In the West, psychoanalysis has grown through Freud, Adler, Jung and Wilhelm Reich, to solve the problems arising from the ego such as frustrations, conflicts, schizophrenia and madness. In comparison to your meditation techniques, please explain the contributions, limitations and incompleteness of the system of psychoanalysis in solving the human problems rooted in the ego.
The first thing to be understood is that any problem rooted in the ego cannot be solved without transcending the ego. You can postpone the problem, you can bring in a little normality, you can create a little normalness about it, you can dilute the problem but you cannot solve it. You can make a man function more efficiently in the society through psychoanalysis but psychoanalysis never solves a problem. And whenever a problem is postponed, shifted, it creates another problem. It simply changes its place, but it remains there. A new eruption will come sooner or later and when the new eruption of the old problem comes it will become more difficult to postpone and shift it.
Psychoanalysis is a temporary relief because psychoanalysis cannot conceive of anything which transcends ego. A problem can be solved only when you can go beyond it. If you cannot go beyond it, then you are the problem. Then who is going to solve it? Then how is one going to solve it? Then you are the problem; the problem is not something separate from you.
Yoga, tantra and all meditation techniques, they are based upon a different ground. They say that the problems are there, the problems are around you, but you are never the problem. You can transcend them; you can look at them like an observer is looking down from the hill into the valley. This witnessing self can solve the problem. Really, just by witnessing a problem it is half solved already because when you can witness a problem, when you can observe it impartially, when you are not involved in it, you can stand by the side and look at it. The very clarity that comes out of this witnessing gives you the clue, gives you the secret key. And almost all problems are there because there is no clarity through which to understand them. You do not need solutions: you need clarity.
A problem rightly understood is solved, because a problem arises through a nonunderstanding mind. You create the problem because you are not understanding. So the basic thing is not to solve the problem: the basic thing is to create more understanding. And if more understanding, more clarity is there, and the problem can be encountered impartially, observed as if it doesn’t belong to you, as if it belongs to someone else; if you can create a distance between the problem and you – only then can it be solved.
Meditation creates a distance; it gives you a perspective. You go beyond the problem. The level of consciousness changes. Through psychoanalysis you remain on the same level. The level never changes; you are adjusted on the same level again. Your awareness, your consciousness, your witnessing capacity, doesn’t change. As you move in meditation you go higher and higher. You can look down at your problems. They are now in the valley, and you have come to a hill. From this perspective, this height, all the problems look different. And the more the distance grows, the more you become capable of observing them as if they do not belong to you.
Remember one thing: if a problem doesn’t belong to you, you can always give good advice on how to solve it. If it belongs to someone else, if someone else is in difficulty, you are always wise. You can give very good advice but if the problem belongs to you, you simply do not know what to do. What has happened? The problem is the same but now you are involved in it. When it was someone else’s problem, you had a distance from which to look at it impartially. Everyone is a good advisor for others but when it happens to oneself then all your wisdom is lost because the distance is lost.
Someone has died and the family is in anguish: you can give good advice. You can say the soul is immortal; you can say nothing dies, that life is eternal. But someone has died whom you loved, who means something to you, who was near, intimate, and now you are beating your breast and crying and weeping. Now you cannot give the same advice to yourself – that life is immortal and no one ever dies. Now it looks absurd.
So remember, while advising others you may look foolish. When you say to someone whose beloved has died that life is immortal, he will think you stupid. You are talking nonsense to him. He knows what it feels like to lose a beloved. No philosophy can give consolation. And he knows why you are saying this thing: because the problem is not yours. You can afford to be wise; he cannot afford it.
Through meditation you transcend your ordinary being. A new point arises in you from where you can look at things in a new way. The distance is created. Problems are there but they are now very far away – as if happening to someone else. Now you can give good advice to yourself, but there is no need to give it. The very distance will make you wise. So the whole technique of meditation consists of creating a distance between the problems and you. Right now, as you are, you are so much entangled with your problems that you cannot think, you cannot contemplate, you cannot see through them, you cannot witness them.
Psychoanalysis helps just for readjustment. It is not a transformation; that is one thing. And another thing: in psychoanalysis you become dependent. You need an expert and the expert will do everything. It will take three years, four years, or even five years if the problem is very deep, and you will become just a dependent – you are not growing. Rather, on the contrary, you are becoming more and more dependent. You will need this psychoanalyst every day or twice a week or thrice a week. Once you miss him you will feel lost. If you stop psychoanalysis, you will feel lost. It becomes intoxicating, it becomes alcoholic.
You start being dependent upon someone – someone who is an expert. You can tell your problem to him and he will solve it. He will discuss it, and he will bring the unconscious roots out of you. But he will do it; the solving will be done by someone else.
Remember, a problem solved by someone else is not going to give you more maturity. A problem solved by someone else may give him some maturity but it cannot give you maturity. You may become more immature. Then whenever there is a problem, you will need some expert advice, some professional advice. And I do not think that even psychoanalysts grow mature through your problems because they go for psychoanalysis to other psychoanalysts. They have their own problems. They solve your problems but they cannot solve their problems. Again, the question of distance.
Wilhelm Reich himself tried again and again to be psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. Freud refused to psychoanalyze him and all his life he felt hurt because Freud refused him. And Freudians, orthodox Freudians, never accepted that he was an expert because he himself had not been psychoanalyzed.
Every psychoanalyst goes to someone else with his own problems. It is just like the medical profession. If the doctor himself is ill he cannot diagnose himself. He is so near that he is afraid, so he will go to someone else. If you are a surgeon you cannot operate upon your own body – or can you? The distance is not there. It is difficult to operate upon one’s own body. But it is also difficult if your wife is really ill and a serious operation is to be done – you cannot operate because your hand will tremble. The intimacy is so much that you will be afraid, you cannot be a good surgeon. You will have to take advice; you will have to call some other surgeon to operate on your wife.
What is happening? You have been operating; you have done many operations. And now what is happening? You cannot do it on your child or your wife because the distance is so little – as if there is no distance. Without distance you cannot be impartial. So a psychoanalyst can help others but when he is in trouble he will have to take advice, he will have to be psychoanalyzed by someone else. And this is really strange that even a person like Wilhelm Reich goes mad in the end.
We cannot conceive a buddha going mad – or can you conceive of it? And if a buddha can go mad, then there is no way out of this misery. It is inconceivable that a buddha goes mad.
Look at Sigmund Freud’s life. He is the father and founder of psychoanalysis; he went on talking about problems very deeply. But as far as he himself was concerned not a single problem was solved. Not a single problem was solved! Fear was as much a problem for him as for anybody else. He was so afraid and nervous. Anger was as much a problem for him as for anybody else. He would get so angry that in anger he would fall unconscious in a fit. And this man knew so much about the human mind but as far as he himself was concerned, that knowledge seems of no use.
Jung himself would fall unconscious when in deep anxiety; he would have a fit. What is the problem? Distance is the problem. They had been thinking about problems but they had not been growing in consciousness. They thought intellectually, keenly, logically, and they concluded something. Sometimes those conclusions may have been right, but that is not the point. They did not grow in consciousness, they did not become in any way superhuman. And unless you transcend humanity, the problems cannot be solved; they can only be adjusted.
Freud said, in the last days of his life, that man is incurable. At the most we can hope that he can exist as an adjusted being; there is no other hope. This is at the most! Man cannot be happy, Freud says. At the most we can arrange it so that he is not very much unhappy. That’s all. But he cannot be happy; he is incurable. What type of solution can come out of such an attitude? And this is after forty years’ experience with human beings! He concludes that man cannot be helped, that man is naturally, by nature, miserable, that he will remain in misery.
But yoga says that man can be transcended. It is not man who is incurable; it is his minimal consciousness that creates the problem. Grow in consciousness, increase in consciousness, and problems decrease. They exist in the same proportion: if there is a minimum of consciousness, there is a maximum of problems; if there is a maximum of consciousness, there is a minimum of problems. With total consciousness, problems simply disappear just like the sun rises in the morning and dewdrops disappear. With total consciousness there are no problems because with a total consciousness, problems cannot arise. At the most psychoanalysis can be a cure, but problems will go on arising; it is not preventive.
Yoga, meditation, goes to the very depth. It will change you so that problems cannot arise. Psychoanalysis is concerned with problems; meditation is concerned with you directly. It is not concerned with problems at all. That is why the greatest of Eastern psychologists – Buddha, Mahavira or Krishna – do not talk about problems. Because of this, Western psychology thinks that psychology is a new phenomenon. It is not!
It was just in this century, in the first part of this century, that Freud could prove scientifically that there is such a thing as the unconscious. Buddha talked about it twenty-five centuries before. But Buddha has never tackled any problem because, says Buddha, problems are infinite. If you go on tackling every problem, you will never really be able to tackle them. Tackle the man himself. Just forget the problems. Tackle the being itself and help the being to grow. As the being grows, as it becomes more conscious, problems go on dropping; you need not be worried about them.
For example, a person is schizophrenic, split, divided. Psychoanalysis will deal with this split – with how to make this split workable, with how to adjust this man so that he can function, so that he can live in the society peacefully. Psychoanalysis will tackle the problem, the schizophrenia. If this man comes to Buddha, Buddha will not talk about the schizophrenic state. He will say, “Meditate so that the inner being becomes one. When the inner being becomes one, the split will disappear on the periphery.” The split is there – but it is not the cause, it is just the effect. Somewhere deep in the being there is a duality and that duality has made this crack on the periphery.
You go on cementing the crack but the inner split remains. Then the crack will appear somewhere else. Then you cement that crack; then somewhere else the crack will go on appearing. So if you treat one psychological problem, another problem arises immediately; then you treat another and a third arises.
This is good as far as the professionals are concerned because they live off it. But this is not a help. The West will have to go beyond psychoanalysis and unless the West comes to the methods of growing consciousness, of inner growth of being, of expansion of consciousness, psychoanalysis cannot be of much help.
Now, this is happening already: psychoanalysis is already out of date. The keen thinkers of the West are now thinking about how to expand consciousness and not about how to solve problems – about how to make a man alert and aware. Now this has come; the seeds have sprouted. The emphasis has to be remembered.
I am not concerned with your problems. There are millions and it is just useless to go on solving them – because you are the creator and you remain untouched. I solve a problem and you will create ten. You cannot be defeated because the creator remains behind them. And as I go on solving, I am just wasting my energy.
I will push aside your problems; I will simply penetrate you. The creator must be changed. And once the creator is changed, the problems on the periphery drop. Now no one is cooperating with them, no one is helping to create them, no one is enjoying them. You may feel this word strange but remember well that you enjoy your problems; hence you create them. You enjoy them for so many reasons.
The whole of humanity is sick. There are basic reasons, basic causes, which we go on overlooking. Whenever a child is sick he gets attention; whenever he is healthy no one gives him any attention. Whenever a child is sick, the parents love him – or at least they pretend. But whenever he is okay, no one is worried about him. No one thinks to give him a good kiss or a good hug. The child learns the trick. And love is a basic need and attention is a basic food. For the child, attention is even more potentially necessary than milk. Without attention something will die within him.
You may have heard about new experiments in one English laboratory, Delabar, where they are experimenting with plants. Even plants grow faster if you give them attention – just look at them lovingly. Two plants are used for the experiment. Give one plant attention, love – just a smiling, loving approach – and to the other do not give any attention. Give everything else necessary water, fertilizers, sunrays; give everything equally to each but to one give more attention. To the other do not give any attention; whenever you pass nearby just don’t look at it. And you will see that the one grows faster, brings bigger flowers, and the other grows in a delayed way and brings smaller flowers.
Attention is energy. When someone looks lovingly at you he is giving you food – a very subtle food. So every child needs attention and you give attention only when he is ill, when there is some problem. So if the child needs attention he will create problems, he will become a creator of problems.
Love is a basic need. Your body grows with food, your soul grows with love. But you can get love only when you are ill, when you have some problem; otherwise, no one is going to give you love. The child learns your ways; then he starts creating problems. Whenever he is ill or with a problem, everyone gives attention.
Have you ever observed? In your house the children are playing silently, peacefully. Then if some guests come, they start creating trouble. This is because your attention goes to the guests and now the children are hankering for attention. They need your attention, your guests’ attention, everybody’s attention toward them. They will do something; they will create some trouble. This is unconscious but then it becomes a pattern. And when you are grown up, you still go on doing it.
For women, it is true that ninety-nine percent of their illnesses, their mental problems, are basically love needs. Whenever you love a woman, she has no problems. Whenever there is some problem in love, many problems arise. Now she is hankering for attention. And psychoanalysts are exploiting this need for attention, because a psychoanalyst is a professional attention-giver. You go to him: he is a professional. For one hour he looks at you attentively. Whatsoever you say, whatsoever nonsense, he listens as if the Vedas are being preached. And he persuades you to talk more, to say anything, relevant or irrelevant, to bring your mind out. Then you feel so good.
You know, ninety-nine percent of patients fall in love with their psychoanalysts. And how to protect the client-expert relationship is a great problem because sooner or later it becomes a lovers’ relationship. Why? Why does a woman patient fall in love with a male psychoanalyst? Or the reverse: Why does a male patient fall in love with a woman psychoanalyst? The reason is that so much attention is given for the first time. The love need is fulfilled.
Unless your basic being is changed, nothing will come out of solving problems. You have an infinite potential to create new ones. Meditation is an effort to make you independent, first; and second, to change your type and quality of consciousness. With a new quality of consciousness old problems cannot exist: they simply disappear. For instance, you were a small child; you had a different type of problem. When you became older, they simply disappeared. Where have they gone? You never solved them, they simply disappeared. You cannot even remember what the problems were that belonged to your childhood. But you have grown and those problems disappeared.
Then you were a little older, you had a different type of problem; when you become old they will not be there. Not that you will be able to solve them – no one is able to solve problems – one can simply grow out of them. When you are old you will laugh at your own problems which were there, so urgent, so destructive that you had many times contemplated committing suicide because of them. And then when you have grown old, you will simply laugh: Where have those problems gone? Have you solved them? No – you have simply grown. Those problems belonged to a particular state of growth.
Similar is the case as you grow deeper into consciousness. Then too problems go on disappearing. A moment comes when you are so aware that problems do not arise. Meditation is not analysis. Meditation is growth. It is not concerned with problems; it is concerned with the being.
-Osho
From The Supreme Doctrine, Discourse #13, Q1
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