Una conversación con Sudhir Kakar*

I´ve got the feeling, here, listening to you, that you are a sort of a guru… Is it a correct impression?

I also got the feeling! (ríe)

How does one gets knowledge? The western idea is very much critical thinking… here the idea is to completely surrender to the guru, that you will absorb more from the guru surrending than with critical thought. But after you absorbed… you must kill him after, but not from the beginning, with the critical thought.

But at the end the disciple must kill the guru, or the anayst… or the father…

Or what he stands for…That you are no longer needing because you have inside the guru.

The word “guru” doesn`t have prestige in the West, like in India, where is a more complex issue… Can we think in the psychoanalist as a type of “guru” practice?

Gurus are not uniquely Indian though India seems to be their natural habitat. Their appeal is to everyone who shares the romantic vision of reality. In contrast to the tragic vision which sees life as full of incomprehensible afflictions, where many wishes are fated to remain unfulfilled and which comes to an end with the death of the body, in the romantic vision life is not tragic but a romantic quest. The quest can extend over many births, with the goal and possibility of apprehending another, ‘higher’ level of reality beyond the shared, verifiable, empirical reality of our world, our bodies, and our emotions. The Guru holds the promise of an access to this ‘higher’ reality, full of radical transformations of life and consciousness.

Another reason for the attraction of the Guru lies in the fact that except for the psychopaths, most human beings are deeply moral in the sense that there is an unconscious longing for an ideal self that is free of all too human distortions of lust, anger, envy, narcissisism and so on that afflict our empirical selves as we experience it our daily life. The Guru then incorporates this ideal self. Establishing a relationship to the Guru through two great constructs of human imagination: idealization and identification, is establishing a relationship with an ideal, moral self.

For those influenced by modern ideologies of egalitarianism originating in the West, susceptibility of a follower to the charisma of a Guru will appear as the reflection of an enfeebled self, of a psychic helplessness that needs to be reversed by an idealization and identification with a Guru who kindles hope through his own possession of an unshakeable self confidence, encompassing compassion and a certainty of his convictions. For such a modern person, the follower’s surrender to the Guru is a sign of infantile regression, the surrender of adult agency.

The traditional Indian take on surrender is radically different and much more positive. One guru writes of the follower’s experience: “ 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.” Another extols the merits of surrender thus: “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 becomes full. His former feeling of emptiness and lack disappears.” The Western experience with demonic charismatic leaders of religious cults or nations (Hitler, Stalin) will naturally have difficulty with the traditional Indian extolling of surrender, and of idealization and identification as motors of psychic transformation. Both, I think, though would agree that the attraction of a Guru is a phenomenon that lies at the very beginning of human life and interaction.

Yet the “guru fantasy,” namely the existence of someone, somewhere, who will heal the wounds suffered in early relationships and remove the blights on the soul so that it shines anew in its pristine state, is common across many cultures. Irrespective of their conscious subscription to the ideology of egalitarianism and a more contractual doctor-patient relationship, many Western patients approach analysis and the analyst with a full-blown “guru fantasy” which, however, is more hidden and less accessible to consciousness than is the case in India, Iran or other Asian countries.

You have been a sort of interpreter of the “indian mind” to the West… Do you think that this work can be done by a westerner too?

Certainly. One only has to be aware that  psychoanalytical knowledge of a culture, of the ‘mind’ of its people, is not equivalent to its anthropological knowledge although there may be some overlap between the two. Psychoanalytic knowledge is primarily the knowledge of the culture’s imagination, of its fantasy as encoded in its symbolic products, its myths and folktales, its popular art, music, literature and cinema. A Western analyst who is willing to immerse himself in the culture’s imagination for a long period, speak its language and encounter its people in the clinical setting can certainly do this work

What does the West do and did with the eastern traditions, and viceversa?

I believe that an increase in the mutual exchanges between psychoanalysis and Eastern meditative healing traditions holds the best chance for a rejuvenation of both traditions. In the West, the psychoanlytic reception to Eastern traditions has been limited to a few psychoanalysts who have been interested in learning and reconciling Buddhist philosophy and practices of amelioration of suffering with their own tradition of psychological enquiry. In the East, the interest of spiritual ‘masters’ in learning from psychoanalysis has been even more limited. I believe this can, and should change for the benefit of of both. To give just a few examples: In psychoanalysis, empathy is a core requirement for the intending analyst, the chief tool for gathering data for understanding the patient. Tolerance and compassion are the precursors to empathy, and we can fruitfully look to Buddhist and other spiritual traditions for pointers in their cultivation. Indeed it is odd that aspiring psychoanalysts have often only heard about but have no personal experience of one of the profession’s chief requirements: listening to the client with free-floating, evenly hovering attention that each analyst picks up more or less informally and unsupervised on their own. Such an experience, which is missing from the psychoanalytic training programs, could be easily provided through a short four-to-five-day meditation workshop such as that of vipassana. As the analyst C. Clement reflecting on her own experience has observed, the analyst who has experienced this mode of meditation is likely to listen to her patient differently. She is likely to be more attuned to subtle, emerging twinges of fear, sadness, or helplessness. Such an analyst is also able to hold these feelings longer and more deeply without reaching for the reassuring effort to organize and interpret.

…This brings me to a much more difficult issue. Can the Buddhist and psychoanalytic methods of transforming emotions be reconciled? Here my answer is a qualified “No.” In psychoanalytic therapy one seeks access to the client’s unconscious through methods such as free association, that is, saying whatever comes to the mind, paying attention to the client’s slips of the tongue, hesitations, dreams, fantasies, and to what is going on unconsciously between the client and the therapist. Language and words play an important though not an exclusive role in psychoanalytic therapy.

From the Buddhist perspective and its emphasis on direct experience, language and words distract us from direct experience. They create distance from the immediacy of experience in order to do the cognitive work necessary for communication to the therapist. This disdain for language is also shared by Hindu spiritual  traditions. As the 16th century Indian saint Dadu puts it: “The Guru speaks first to the mind, then with the glance of the eye. If the disciple fails to understand, he instructs him at last by mouth”. “He that understands a spoken word is a common man. He that interprets a gesture is an initiate. He that reads the thought of the mind unsearchable, unfathomable is a God.” Here psychoanalysis diverges from Eastern traditions, but it can heed Buddhist warnings on the limitations of language and become much more sensitive to the nuances of silence and other non-verbal communication in the therapeutic setting.

In my opinión, psychoanalysis cannot and should not reject the medium of language and words that has brought it such rich dividends of insight into the workings of the human mind. It can also wonder whether the exclusive Buddhist focus on direct experience stems from an idealization of its meditative practices. But then many psychoanalysts look upon and are proud of their tradition as a hermeneutics of suspicion and believe that many Buddhists operate in a hermeneutics of idealization. Where psychoanalysis can contribute to Buddhist practice is perhaps by making it aware of the unconscious dynamics of the student-master relationship. That is, of having the student become conscious of his changing, transference reaction towards the teacher and  the spiritual teacher’s unconscious counter-transference reactions towards the student. It can make the spiritual Master aware of the psychological danger posed by the massive idealization of his students, a danger that increases with one’s prominence as a teacher.  Negative transferences, negative feelings, and malignant projections are easier to handle. Since they cause severe psychic discomfort, compelling us to reject them by discriminating inside between what belongs to us and what other students are projecting on to us. This painful motivation for repelling the invasion of the self by others does not exist when such projections are very narcissistically gratifying, as they are invariably in case of adoring students. It is difficult not to at least smell the incense smoke being burnt at your altar by many proclaiming your greatness. At the end, psychoanalysis will doubt that transformation of emotions or their complete elimination as a goal of spiritual practice is not a forever achievement even in case of enlightened masters. It remains constantly under threat from the darker forces of the psyche. One is never not human.

Your training analysis was in German… What`s left when you are analyzed in another language than your mother tongue? What do you earn?

When I look back at my training analysis in German, I can only say that my intense need to be ‘understood’ by the analyst, a need I shared with every patient, gave birth to an unconscious force that made me underplay those cultural parts of my self which I believed would be too foreign to my German analyst’s experience. In the transference-love, what I sought was closeness to the analyst, including the sharing of his culturally shaped interests, attitudes and beliefs. This intense need to be close and to be understood, paradoxically by removing parts of my cultural self from the analytic arena of understanding, was epitomized by the fact that I soon started writing short stories and dreaming in German, the language of my analyst, something I have not done before or after my analysis.

Later, years after the analysis was over, I also realized that there is a degree of emotional poverty when the analysis is conducted in a language other than the mother tongue wherein much of one’s native culture is encoded. One’s mother tongue, the language of one’s childhood, is intimately linked with emotionally colored sensory-motor experiences. Psychoanalysis in a language that is not the patient’s own is often in danger of leading to “operational thinking”, that is, verbal expressions lacking associational links with feelings, symbols, and memories. However grammatically correct and rich in its vocabulary, the alien language suffers from emotional poverty, certainly as far as early memories are concerned.

The emotional shortcomings of a language acquired later, German in my case,  has been dramatically demonstrated by an experiment in which subjects are asked the following question: a train is approaching at high speed. If you can push one individual on the track, stopping the train, it will save the lives of six others standing a little distance down the track. Will you push that individual in front of the train? Asked and answered in the mother tongue, most people show signs of an emotional dilemma and would not push the person to his death. The same question in the acquired language evokes much greater calculated rationality and the readiness to push one person in order to save the lives of six.

Foucault, who didn´t like Psychoanalysis, thought that it was a sort of spiritual transformation… ¿What`s the place of “the spiritual” in Psychoanalysis?

Foucault is right if we reimagine psychoanalysis not only as a medical treatment but also as a spiritual enterprise, a transforming quest for self-knowledge that extends the range of our compassion and empathy. A successful analysis would then be one that leads to self understanding and growth of a wisdom that enriches our life with meaning and motivates us to act beyond our narrow interests. It will not be content with reaching the Freudian ideal of the autonomous individual but view it as a stepping stone to the caring individual.

Psychoanalysis will then be seen, as I prefer to do, as a modern meditative practice, a two-person (analyst and analysand) ‘rational’ meditation, taking its special place among other introspective methods that stem from the spiritual traditions of the world.

Which will be, in your opinion, the future of Psychoanalysis?

I believe classical psychoanalysis has a  limited future as a method of treatment although psychotherapies informed by psychoanalysis will continue to attract a who not only seeks symptom relief but also their ‘meaning’.  Its future will be for all those who seek a deep introspection, especially biographical, into the makings of their psyches.

Psychoanalysis from its foundation has highlightened history. Do you think that nowadays we must pay the same attention to geography?

I believe that in future, the more important contributions to psychoanalysis that could rejuvenate its current stagnant theoretical/conceptual state, could come from Asia. The geography of psychoanalysis will become as important as its history. The Asian contributions to psychoanalysis will, first, relativize what are today often regarded as universals. Second, in my reimagining of a future psychoanalysis as a meditative discipline, the Asian contributions will provide impulses from the meditation practices and concepts from the rich spiritual traditions of their societies, without psychoanalysis losing its uniqueness as a quest for psychic truth.

Please tell us something about the kern complex, but in asian context: Ganesha, Ajax, etc…

Freud considered the myth of Oedipus as a hegemonic narrative of all cultures at all times, although enough evidence is now available to suggest that its dominance may be limited to some Western cultures at certain periods of their history.  In other words, the Oedipus complex, in one variation or another, may well be universal, but it is not equally hegemonic across cultures. 

The version we have from psychoanalysis and the signal importance paid to this version is a singularly Western, not quite as ubiquitous in the imaginations of other peoples. In most folktales around the world, for instance, it is matricide and not parricide that is central to the story and its imaginative power.

In India, the hegemonic narrative is that of Devi, the Mother-Goddess in her many forms, and what I have called “Maternal Enthrallment” of the pre-oedipal and oedipal periods. By maternal enthrallment I mean: the wish to get away from the mother together with the dread of separation, the wish to destroy the engulfing mother who also ensures the child’s survival, and additionally in the male child, incestuous desire coexisting with the terror inspired by an overwhelming female sexuality.

Coming to the triangulation of the oedipal period, for the boy, the father is less a rival than an ally in the encounter with an overpowering maternal-feminine; the son’s need for an ‘oedipal alliance’, that is for the father’s firm support, solidarity and emotional availability at a stage of life where the dangers of maternal enthrallment were at their peak,  outweigh the oedipal conflict. In the Ganesha complex, the myths have the son sacrifice to the father his own right to sexual activity and generational ascendancy. The son does so in order to deflect the father’s envy and his primal fear of annihilation at the father’s hands while keeping the bond of love between father and son intact.

The Ganesha myth also inverts the psychoanalytically postulated causality between the fantasies of parricide and filicide. It is charged with the fear of filicide rather than the Oedipal guilt of parricide. In another of its variations as the Ajase complex, Okonogi  has postulated it as the dominant narrative of the male self in Japan. And, in Iran, it is also characteristic of the major Iranian myth of father-son relations, that of Rustam and Sohrab.

Do you find that Psychoanalysis, which is so sensitive to personal differences, is less sensitive with cultural ones…? What could be a “cultural sensitive analyst”?

He/She recognizes that human beings share universals but these are much fewer than what many if not most analysts believe. The culturally sensitive analyst recognizes that many psychoanalytic propositions on what constitutes psychological maturity, gender-appropriate behaviors, “positive” or “negative” resolutions of developmental conflicts and complexes, that often appear in the garb of universal truths, are actually the incorporation of Western middle class experience and values into psychoanalytic theory. To give one example: The differentiation of human beings into male and female genders is universal but it is our cultural heritage that further elaborates what it means to be, look, think and behave like a woman or a man. This becomes clearer if one thinks of Greek or Roman sculptures which have greatly influenced Western gender representations. Here, male gods are represented by hard, muscled bodies and chests without any fat. One only needs to compare Greek and Roman statuary with sculpted representations of Hindu gods, or the Buddha, where the bodies are softer, suppler and in their hint of breasts, nearer to the female form.

The visually lesser differentiation between male and female representations in Indian Hindu culture is reinforced by an important, widespread form of religiosity, of Vaishnavism, which not only provides a sanction for man’s feminine strivings but raises these to the level of a religious-spiritual quest. It is a culture where a culture-hero like Gandhi can publicly proclaim that he had mentally become a woman, and that there is as much reason for a man to wish that he was born a woman as for women to do otherwise, and take for granted that he will strike a responsive chord in his audience. Between a minimum of sexual differentiation that is required to function heterosexually with a modicum of pleasure, and a maximum which cuts off any sense of empathy and emotional contact with the other sex, which is then experienced as a different species altogether, there is a whole range of positions, each occupied by a culture which insists on calling it the only one that is mature and healthy.

But I would also add that as someone aspiring to be a culturally sensitive analyst, I  am  not a cultural relativist but a minimal universalist. Even as I question much of psychoanalytic superstructure, I continue to stand on its foundations and subscribe to its basic assumptions: the importance of the unconscious part of the mind in our thought and actions, the vital significance of early childhood experiences for later life, the importance of Eros in human motivation, the dynamic interplay, including conflict, between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, and the vital import of transference and counter-transference in the therapist and patient relationship. All the rest is up for grabs and just as we have begun to talk of modernity in the plural, of different modernities, perhaps we will soon be talking of Japanese, French, Chinese, Argentinian and Indian psychoanalyses.

Perhaps we need to look at universals not as what is shared but as what we should have in common, not as what is but as what is desirable.

Which are the links between Religion and Psychoanalysis?

Since Freud’s stern dismissal of religious rituals and belief in God as remnants of infantile mental life,  psychoanalysts have prided themselves on their a-religiosity.

But we must remember that though Freud dismissed religious beliefs and rituals, he was more circumspect, if not respectful towards the third and, to me, the most important aspect of religion: religious feeling. Although calling the pinacle of religious feeling, the unio mystica, a regression to the primary narcissism of the infant in an ‘oceanic feeling’, at other places Freud regretted having ignored the ‘rarer and more profound type of religious emotion experienced by mystics and saints.’ My point is that we need to realize that this so-called religious emotion is not limited to saints and mystics but is a fundamental need in human beings. It is actually not religious at all and most of us have experienced this emotion in perceptible moments of elation in the presence of nature, the thrill in front of a work of art or hearing a piece of music, ineffable intimacy with a loved one after the sexual embrace when the bodies have separated and are lying together side by side, but are not yet two in their responses. There are many other such moments, minor epiphanies, which escape our conscious awareness since we expect the mystical experience to be the province of mystics and saints, and thus an exception rather than a rule in human life.

The siren-call of religion lies in the promise and delivery of these moments: in rituals relating to rites of passage, worship at home or at temple, mosque or church, festivals and pilgrimages, mystical practices and so on.

It is the religious moments that overcome what the Irish poet William Yeats in his poem Meru called the “desolation of reality.”  They are flashes, that in the words of the English poet John Keats ‘light up the narrow, mundane world of daily existence, a world which has always been inadequate to our experience and unequal to bear the burden of our hopes.’

These flashes of light are like musical moments and phrases that suddenly and inexplicably move you without your knowing why. Freud, famously, was immune to these. Religious experience and emotion is more akin to music than to art and literature. I believe, we psychoanalysts need to identify with Freud’s strengths rather than be constrained by his limitations, whether in relation to music or religious experience.

I also wonder whether this deafness to the music of religious experiences (in Christianity, perhaps in the Protestant churches more than in the Catholic ones) another reason for the crisis in the liberal order in so many countries of the world?  It would be a folly to dismiss the religious impulse that is found not only in traditional religions but in all ideologies and movements that promise the individual the experience of transcending her individual boundaries, the experience of being part of something greater than one’s individual existence. Besides the reality and pleasure principles there is also what I have called a unity-seeking principle, impelled by Eros in its widest sense, which we ignore at our peril of seeking a fuller understanding of the human psyche. 

Which are the difference, in general terms, between the mind in the East and in the West?

Very generally there are two versions on the nature of the person and of human experience that are mixed in different proportions in Asian and Western minds. One version, dominanting the mind of a modern Western person is also the basic storyline of psychoanalysis, with its roots in the Enlightenment. This versión holds that human satisfactions and goals are fundamentally personal and individual. Each of us lives in his or her own subjective world, pursuing personal pleasures and private fantasies, constructing a lifeline which, when his time is over, will vanish. The essential function of society is to preserve the possibility of that personal fulfillment.  Society cannot provide anything positive; it cannot add anything essential to individual fulfillment. What it can do is to prevent something negative, the interference with individual satisfactions.

The other storyline of the mind, common to many Asian civilizations, is a counter-view which exalts the community vis-a-vis the individual. This view stresses that belonging to a community is a fundamental need of a person and asserts that only if a person truly belongs to such a community, naturally and unselfconsciously, can she/he enter the living stream and lead a full, creative spontaneous life.

Both visions have their dark side. If the shadow side of individualism is an unregenerate pursuit of selfishness and unbridled greed, then the dark side of communitarianism is its exclusivity, intolerance and potential for violence. We need to realize that both visions persist in the psyche even if one is more dominant at a particular historical time. For instance, in the West, communitarian vision of life has not become outdated, regressive, pathological and so on. In its malevolent form, we encounter it today in the resurgence of nationalist communitarianism in most European countries and racial communitarianism in the United States.

In contrast to modern West, the Eastern view (though I am primarily talking of the Indian view with which I am most familiar) of the self is not that of a bounded, unique individuality. The Indian person is not a self-contained center of awareness interacting with other, similar such individuals as in the Greek and post-enlightenment European civilization. Instead, in the dominant image of the culture, the self is constituted of relationships. An Indian is not a monad but derives his personal nature interpersonally. All affects, needs and motives are relational and his distresses are disorders of relationships, not only with his human but also with his natural and cosmic orders.

Corresponding to the cultural image of the body in constant exchage with the environment while ceaselessly changing inside, the Indian person, too, thus tends to experience himself as more of a changing being whose personal psychological nature is not constituted of a stable but a more fluid “sense of identity” that is constantly formed and reformed by his interactions with the environment. The Indian person’s boundaries —between self and others, between body and mind— also tend to be less clearly demarcated. As a corollary, it follows that a large part of individual happiness or suffering in the Indian mind would be viewed as the individual’s share of the happiness or suffering of his family or community, his salient group in a particular context.  In individuals, of course, the individual and relational way of perceiving the self and the world will be mixed in different proportions though one would expect one or the other dominate in a particular culture.

Let me add that I am not advancing any simplified dichotomy between Western cultural image of an individual, autonomous self and a relational, transpersonal self of  Indian culture. Both visions of human experience are present in all the major cultures though a particular culture may, over a length of time, highlight and emphasize one at the expense of the other.

You have patients from different countries… which posibilities and limitations do you find in working as an analyst from a different cultural context?

How should a psychoanalyst approach the issue of cultural difference of his client in his practice? The ideal situation would be that this difference exists only minimally, in the sense that the analyst has obtained a psychoanalytic knowledge of the patient’s culture through a long immersion in its daily life and its myths, its folklore and literature, its language and its music, an absorption not through the bones as in case of his patient, but through the head and the heart. Anything less than this maximalist position has the danger of the analyst succumbing to the lure of cultural stereotyping in dealing with the particularities of the patient’s experience. In cross-cultural therapeutic dyads, little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing, collapsing important differences, assuming sameness when only similarities exist. What the analyst needs is not a detailed knowledge of the patient’s culture but a serious questioning and awareness of the assumptions underlying his own, the culture he was born into and the culture in which he has been professionally socialized as a psychoanalyst. In other words, what I am suggesting is that in absence of the possibility of obtaining a deep psychoanalytic knowledge of his patient’s culture, the analyst needs to strive for a state of affairs where the patient’s feelings of estrangement because of his cultural differences from the analyst are minimized and the patient does not, or only minimally cuts off the cultural part of the self from the therapeutic situation. This is possible only if the analyst begins to value his own Unknowing, convey a cultural openness which comes from becoming aware of his culture’s fundamental propositions about human nature, human experience, the fulfilled human life, and then to acknowledge their relativity by seeing them as cultural products, embedded in a particular place and time. He needs to become sensitive to the hidden existence of what Heinz Kohut called “health and maturity moralities” of his particular analytical school.

Given that ethnocentrism, the tendency to view alien cultures in terms of our  own, and unresolved cultural chauvinism, are the patrimony of all human beings, including that of psychoanalysts, the acquisition of cultural openness is not an easy task. Cultural biases can lurk in the most unlikely places.

Do you think that middle class western patients´ mind shape psychoanalytical theories?

Yes, overwhelmingly so.  Most of our knowledge on how human beings feel, think, act, is derived from a small subset of the human population which the psychologists Joseph Heinrich call WEIRD, the acronym standing for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Psychologists, sociologists, psychotherapists, philosophers, are as WEIRD as the subjects of their studies, ministrations or speculations. It is this small group of statistical outliers, overwhelmingly Western, urban  middle class that provides us with both the producers and subjects of our contemporary psychoanalytic knowledge we have then blithely proceed to generalize to the rest of humankind. Shared by analyst and patient alike, pervading the analytic space in which the two are functioning, fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, male and female and so on which are essentially Western in origin often remain unexamined and are regarded as universally valid. As has been said, if a fish was a scientist, the last discovery it would make would be of water.

You are in both sides, even with your clothes… it´s difficult to find someone who combines a western education in an eastern mind… What about the future of Psychoanalysis, seen from you point of view in the East?

I think that psychoanalysis in the West or in the East will have to leave the medical model completely.

Its future is a very modern meditation, of two people together, a joint meditation. Problems disapper as doing meditation, but that´s not the most important part. Healing neurosis as a byproduct of the meditation, but a meditation with words also, different from mystic one.