The International Journal of

1034 Book Reviews

Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World

by Sudhir Kakar
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, London, 2009; 178 pp.

Sudhir Kakar acknowledges that any engagement with the spiritual in

psychoanalysis or academic psychology has long been regarded as suspicious
and not to be considered seriously. Spiritual notions of an intimate connec-
tion between self and not-self are at odds with the rationalist’s insistence on
an enduring separation between the two. Kakar reminds us that the spiritual
vision never lost its ascendancy in many non-Western societies. He claims
that psychoanalysts such as Ferenczi, Jung, and, to this reviewer’s initial
surprise, Kohut, can be seen as representing such a position against the
rationalist Freud.
In Kakar’s view, there is a recent spiritual revival and probable integration
of the spiritual and rational in psychoanalysis:
For me, the spiritual occupies a continuum from moments of self-transcendence
marked by a loving connection to an object – nature, art, visions of philosophy or
science, the beloved in sexual embrace – to the mystical union of the saints where
the sense of the self completely disappears.
(p. 5)

Mad and Divine is Kakar’s attempt to contribute to ‘‘the coming integration of the
spirit and the psyche in the evolving psychology of the person’’
(p. 6).
Kakar goes about this task by looking at the lives of holy men and saints
from a psychoanalytic perspective and by considering psychoanalytic prac-
tice from the perspective of spirituality. The first study in the book is that
of the childhood of a popular yet self-serving charismatic guru of the 1970s
and 1980s, Rajneesh, later known as Bhagwan (Incarnation of God). After
great success in India, legal troubles led him from his ashram there to Ore-
gon. From his missions in India and Oregon, he acquired 50,000 committed
followers and 92 Rolls Royces. Sex was emphasized to promote the silence
of the mind that enabled true meditation.
In this essay on Rajneesh Kakar employs a careful psychogenetic formu-
lation of key traumatic events (the death of his grandfather) and critical
developmental relationships (a more than doting grandmother). However,
he fails to account fully for the man’s charismatic power. There is no such
thing as a charismatic leader in a vacuum. Such leaders need followers and
the process that drew thousands to Rajneesh remains largely unexplained.
As a psychoanalyst Kakar wonders if Rajneesh’s enlightenment stemmed
from an extended hypomanic episode. Perhaps, but how does this hypo-
manic man wind up with 92 Rolls Royces?
Kakar believes that the saint is the archetypal figure of faith in the world
religions, the figure who exemplifies the possibilities of freedom. Despite his
human shortcomings, the saint reveals belief as a source of joy, wonder and
awe. ‘‘The saint appears committed to this extension of human potentials
and thus deserves the special interest and even admiration of the psycho-

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 Book Reviews 1035

analyst’’ (p. 36). Kakar presents the story of Drukpa Kunley as an example
of how saints demonstrate conflict with drives, and its resolution as well.
Twenty five years old in the year 1480, Drukpa Kunley returned home after
many years of monastic training. Becoming enlightened, he flouted taboos
and came close to being seduced by his own mother. She was willing but he
demurred, earning himself a special place among the ‘crazy wise men’ of
world religions. By exposing the hidden foibles of his mother, Kunley expi-
ated her sins and she lived to be 130. Subsequent allegedly scandalous
actions were meant to shock the minds of listeners out of their conventional
conditioning and open them to the path to Buddahood. Applying a psycho-
analytic framework, Kakar addresses the oedipal and adds more detail of
Drupka Kunley’s exuberant phallicism, his possession of a magical and
majestic sexual organ, a deadly weapon that he uses to subdue his enemies
and to delight the maidens he meets on his travels. Drupka Kunley is every
phallic-stage boy’s wish come true. He is shocked by his mother’s sexual
interest in him, but her faults and sins are ultimately removed, as is the
son’s sexual interest in her. He can then embark on his mature sexual and
spiritual road.
In a similar way 20th century saint Swami Muktananda meditates for
years and then, suddenly, a period comes when he cannot eradicate the image
of a woman and the accompanying intense sexual stimulation. After some
time Muktananda is told that the image is of Mother Kundalini who has
appeared to expel his sexual appetites. Again Kakar looks to Freud’s Oedi-
pus as the explanation. It is the mother of early childhood who introduced
desire who is now reincarnated in the nude goddess. Mother Kundalini is the
powerful religious-spiritual signifier, or, as Freud might say, the point of
attachment for the transference highly active in the here and now. In the
height of passion Muktananda longs for his guru, who to Kakar represents
the father who will prevent the realization of the forbidden. Kakar nicely
mentions Ulysses ordering himself to be tied to the mast as a representation
of the protective power of the father’s phallus against the irresistible sexual
call of the sirens (mother). Kakar concludes that both Kunley and Mukta-
nanda demonstrate that the resurgence of the early mother–son seduction
complex is an integral part of the spiritual development of saints. In some
cases like that of Muktananda, the seduction is recreated with hallucinatory
intensity. Their saintliness lies in the resolution of the oedipal conflict after it
has returned in adulthood with violent intensity, only to be put to rest once
and for all. The mother symbols that assist the saint to become enlightened
are both sexual and spiritual. In ordinary humans they exist in the field of
desire alone.
Kakar discusses Kunley’s place in Tantric Buddhism. Kunley’s thousands
of brief incandescent sexual affairs serve to demonstrate the transitory nat-
ure of a passion that is to be embraced. This occurs in order to teach that
powerful sexual emotions can be transformed ultimately into the tenderness
and empathy of the enlightened mind, to the sensitivity and action that
helps others. Kakar points out that Kunley’s phallicism stands in sharp con-
trast to Ulysses’ predominantly oral imagery with the wishes being to rest,
sleep, be soothed, fed, and reunited. Kunley’s phallic insouciance gives way

Copyright ª 2010 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91

1036 Book Reviews

in old age to a revival of earlier unconscious fantasies where the boy sees
the mother as both terrifying and nurturing, threatening and protective
yet the source of all power. Such is the regression found in many saints,
Kakar tells us. And, he goes on: ‘‘The prelude to mystical enlightenment is
the exhaustion of desire’s performative repertoire’’ (p. 75).
In the next study, Kakar chooses Gandhi to demonstrate that, even
though a psychoanalyst is trained to be suspicious of both saints and spiri-
tuality, he can acknowledge Gandhi’s greatness without idealizing it or
reducing it to neurotic conflict. In his extensive writings, Gandhi publicly
discusses his most private thoughts and makes his inner self far more avail-
able for study by a psychoanalyst than most persons we would call a saint.
Gandhi’s spirituality did not set him apart from ordinary life but instead
aimed at changing a world of injustice and violence. This outward directed
force Kakar terms ‘‘practical spirituality’’ (p. 84). To Gandhi, the refusal to
do harm was the essence of spirituality, with empathy at its very core.
Rather than Freud, Kakar’s frame of reference here is Kohut. My initial
surprise at Kakar’s grouping Kohut with those psychoanalysts who are
more spiritual than scientific disappeared given this essential importance of
empathy.
In his chapter on Gandhi, Kakar discusses altruism and he alleges that
traditional analysts see it as a subcategory of masochism. I am not so
sure that such a view is widely held, although some might see Gandhi as
masochistic. According to Kakar, Gandhi’s guiding principle was not the
renunciation of action, but the renunciation of the goals of action, in favor
of uncompromising ethical living, deep introspection, fearlessness, indiffer-
ence to praise or censure, and the absence of jealousy. Gandhi saw sexuality
as the chief obstacle to his adherence to the principles of non-violence and
truth. In his late 70s he would have young women share his bed and in the
morning try to ascertain whether any trace of sexual feeling had been
evoked in either himself or the woman. Kakar wonders whether this
reflected Gandhi’s true testing of himself or a regression to the need for
motherly warmth or both. Kakar sees Gandhi as a pioneer in a practical
spirituality ‘‘uniquely suited to address the challenges of our times and the
worlds still to come’’ (p. 98). Powerfully true of Gandhi, of course, but was
the mold not found in countless saints from Jesus onward, to speak only of
the Christian tradition?
Kakar is most interested in the healing aspect of the interaction between
the teacher–healer and the seeker–patient in the Eastern traditions and how
understanding it can make better sense of the analyst–analysand interaction.
People go to the spiritual leader for mental or physical relief, even cure,
sometimes alleged to be miraculous. Kakar believes that Freudian resolution
of oedipal conflicts and Kleinian overcoming of archaic depression and
paranoia do occur in such relationships with no more than fragmentary
conscious insight. What is paramount in understanding the curative
nature of the relationship with the spiritual leader, however, is the self psy-
chology of Heinz Kohut. In Kakar’s understanding of Kohut’s theory,
‘‘analysis cures by restoring the empathic responsiveness of the ‘selfobject’
of which the most important is the mother of infancy’’ (p. 104). The healer

Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91 Copyright ª 2010 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 Book Reviews 1037

furthers the process by ‘‘his willingness to let the seeker merge with what
the latter perceives to be the teacher’s greatness, strength, calmness, just
as the mother once did when she lifted the anxious infant and held him
against her body’’ (p. 105). Some modern gurus have followers study their
photograph between meetings to hasten such a merger. The guru is initially
far more personally active in fostering idealization than is the analyst. To
such ‘practitioners’ surrender of the self is absolute and absolutely necessary.
They provide an archaic selfobject experience where the seeker–patient feels
understood on the most profound level. Psychoanalysts communicate their
empathy chiefly through words. The Eastern spiritual practitioners use many
senses to become exquisitely sensitive and empathic to their subjects. Kakar,
aware of the dangers regression in healer and seeker can bring, wonders
whether spiritual training could enhance a psychoanalyst’s deep capacity for
empathy. Perhaps there is merit in Kakar’s suggestion, but the methodology
of careful evaluation of such training seems as distant as the prospect of
recruiting analysts as research subjects and securing funding for such
research. Kakar admonishes us not to let the traditional Freudian suspicion
of the spiritual domain get in the way of borrowing from what centuries of
Eastern practitioners have learned about empathy.
Kakar concludes with a valuable chapter comparing Freud’s concept of
religion as illusion with Hindu ideas. Hindus, Kakar tells us, may believe in
one God or many or none. What makes one a Hindu is adherence to ritual
practices and rules. In contrast to Freud’s father who underlies the concep-
tion of God, maternal figures also abound in Hindu mythology. Where
Freud saw illusion as something to be analyzed, Hinduism embraces it in
manifest forms – something that is not juxtaposed to reality but constitutes
points on an endless spectrum of realities.
This book is a page turner replete with references from sociology, neurobi-
ology, philosophy, and Eastern and Western poetry. Cognitive-behavioral
techniques have incorporated Buddhist thinking in their treatment of bor-
derline and other patients. It is time for more psychoanalysts to visit Eastern
spirituality for new ⁄ old ideas, and Mad and Divine is a good place to start.
Jerome A. Winer
Institute for Psychoanalysis, 122 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603, USA
E-mail: winer@uic.edu

Partners in Thought: Working With Unformulated Experience, Dissociation,

and Enactment
by Donnel B. Stern
Routledge, New York, NY, 2010; 229 + xix pp; $34.95

In his 1997 volume, Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to

Imagination in Psychoanalysis, Donnel Stern (1997) laid the groundwork for
an interpersonal psychoanalytic theory centering upon the dialogic creation
of meaning by analyst and patient. Drawing upon the work of interpersonal

Copyright ª 2010 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.