by Sudhir Kakar
If there is a second word besides surrender with which the guru-disciple relationship can be captured, it is intimacy. As Lawrence Babb remarks of his interviews with the devotees of Sai Baba, ‘What emerges as one general theme in these accounts is the same kind of visual, tactile and alimentary intimacy that is so central to devotional Hinduism in general. The devotees long to see him, to hear him, to be near him, to have private audiences with him, to touch him (especially his feet) and to receive or consume, or use in other ways, substances and objects that have been touched by him or that originate from him.’36 This striving for intimacy not only marks the disciple’s response to the devotional, but also to the knowledge, guru. Pupul Jayakar, in talking of her response to the ‘intellectual’ Krishnamurti, says ‘I’ was driven by the urge to be with him, to be noticed by him, to probe into the mysteries that pervaded his presence. I was afraid of what would happen, but I could not keep away.’37
The sought-for intimacy is of an archaic nature, before the birth of language which separates and bifurcates. In the intimacy scale of the 16th-century north Indian saint Dabu:
The guru speaks first with the mind
Then with the glance of the eye
If the disciple fails to understand
He instructs him at last by word of mouth
He that understands the spoken word is a common man
He that interprets the gesture is an intiate
He that reads the thought of the mind
Unsearchable, unfathomable, is a god.38
In the desired preverbal intimacy with the guru, Jnaneshvara highlights the devotee’s infantile quiescence.
To say nothing is your praise
To do nothing is your worship
To be nothing is to be near you.39
Analysts are, of course, familiar with the regressive movements in the patient’s psyche occasioned by the growing transference toward the analyst. The regression gives the patient a double vision, both in relation to himself and to the analyst. Within the transference, he ‘sees’ the analyst as a parental selfobject; in the real relationship as a helpful doctor. The two images, in flux over time, constantly condition each other. Because of the copresence of the patient’s adult self, the illusion in relation to the analyst, though it waxes and wanes, remains more or less moderate.40
The patient’s illusion of the analyst corresponds to another illusion in relation to the self. Patients in analysis often report feeling childlike, even childish, also outside the analytic setting. They imagine themselves at times to be smaller and more awkward than their actual adult selves. The infantile and the adult in relation to the self shape each other and are often in a state of partial identity. In the guru-disciple relationship, the identity between the actual and the infantile selves of the disciple on the one hand and the real and parental representations of the master on the other overlap to a much greater extent and for longer periods of time than in psychoanalysis. The double vision in relation to both self and guru representations tends to become monocular. In other words, the guru-disciple interaction touches deeper, more regressed layers of the psyche which are generally not reached by psychoanalysis. The devotee, I believe, is better (but also more dangerously) placed than the analysand to connect with—and correct—the depressive core at the base of human life from which a self first emerged and which lies beyond words and interpretations.
The healing techniques of the guru are thus designed to foster deeper regressions than those of the analyst. Elsewhere, I have talked of the importance of looking and being looked at as a primary technique of the master-disciple intercourse.41 I discussed the identity-giving power of the eyes that recognize, that is, of their self-evoking and self-sustaining functions. Taken in through the eyes, the guru as a benign selfobject opens the devotee’s closed world of archaic destructive relationships to new possibilities. The technical word, used in scriptural descriptions of the initiation process, is darshanat, ‘through the guru’s look’ in which, as Muktananda observes, ‘you are seen in every detail as in a clear mirror.’42 To the utter clarity of the look he might have added its absolute love and complete forgiveness. To adapt Dostoyevski’s remark on the lover’s vision, in darshanat the devotee is looked at, and is enabled to look at himself or herself, as God might have. Even gurus with thousands of disciples, whose devotees might conceivably doubt that a one-to-one recognition by the guru is taking place at regular intervals, are at pains to confirm the operation of darshanat in spite of the large numbers involved. To quote Muktananda again: ‘Many people become angry with me out of love. They say “Baba did not look at me,” or “When Baba looked at me, he didn’t smile!” People who say these things do not understand that when I sit on my chair I look at everyone once, silently and with great joy…. True love has no language. If I look at someone, silently emitting a ray of love, that is sublime. This is true and should be understood: love is a secret ray of the eyes.’43
What about the guru’s words, the discourses to which the devotees listen with such rapt a ttention? To someone reading such a discourse or listening to it apart from a devotee group, it may seem trite, repetitious, and full of well-known homilies. The power of the guru’s speech, however, lies not in its insight, but has a different source. ‘I did not understand but I came away with the words alive within me’ is a typical reaction.44 The psychological impact of the words is not through their literal meaning but their symbolic power, through the sound which conveys the experience of the guru’s presence within the psyche. They are a form of early human contact, much as the experience of a child who is soothed by the mother’s vocalizations even when he is physically separated from her and cannot feel her arms around him. In psychoanalysis, a patient will sometimes comment on the quality of the therapist’s voice when he feels it as a psychological bridge which joins the two or when he feels it as distancing and evoking a self-fragmenting response. Susan Bady has suggested that it is not only the psychological reaction to the therapist’s voice but its virtual ingestion by the patient in a concrete way which is significant.45 Taken into one’s vocal chords, the pattern and rate of breathing, the movement of the diaphragm, the relaxed and self-assured voice of the therapist or the guru will calm his agitation, infuse hope and courage into his own timid and hesitant voice.
The concrete physical and psychic manifestations of the guru’s speech and sound are immeasurably enhanced by the group setting in which a disciple normally hears his words. To quote from my own experience of listening to a guru in a large crowd: ‘At first there is a sense of unease as the body, the container of our individuality and the demarcator of our spatial boundaries, is sharply wrenched from its habitual mode of experiencing others. For as we grow up, the touch of others, once so deliberately courted and responded to with delight, increasingly becomes ambivalent. Coming from a loved one, touch is deliciously welcomed; with strangers, on the other hand, there is an involuntary shrinking of the body, their touch taking on the menacing air of invasion by the other. But once the fear of touch disappears in the fierce press of other bodies and the individual lets himself become a part of the crowd’s density, the original apprehension is gradually transformed into an expansiveness that stretches to include the others. Distances and differences—of status, age and sex—disappear in an exhilarating feeling (temporary to be sure) that individual boundaries can indeed be transcended and were perhaps illusory in the first place. Of course, touch is only one of the sensual stimuli that hammer at the gate of individual identity. Other excitations, channelled through vision, hearing and smell, are also very much involved. In addition, as Phyllis Greenacre has suggested, there are other, more subliminal exchanges of body heat, muscle tension and body rhythms taking place in a crowd. In short the crowd’s assault on the sense of individual identity appears to be well-nigh irresistible; its invitation to a psychological regression—in which the image of one’s body becomes fluid and increasingly blurred, controls over emotions and impulses are weakened, critical f
aculties and rational thought processes are abandoned—is extended in a way that is both forceful and seductive.’46
Other techniques employed in the guru-disciple interaction perform a similar function of psychic loosening and fostering deep regression—an increasing surrender to the selfobject experience of the merging kind. The taking in of prasada, food offerings touched or tasted by the guru, drinking of the water used to wash his feet, helps in a loosening up of individual bodily and psychic boundaries, transforming the experience of the guru from that of a separate Other to one of comingling with a selfobject. Gurus and devotees have always known that meditation on the guru’s face or form or the contemplative use of his photograph, as required in some cults, will contribute to and hasten the merging experience. As Muktananda observes: ‘The mind that always contemplates the guru eventually becomes the guru. Meditation on the guru’s form, immerses the meditator in the state of the guru.’47
In a sense, my use of the term guru-disciple interaction has been a misnomer since it has had the disciple’s rather than the guru’s inner state as its focus. Perhaps this is as it should be given the fact that ostensibly the disciple is the one in search of healing, and that we know infinitely more about the inner processes of disciples than those of the gurus. Yet an analyst has to wonder how a guru deals with the massive idealizing transferences of so many disciples. Negative transferences and malignant projections are of course easier to handle since they cause severe discomfort, compelling us to reject them by discriminating inside between what belongs to us and the alien attributes that have been projected onto us. This painful motivation for repelling the invasion of the self by others does not exist when projections are narcissistically gratifying, as they invariably are in case of the adoring followers.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that for the self-sustaining and self-healing responses to be evoked in the follower (or in the patient), the guru (and the analyst) must accept being the wiser, greater, and more powerful parent. To accept and yet not identify with the disciple’s parental representation demands the guru remain in touch with his own infantile self. The best of the gurus, as we saw in the case of Ramakrishna, clearly do that; their own relationship to the Divine keeps intact self-representations other than those of the omniscient parent. But for many others, I would speculate, the temptation to identify with the disciple’s projected parental self is overwhelming. As the parent and the stronger figure in the parent-child relationship, it is easier to unload one’s conflicts and the depressive self onto the child. In the case of the analyst’s countertransference, as Michael Moeller points out, the identification with the parental role is a source of twofold relief: one, in the transferential repetition of the relationship with the patient the analyst is the stronger and the less incriminated parent, and two, in reality he is not that parent at all.48 The empirical finding on the antidepressive effect of the psychoanalytic role also applies to the guru. His calm, cheerful, loving mien is perhaps a consequence rather than a cause of his role as the healer.
I have mentioned above that the dangers of the guru role lie in the disciples’ massive parental projections which the guru must process internally. Although the guru shares this danger with the analyst, or more generally, with any healer, the intensity of these projections, their duration, and the sheer number of devotees involved are vastly greater than in the case of his secular counterparts. These idealizing projections are subversive of the guru’s self-representation, constitute an insidious assault which a few gurus—again like some therapists—are not able to successfully resist. A regression to an omnipotent grandiosity is one consequence, while in the sexual sphere a retreat into sexual perversion has been reported often enough to constitute a specific danger of the guru role. It is sad to hear or read reliable reports about 70-year-old gurus who become Peeping Toms as they arrange, with all the cunning of the voyeur, to spy on their teenaged female disciples (generally Western) undressing for the night in the ashram. The promiscuity of some other gurus, pathetically effortful in the case of elderly bodies with a tendency to flag, is also too well known to merit further repetition.
The sexual aberrations, however, have not only to do with pathological regression in stray individual cases, but are perhaps also facilitated by the way the fundamentals of healing are conceptualized in the guru-devotee encounter. For instance, given the significance of a specific kind of intimacy, there is no inherent reason (except cultural disapproval) why intimacy between guru and devotee does not progess to the most intimate encounter of all and be seen as a special mark of the guru’s favour; why the merger of souls does not take place through their containers, the bodies. If substances which have been in intimate contact with the guru’s body are powerful agents of inner change when ingested by the devotee, then the logic of transformation dictates that the most powerful transforming substance would be the guru’s ‘purest’ and innermost essence—his semen.
3
Psychoanalysis and Religion Revisited
In conclusion, as I take up the wider issue of the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, I do not propose to dwell overly long on Freud’s well-known and essentially hostile view of religion. Freud believed that the common theme running through different aspects of religion—knowledge, belief, ritual, religious experience and feelings, ethical consequences in values and conduct—was an expression of the infantile in mental life. Religion was the way man defended himself against anxiety and the afflictions of an incomprehensible fate. Given Freud’s stature and authority within the field, his views were to have a decisive influence on the way psychoanalysis, especially in its fledgling years, approached religion. Occasionally Freud might have tried to relativize his position, as in his letter to Oskar Pfister on The Future of an Illusion: ‘Let us be quite clear on the point that the views expressed in my book form no part of analytic theory. They are my personal views, which coincide with those of many non-analysts and pre-analysts, but there are certainly many excellent analysts who do not share them. If I drew on analysis for certain arguments—in reality one argument—that need deter no one from using the non-partisan method of analysis for arguing the opposite view.’1 At another place Freud admitted that his study of religious belief was limited to that of the common man, and that he regretted having ignored ‘the rarer and more profound type of religious emotion as experienced by mystics and saints.’2 In this brief book, I have in a sense tried to address the outstanding psychoanalytic agenda on religion. By concentrating on the ‘more profound type of religious emotion’ experienced by the mystic, I have attempted to complement Freud’s analysis of the meaning of religion for the ‘common man’ with the meaning it has for the saint.
Freud’s rare disclaimers, perhaps attempts at protecting the sensitivities of his more spiritually inclined friends and admirers, did not prevent the emergence of a dominant psychoanalytic interpretation of religion. If there were disagreements among the early analysts with the master, they were on details rather than the essence of Freud’s theoretical approach. Basic to this approach, of course, was the analogy between religious and psychopathological phenomena.
Religious ideas, for instance, the Judeo-Christian cosmogonies, were dubbed as illusory wish fulfilments. Their hold on man’s imagination was seen as derived from the child’s helplessness in the face of a threatening external world on the one hand and his ambivalent feelings toward a father who is both a source of protection and fear on the other.3
Religious rituals were scathingly indicted through psychiatric diagnostic labels after Freud began the process by comparing the practices of the devout to the self-imposed restrictions of the obsessional neurotic.4
Religious experience, of which the mystical, ‘oceanic’ feeling is widely held to be the standard bearer, we already saw in the first chapter, was a regression to the limitless primary narcissism of the infant united with the mother at the breast. Or, in more libidinal terms, Wilhelm Reich interpreted mystical experience as a
misinterpretation of sexual feelings. The mystical response was a distorted sexuality which did not allow the perception of sexual excitation and precluded orgastic release.5 (Let me add here that a Hindu tantric in describing a vital part of his own practice would be in substantial agreement with Reich’s formulation.) The inner world of religious belief too did not escape psychopathological analogy in being compared to amentia, a state of blissful, hallucinatory confusion.6
Well into the adult years of psychoanalysis as a discipline, many analysts would continue to follow Freud’s lead. To give only one notorious instance: Franz Alexander, seeking a psychological understanding of the stages of meditation in Buddhism, discerned in them successive clinical pictures of melancholia, catatonic ecstasy, apathy, and schizophrenic dementia.7 For him what motivates the Buddhist meditator is the attempt to regress to a condition of intrauterine existence. Even today, more than 80 years after Freud’s first foray into religion in his 1907 article ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,’ the efforts by psychoanalysts to move the religious world with the lever of psychopathology have not been given up. In Jeffrey Masson’s 1980 study of Indian religious traditions, for example, much of Buddhism was seen as a massive defence against depression while the Hindu tantric’s desire for stillness, echoing Wilhelm Reich, was traced to early fears of sexual excitement.8
There are numerous other instances within psychoanalytic literature where the significance of the analogy between religious and psychopathological phenomena is not questioned. The writers share Freud’s original assumption that the meaning of the likeness between the two is unambiguous. But as the French philosopher Paul Ricouer remarks, ‘Analysis does indeed throw some light on what we have called the birth of idols; but it has no way of deciding whether that is all that faith is; whether ritual is originally, in its primordial function, obsessional ritual; whether faith is merely consolation on the childhood pattern. Analysis can reveal to the religious man his caricature, but it leaves him the task of meditating on the possibility of not resembling his distorted double.’9 From within the ranks of the analysts, Erik Erikson voices a similar concern when in speaking of religious striving he rhetorically asks, ‘But must we call it regression if man thus seeks again the earliest encounters of his trustful past in his efforts to reach a hoped for and eternal future?’10