Sudhir Kakar on mysticism,psychoanalysis,and culture

Abstract

This essay is designed to illumine Sudhir Kakar’s contributions with regard to psychoanalytic theorizing about mysticism and culture. It proceeds in five interrelated parts: (1) presents a broad definitional and comparative context with respect to the academically contested term “mysticism”; (2) explores the initial entry of the psychoanalytic engagement with mysticism (i.e., Freud’s famous analysis of the oceanic feeling); (3) describes the psychoanalytic models (classic, adaptive and transformational) of mysticism which developed out of and after Freud; (4) places Kakar within this development, unpacking his specific contributions, advances and debates with other reigning psychoanalysts; (5) discusses Kakar’s contributions and indeed psychoanalysis as a whole relative to the wider, contemporary academic study of mysticism.

What is mysticism?

In a colloquial sense, most educated people understand what is meant by the term “mysticism.” For example, one might refer to the Catholic nun St. Teresa of Avila, the Zen master Dogen, the Sufi al-Hallaj, or the Hindu Sage Sri Aurobindo as “mystics.” One could also adduce Plotinus’ Enneads, the Hindu Upanishads or the Kabbalah’s Zohar as classic “mystical texts.” Again, one might point to Ramakrishna’s vision of Kali, St. Augustine’s experience of the “Light” in his Confessions, and Buddha’s attainment of Nirvana as examples of “mystical experiences” within the religious traditions proper. It is Freud’s contemporary William James, in his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience, who offers a general definitional strategy to house such disparate texts, experiences and religions when he says that the characteristics of mysticism include that of transience, noesis, passivity, ineffability and, most importantly, unity: “In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness” (James, 1929, p. 410). ¹

While this is initially helpful, the fact is that in the academic study of mysticism things are a good deal more complicated. For example, with regard to how to define the term, there is as much variability here as there is with regard to the academic use of the term “religion.” As early as Dean Inge’s Appendix A to his noted Christian Mysticism (1899), one gets a list of no less than twenty-six varying definitions of mysticism (complete with Inge’s acerbic commentary). The philosopher Louis Dupré warned that no single definition of mysticism has been offered that is sufficiently comprehensive enough to incorporate the vast terrain of texts and figures that have been framed as being under the conceptual umbrella we call “mysticism” (Dupré, 1987). Moreover, the attempt to find some universal, perennial “core” of mysticism (such as the aforementioned Jamesian “unity” or, as has been attempted in subsequent decades, the “nondual”) has fallen by the wayside. Instead what we have is the gradual admission that what is catalogued “in the traditions” is an entire spectrum of diverse experiences and insights, some of which may include not only different kinds of nondual apprehension or of unity (e.g., St. Teresa of Avila speaks of three different kinds of “unity”) but also a bevy of other phenomena (e.g., visions, raptures, heavenly ascents, locutions), all inscribed in religious texts and communities. Moreover, many scholars insist that the latter are incapable of being divorced from their tradition and theology without doing violence to their meaning. Bernard McGinn, the generally acknowledged foremost scholar of Christian Mysticism, speaks to such concerns when he observes that there are few instances of “unity” among Christian mystics and, further, that he prefers the definitional strategy of utilizing the term “the Presence of God” (taken from another of Freud’s contemporaries, the psychologist and theologian Joseph Maréchal) as the preferred term to house the varieties of Christian mysticism. As a proponent of what he calls “mystical theology,” he insists that any “experience” cannot be uprooted from the entire matrix of church, tradition, and theology (McGinn, 1991). In sum, at the risk of pathologizing the subject, cataloging the varieties of mysticism requires avoiding reducing it to a singular “experience” or “common-core” in favor of laboring to compile something akin to the mystical equivalent of the diagnostic statistical manual. Mystical experiences are multiple and vary not only in degree but in kind (Carmody & Carmody, 1996; Parsons, 2019).

Things get worse when one enjoins the comparativist to sit at the table. They complain that terms like mysticism and spirituality are western in origin, inexorably intertwined with the worldview and metaphysics of western religious traditions (especially Christianity), and are all too often in the service of not simply distortion but orientalism and colonialism. Terms like nirvana, moksha, and fana may have some general affinity with what is called “mysticism” if the latter is used as a “term of art,” but even there one must be careful to qualify its use with respect to an ensuing dialogue with the relevant scholarly experts. Too much of what has passed for the psychoanalysis of mysticism is in reality the analysis of concocted, imagined cases, the results of which are all too easily universalized. Indeed, many psychoanalytic investigations into mysticism are replete with obvious misunderstandings, little interdisciplinary sophistication, reliance on faulty translations and scholarship, cultural misappropriations, and theoretical models that betray not only their analytic limits but a baked in “ethno” dimension hidden by their supposed value-neutral and universal applicability.

Finally, and importantly for the psychoanalyst, it is clear that all traditions insist that mysticism is more than just “an experience.” It is a process which culminates in an often radical form of personal transformation. It is not simply experience that is at issue here (although that to) but the alleviation of suffering and the development of psycho-spiritual discernment, dispositions, capacities, virtues and wisdom. At the very least, then, there are affinities between the mystical process and that of psychoanalytic therapy, although again one must be careful not to stand pat with the conclusion that such mystical therapies can be easily explained, dismissed or pigeonholed with respect to the more sophisticated theoretical models found in the psychoanalytic tradition. To be sure, there is some truth in the latter; that psychoanalysis can be of interpretative help in providing, for example, the lack of articulation and engagement within mystical traditions concerning the complicity of developmental determinisms (e.g., the so-called guru “scandal literature”). On the other hand, there may be some truth that mystical therapies are diverse, admit of a legitimate soteriological aim absent in psychoanalysis, and may well house a wisdom not yet understood or theorized in existing psychoanalytic theory.

On the whole, then, the portable lessons for the psychoanalytically minded scholar are to acknowledge the variety of mystics, mystical experiences, and mystical therapies; to seek out multiple dialogue partners in order the get the case in question right; to be cautious in universalizing; to acknowledge the possible limits of psychoanalytic models; and to be reflexive with regard to the cultural biases that may lurk in any model.

Early psychoanalytic interpretations of mysticism

How, then, does all this translate into assessing the works of Sudhir Kakar vis-à-vis mysticism? To make this clear, we must provide some context. The latter requires that we take a slight but necessary detour through the history of psychoanalytic theorizing about mysticism, starting at the beginning. Fortunately there is something like an origin text one can isolate, namely, Freud’s analysis of Romain Rolland’s famous “oceanic feeling” in Civilization and Its Discontents. Rolland was a highly admired cultural figure for his work as a Sorbonne professor of musicology, Nobel prize winner (for literature) and social activist. In 1927 Freud sent him a him a copy of Future of an Illusion. Rolland responded almost immediately (in a letter of Dec. 5^th, 1927), thanking him for the gift and relating that while he agreed with his analysis of the “common-man’s” adolescent appropriation of religion, mysticism was the true origin of religion and more, the latter could be accessed apart from church and tradition. He went on to confess that he himself was a mystic and was in the process of finishing biographies of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda (which he eventually sent to Freud). He concluded by asking Freud to make an analysis of this deeper religious datum, suggesting that he might incorporate its profundity as part of a more expansive “mystical psychoanalysis” (Parsons, 1999). ²

From the perspective of the academic study of mysticism the Freud-Rolland debate over oceanic feelings marks a historically crucial turning point and is part of the “modern” turn towards investigating mysticism. Genealogically speaking, it was the early Church Fathers [e.g, those early theologians who played a definitive role in shaping Christian thought and practice spanning figures from Ignatius of Antioch (35–110) and Origen (185–254) to Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) and St . Augustine (354–430)], who repurposed the Greek “mystikos” (translated as “the hidden”) to refer not to secret ritualistic activities (as was the case with the Greek Mystery religions) but to an encounter with God. Implicit in the newly minted Christian terms “mystical theology” and “mystical contemplation” was the notion that Christian mystical experience could be accessed only through the auspices of church and tradition (biblical, liturgical, spiritual). For them mystical experience was not indicative of an innate generic religious consciousness but signified the presence of an objective reality above and beyond the wholly subjective. As Louis Boyer put it, mysticism was “the experience of an invisible objective world: the world whose coming the Scriptures reveal to us in Jesus Christ, the world into which we enter, ontologically, through the liturgy” (Bouyer, 1980, pp. 52–3).

In the 16th and 17th centuries one finds a sea change: the emergence of mysticism as a substantive (the French la mystique), the delineation of the topic in terms of a subjective experience divorced from church and tradition and, subsequently, the investigation and interpretation of such experiences from multiple academic perspectives, notable of which were the psychologists (evinced in figures like Henri Charcot, Ferdinand Morel, and Th. Flournoy). Challenging the common view of the divine as “God” was a competitor: the generic philosophical term “the Absolute,” defined “as an obscure, universal dimension of man, perceived or experienced as a reality [un réel] hidden beneath a diversity of institutions, religions, and doctrines” (de Certeau, 1992, p. 14). Mystical experiences, now conceived of as an innate part of human equipment, became associated with a laundry list of generic terms (e.g., peak experiences, joy, bliss, transcendence of space and time, sense of immortality). It is here that we can locate the researches of William James, for no better example of this modern turn can be found than in his works. This is so for James defined mysticism in a way diametrically opposed to that found in the early Church Fathers. James states that in his Varieties he is “treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study,” defining religious experience, of which mysticism for him was clearly the deepest form, as “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (James, 1929, pp. 31–32). As noted earlier, passivity, noesis, ineffability, transiency, and unity: these were the basic characteristics of mystical texts and experiences. This new framing upended that offered by the Church Fathers: tradition and its accoutrements, by which James meant theology, philosophy, liturgy, ritual and the various aspects of church organizations, and all crucial for access to the Presence of God for the Church Fathers, were now understood as secondary phenomena, derived from the primary experiential matrix located in the individual, and thus unessential for access to the divine. This historical shift, then, authorized an “unchurched” usage of the term, democratizing and individualizing it, while inviting a broad array of social scientists and humanists, replete with their panoply of methodological perspectives, to add their insightful voices. It is this modern shift that Rolland was influenced by when he wrote to Freud about the oceanic feeling and his desire to see a “mystical psychoanalysis.” Michel de Certeau noted its importance by referring to it as a “significant debate” which marks the historical trend towards a non-institutional form of mysticism and the rise of psycho-spirituality (de Certeau, 1992). This trend has come to fruition for many in contemporary culture who use psychological formulations for the purposes of organizing, monitoring, and expressing the need for wholeness, numinous experiences, and individuation. Such systems (which later included psycho-spiritualities like those of Carl Jung [archetypical], Abraham Maslow [humanistic], and Ken Wilber/Jorge Ferrer [transpersonal]), have enabled those who seek a modern, unchurched, nontraditional way of mapping religious proclivities. It would be accurate to say that psycho-spiritual models and “therapies” are deracinated cultural products taken from a host of differing traditional religions and various cultures in the service of individualizing, universalizing, and democratizing mysticism. They seek the “juice” of peak-experiences (to use Maslow’s phrase) without what they consider to be the often mendacious “baggage” of church and tradition.

If Freud and Rolland helped usher in a new understanding of the mystical, it is the subsequent psychoanalytic “reception history” of their debate that helped forestall any expansive engagement with the topic. The still extant and erroneous “received view” of Freud’s attempt to analyze mysticism understands the “oceanic feeling” as an instance of the Jamesian transient experience of unity and, further, the perennial core of “mysticism everywhere.” The latter is interpreted in empirical, developmental terms as the universal apprehension of the unbounded sense of self and omnipotence endemic to the phase of primary narcissism. Any “mystical experience,” then, is but the regurgitation of the memory of that state, mostly through meditation or prayer. The problem with this view, aside from the assumption that it constitutes the core of all mysticism (thereby forestalling the need to investigate further the varieties of mystical encounters) is that there is no evidence for it in the Freud-Rolland correspondence. In describing his own personal mysticism to Freud, Rolland stated that it was a “constant state.” Freud as well understood it as such when, in summing up Rolland’s letter to him in Civilization and Its Discontents, noted that Rolland told him that he was “never without” the oceanic feeling. This is not the Jamesian transient experience of union with God. Indeed, a perusal of Rolland’s works, which Freud never bothered to investigate, reveals that he speaks of transient feelings of unity with nature as a youth which later, as a result of personal introspection and reformation, eventually culminated in the continual presence of the oceanic. Without arguing for exact similarities, Rolland’s presentation of the oceanic feeling bears a greater affinity with the more advanced mystical states characteristic of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s sahaj samedhi (the permanent, continual feeling of the divine presence) or St. Teresa’s “spiritual marriage” (where the holy trinity are a constant presence in the depths of the soul). Moreover, Freud’s interpretation of Rolland’s oceanic feeling stressed not regression but the preservation of the primary narcissistic state. In some people, reasoned Freud, this “primary ego-feeling” of the oceanic would not disappear through development but be preserved, existing “side-by-side” with the more narrow ego feeling of adulthood. Freud went on to say that this feeling, which he admitted he could not discover in himself and which left him no peace, could exist apart from the Church and was not the origin of religion, although it could have been co-opted by it to defend against the dangers and exigencies of the world. In that sense we have the beginnings of the classic, pejorative psychoanalytic model of mysticism as being essentially defensive and explainable in empirical terms as being based in the developmental process (Parsons, 1999).

A full reconstruction of Rolland’s mysticism as found in his writings and journals indicates that Freud not only misunderstood the oceanic feeling (hence once again emphasizing the need to get “the case” right) but never did justice to its ethical, existential, and “therapeutic” dimensions (as fairly recent literature claims and attempts to rectify). ³ To complicate matters, Freud did offer an explanation, but one using different model, for the more familiar Jamesian transient mystical experience in the pages of Civilization and It Discontents. This occurs at the end of the first chapter of the latter where Freud refers to the “practices of Yoga” and “regressions to primordial states of mind which have long ago been overlaid.” He goes on to cite the affinity of the latter with “trances and ecstasies,” deferring their critical analyses but offering up a line from Schiller’s diver: “let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light.” He came back to this line of thought in his subsequent letters to Rolland, his conversations with the poet Bruno Goetz and in his New Introductory Lectures, where he admitted that such practices bear a resemblance to psychoanalysis in that both upset the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, there to spy insight into the depths of the ego and in the id. While Freud left room for how such insights could be therapeutically useful hence ushering in an “adaptive” potential to mysticism, he denied they could lead to the kind of ultimate truths which could procure salvation (Parsons, 1999). In turn, Rolland argued that this “noetic” element of mystical insight, as James would have it, accessed a dimension of the unconscious which could be referred to as “religious” (which one can cite as an instance of what we will call the “transformational school,” defined and elaborated below). Freud seemingly offered a truce by writing to Rolland that he was not an out-and-out skeptic and that his analysis in Future of an Illusion was not geared towards its “deepest sources” but only towards the “common-man’s” religion. In sum, then, what we have in the Freud-Rolland correspondence is a series of conversations which are interesting, fertile, and in need of deeper exploration. Unfortunately, Freud’s dalliance with the oceanic feeling and related mystical phenomena was later simplified and misrepresented by later psychoanalysts, leading to the inhibition of deeper research and analysis with regard to mysticism. ⁴

Before we leave Freud, it should be noted that Rolland was not the only proponent of eastern religions with whom he corresponded. Commensurate with his desire to internationalize psychoanalysis, he was always on the lookout for those “brainworkers” and “cultural elite” who might aid his cause. One could cite in this regard the Japanese analyst Heisku Kosawa, who brought his native Buddhist belief to bear on the formation of specifically Japanese psychoanalysis and, more germane to our discussion, Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose (1887–1953), who became the founder of psychoanalysis in India (Hiltebeitel, 2018).

Freud’s correspondence with Bose ran from 1921–1937, comprised close to two dozen letters, and was virtually concurrent with his correspondence with Rolland (1923–1939). Bose received his medical degree from Calcutta Medical College (1910) and received the first doctor of science degree awarded in India (1921) for his doctoral thesis titled The Concept of Repression. It was the publication of the latter, which contained some of the pivotal metapsychological insights and concepts he had come to formulate through practicing his own brand of psychotherapy, that was his initial intellectual salvo in his correspondence with Freud. When Bose again gifted Freud on the occasion of his 75^th birthday an ivory statue of the Indian God Vishnu Freud gave it a place of honor on his desk in London, noting how it symbolized the conquest it [psychoanalysis] had made in foreign countries. By 1922 Bose had helped to found the first Indian psychoanalytic society, beginning a fruitful history of Indian psychoanalysts, not the least of which include S.C. Mitra, Tarun Sinha, and, of course, Sudhir Kakar.

What is of importance for our purposes is how Bose, reflecting strategies we have seen before, countered Freud by offering revisions to psychoanalytic theory. The most drastic of these argued for a grand metapsychological concept he dubbed the “theoretical ego.” The latter targets “the average man’s “I” that feels the continuity of experience” and, as such, can be said to be the “hypothetical entity which maintains the continuity of mental experience both conscious and unconscious…the thread which keeps the individual beads together in a necklace” (Hiltebeitel, 2018, p. 114). As such, the theoretical ego is “the great reservoir of all wishes both conscious and unconscious. It includes within itself the Freudian ego, the id, and the super-ego, in fact, all manifestations of mental life” (Hiltebeitel, 2018, p. 114). Bose, who had an allegiance to the Upanishads and Advaita Vedanta, seems to have imported Hindu philosophy into the notion of a theoretical ego. As Hiltebeitel notes, the latter embodies the characteristics of a jivatman (a “living Self”) and employs Hindu images in its description: “[Bose’s] Vedanta-oriented readers and patients could recognize it as synonymous with the jivatman: the self caught up in samsaric life that would nonetheless be theoretically (ontologically and “ultimately”) free not only from reincarnation caused by karmic suffering, but from biological drives” (Hiltebeitel, 2018, p. 119).

Bose argued, then, that Hinduism contained an introspective wisdom that pointed to the existence of a transformational dimension to consciousness. He formally articulated this position in a small paper, titled “The Psychological Outlook of Hindu Philosophy,” delivered at the Indian Philosophical Congress in 1930. This paper can be framed as Bose’s Hindu counterpart to Oskar Pfister’s Protestant response to Freud as contained in his “The Illusion of the Future.” Bose is willing to admit, as had Pfister, to a form of religion where God is a projection and designed to cater to infantile needs. But then, by way of entering the definitional debate about “what” religion is, he offered the example of the Upanishads, framed as a higher, introspective and psychological form of religion. Here the religious seeker is re-defined as not bound by feelings of need and danger but by the need for wisdom. The early Upanishadic rishis accessed a deeper level of consciousness, termed by Bose “pure consciousness” (consciousness without an object), which had the therapeutic effect of leading to a condition in which “all pains cease to exist, and there is a peculiar feeling of blissfulness” (Hiltebeitel, 2018, p. 133). In a psychoanalytic re-framing of the Upanishadic claim that the meditative insight into Brahman results in “Sat, Chit, Ananda” (Truth, [pure] Consciousness, Bliss) Bose was offering a Hindu variant of Rolland’s desire to see the establishment of a “mystical psychoanalysis.” As with Pfister, there is no indication that Freud wished to follow Bose’s suggestions in any way. Once again, we have a series of interesting encounters which have been mostly buried in the history of psychoanalytic theorizing about mysticism.

Psychoanalytic models of mysticism: Classic, adaptive, and transformational

Three discernable interpretative models have grown out of Freud’s initial foray into mysticism: the classic-reductive (which see developmental themes in mystical experience and saintly lives with a penchant for reductionism and pathologizing); the adaptive (which finds some therapeutic value in mystical experiences without endorsing its ontological claims); and the transformational (which, as with Rolland and Bose, allows for the possible existence of a higher, non-developmentally based form of consciousness).

Despite what we labored to show was the complexity of Freud’s unresolved entry into the analysis of mysticism, it is the classic reductive model of interpretation that has historically held sway. For our purposes, that view is best articulated in the works of J.M. Masson, especially pertinent in that it is Masson in particular to whom Kakar takes exception (as we shall see below). Masson’s writings on mysticism are wide ranging, incorporating a major monograph (The Oceanic Feeling) as well as multiple articles. There is no room for culture in his various analyses. On the contrary, he confidently concludes that Vedanta philosophy, with its emphasis on the world as illusion, can only signify derealization, depersonalization, and aggressive annihilation fantasies. The ascetic emphasis on celibacy, watching one’s breath and quieting the mind betrays an inability to work-through the dangerous possibilities inherent in sexual excitement. The ascetic diet can be explained with recourse to anorexia nervosa. The narrative of Krishna’s encounter with the hunchback indicates Oedipal issues and castration anxiety. He speculates, without supporting evidence, that an analysis of Buddha’s four noble truths reveal that he was deeply depressed. Abandoned by loved ones as a child and engaged in introspective meditative activity to find the root of suffering, the Buddha proclaimed the cure of nirvana—a cure which indicates a manic defense against the emergence of the severe trauma which accompanied being abandoned. Ramakrishna, on the other hand, is framed as a pervert whose sadhanas reflect gender confusion, infantilism, and autoeroticism. Indeed for Masson, Ramakrishna is a “happy” pervert only because the pathology inherent in his Indian religio-cultural surround countenanced, if not encouraged, his otherwise perverted behavior (Masson, 1976, 1979, 1980). ⁵

As mentioned above, what can be called the “adaptive” approach at best brackets the question of the existence of the divine and is more charitable in framing mystical experiences and practices as having a therapeutic value. A paradigmatic instance would be Prince and Savage’s claim that mystical experience is a controlled “regression in the service of the ego” which can lead to insight, the restoration of basic trust, and renewed self-esteem (Prince & Savage, 1972). ⁶ Herbert Fingarette followed suit by adducing a case history of a successful analysis which argued that the Buddhist notions of “no self” and “emptiness” were best translated into western psychoanalytic nomenclature as the “loss” of the “transference self.” In other words, Buddhism was “really” a form of “eastern psychoanalysis,” and what was needed was the pursuit of its “proper” translation into the more accurate western lens (Parsons, 2009).

The transformational school, on the other hand, claims that deep within the psyche is a form of the religious a priori. An initial case in point is that of Erik Erikson, interesting for us insofar as not only did Kakar study under him but also referred to him as his “guru” (Kakar, 2015). In his Young Man Luther Erikson noted that monastic techniques enabled access to a “third nostalgia,” the latter described as “the pure self itself, the unborn core of creation, the -- as it were, preparental – center where God is pure nothing: ein lauter Nichts, in the words of Angelus Silesius” (Erikson, 1958, p. 264). Erikson goes on to note that this transformational core is also found in Zen Buddhism (at that time making its way into American culture): “This pure self is no longer sick with a conflict between right and wrong, not dependent on providers, and not depend on guides to reason and reality… One basic form of heroic asceticism, therefore, one way of liberating man from his existential delimitations, is to retrace the steps of the development of the I, to forego even object relations in the most primitive sense, to step down and back to the borderline where the I emerged from its matrix…the Eastern form cultivates the art of deliberate self-loss: Zen Buddhism is probably its most systematic form” (Erikson, 1958, p. 264–5; 119).

For Erikson this mystical, transformational dimension to the psyche centered around those concerns and anxieties about foundational issues of existence: the “ultimate questions” of death, nothingness and meaning. The import of Erikson’s extension of psychoanalytic theory is clear: the deepest level of selfhood is that in which we become aware of our contact with divinity. Commensurate if alternate formulations of the transformational can be found in Wilfred Bion’s notion of “O”, which he defined as “ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself. O does not fall in the domain of knowledge or learning save incidentally; it can be “become,” but it cannot be known” (Cooper, 2019, p. 98–99) and Jacques Lacan’s notion of The Real. The latter is akin to a “thing-in-itself,” an Absolute that is ineffable, undifferentiated, and primordial. In referencing a philosophical version of this primordial Reality, Lacan pointed to the neo-Platonic Sage Plotinus and his rendering, in his famous book The Enneads, of what he called the “One.” As some have observed, Lacan has shifted psychoanalytic conceptions of language, the unconscious, truth, and healing towards a perspective commensurate with philosophical and religious mysticism (Webb & Sells, 1995).

Finally, it is worth mentioning Heinz Kohut’s concept of “cosmic narcissism,” a concept which captures the religio-ethical goal of his psychology. Cosmic narcissism is seen as a developmentally mature attainment indicative of ethical and existential achievement beyond the results of a successful analysis. Referring back to the “oceanic feeling” (which Kohut, like so many analysts, mistakenly understood as transient), Kohut insists that cosmic narcissism is statelike, consisting in “a shift of the narcissistic cathexis from the self to a concept of participation in a supraindividual and timeless existence” (Kohut, 1978, p. 456). Cosmic narcissism “transcends the bounds of the individual,” and one lives “sub specie aeternitas” without elation or anxiety, bathed in a continual communion with a contentless, supraordinate Self, participating in “supraindividual ideals and the world with which one identifies” (Kohut, 1978, p. 456). To this ideal Kohut conjoins a cultural agenda. In his essay “On Leadership” Kohut suggests the need for a new, unchurched rational religion, “an as yet uncreated system of mystical rationality which could take the place of the religions of the past” (Kohut, 1985, p. 70). He then points to “instances of heroic men of constructive political action who have achieved a transformation of their narcissism into a contentless, inspiring personal religion” further commenting that humanity will have to produce such types in greater numbers in order to survive (Kohut, 1985, p. 70). As to who might embody such an achievement, Kohut points to Dag Hammarskjöld, the former secretary-general of the United Nations: “Dag Hammarskjöld...an example of this type, describes his contentless mysticism in the following words: “Faith is a state of mind and of the soul…the language of religion is (only) a set of formulas which register a basic religious experience” (Kohut, 1985, p. 71). ⁷ It is ironic that such later forms of metapsychology have come to a position closer to Rolland than to Freud.

Kakar on mysticism

Now that the stage has been set we can best situate where Kakar fits in this spectrum of models and the advances that he made. In beginning one might note that in several of his writings, contra Masson and others, he confesses to having a deep sympathy for the mystics. So it is that in his Inner World, among other places, he cites Medard Boss’s observation that advanced mystics do not evince weakness and regression but are “fully aware personalities” who are “mature, sober, and strong” (Kakar, 1979a, p. 27). One might also speculate that his sympathy with earlier psychoanalysts like Dr. Bose and his western “guru” Erikson, as well as his Indian and Hindu roots, supported his more capacious attitude towards mysticism. With regard to the latter, he tells us that he locates himself in that cadre of persons belonging to the tradition of the “Indian intellectual,” characterized as “an intellectual tradition more than a hundred years old, starting with Ram Mohan Roy (1774–1833), a tradition devoted to the vicissitudes of Indian identity in modern times” (Kakar, 1979a, p. 27). Kakar shares with us his deep identification with Nehru, another member of this tradition, who made it part of his life-task to capture not simply the geographical, physical and diverse cultural strands of India, but that “peculiar spirit” and “identity” which marks India as unique. ⁸ Kakar’s membership in this tradition led him to adopt the position of the Indian intellectual who strives, using the terminology and methodology created in the west, to not simply repudiate, analyze and dissect but also to assimilate and resurrect the unique wisdom of India and its culture. Parenthetically, such considerations are not insignificant given that Masson’s biographical reminiscences highlighted how his pathologizing of all things Hindu were in part due to his acute disillusionment with Paul Brunton, his father’s live-in guru and western disciple of Sri Ramana Maharshi. Indeed, one can make the argument that one must take into account such considerations when assessing why it is that certain psychoanalysts, in choosing from an array of available models, select those that are the most reductive and pathologizing (Parsons, 2008).

In the case of Kakar, the above renders it understandable that the pervading postmodern theme of his works lies in denying the (culturally mandated) discovery of an absolute truth, walking the fine line between psychological universalism and cultural relativism, and respecting different (and equal) visions of reality, mental health, gender identity and selfhood. As he put it, without such reflexivity one invariably lands in a position in which cultural judgments “about psychological maturity, the nature of reality, “positive” and “negative” resolutions of conflicts and complexes often appear in the garb of psychoanalytic universals” (Kakar, 1995, p. 281). Kakar insists that all attempts at cross-cultural applied psychoanalysis must be qualified by taking into account new information gleaned through specifically Indian case history material and relevant ethnographic observations (e.g., the conceptual import of Geertz’s “thick description” and Marriott’s notion of the “–dividual”). Indeed, he goes so far as to call for a “radical revision” of psychoanalytic theory and the need to include what anthropologists refer to as the “native’s point of view” (Kakar, 1991).

One can see this perspective shining through when Kakar chastises Masson and other psychoanalysts for practicing a form of psychological orientalism. He duly notes that many in the latter camp see the Hindu striving for nirvana and moksha in wholly pejorative terms: “reality testing may well have fallen by the wayside” (Kakar, 1982a, 1982b, p. 89). Reviewing Masson’s work, Kakar notes how it “must be of special interest to an Indian psychoanalyst…(for it) can only lend credence to the position of an increasing number of third-world intellectuals who maintain that the western sciences of man, including psychoanalysis, are in fact culture-bound ethnosciences whose claim to universality is both based upon and is an aspect of the global political and economic domination by the West” (Kakar, 1982a, 1982b, pp. 289; 292). Masson’s approach is “neither careful enough nor sensitive enough to its subject matter” resulting in the “banal oversimplification of human motives and debunking of human endeavors” (Kakar, 1982a, 1982b, pp. 295–96). To be sure, Kakar is hardly against using “classic” models, along with adaptive and transformational ones, all siphoned through relevant cultural lens where applicable. Rather, what is demanded as an antidote to Masson and others is a culturally reflexive, non-reductionistic psychoanalysis aided by relevant ethnographic studies aimed at getting the “case” right.

Turning to his complex and various analyses of mysticism, we can organize the latter with respect to three rubrics: (1) mystical worldviews and practices; (2) the lives of the mystics; (3) mystical relationships. With regard to the first, Kakar departs in a significant way from Freud. Freud’s thoughts on religious worldviews (weltanschauung) emphasized their inability to be verified empirically and, despite some historical value as a “mental” tool of civilization (read: cultural super-ego) to offset the anti-social aggressive and sexual wishes of “the masses” through fear and guilt, was no longer effective due to secularization (hence his wish to insert psychoanalysis into culture as a “secular” cure of souls). Kakar, on the other hand, takes a Winnicottian turn by emphasizing how a religious worldview functions transitionally.

Winnicott used the terms “transitional objects” and “transitional phenomena” to explain the emergence in the child’s life of an object, such as a blanket or stuffed animal, to which the child develops an intense bond and from which it receives nurturance. Such objects punctuate the cultural landscape of art and religion (e.g., the little boy’s relationship with the alien in the film “E.T.”; the tiger in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes), aiding in the process of individuation and the mastery of the world “out-there.” Importantly, transitional objects point to an area of experience to which both inner psychological and outer cultural reality contribute. For Winnicott this fact points to an unchallenged “third” area of experiencing, both real and unreal, which undercuts Freud’s simple opposition between inner and outer reality and their correlates, the pleasure and reality principles. This third area is what he refers to as the “substance of illusion” – an inner/outer space illumined by transitional objects. “Illusion,” in this Winnicottian sense, is not so much “delusion” (as Freud would see in religious worldviews) but the more accurate and necessary psychological rendering of how human beings live their lives (Winnicott, 1971).

There is a new psychoanalytic epistemology at work here. Contra Freud, Winnicott sees value in religion as a transitional object. This lies in part due to the fact that for Winnicott, the very definition of what constitutes a healthy person is the ability to creatively engage and master an external reality which, as an “x out there,” is never fully understood or mastered. For Freud any religious worldview, because it could not be empirically confirmed, was at least an illusion, if not a form of delusion and pathology. Winnicott, on the other hand, would say that because we never get to the “x” which defines the “real” of external reality, the task of “reality-acceptance” is life-long. Religion, along with science and art, offers us creative resources for engaging and adapting to the ultimately unknowable “x” which lies “out there.” This means that one cannot rule out the possible veracity of the noetic claims of the mystics.

Ana-Maria Rizzuto, in her book The Birth of the Living God, is usually credited with using Winnicott’s theorizing about transitional objects to develop a new way of thinking about the course of a believer’s evolving religious worldview (which she calls the “God representation”), including the inclusion of mystical insights (Rizzuto, 1979). ⁹ However, writing at exactly the same time, Kakar was developing a similar set of ideas. In his Inner World, speaking to the psychological terrain of the Hindu inner world, he refers to a “cluster of ideas,” the core of which consists of the Hindu notions of moksha, dharma, and karma. The latter, thinks Kakar, provides “a coherent, consistent world image in which the goals of human existence, the way to reach this goal, the errors to be avoided, and the obstacles to be expected along the way” are offered to the individual (Kakar, 1979a, p. 15). It is in speaking to how this “image” is internalized and functions that Kakar becomes Winnicottian, claiming that it is initially mediated through the mother and that “such world images (in any culture) constitute a third distinct category, both ‘real’ and ‘unreal,’ a meta-reality which is neither deterministically universal nor utterly idiosyncratic but which fills the space between the two.…exercis[ing] an influence on individual thought and behavior that is somewhat comparable to the working of the reality and pleasure principles” (Kakar, 1979a, p. 50).

Diving further into this Hindu “world image,” Kakar becomes more anthropological, stressing its culturally relative value. Noting that the aim of Hinduism is best expressed in the Upanishadic notion of moksha, he once again laments the strong tradition within psychoanalysis which tends to render it in pathological terms. This is due to the implicit “enthno” value system and unfortunate colonialist tendencies of western psychoanalysis. In contrast, and emphasizing the relativity of cultural themes like the (western) value of atomistic individuality versus the preference of the pole of “fusion” and interdependence (what McKim Marriot calls the “-dividual”), Kakar thinks that the Hindu worldview, with its introspective discipline of yoga and aim of moksha, offers a vision of reality which is simply different, if not in some sense more profound, than that offered by Freud. So it is he contrasts the two as follows:

The psycho-analytic vision of reality… is primarily influenced by a mixture of the tragic and the ironic…Fittingly enough, Oedipus, Hamlet and Lear are its heroes. The tragic vision and its ironic amelioration are aptly condensed in Freud’s offer to the sufferer to exchange his unbearable neurotic misery for ordinary human unhappiness. On the other hand, the yogic (or more broadly the Hindu) vision of reality is a combination of the tragic and the romantic…The new journey is a search and the seeker, if he withstands all the perils of the road, will be rewarded by exaltation beyond normal human experience. The heroes of this vision are not the Oedipus’s and the Hamlets but the Nachiketas and the Meeras…These different visions of reality… may converge in some respects yet diverge in others. To call such a deviations ‘pathological’ or ‘ignorant’ is to confuse a vision of reality with the reality and thus to remain unaware of its relativity (Kakar, 1979a, pp. 28–29).

Kakar goes on to cite how bridges can be adduced to link the psychoanalytic and Hindu visions of reality. Those bridges are found in what we have called the transformational school:

The chasm between the Yogic and psychoanalytic views on the final goals of adulthood is however not unbridgeable. There is a bridge in Heinz Kohut’s concepts of ‘mature narcissism,’ ‘cosmic narcissism’….Even closer in spirit (especially to Raja Yoga) is Bion’s work. Bion goes beyond the medical model of psychoanalysis and sees the pursuit of O – his sign for ultimate reality represented by such terms as absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite – as the aim of the psychoanalytic endeavour (Kakar, 1979b, p. 126).

Particularly striking along these lines is his concept of “amplified empathy.” Contrasting extant psychoanalytic models about personhood with that found in the Upanishads (and so recalling his predecessor Dr. Bose), Kakar recasts the Hindu aim of moksha as “not limited to gaining the awareness of ‘I’ in a composite self. Rather, it is held that this ultimate ‘man’s meaning’ is not realized until a person also has a similar feeling of ‘I’ in the selves of others, an empathy amplified to the point of complete identification” (Kakar, 1979a, p. 19; Kakar, 2009). Going further, in an attempt to resurrect the value of buried, archaic modes of knowing, Kakar affirms a modified theory about the nature of the unconscious (again recalling Bose) which might account for unusual psychic phenomena:

In the Hindu ideal, reality is not primarily mediated through the conscious and pre-conscious perceptions, unconscious defenses and rational thought processes that make up the ego; it emanates from the deepest and phylogenetically much older structural layer of personality – the id, the mental representative of the organism’s instinctual drives. Reality, according to Hindu belief, can be apprehended or known only through those archaic, unconscious, pre-verbal processes of sensing and feeling (like intuition, or what is known as extra-sensory perception) (Kakar, 1979a, p. 20; Kakar, 2009). ¹⁰

It is the aim of Hindu mystical practices like Yoga to empower one to access such modes of knowing. Kakar’s authorization of the introspective depths yoga accesses brings him closer to Rolland, who affirmed how yoga could lead to a deep insight into the nature of transcendental consciousness, than to Freud, who affirmed (as stated above) that it could only “grasp happenings in the depths of the ego and in the id.” Moreover, by adducing Roland Fischer’s spectrum of conscious states from the “ergotropic” (hyperarousal, ecstatic) to the “trophotropic” (hyporarousal, samadhi), Kakar indicates the relevance of empirical research (physiological, neurocognitive) for psychoanalytic forays into mysticism. Finally, by emphasizing once again the need to accept the relativity of cultural norms, he contrasts Erikson’s (western) life-cycle schema with that of the Hindu, specifically highlighting the latter’s phase appropriate task of renouncing the world and seeking “realization” in the later stages of life (Kakar, 1979a).

Kakar makes a series of different yet related observations concerning individual mystics. Such analyses include yet go beyond the focus on “experience” to address matters of lifestyle: gender identity, sexual orientation, and adaptation to the external world. Most revealing in this regard is his analysis of Ramakrishna. Basing the latter primarily on the extant biographies of the Paramahamsa, Kakar initially seeks to grant metapsychological legitimacy to the mystical intent to seek transcendental visions. It is here that he draws on a transformational theorist, Jacque Lacan, who Kakar refers to as one of the “mystics” of psychoanalysis:

Lacan…has postulated that man’s psychic life constantly seeks to deal with a primordial state of affairs which he calls the Real. The Real itself is unknowable, though we constantly create myths as its markers. Perhaps the principal myth involves the rupture of a basic union, the separation from the mother’s body, leaving us with a fundamental feeling of incompletion. The fantasies around this insufficiency are universal, governing the psyche of both patients and analysts alike. In the psyche, this lack is translated as desire, and the human venture is a history of desire as it ceaselessly loses and discovers itself in (what Lacan calls) The Imaginary and, with the advent of language, The Symbolic order. Born of rupture, desire’s fate is an endless quest for the lost object; all real objects merely interrupt the search…The mystical quest seeks to rescue from primal repression the constantly lived contrast between an original interlocking and a radical rupture. The mystic, unlike most others, does not mistake his hunger for its fulfillment. If we are all fundamentally perverse in the play of our desire, then the mystic is the only one who seeks to go beyond the illusion of The Imaginary and, yes, also the maya of The Symbolic register (Kakar, 1991, p. 27).

Kakar then goes on to add the relative cultural sophistication to the nature of this striving. The mystical intent to seek The Real is framed in theistic forms of Hinduism as bhakti. Insisting, contra Freud, that there exist culturally-specific defense mechanisms, Kakar reflexively frames “bhavas” (religious practices aimed at heightening devotional moods) as a culturally distinct Indian ego defense mechanism akin to Freud’s understanding of the nature and function of “sublimation.” The psychological core of bhava is defined by Kakar as a passionate form of devotion done with “all one’s heart…soul…might” (Kakar, 1991, p. 13). So framed, it engenders an intense form of experiencing similar to extreme forms of love, grief, and fear. While such passion may well unearth developmental issues it can also transform them into the altered, ecstatic state which bequeaths visionary products.

The products of intense bhava devotion are categorized under three headings: hallucinations (understood as non-pathological, being indicative of “thin boundaries” and an artistic sensibility); conscious visions (understood as culturally specific symbolic representations of psychic processes); and unconscious visions. The latter heading, which Kakar uses to target Ramakrishna’s mystical experience of Kali (the Divine mother), is useful for distinguishing how he departs from previous psychoanalytic pathologizing. Narasingha Sil, a self-confessed follower of Masson’s work, sees the etiology of Ramakrishna’s vision rooted in his “depression and aggression towards the most important object (the Mother goddess) in his life...and thus, in Freudian terms… a classic case of the shadow of the object falling upon the ego” (Sil, 1991, p. 118). While Kakar does see pre-oedipal complicity in the vision of Kali, he goes further to argue that bhava, as a culturally distinct defense mechanism, unearths not only psychological issues but (in following Winnicott once again) a transitional form of experiencing that ignites “the unknowable ground of creativeness as such” (Kakar, 1991, p. 29). Mystical experience, then, becomes “the preeminent way of uncovering the vein of creativity that runs deep in all of us” (Kakar, 1991, p. 29). Ramakrishna’s bhavas also included devotional exercises such as what some in the west might call cross-dressing. In contrast, Kakar rightly understands bhavas as a state of devotion (bhavas literally translated as “being” or “becoming” and here meaning religious practices aimed at heightening devotion to Krishna by identifying with the milkmaids). Such expressions of sexuality and gender identity are easily dismissed by Masson as being simple perversion. In the hands of Kakar, however, it is better understood in terms of actualizing a culturally alternate gender ideal: that of divine androgyny. Such an ideal is not seen as “abnormal” or “perverted” or anything other than one of many equal, if different, cultural and religious solutions to the existential challenges surrounding universal conflicts about gender identity and sexual orientation. To this end, he notes that object-relations theory does not posit, as did Freud, that both boys and girls are initially born as “little men” but, because the mother is the first “object” with which we identity, as “little women.” For males, this means that the de-repression and “ego-syntonic” (i.e., accepted by the ego) integration of one’s primary femininity is a developmental task – one recognized in Hinduism and targeted by many of its tantric practices. Armed with this new model, Kakar interprets Ramakrishna’s various practices activating what Winnicott called the “pure female element.” The de-repression and integration of the latter may well be heralded, in certain cultures and religions (as with tantra), as a gender ideal (i.e., divine androgyny) to be realized. The latter is then linked to a specific form of the multiple, available, and relatively equal modes of adaptation to reality. For example, one such western ideal mode is expressed in the oft-used notion of the “protestant ethic,” which valorizes the need for continual “doing,” “mastery” and even “active opposition.” Tantra, however, valorizes a more “feminine” mode, as is reflected in the Hindu notions of “ananda” and “focused receptivity.” The latter terms are defined with respect to a permanent form of psychological transformation centered around a receptive, empathic attunement with the flow of everyday events, championing a subjectivity imbued with the delight of creative apperception and the virtues of simply “being” and the more relaxed attitude of “reception absorption” (Kakar, 1982a, 1982b). ¹¹

Finally, Kakar offers his observations on what can be called a mystical “relationship,” specifically that of the guru-disciple. Distinguishing between the ritualistic guide of the early Vedas, the spiritual friend and director of the Upanishads, and the bhakti/moksha (devotional/liberation) guru of the Bhagavad Gita and Tantras, Kakar sets his sights on the latter. This more recent vintage highlights the guru as a virtual god while the disciple may be encouraged to embody the qualities, for example, of childlike surrender. So construed, the relationship is amenable to a Kohutian analysis of how the guru “heals.” This “guru fantasy” is enabled through culture at large, which constructs the bhakti guru as a “primary cultural self-object” and what Bollas calls a “transformational object.” The choice of one among an array of such gurus is then made according to that psychological gradient Kakar calls “parental style.” Along with the require renunciatory rules, devotion, and submission, an idealizing transference is thus instigated, culminating in a form of regression in the expectation of a “developmental second chance.” The process of idealization and introjection, facilitated by darshan (the guru’s “look”), nuances of the guru’s voice and touch, prasada (food offerings), teachings, and the support of the group, offer the psychological conditions needed to “re-grow” the archaic narcissistic structures (grandiose self; idealized parent imago) into mature ones (realistic self-esteem, purpose, self-cohesion). As such, Kakar frames the guru-disciple relationship as a culturally distinct form of a therapeutic enterprise (Kakar, 1991). However, this culturally sensitive “adaptive” take is mitigated by Kakar’s insistence that such relationships can also go horribly wrong. Kakar is critical of the supposed “enlightened” gurus like Aurobindo and Maharaja Charan Singh who give indication that psychoanalysis can be dispensed with, further noting that any “guru” is subject to the dictates of the unconscious (Kakar, 1982a, 1982b). Indeed, his observations on the “case histories” of adepts such as Osho and Drukpa Kunley reveal the role developmental determinisms played in the course of their respective lives. As he put it, “the spirit never completely escapes the gravitational pull exerted by the forces of narcissism, aggression and desire in the psyche” (Kakar, 2009, p. 35). In the case of the guru-disciple relationship, he notes that guru’s may suffer from unintegrated residues of primitive narcissistic structures to the point of exhibiting fantasies of omnipotent grandiosity, sexual perversion, and even self-fragmentation. This is a needed cautionary tale. Given what can be called the “scandal” literature concerning such luminaries as Joshu Sasaki, Baba Muktananda and Sogyal Rinpoche, as well as the rampant scandals afflicting Christian and Jewish traditions (e.g., the Catholic abuse scandal in general, Robert Morris, Ravi Zacharias, Moshe Keller, etc.), such reservations are well founded.

Summing up, moving forward

Summing up, then, what do we have in Kakar’s take on mysticism, psychoanalysis and culture? The first observation is that it is inclusive. Depending on the mystical phenomenon and case history in question, he is willing to utilize classic reductive, adaptive and transformational models. With respect to the transformational, there is a red thread that links him, historically speaking, to Bose, Rolland, Erikson, and what he calls the “mystics” of psychoanalysis (Lacan, Bion, Kohut, Winnicott). At the same time, he further develops what can be called the reflexive element (the need to take culture into consideration). On the one hand, this enables him to spy the “ethno” element in psychoanalytic metapsychology and application, calling out its potential misuse as a colonial and orientalist tool. On the other he endeavors, as with his views on bhava and gender, to model the application of a culturally sensitive psychoanalytic enterprise. Kakar’s formulations, then, which link to the past yet also “go beyond” previous theorists, can rightly be framed as significant contributions and advances in the intersection between mysticism, psychoanalysis and culture.

Going forward, even a cursory survey of the psychoanalytic landscape over the past few decades reveals that there has been increasing attempts at integrating the wisdom of meditative traditions into the therapeutic process. The latter has been facilitated by the advent of a pluralistic socio-cultural soil and the lead of those psychoanalysts who have become well versed intellectually in the textual traditions of mysticism and existentially in meditative accomplishment. Wearing the hats of the trained psychoanalyst, the meditation teacher, the university professor, and even the neurocognitive scientist, this new cadre of researchers aim to authorize and make available a wide spectrum of introspective disciplines and insight. ¹² To be sure, progress along these lines will take time and effort. William James once said with respect to mysticism that “we had better keep an open mind and collect facts sympathetically for a long time to come. We shall not understand these alterations of consciousness either in this generation or the next” (James, 1980, p. 221). Repurposed here for analysis in any tradition, that means that “mysticism” is a complex subject with a spectrum of phenomena that demands interdisciplinary consultation. At the very least, one must get the case right before one thinks of engaging in methodological analysis, if only to ascertain the proper models and their potential benefits, weaknesses, limits, and the need for new formulations. Kakar’s forays into dialogue with multiple methodological perspectives, from “other” social sciences like anthropology and natural sciences like physiological and neurological research to the textual, philosophical and theological dimensions of mysticism, is a welcome addition to this movement. Indeed, he has helped to model what the future of the dialogue with mysticism must entail.