Self and Identity in Modern Psychology and Indian Thought (Path in Psychology)

435 Pages·1998·1.82 MB·English

by  Anand C. Paranjpe

S I
ELF AND DENTITY IN
M P
ODERN SYCHOLOGY
I T
AND NDIAN HOUGHT
PATH IN PSYCHOLOGY
PublishedinCooperationwithPublicationsforthe
AdvancementofTheoryandHistory in Psychology(PATH)
Series Editors:
David Bakan, York University
John Broughton, Teachers College, Columbia University
Robert W. Rieber, John Jay College, CUNY, and Columbia University
Howard Gruber, University of Geneva
COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY A Case Study of
Understanding
David Leiser and Christiane Gillièron
A CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY: Interpretation of the Personal World
Edmund V. Sullivan
CRITICAL THEORIES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
Edited by John M. Broughton
CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY AND QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGY:
Theoretical and Empirical Considerations
Carl Ratner
DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACHES TO THE SELF
Edited by Benjamin Lee and Gil G. Noam
FRANTZFANON AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPPRESSION
Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan
HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY: Concepts and Criticisms
Edited by Joseph R. Royce and Leendert P. Mos
MANUFACTURING SOCIAL DISTRESS: Psychopathy in Everyday Life
Robert W. Rieber
THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF ETHNONATIONALlSM
Dusan Kecmanovic
PSYCHOSOCIAL THEORIES OF THE SELF
Edited by Benjamin Lee
SELF AND IDENTITY IN MODERN PSYCHOLOGY AND INDIAN THOUGHT
Anand C. Paranjpe
THEORETICAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Meeting of East and West
Anand C. Paranjpe
WILHELMWUNDT AND THE MAKING OF A SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY
Edited by R. W. Rieher
S I
ELFAND DENTITY IN
M P
ODERN SYCHOLOGY
I T
AND NDIAN HOUGHT
ANANDC. PARANJPE
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
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To the memory of my revered guru,
the late Shri B. R. Ambekar;
and to my most respected teacher,
the late Professor Erik H. Erikson;
great healers who stimulated my thinking about self and identity
in their own different ways.
This page left intentionally blank.
P
REFACE
Some of the common questions that confront all of us are: What does it mean to
be a human being? What makes us good and happy persons? And how can we
attain happiness, or the highest possible good in life? These are common and yet
profound questions that have been answered differently in different societies at
different times. In the process of growing up within a specific cultural milieu, we
tend to seek answers to deeply personal questions such as “Who am I?” or “What
is the best that can happen to me?” in the light of accumulated wisdom of our
forebears. As the 20th century draws to a close, the world is rapidly getting smaller,
and many of us get exposed to the legacies of several cultures from around the
world. The increasing exposure to varied cultures is both an opportunity and a
challenge.
Born in India during the colonial days, I was exposed to a highly Anglicized
educational system and a completely Eurocentric curriculum. The colonial mold of
the Indian educational system has persisted throughout the five decades of the
postcolonial era. As a student of philosophy in the rnid-1950s, I read such texts
as Plato’s Republic, took courses in metaphysics and ethics shaped by thinkers of
the European Enlightment, and earned my Bachelor’s degree with a philosophy
major without having to learn a single concept of Indian philosophy. Graduate
training in psychology in an Indian university in the early 1960s also bore a
completely Anglo-American mold, such that the transition to research and teach-
ing in a North American system was easy. Nevertheless, growing up in India
inevitably involved exposure to the indigenous intellectual and cultural tradition.
_
My father introduced me to the Bhagavad-Gita, and the nationalistic movement
brought home the relevance of traditional Indian ways of life, philosophy, and
ideals. The dual cultural heritage of Europe and India became a matter of personal
concern and a constant battle when, as an immigrant to Canada, a sense of Indian
identity continued to grow in proportion to the constant pressures for assimilation
into the Western way of life. This volume is a product of an attempt to make sense
of the dual cultural legacy of Europe and India.
Part of the exposure to Western models in psychology was an opportunity to
vii
viii PREFACE
learn Western theories of human development, first through books while in India
and then under the tutelage of the late Professor Erik Erikson at Harvard Univer-
sity. After several years of studying and teaching Western theories of personality
and developmental psychology, it began to dawn on me that lessons learned from
the Indian tradition were in some ways very similar -and yet in other ways
profoundly different-from their Western counterparts. The Erikson approach,
true to its roots in psychoanalysis and the academic milieu, focused on patholog-
ical, as well as normal, ways in which individuals cope with inner and outer
changes throughout the life span. Erikson speculated on what remains the same
and is untouched by constant flux in a person’s passage through the life cycle; he
even hinted at the existential significance of the quest for the principle of sameness
underlying the continual revision in one’s sense of identity. However, in Erikson’s
work, as in contemporary psychology at large, the deeply philosophical and
existential issues about self and identity get routinely excluded as unsuitable to the
scientific and academic sphere to which psychology is inextricably bound. In my
view, such restriction of the scope of inquiry into the nature of selfhood is an
incidental product of the historical and cultural background of contemporary
psychology. Such restriction did not apply to self-knowledge as pursued in the
Indian tradition and there is no reason to regard such a conventional disciplinary
limitation as either necessary or legitimate. Moreover, the philosophical and
spiritual aspects of psychological thinking in the Indian tradition complement
contemporary psychological thinking and offset some of its serious shortcomings.
Self and identity remain central topics of inquiry in several related disciplines
today: philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, along with psychology. The work
presented in this volume is allied to, and yet different from, some of the recent
publications in this broad field of studies. Consistent with the readership of this
literature, which is spread across various disciplines, I have tried to address this
book to an interdisciplinary audience. I also presume an international audience
spread across the English-speaking world in the East as well as the West.
In terms of its scholarly and historical approach, this book resembles Charles
Taylor’s Sources of Self (Harvard University Press, 1989). In dealing with the
concepts of person and identity, and in viewing them from philosophical and
psychological angles, it resembles Harré’s Personal Being (Blackwell, 1983).
However, unlike these works, which are framed almost exclusively within the
Western cultural conceptual frameworks, the present work tries to integrate West-
ern and Eastern perspectives. In this regard, it strikes a chord with Alan Roland’s
In Search of Self in India and Japan (Princeton University Press, 1988), but it
does not adopt his clinical approach. Like Steven Collins’s Selfless Persons
(Cambridge University Press, 1982), it delves into Eastern traditions but deals with
psychological issues more than philosophical ones. It shares some of the spiritual
and transpersonal concerns of Eastern traditions that such authors as Alan Watts
and Ken Wilber address, but it tries to connect more directly and critically with
PREFACE ix
classical Sanskrit texts and their scholarly interpretations. Like David Loy’s
Nonduality (Yale University Press, 1988) and Working Emptiness by Newman
Glass (Scholars Press, 1995), this book considers the practice of meditation within
the context of postmodern thought, but unlike them it focuses on Advaita Vedantic,
rather than Buddhist, tradition.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It has been over 15 years since I prepared the first outline of this book. As
could be expected, the project has evolved well beyond the contours that I had
envisioned at the beginning. This work would not have seen the light of the day
without the facilities provided by Simon Fraser University. The University’s
sabbatical leave policy allowed me to spend almost 2 years of full-time work on
this project at different stages. In 1986, when this project was in its early stages, I
was invited to give a series of lectures at the Allahabad University in India. I wish
to thank Radhakrishna Naidu, Janak Pandey, R. C. Tripathi, Ajit Dalal, and other
friends from Allahabad for giving me valuable opportunities to discuss various
ideas. I am very grateful to Krishna S. and Mrs. Leela Arjunwadkar and Ashok
Kelkar for guiding me in the right direction and for providing inspiration and
encouragement year after year.
Teaching a senior undergraduate seminar in personality at Simon Fraser
University gave me an opportunity to discuss a variety of ideas about the self,
identity, self-actualization, and self-realization in the classroom. A similar oppor-
tunity was provided by a course on self and society that I taught as part of the
Graduate Liberal Studies Program at SFU. Numerous students in these classes
helped me in articulating my own ideas and often made interesting comments.
Although I cannot list the many members of the classes, I wish to thank them all.
I must also thank my friends from the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychologists
(WCTP) group, who provided intellectual stimulation and encouragement at our
annual meetings in beautiful Banff. I have particularly benefitted from my dis-
cussions with Vaden House, Don Kuiken, Marvin Macdonald, Tim Rogers, and
Hank Stam of the WCTP group.
I also wish to express my gratitude to a number of colleagues and students at
Simon Fraser University who read portions of the manuscript at various stages of
its preparation and gave many useful comments and suggestions: Bruce Alex-
ander, Ted Altar, Gira Bhatt, John Bogardus, Tirthankar Bose, Jeremy Carpen-
dale, Michael Coles, Steve Cunningham, Karen Jackson, James Marcia, Leslie
Morgan, Ken Porter, Wyn Roberts, and Randy Tonks. Several friends from India
and North America also read one or several chapters and made numerous sugges-
tions: John Broughton, Michael Chandler, Ashok Gangadean, Anthony Green-
wald, David Ho, Uday Jain, Don Kuiken, Mahesh Mehta, Carl Ratner, Joseph