Critical Evaluation of Ramakrishna’s Behaviour – A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Ramakrishna is a mystic in its real sense of the term. Any mystic is considered by psychoanalysts, as having a certain kind of mental disorder. Therefore, here it is attempted to do some analysis of the psychology of religion and mystic with the help of the great thinker and American psychologist William James and a distinguished psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar. Ramakrishna can be said to be a “mystic” in its true sense of the term. The mystical consciousness or mystical behaviour is so much away and above the normal state of consciousness that the psychologists in general and psychoanalysts in particular,tend to consider mystical behaviour to be “abnormal” behaviour. Thus, because the mystical behaviour does not constitute the behaviour of the 68% of the population, it is normally considered to be ‘abnormal’ behaviour in the empirical science of psychology. However, with the advent of humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, the above-normal behaviour is being recognized as the ‘self-actualization’ state of personality development. Abraham Maslow has described the characteristics of self-actualized people which are not considered as the pathological behaviour of ‘below-normal’ category. And Ramakrishna’s behaviour is the behaviour of a self-realized person, which is still above than even the behaviour of selfactualized persons. However, especially, Ramakrishna’s behaviour being of a unique mystical pattern, a number of psychoanalysts, unaware of the psychology of religion in general and of Eastern religion in particular, have been tempted to interpret his behaviour as pathological or schizophrenic. This being so, an attempt is made here to analyze Ramakrishna’s mystical behaviour in the light of the three eminent psychologists, namely, William James, Sudhir Kakar and Jeffery Kripal.
For, William James said that, “it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence. One might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct:- but that would be too absurd. Thus the reinterpretation of psychoanalysis is needed in this light.