The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism.

• Author: McLean, Malcolm

Academically speaking, psychoanalysis is getting an increasingly bad press,(1) though I suspect it still has a fair deal of popular support. The criticism, though, is getting to the psychoanalysts. This book is an attempt to reclaim some lost ground by arguing that while "there is no longer the same concern with establishing psychoanalysis as a science in the positivist sense," and "psychoanalytic theory cannot be proven by experimental means" (p. 64), it still has a role in the area of the explanation of religious phenomena, for example, the Hindu mystic and the guru.

Kakar begins by explaining that the kind of psychoanalysis he advocates is that practiced by "relational" analysts such as Winnicott and Kohut, and American ego psychologists, a form which takes a much more sympathetic view of religion than does classical Freudian (reductionist) analysis. He then devotes the two main chapters of the book to an application of this kind of analysis to the well-known nineteenth-century mystic Ramakrishna, and the guru as healer. It is his claim that analysis can explain and illuminate the ecstatic states and seemingly bizarre behavior of a mystic like Ramakrishna and the processes involved in the psychological healing of the more legitimate gurus of India.

Kakar's explanations are notable for being generous and nonreductive. He genuinely seeks to explain and understand, rather than to reduce and explain away. It is here that he displays his great talent for explaining things Indian clearly and simply, without misleading oversimplification, a talent Kakar exhibits in all his books. Readers unfamiliar with Hinduism will warm to Kakar's clear exposition, and those who are familiar will envy his facility. Ramakrishna, "an outrageous figure to unsympathetic and prosaic observers" (p. 18), is explained in terms of contemporary Hindu beliefs and practices as much as psychoanalytic ones. And the guru-sisya (masterdisciple) relationship, a feature of Hindu practice often misunderstood in the West, is similarly analyzed so that the positive, healing aspects of the relationship are made...