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Psychotherapy is still a novelty in India; its practitioners are few, and they are making but slow headway against the competition of astrlogers, swamis, Ayurvedists, hakims and wonder-workers of every conceivable kind.
The dominant trend is an unorthodox and eclectic combination of Freud and Adler. Freud, as one of them explained, ‘provides the answers to the Indian's daily agonized reappraisal of his sexual and digestive functions; and Adler provides the label for his cherished inferiority complex’.
Jung, surprisingly, has no following, and his books are hardly read either by the profession or by the educated public. He is disliked on the grounds that he misrepresented Indian philosophy and religion, and ‘understood nothing of India’. The motive behind this is a kind of mythological parochialism: Europeans are welcome to talk about King Oedipus, but the Hindu Pantheon they should leave alone.
My hope in seeking out Indian psychiatrists was to catch some glimpses into the Indian mind on its less obvious levels; more particularly, into ways of reacting to the breakdown of social traditions and religious beliefs.
The majority of my informants denied that there was any significant difference in the basic psychic make-up of Westerners and Indians. The apparent differences, they maintained, were on the surface; in the realm of the unconscious all men were equal, regardless