Psychoanalysis and the Practice of Yoga, Part 1

A narrow focus of extreme specialisation is a major cause of inaccurate assessment and therefore, inappropriate decisions and action. This is, however, a symptom of our modern-day fixation on mental analysis rather than on an approach that integrates the various parts into a coordinated whole, and therefore, a more complete pattern.

This narrow focus can lead to increased detailed observation and has therefore some limited uses. However, the rise of Western psychology with the development of Freudian analysis through techniques such as psychoanalysis that delve into the subconscious embedded drives based in childhood trauma, suppressed feelings and experiences, while bringing up things that we may have kept deeply hidden in the subconscious, may also create enormous challenges and even enhance the disruptions the individual is feeling. It is interesting to note that many people who undergo psychological therapy in the West using techniques of this sort never actually reach any resolution or clearance of the issues that led them to therapy in the first place; rather, they remain on a constant treadmill of therapy, in many cases with drugs prescribed, to somehow remain functional in society.

Freud’s process focused very heavily on suppressed sexual feelings and desires, and unesolved feelings between an individual and his parents stretching back to childhood. These things, when brought to the surface through psychoanalysis, are not generally released, but are then dwelt upon, and through increased focus, given an increased power over the individual’s awareness, feelings and moods.

The process is further limited by the fact that it seems to want to attribute virtually all human action to these suppressed and hidden forces of sexual frustration, tension and suppression. It thereby avoids looking at the entirety of the human being, the multiple layers of conscoiusness that have developed and which each have their influence on the totaly of human understanding and action. In the Freudian universe, the idea of higher forces acting upon the being, of an evolutionary pressure, of the natural expressions of mind, the role of the soul, or psychic being, are all essentially disregarded.

For an individual taking up the practice of yoga and spiritual development, fixating on these lower forces, particularly without the wider context of the entirety of consciousness development, is at best a distraction from the objective, and at worst, by raising up all manner of energies that the individual is not in a position to actually resolve, a tremendous cause of failure. Spending time and focus on dealing with unleashed embedded complexes without developing a solid basis of understanding and focus that can minimize and properly limit those complexes, turns out to be a serious mistake, as Sri Aurobindo notes here.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “Your practice of psycho-analysis was a mistake. It has for the time at least, made the work of purification more complicated, not easier. The psycho-analysis of Freud is the last thing that one should associate with Yoga. It takes up a certain part, the darkest, the most perilous, the unhealthiest part of the nature, the lower vital subconscious layer, isolates some of its most morbid phenomena and attributes to it and them an action out of all proportion to its true role in the nature. Modern psychology is an infant science, at once rash, fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind — to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms — runs riot here. Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood and it can have a nasty influence and tend to make the mind and vital more and not less fundamentally impure than before.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 5, Physical Consciousness — Subconscient — Sleep and Dream — Illness, pg. 93