amita, a 30-year-old woman who is a lecturer in Hindi in a local college, is one of the closest disciples of a contemporary female guru, Nirmala Devi. Born into an orthdox middleclass Brahmin family, she has been engaged in the ‘search’ ever since childhood. ‘My mother used to worship 560 million gods every day,’ she says in a bitter, contemptuous voice, ‘but it didn’t change her a bit. She was a hot-tempered, dried-up woman with little human sympathy or kindness. So what was the use of observing all the rites and praying to the gods?’ As Amita talks of her past, it is clear that she has been in a hostile clinch with her mother all her life. Amita went to see many gurus but was dissatisfied with every one of them till one day, a few years ago, she attended one of Mataji’s public meetings. Her conversion was instantaneous and she has remained a devoted disciple ever since. ‘Mataji is like the cloud that gives rain to everyone,’ she says. I am struck by the juxtaposition of her imagery in which mother is dry while Mataji brims over with the rain of love.
For Amita, then, Mataji’s parental style has elements of both the familiar and the strange. The familiarity is in Mataji’s fierceness, the ‘hot temper’; the difference, and this is indeed crucial, is in the preponderance of warmth and love in Mataji as compared to Amita’s early experience of the indifference of her mother’s style. A guru like the late Maharaj Charan Singh of the Radhasoami sect, I would suggest, is too remote from Amita’s central conflict, while the late Bhagwan Rajneesh, of Oregon and Pune fame, would be too threatening to the moral values of a girl brought up in an orthodox, middleclass Brahmin family. Mataji’s parental style, on the other hand, dovetails with Amita’s selfobject needs and social experience.
That the guru-disciple relationship is in important ways an extension of the parent-child relationship, constituting a developmental second chance for obtaining the required nutrients for the cohesion, integration, and vigorousness of self, is implicit in some of the older devotional literature and is often explicitly stated by modern gurus. Basava, the 12th-century founder of the Virsaiva sect, identifies the guru god with a particular aspect of the mother:
As a mother runs
Close behind the child
With his hand on a cobra
or a fire
The lord of meeting ri
vers
Stays with me
Every step of the way
And looks after me.23
In his instructions to disciples a contemporary guru, Swami Satyanand Saraswati, tells us, ‘Now in relation with the guru, the disciple chooses and bhava (emotional state) for himself, according to his personality and needs, and develops that to its fullest potential. If he feels the need for a friend, he should regard the guru as his friend. Or, if he has been lacking parental love, the guru can be his father and mother…. It all depends on your basic needs and which area of your personality is the most powerful. Sometimes in adopting a certain bhava toward the guru, the disciple tends to transfer his complexes and neurosis too. If he has become insecure due to the suffering meted out to him by harsh parents, then in relationship with the guru too, he feels insecure.’24
Swami Satyanand’s remarks also tell us of the difficulties in the path of surrender to the guru, an emotional experience which is indispensable for mutative changes in the disciple’s self.
If there is one demand made by the guru on the disciple, it is of surrender, an opening up and receptivity of the latter’s psyche which is sometimes sought to be conveyed through (what men imagine to be) the imagery of female sexual experience. Saraswati writes, ‘When you surrender to the guru, you become like a valley, a vacuum, an abyss, a bottomless pit. You acquire depth, not height. This surrender can be felt in many ways. The guru begins to manifest in you; his energy begins to flow into you. The guru’s energy is continuously flowing, but in order to receive it, you have to become a womb, a receptacle.’25
Surrender of the self is, of course, ubiquitous in the religious traditions of the world. In his The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James called it regeneration by relaxing and letting go, psychologically indistinguishable from Lutheran justification by faith and the Wesleyan acceptance of free grace. He characterized it as giving one’s private convulsive self a rest and finding that a greater self is there. ‘The results, slow or sudden, great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomenon which ensues on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature.’ He added, … ‘You see why self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning point of religious life…. One may say the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender.’26
In Sufism, too, surrender to the master is a necessary prerequisite for the state of fana fil-shaykh or annihilation of oneself in the master. Of the radah, the relationship between the Sufi master and his disciple, the Sufi poet says: ‘O heart, if thou wanted the Beloved to be happy with thee, then thou must do and say what he commands. If he says, “Weep blood!” do not ask “Why?”; if He says, “Die!” do not say “How is that fitting?”27
In terms of self psychology, surrender is the full flowering of the idealizing transference, with its strong need for the experience of merging into a good and powerful, wise and perfect selfobject—the guru. ‘This is the secret of the guru-disciple relationship,’ says one guru. ‘The guru is the disciple, but perfected, complete. When he forms a relationship with the guru, the disciple is in fact forming a relationship with his own best self.’28 The disciple, in experiencing his or her self as part of the guru’s self, hearing with the guru’s ears, seeing with the guru’s eyes, tasting with the guru’s tongue, feeling with the guru’s skin, may be said to be striving for some of the most archaic selfobject experiences.
Ramakrishna, the arch example of the Indian penchant for using narrative form in construction of a coherent and integrated world, of his preference for the language of the concrete, of image and symbol over more conceptual and abstract forms, tells us the following parable.
One day while driving with Arjuna (the warrior hero of the epic Mahabharata), Krishna (who is both God and Arjuna’s guru) looked at the sky and said, ‘See, Friend, how beautiful is the flock of pigeons flying there!’ Arjuna saw it and immediately said, ‘Yes, friend, very beautiful pigeons indeed.’ The very next moment Krishna looked up again and said, ‘How strange, friend, they are by no means pigeons.’ Arjuna saw the birds and said, ‘Quite so, my friend, they are not pigeons at all.’ ‘Now try to understand the matter,’ Ramakrishan exhorts us. ‘Arjuna’s truthfulness is unquestionable. He could have never flattered Krishna in agreeing with him both the times. But Arjuna’s devotional surrender to Krishna was so very great that he actually saw with his own eyes whatever Krishna saw with his.’29
Devotees come to the guru, as do patients to the analyst, in a conflicted state. On the one hand, there is the unconscious hope of making up for missing or deficient selfobject responses in interaction with the guru. On the other hand, there is the fear of evoking self-fragmenting responses through the same interaction. The omnipresence of fears of injury to the self and of regression into early primitive states of self-dissolution is what forces the devotee to be wary of intimacy. It prevents the desired surrender to the guru, however high the conscious idealization of the values of surrender and letting go might be. Gurus are of course aware of the conflict and in their various ways have sought to reassure the disciples about their fears. Muktananda, for instance, writes, ‘There are only two ways to live: One is with constant conflict, and the other is with surrender. Conflict leads to anguish and suffering…. But when someone surrenders with understanding and equanimity, his house, body and heart become full. His former feeling of emptiness and lack disappears.’30 And one of his disciples puts it in a language which the modern self psychologist would have no hesitation in acknowledging as his own: ‘We live in countless fleeting relationships, always seeking, finding and losing again. As children and adults, we learn through these relationships. We learn by taking into ourselves our loved ones’ thoughts and voices, absorbing our loved ones’ very presence along with their knowledge.’31 Gurus, gurus have always emphasized, are not human beings, not objects in the inelegant language of psychoanalysis, but functions. They are the power of grace in spiritual terms and intense selfobject experiences in the language of self psychology.
The psychological term ‘intense selfobject experience’ of course transfers the location of the fount of ‘grace’ from the person of the guru to the psyche of the devotee. It is a grace we have all experienced as infants when the mother’s various ministrations transformed our internal world from states of disintegration to one of feeling integrated, from dreaded intimations of fragmentation to blissful experiences of wholeness. The persistent search for this inner metamorphosis in adult life is what makes the guru in India—to use Christopher Bollas’ concept—a primary ‘transformational object.’32 He is the culturally sanctioned addressee of a collective request for the transforming experience which goes beyond healing in its narrow sense. The guru’s grace is, then, the devotee’s recollection of an earlier transformed state. It is a remembrance, Bollas reminds us, which does not take place cognitively but existentially through intense affective experience, even when the latter is not on the same scale as in early life. The anticipation of being transformed by the guru inspires the reverential attitude toward his person, an attitude which in secular man, especially in the West, is more easily evoked by the transformational objects of art than those of religious faith.
The idealizing transference, leading to the merging experience, is thus the core of the healing process in the guru-disciple relationship. The healing is seen in terms of an alchemical transformation of the self: ‘When iron comes in contact with the philosopher’s stone, it is transmuted in gold. Sandalwood trees infuse their fragrance into the trees around them.’33 Psychoanalysts, of the object relations and self psychology schools, will have no quarrel with this formulation of the basis of healing. Their model of the healthy person, however, requires an additional step—of reemergence; the drowning and the resurfacing are both constituents of psychological growth, at all developmental levels. In Kohut’s language, healing wi
ll not only involve an ancient merger state but a further shift from this state to an experience of empathic resonance with the selfobject.
Gurus are generally aware of the dangers of self-fragmentation and the disciple’s defences against that dreaded inner state. Modern gurus, like Muktananda, talk explicitly about the agitation and anxiety a disciple may feel when he is close to the guru. The training required en route to surrender is hard and painful. Merger experience, they know, takes place not at once but in progressive stages as, for instance, depicted in Jnaneshvara’s description of the unfolding of the guru-disciple relationship in the imagery of bridal mysticism.34 They are aware of the resistances and the negative transferences, the times when the devotee loses faith in the guru, and doubts and suspicions tend to creep in. Do not break the relationship when this is happening, is the general and analytically sound advice. The development of inimical feelings toward the guru are part of the process of healing transformation. What is important about the feelings toward the guru is their strength, not their direction. Whether devoted or hostile, as long as the disciple remains turned toward the guru, he will be met by total acceptance. Muktananda describes the ideal guru’s behavior: ‘A true guru breaks your old habits of fault-finding, of seeing sin, of hating yourself. He roots out the negative seeds that you have sown as well as your feelings of guilt…. You willl never hear the guru criticize you. Instead, when you are in his company, you will never be found guilty in the guru’s eyes. You will find in them only the praise of your hidden inner God.’35
The ‘ambience of affective acceptance’ provided by the guru and his establishment, the ashram, will, the master knows, make the disciple feel increasingly safe, shifting the inner balance betweeen need and fear toward the former. Old repressed and disavowed selfobject needs will rewaken and be mobilized, making the transference more and more intense. Or, put simply, as the conflict between need and fear recedes, the guru, like the analyst, will become the focus for the freshly released, though old, capacities for love, which push strongly toward a merger with the beloved.
