Psychoanalysis and Spirituality

 

Photo Credit: Journal for Cultural & Religious Theory

Psychoanalysis and Spirituality

In science, analysis is an important tool to arrive at cognitive results. But when it comes to spirituality analytical methods are in a way incomplete. They help us only to a certain extent and then they leave us in a limbo. One feels that something has happened, but a lot is missing. Something seems to be incomplete, hanging, suspended. But that is natural because analysis is a very new process.

The inventor of any process or new study dies and then that process continues to evolve over a period of time, till it reaches completion, till it comes full circle. Sometimes it takes centuries for a certain method to become so complete that once we pass through it, we don’t have any feelings of incompletion or of missing something. And once that happens, that means that the process has become a circle. It gives us a smoothness, an ease, an at-homeness, a relaxation.

Psychoanalysis is just a diagnosis without a medicine. It makes us clearly aware of what is wrong, but then what to do? In fact, in understanding what is wrong, a few things are reconciled, but many more things bubble up from the unconscious. A few things are solved; many more things become questions.

So, the analytic process makes us a little aware but it makes us a little more anxious too, because now we know many more things of which we were never aware. It gives us a certain insight into our being, but the centre is not revealed through it – only layers of the mind – because Freud had no concept of the soul, so he thought that there are layers and layers of the mind – conscious, subconscious, unconscious – but nothing beyond that.

That means that there are only peripheries, concentric circles and no centre. A body cannot exist without a soul. If the body exists, the soul must exist, because the outside cannot exist without an inside. If the outside exists, we may not be able to penetrate the inside, but the inside must be there, because they go together – the outside and the inside. The body is nothing but the outside soul, and the soul is nothing but the inside body. 

Psychology is complete only when at its peak it becomes a religion, because that is the very culmination. A tree is complete only when it flowers. Otherwise, the tree can be there very green and everything good and beautiful, but still barren if the flowers are not there. Something tremendously beautiful will be missing.

In a way it looks complete – the tree is there, alive, green, its branches high in the sky – but something is missing. The tree has not yet been able to blossom, to overflow. The tree has not yet been able to produce colour and song and ecstasy. So, unless psychology becomes a religion, it remains like a tree without flowers.

So, psychology is just a foundation. When the temple is completed, it will become religion. We have tried this in India. It was psychology in the beginning; then by and by we failed. For centuries we felt that something was missing. Then a totally new thing arose out of it – and that is religion. This came from turning inwards, on becoming introversive.