J. L.

M A S S O N

SEX AND YOGA:

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE
INDIAN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE*

I want to approach the subject of this paper in a more personal manner

than is usual in such writings. Most Sanskritists, like me, have concentrat-
ed their scholarly interests in India's ancient past and have spent most
of their time reading the ancient Sanskrit texts. I suspect that this some-
times produced a feeling of unease. By concentrating on the past, were
we avoiding the present of India? Daniel H. H. Ingalls, in his article
on 'The Study of the Past '1, put the matter well when he said that
we could become interested in Ancient India, but it was only possible
to 'love' what we knew more personally in India's present. Psycho-
analysis is a historical science that illuminates the present precisely
by concerning itself with the past. I can remember a summer in the
hill station of Mahabaleshwar, where I spent eight hours a day reading
the Dhvany~tloka and the N~ttya~stra with a Pandit. Later in the even-
ing I would put my reading aside and would go for a long walk, at
dusk, in the streets of Mahabaleshwar. I remember one evening in partic-
ular when I saw walking towards me a m a n dressed like a tiger, painted
with black and yellow stripes, carrying a sword with a young boy along-
side him. Shopkeepers all rushed out of their shops to give him money.
I wondered who the m a n was, why he was dressed that way, and why
people gave him money. I thought back into m y texts, and I had no answer.
N o r could I find one from anyone else who saw him: the answer I received
to my question was: " H e is a m a n dressed up as a tiger and m a n y people
are giving him m o n e y . " I felt as exasperated and as ignorant as E. M.
Forster in The Hill o f Devi who was always told that "flowers were
flowers" and "trees were trees". And the more I walked around the city,
the more teeming life I encountered, the more things I found myself
unable to understand. I spent my time trying to understand a world long
gone by, when all around me were things totally impervious to my com-
prehension. I suspected that even if I did have access to the 'meaning' of
these events I witnessed, that is, even if I did learn what the history of
these happenings were, where they came from, what overt meaning they

Journal of Indian Philosophy 2 (1974) 307-320. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 1974 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
308 J . L . MASSON

held for the people of the town, in short, even if I did become a well
informed anthropologist, something would still escape me. The history,
the etiology and the complete description of these events was not all I was
looking for. I wanted some deeper explanation that would have the power
to satisfy some more diffuse craving in me to really know what something
meant. Apart from family tradition, or training, or apparent vocation,
what really made this particular man wear the clothes of a tiger and wan-
der the streets of a city like Mahabaleshwar? Or for that matter, what
brought the Indian ascetics I saw to wear a loin cloth and wander offinto
the forests, now and in ancient India? In ancient India, or medieaval
India, or modern India, I found that the same curiosity worked away at
me. I really wanted to know in some depth what motivated the stories I
read, the people I saw, what led them, when all else had been considered,
to do the things they did. You may agree that psychoanalysis has much
to say to the sociologist and the anthropologist and you will point out
that many anthropologists, especially of ten or fifteen years back, Kluck-
hohn, Cora du Bois, Bateson, Margaret Mead, etc., 2 all took an active
and intelligent interest in the progress of psychoanalysis. And historians
continue to occupy themselves with traditional psychoanalytic questions,
as witness the work on Hitler z, the Langer studies 4, the biography of
Colonel House 5, the work on Chambers and Hiss 6, etc. And as for literary
criticism, the amount of work has always been and remains quite large
and impressive 7. All this we agree with. But Sanskrit, you will say, surely
here is an area that can profit, if at all, only in the most minor way from
the insights gained by psychoanalysis. Well, it is the purpose of the
present paper to try to argue that this is not so. I realise that it is
difficult to convince the reader rather than simply assure him that it is so;
that I have myself experienced it to be so. I should have to take up a single
puzzling feature from a Sanskrit text, and try to show how an analytic
attitude might help us to solve what have been traditionally puzzling
features. This is what I tried to do in a paper of mine, Fratricide Among
the Monkeys. I tried to show, with what success I cannot yet judge until
the paper is published and others can then search for more simple soluti-
ons, that the strange episode concerning the origins of the fraternal hatred
that Vfilin and Sugriva shared for one another, can be paralleled by situa-
tions that psychoanalysts will see every day in their practice. If I am cor-
rect, then the reason that commentators on the Rfimftyan.a, and the entire
 SEX A N D Y O G A 309

Sanskrit tradition, has felt somewhat uneasy about the death of V~lin at
R~ma's hands, is because they recognised, beneath the surface of the
words of the story, that R~ma was taken in, he showed too little psycho-
logical understanding, and adjudged Sugriva to be the virtuous king,
whereas in fact a close and sceptical reading of the text reveals that it was
really V~lin who perceived the murderous, if not consciously so, intention
of his brother, and hence banished him from the kingdom. But here I may
make a confession that may not please psychoanalysts: I am not totally
convinced that psychoanalytic understanding will always help to reveal
such ambiguities. I never felt totally comfortable with two of Freud's
books: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Jokes and their Relation
to the Unconscious. Both works postulate that parapraxes, especially
linguistic slips, will inevitably reveal deeper underlying feelings. True,
such 'mistakes' carry meaning, and often they can lead to greater depths
of understanding. But I do not think it is the 'slips' of a Sanskrit text, or
the symbols they contain, that will lead us into a fuller understanding of
their deeper significance. Rather I think it is a much more diffuse help
that one can expect from psychoanalysis. It is the basic psychoanalytic
attitude which will, I feel, be of most benefit to Sanskrit scholars. Freud
spoke of it, in very unusual terms, and in a much more profound way
than I ever could, in a letter to the Reverend Pfister, a Swiss pastor-
analyst with whom, in spite of basic disagreements over religious matters,
Freud remained on very good terms. Let me read you the relevant passage
- I think it is magnificent:

Y o u r analysis suffers from the hereditary weakness o f virtue. It is the work o f an over-
decent m a n who feels himself obliged to be discreet.., discretion is incompatible with
... psychoanalysis. One has to become a bad fellow, transcend the rules, sacrifice one-
self, betray, and behave like the artist who buys paints with his wife's household
money, or burns the furniture to w a r m the r o o m for his model. Without some such
criminality there is n o real achievement, s

What then is this psychoanalytic attitude that I speak of? It resists the
attempt to see everything in terms of others. Thus it is that when Freud
was asked whether a man could be held responsible for his dreams, he
replied: " W h o m else would you hold responsible?" Psychoanalysis is, in
my view, always sceptical of anagogic or 'spiritual' explanations, or of
explanations in terms of what we cannot understand. It is also persistent
in its search for truth, pressing on when most people would rather say,
310 J.L. MASSON

"let's just forget it." "Well yes," they may say, "there is an element of
homosexuality in the nineteenth century sage Ramakrishna, but why
bring this up, why not just regard it as personal to him and forget it?" I
am reminded of the manner in which Freud responded to Jung, as early
as 1909 when Jung said that he had received a much more enthusiastic
response to psychoanalysis in the United States by simply omitting the
distasteful doctrines about the importance of infantile sexuality. Yes, drily
replied Freud, and the response would have been even more enthusiastic
had you left out the unconscious, repression, resistance...
The title of this paper, sex, yoga and the Indian religious experience, in
some profound sense, just about covers the whole of the Sanskrit tradi-
tion. If by sex we include the entire range of literature devoted to love, not
only the KamMastra tradition, but the hundreds of plays from Bhasa,
Kalidasa and BhavabhOti down to the present day which have romantic
and sensual love as their theme, then we also touch upon the whole tradi-
tion of Alahkdraddstra and its further ramifications. If by Yoga we mean
the tradition of asceticism and philosophical speculation begun in the
earliest Upani.sads, down through the philosophical portions of the
Mahdbhdrata, the Brahmas~tras and its great commentary tradition, right
up to the medieaval encyclopedic works such as the Yogav~si.st..hama-
hdrdmdya.na, then we include almost every great religious/philosophical
and speculative work of ancient India. The Indian religious experience
is the attitude taken towards these works, an attitude of contemplation
and emotional involvement with them. Furthermore, there is something
very peculiar, and not only to the Indian tradition, which I realised as I
thought about all these texts from two such seemingly different traditions:
that there was hardly a work of Indian origin, which did not, in some
degree, combine the two basic attitudes, sensuality and mysticism or
asceticism. Just think of any of the great mythic representatives of one or
the other attitude: Siva the great ascetic. His wife Parvati, the great beauty.
Their protracted love-making in the Himalaya's goes on for one thousand
years. Vi.s.nu and his great power of Maya, the power to delude. And then
his further history as K.r.sn.a, the narcissistic infant, the eternal adolescent,
the great lover. Never mind mythical figures, think of the mythology
that grows around even a historical philosopher such as Saflkaracarya:
does not the commentary on the beautiful love poem, the Amarudataka,
tell us that gaflkara is responsible for its authorship, when he practiced
 SEX AND YOGA 311

parakdyaprave~a, entry into another body, to taste the joys of sexuality in

the body of a young dying prince? Is not the great Abhinavagupta, so
austere that he committed suicide by entering a cave in Kashmir with
1200 disciples, depicted in orthodox texts, as sitting in a vineyard, sur-
rounded by beautiful women disciples, fruit in his hand, wine on his lips,
the Sanskrit texts on his lapg? The Tantric texts, both early and late,
make this collocation explicit in such peculiar ways that they provide a
field-day for the psychologically minded. Think too of the preoccupation
with temptation in almost every Indian religious text. Surely this is an
area of experience in which the insights derived from psychoanalysis can
benefit us greatly. For psychoanalysis has taught us to be aware of deriva-
tives, distorted, hidden eruptions of drives banished into the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis teaches us much about how the repressed returns - how it
can be recognised even in its most disguised forms. Again I am not refer-
ring to the slips we make in everyday life, but of much larger constalla-
tions revealing agitation beneath the surface. For example, the preoccupa-
tion of writers is a fine tap-root leading far down into the dark shaft of
their unconscious. Why was Rilke preoccupied with puppets? Or Heming-
way with big powerful guns ? Or V~tlmiki with loss of love ? And from there,
it is hard to resist asking more generally, why is Sanskrit culture so preoccu-
pied with illusion and delusion (rndya, moha); with a sense of things passing
away (k.san.ikatvam - or te hi no divas~.h gat~h); with worldweariness
(vairdgya), with the nature of death and of saving phantasies (manorajya).
In thinking about the very name of yoga, hat.ha-yoga, we can discern
the notion of violence. Violence to the body and hence control, through
the inner body and its organs, of the outer world. When this fails, as it
must inevitably do, hallucination and states bordering on the psychoses
are likely to develop. When such delusional states are not only ego-
syntonic, but acceptable to the culture as well, we find ourselves with much
larger problems that bring into focus the whole motion of the psycho-
dynamics of an entire culture. It is true that people are most attracted
by what is successfully sublimated. This is equally valid for India, for we
find that the culture respects Kalid~tsa more than some of the obscure
authors of the Tantras. But there is also an attraction that depends on the
contrary - the raw, naked display of what are usually unconscious fanta-
sies: preoccupation with bowels, with faeces, with semen, with menstrual
blood. It seems that people run away from certain things only to be able
312 J.L. MASSON

to come closer to them, but unobserved. Hence yoga is unhappy with the
body, and at the same time all Yogins are obsessed with the body and its
products. The same mechanism takes place in the sphere of sexuality: if
it is discussed only within certain contexts, one's preoccupation is denied.
So we find that the lefthanded Tantrics have various ceremonies that
involve sexual intercourse (most often with non-mother figures, e.g.,
washerwomen), but that the sexual content to such activities can be
consciously denied because of the fact that they take place in a r i t u a l
c o n t e x t . Modern Indian mystics rarely speak directly of sexuality, and
yet I would hazard the guess that there is not a single one whose life and
writings do not clearly reveal the derivatives of displaced sexuality (one
has only to think of Ramakrishna and his transvestite activities, or of
Aurobindo and his 'Mother').
Again I come back to an earlier point: we need and demand, we hunger
for, an explanation of those things in India that most fascinate us. Who is
this strange God, Gane~a, ubiquitous throughout Maharasthra as a flat
orange stone, with two sparkling eyes? And who is this attractive, charm-
ing monkey god, Hanuman? What is the source of his fascination for
everyone, villager and scholar alike? And what about the text in which
Hanum~n is embedded, the R~mayan. a? One needs a critical text, granted.
But we have it (though some may justifiably dispute this). We need more
knowledge of the culture of the period. We need to know more of the
history of the text, and of the history of its travels and transmutations,
first throughout India, then throughout Southeast Asia. And we especially
want to understand the nature of its appeal to so many people in so many
different parts of India, Thailand and even China. I grant you that these
are questions we cannot ignore - they are basic to any research. But
alongside them there seem to be even more basic questions that press
equally for an answer: why is R~ma considered the ideal king, and Lak.s-
ma.na the ideal brother, and Sitar the ideal wife, and Hanuman the ideal
Bhakta? What needs do such figures answer? How can we understand
the many strange episodes in the narrative? Why, really, was Sfirphan.akha
defaced? Why, really, did R~ma abandon Sitfi, to confuse and embarrass
and even disgust the later tradition? Can the answers to these questions
only touch the surface? If a friend leaves his wife and we are puzzled, is it
not a legitimate activity to wonder about it, to review what we know of
their lives in order to help satisfy a basic curiosity? Of course by now you
 SEX AND YOGA 313

know what I am driving at: I am asking you to recognise that these are
all questions that psychonanalysis has traditionally concerned itself with:
the inner life of people. Let me tell you a very abbreviated case history
that I read in an article of Phyllis Greenacre 1°, and which made a
profound impression on me: a patient consistently recounted an episode
from his adult years which deeply affected him: late at night there was a
knock on his front door. When he went to open the door, a burglar lept
into the house. It was traumatic for him, but years later, when he re-
membered it, he found himself seeing, very clearly, the shining door-knob
on his front door. Elaborate analytic work finally revealed that his door-
knob was only a phantom from a much earlier and much more profound-
ly revealing experience: as a child he had looked through the key-hole
into his parent's bedroom to watch them having intercourse. The shining
door knob from later years replaced this earlier and more highly charged
door-knob from his childhood. It is an impressive fragment from an
analysis, and frankly I doubt whether it will be possible for psychoanalysis
to reveal anything quite so revealing about an ancient Sanskrit text. But
on the other hand, when we think about what underlies this psychoanalytic
observation, we can, I believe, learn something that will be of use in our
Sanskrit research. For the theoretical underpinning of this episode is a
phenomenon first discovered and described by Freud, as early as 189911:
that of screen-memories. The concept has a great and unlimited explana-
tory power, and helps not only the psychoanalyst, but the literary critic
and the historian of culture as well. As Fenichel 1~ puts it: "In discussing
the defence mechanism of denial, the psychology of screen memories be-
came clear: a person who tries to repress a memory is seeking associately
connected substitute scenes which he may offer his memory." Fenichel
later (op, cit.. p. 529) shows how screen experiences can be constructed
through the phantasies and games of children: "Just as this is only a fan-
tasy, that (occurrence) was not true." If we allow ourselves to think about
this, both in relation to our own lives and in relation to what we read in a
Sanskrit text, we can begin to see its many useful areas of application,
and also how easily it extends itself into other areas of experience. Freud
already showed the connection between screen memories and d~jh-vu
experiences. I feel that this is an area not so far removed from states of
depersonalization and derealization, a phenomenon we encounter very
often in descriptions of Indian religious experiences 13. We should ap-
314 J.L. MASSON

proach this and other allied phenomena, such as hypnagogic states 14

with the recognition that they are after all universal, if somewhat patho-
logical, experiences, common to the Yogavdsi.s.tha, to state hospital pa-
tients in psychotic states, to modern poets, and to ordinary people. Such
states seem to be of fascination to many people, not only to ancient In-
dians. Even psychoanalysts from the Freudian school have fallen prey to
the mystery of states of altered consciousness: David Rapaport was
interested in automatic writing, Silberer 15 first spoke in detail of the
strange state just before falling asleep (no mystery to those aware of the
early Sanskrit writings on dreaming and sleep). The early work of Freud
on hypnosis derived from a tradition not far from this early Indian concern
for magical states, and Freud retained, for quite some time, an interest
in telepathy and other forms of parapsychology 16 at the same time as he
felt repulsed and estranged from his own interest. I think a worthwhile
endeavour would be to collect references to states of deep meditation, and
examine what is mentioned, haphazardly as it were, in connection with
them. What are the details surrounding the descriptions? For Abhinava-
gupta 17 a trance state was a time of destruction. Towards the end of his
Tantrdloka he speaks of razing the world of dreams and illusions through
the fire that he has become, giva's fire is. The stories contained in the
Yogavdsi.st.ha offer a mine of such detail. Needless to say, nobody has
looked at this strange work from anything even approaching a psychologi-
cal point of view. I feel that such states, whether in ancient India, or in
modern America, must be explained, and I regard the refusal to do so, as
a scientific regression. Thus I have never been happy with the explanation
of some psychoanalysts, that certain children have a 'predisposition' to
schizophrenia, say, rather than to search the family constellation thor-
oughly. This is Margaret Mahler's view 19, and much as I admire her work
on childhood psychosis, I regard this kind of explanation as a refusal to
search for causes. Similarly, Heinz Kohut's explanation of 'cosmic nar-
cissism' 2o (he sees them as similar to 'oceanic experiences', mentioned,
sceptically, by Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents) I see not as ex-
planations, but as a refusal to apply the tools of analysis. I cannot help
viewing asceticism (like childhood psychosis) as a defense, not a freely
chosen position. Such reaction-formations seem to me ubiquitous in
Sanskrit texts, and searching them out and identifying them for what they
are, strikes me as a valuable enterprise.
 SEX AND YOGA 315

It is probably clear from what I have said so far, and from the over-
abundance of brief examples, that I regard psychonalysis as a unique tool
for allowing some relief from what I called, earlier, the unease some feel
over devoting themselves so exclusively to a vanished past. For it is
impossible, when one deals with this psychoanalytically, to ignore its
modern derivatives: psychoanalysis as the historical science, forces us to
make the constant shift from the old and the past to the present and the
active. W h a t we see in an ancient Indian ascetic is not so very different
from what we can observe in our own lives, if we have the patience and
the internal courage to seek for it. I f we do not, then we can turn to the
society around us, and find expression for these derivatives there. H o w
else can we explain to ourselves the current obsession with meditation?
To some it seems self-evidently true. To some it seems silly. To the analyst,
it is neither: it is an expression of something much deeper, and it requires
to be understood. The same is true of the interest in health foods. Here
too is an area that extends back into India's past: hardly an early text
exists that does not have something quite revealing to say about diet and
its relation to the sexual life. The bridge is there and of course extends to
each one of us, for he is a rare m a n who does not have his own private
food fads that have their origin far back in his own past, and which have
accreted to them the most far-reaching and disparate symbolic connota-
tions, Or can we ignore the fact that so m a n y Yoga centres find themselves
next door to the increasingly popular interest in Karate? Can we dismiss
this seemingly accidental co-location of contemplation and violence?
Again psychoanalysis has much to say on the subject.
Some critics have been taken aback, not at the fact of my psychoanalytic
interests, but what they consider to be its one-sideness. What they mean
is that I talk of applying to the Indian tradition only one rather narrow
psychology, that of Freud, and I omit m a n y others. M a n y of my readers,
interested in other, more modern, less traditional psychological systems,
must feel the same way. But my experience in reading these other theories,
those of the neo-Freudians in particular, Sullivan, Horney, F r o m m , and
those of Laing, Cooper, etc., has been that they do not seem in any
meaningful way applicable to the one tradition I know well, the Sanskrit
literature of ancient India. They appear irrelevant. For example, in spite
of the fact that Jung concerns himself so often with India, while Freud,
alas, never mentions the tradition, I find that what Jung says strikes me as
316 J.L. MASSON

strange, as somehow profoundly alien from what I know of the Indian

tradition - on the surface, and almost an exercise in blindness. I quote a
sentence he wrote on Ceylon, in his posthumously published book, Mem-
ories, Dreams, Reflection (p. 264): "Ceylon - there is a touch of paradise,
in which one cannot linger too long" which is most unfortunate for those
millions of people, leading lives of psychological complexity on the island
of Ceylon. Freud, on the other hand, seemed to answer so much, or if not
to answer, at least to point in the direction of knowledge. What he said is
embedded in a tradition of scepticism, of an awareness of the limits of
human knowledge ("Before the mystery of the creative artist, analysis
must lay down its arms", he said) and yet it speaks with a profound intel-
lectual integrity, a deep honesty, refusing to pretend, to deny, to simplify.
I am reminded of something I read once in the Pali canon. How the Bud-
dha told his disciples that he did not have the dedryamu.sti the closed fist
of the teacher. He did not hold certain truths back for certain chosen
disciples, but gave of his knowledge, of everything he knew, freely, to
whoever asked. He had no secrets, knew nothing divine. Freud, I feel is
like that. So too is the modesty of the Freudian analyst today: he does
not, unlike Jung, promise something beautiful and spiritual to his patients,
something he is reserving for the end of treatment. He has no magic
wand, no secret knowledge. He will give what he has, only his under-
standing, and that will come only with the freely given help of the patient.
He has nothing hidden, he has only his intense curiosity to know the
truth. And the patient, somewhere buried in him, has this truth.
The entire therapeutic structure is based on the recognition, since Freud,
that mental health, and hence human happiness, consists in an internal
freedom and autonomy as opposed to compulsion and coercion. But
beyond this very fundamental recognition, there has been little written in
the psychoanalytic literature in elaboration of this point. Apart from a
few brief articles by Ernest Jones 22, Kubie 2z and one or two others z4,
there is almost nothing to read. [The psychiatric literature is worse. Roy
Grinker, for example 25, suggests that a good prognosis for mental health
is to be found in the adolescent in the mid-west who is at a small and
mediocre university in order to become, eventually, a Y M C A secretary,
and whose marital ambition is to find a wife who bears a remarkable
similarity to his own mother.] On the other hand, ancient societies in
general seem to have been more articulate on this topic. The ancient
 SEX AND YOGA 317

Chinese have an elaborate and sophisticated version of the healthy or free

man. Here is a poem by the T'ang poet Han Shan:
Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams,
Here lives an idle man,
In the daytime wandering over green mountains,
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff.
Swiftly the springs and autumns pass,
But my mind is at peace, free from dust or delusion.
How pleasant, to know I need nothing to lean on,
to be still as the waters of the autumn river. 2s
And even the Persian tradition concerns itself much with the personalities
of its Sufi saints (contrasting obsession with freedom; see La Passion d'Al-
Hallaj by Massignon). Within the Indian tradition, I am reminded of the
lovely story of Y~tjfiavalkya in the B.rhaddran.yaka Upani.sad: Janaka called
together all the Brahmin sages in his kingdom, tied sacks of gold to the
horns of ten thousand cows, then announced to the .r.sis present that the
wisest amongst them could drive away the cows. None dared, until
Y~jfiavalkya told his pupil to drive them to his house. "Are you then the
wisest among us, O YSjfiavalkya" asked the Brahmins. " N o " , calmly re-
plied Y~tjfiavalkya, " I merely wanted the cows."
Less available, but perhaps more profound is the Mahdbhdrata story of
Tul~dh~tra: so holy was a certain sage that he sat immobile in the forest
for one whole year. Birds nested in his hair, and he did not move a muscle
until the baby birds had hatched, grown up, and flew away from the nest.
When he moved he thought to himself: there is none so holy as me. " O h
yes" said a disembodied voice, "there is one far more holy than you; his
name is Tul~dh~tra." "Where can I find him" asked the proud ascetic?
"Search." One day, tired in his travels, he stops on the outskirts of the
city of Benaras, in a small spice shop, one of many thousands that dot
the entrance to the holy city. The owner sells honey, cloves, cinnamon
and other household spices. Looking into the sage's eyes, the owner
suddenly tells him: " I am Tul~dh~ra, so called because my scales are
always equally balanced. I charge no more to the wealthy merchant than
I do to the poor maid." The sage was thunderstruck, that here in this
ordinary Pd.n shop was to be found the one man in India wiser than he
was. He plied him with questions. Tul~dh~ra could tell him only very
318 J.L. MASSON

little: he knew but one rule, that he should not deliberately h a r m any man,
and this he tried to do as best he could. A p a r t f r o m that he lived a simple,
ordinary life, with a wife and children and a small honest business.
W h a t can we deduce f r o m this story, peculiarly vivid in its narration,
stuck by accident as it were into the great epic o f pre-Christian India?
E a c h person will p r o b a b l y have his own interpretation. M y own goes
something like this: happiness consists in leading an ordinary life based
on the premise o f taking e n o u g h ordinary enjoyments for oneself that one
is not burdened with an unconsciously active sadism that expresses itself
in extreme piety or even gets turned back against oneself and becomes ex-
pressed in sadistically tinged asceticism with a consequent disinterest or a
moral and spiritual snobbery towards other people, such as was the sage's
before his encounter with Tul~dh~tra. A beautiful verse comes to mind

tyaja dharmam adharmam, ca

tyaja satyarn asatya.rn vd
satydsatye ubhe t y a k t v d
y e n a tyajasi tat tyaja

" G i v e up right and wrong. Truth and falsity. A n d when y o u have given
all this up, give up that t h r o u g h which y o u gave it all u p . "
I will n o t presume to analyse these fine and p r o f o u n d lines.

Univ. o f Toronto

NOTES

* Lecture delivered to the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley.
1 Daniel H. H. Ingalls, 'On the Study of the Past', Journal of the American Oriental
Society 80 (1960), 191-197.
2 For an excellent bibliographical account, along with many valuable insights, see
Clyde Kluckhohn, 'The influence of Psychiatry on Anthropology in America during
the Last 100 Years', in 100 Years of American Psychiatry (ed. by J. K. Hall et aL),
Columbia University Press, 1944, pp. 589-618.
z Waiter C. Langer, The Mind o.fAdolfHitler: The Secret Wartime Report, Basic Books,
New York, 1972.
4 W. L. Langer, 'The Next Assignment', American Historical Review 63 (1958), 283-
304. Also, 'Some Correlates of Beliefs on the Malevolence and Benevolence of Super-
natural Beings: A Cross-Cultural Study', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
58 (1958), 161-169.
5 See Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House,
The John Day Co., New York, 1956. See also the review of Bernard Brodie, 'A Psycho-
 SEX A N D YOGA 319

analytic Interpretation of Woodrow Wilson', in Psychoanalysis and History (ed. by

Bruce Mazlish), Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 1963.
6 See Meyer Z. Zeligs, Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers
and Alger Hiss, The Viking Press, New York, 1967.
7 The journal Psychology and Literature is a good example of the kind of work being
done. See also Leon Edel, 'Notes on the Use of Psychological Tools in Literary scholar-
ship', Psychology and Literature, I. 4 (Sept., 1951), 3. Collections include: E. Manheim,
Hidden Patterns: Studies in Psychological Literary Criticism, Macmillan, New York,
1966; Frederick Crew, Psychoanalysis and Literary Process (ed.), Winthrop Publishers,
Inc., Cambridge 1970; N o r m a n N. Holland: Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, New
York, 1966.
g Quoted in the Introduction by Philip Rieff to Freud, History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement, Collier Books, New York, 1967.
9 The text is edited by K. C. Pandey in Abhinavagupta: An Historical andPhilosophical
Study, Chowkhambha Sanskrit Studies, Banaras, 2nd., rev. ed., 1966.
10 In ' A contribution to the Study of Screen Memories', in Trauma, Growth and Per-
sonality, Norton, New York, 1952. pp. 188-203. See also: N. Reider, 'Reconstruction
and Screen Function', Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Society 1 (1953), 389-405.
11 S. Freud, 'Screen Memories', Standard Edition 3 (1899), 301-322.
12 Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, W. W. Norton & Co., New
York, 1945.
18 They are described in almost every Indian text. But one of the most unusually
vivid is to be found in Lilian Silburn, Le Vij~ana Bhairava [annotated translation
of an early Kashmir Saivite text], Publications de l'lnstitut de Civilization lndienne
15 (1961) Paris. For the psychoanalytic material, see J. Arlow, 'The Structure of the
d6j~t vu Experience', Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 (1959),
611-631.
14 See Merton M. Gill and M. Brenman, Hypnosis and Related States, International
Universities Press, New York, 1959.
15 See D. Rapaport, Organization and Pathology of Thought, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1951. See in particular: H. Silberer (1909): 'Report on a Method
of Eliciting and Observing Certain Symbolic Hallucination-Phenomena', pp. 195-207.
16 For interest if not for reliability, I recommend Nandor Fodor, Freud, Jung, and
Occultism, University Books, New York, 1971.
17 See J. L. Masson and M. V. Patwardhan, ~antarasa and Abhinavagupta's Philosophy
of Aesthetics, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 1969.
18 See the end of the [Avarapratybhaijga Viv.rtivimar~int of Abhinavagupta (ed. by
Pandit Madhusudan Kaul Shastri), Nirnaya Sagar Press, Bombay, 1943 (Kashmir
Series of Texts and Studies, No. 65).
19 See his 'Forms and Transformations of Narcissism', Journal of the American Psycho-
analytic Association 14 (1966), 243-272.
~0 Margaret S. Mahler, On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of lndividuation,
International Universities Press, New York, 1968.
21 A n n a Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (tr. by C. Baines), Inter-
national Universities Press, New York, 1936 (rev. ed., 1966).
22 Ernest Jones, 'The Concept of a Normal Mind', in Papers on Psychoanalysis,
Baillere, Tindall and Cox, London, 1948, pp. 201-216.
2a Lawrence S. Kubie, 'The Fundamental Nature of the Distinction Between Health
and Neurosis', Psychoanalytic Quarterly 23 (1951), 167-204.
320 J.L. MASSON

24 See, for example, M. Jahoda, Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health, Basic
Books, New York, 1968 for a review of the literature.
25 Roy Grinker St. and Roy Grinker Jr., and J. Timberlake, "Mentally Healthy'
Young Males - (I-Iomoclites)', Archives of General Psychiatry 6 (1962), 435-453.
26 From: CoM Mountain. 100 Poems by the T'ang poet, Han Shan (tr. and with an
introduction by Burton Watson), Jonathan Cape, London, 1970.