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Because his methods were unorthodox and his goals visionary, Mahatma Gandhi has been dismissed with the most damning condemnation that can be raised against any advocate of change: he meant well, but he was impractical and therefore irrelevant. Part of the case purporting to show his irrelevance is built on Gandhi's alleged misunderstanding of psychology. He is sometimes thought to have assumed that all men are inherently good and that the mere teaching of love would herald a new day of nonviolence. But the continuing chronicle of wars and crime buttresses theories of man's innate aggressiveness, and nonviolence is seen as fundamentally discordant with the nature of man.
However, Gandhi was no mystic, content to transform men by his preaching. He developed a relatively coherent framework for diagnosing the malaise of his country and countrymen, and his interpretation is highly congenial with a respected body of Western psychoanalytic thought. He not only offered a psychological foundation for satyagraha (“soul force” or “truth force”), but also examined the psychological consequences of political, economic, and cultural institutions.1 However, with the notable and important exception of Erik Erikson's psychohistorical study of Gandhi, little attention has been given to his psychological theories.2
In drawing parallels between Gandhi and several psychoanalysts, I do not wish to imply that any particular psychological perspective is inherently Gandhian. Nor do I wish to use well-established analytical theory to “prove” Gandhi correct or incorrect. Psychoanalytic insights do not lend themselves to proofs in the strict scientific sense. By calling attention to concepts from a more familiar analytic framework,