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All of us are often deeply impressed (as we should be) with “religious geniuses” and with the power of religion to transform individuals and offer them salvation from life's inevitable slings and arrows. As psychotherapists, we are, at the same time, puzzled. How can we account for these amazing effects of religious faith? How does religion, ancient and irrational, succeed where we so ignominiously fail?
Following earlier works, in which he has observed Hindu traditions from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, in this brief volume Kakar focuses on one case study, using the opportunity, naturally, to offer us numerous generalizations and asides. These demonstrate an impressive erudition, but they sometimes sound either Delphic or frivolous, Thus, I was truly mystified by a reference to Lacan as “an ironic mystic” (p. 5). Most of the time, however, such asides are pithy and well worth pursuing. Kakar's incisive clarity is just amazing. He often manages to present in one paragraph what others fail to express in whole volumes.
The religious genius selected for analysis here is the 19th-century Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna. Like others in this class of persons, he was recognized early as unique and quickly won disciples and followers. A typical approach to “religious genius” and its actions is to use the labels of psychopathology; for instance, visions are easily interpreted as hallucinations. Kakar, trying to leave behind our conventional diagnostic categories, refuses to use such common psychiatric terminology as hallucinations. He states that visions are “not hallucinations in that they occur during the course of intense religious experience rather than during a psychotic episode…. Visions are, then, special kinds of dreams” (pp. 19-20). Further on, he proposes an important and original view of visions