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The Psychology of the Ascetic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

J. Moussaieff Masson
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Dumont's essay “World Renunciation in Indian Religions,” given as the Frazer lecture at Oxford in 1958, has achieved a considerable reputation; it inspired, for example, J. C. Heesterman's article “Brahmin, Ritual and Renouncer.” Dumont's article is not easy to understand; I feel that the rather naive and hasty general comments: “The renouncer thinks as an individual, and this is the distinctive trait which opposes him to the man-in-the-world and brings him closer to the western thinker” are unfortunate. I also feel that greater historical and linguistic rigor is mandatory. But more important than questions of scholarship and of method, it seems to me that something crucial is missing from Dumont's essay. It is certainly useful to emphasize, as Dumont does, both in this essay and in his more recent Homo Hierarchicus, the structures evident in saṃnyāsa as an institution (“[H]e does not really leave society …”). Even here I could not help but feel that a Marxist approach would have yielded greater theoretical gains. (Cf. the remarkable essays by the late D. D. Kosambi.) I am sorry to see that Dumont has failed to come to terms with renunciation as a psychological event; I shall attempt to focus more closely than has hitherto been done on the psychological characteristics of asceticism.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , August 1976 , pp. 611 - 625
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Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1976

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References

1 Published in Religion/Politics and History in India: Collected Papers in Indian Sociology (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), pp. 32–60.Google Scholar

2 In Wiener Zeitschrift fiir die Kunde Siid-und Ostasiens, VIII (1964), pp. 1—31.Google Scholar

3 “World Renunciation …” (n. 1 above), p. 45.

4 ”The great orthodox theorists and founders of orders, Shankara and Ramanuja were sanyasis….” (Ibid., p. 46). It is hard to speak about contradictions in Saiikara until we have satisfactory critical editions of his genuine works. Indeed, without such editions, it is hard to. know what Saiikara has written; and it is still more difficult to sift fact from fantasy in the idealized legendary accounts of his life. It is worth observing that Saiikara—although he speaks enthusiastically of going beyond such worldly considerations as caste, etc.—nonetheless, in his Bhasya on Brhaddranyaka III.5.1. and IV.5.15, adopts a very conservative position and argues that only a Brahmin should be allowed to become a samnyāsin. Sureśvara, to his credit, not only perceives the theoretical dilemma, but also admits that such a view is contrary to the Upanijadic texts themselves. Thus he writes, in his Vārtika on the Bhāsya (verse 1651): Trayānam api varnṃnām srutau samnyāsadarsanāt. brābmanasyaiva samnyāsa iti bhāsyam virudhyate (“We find in the sacred texts that renunciation is allowed to all three varnas. When the Bhāsya says that only a Brahmin can become an ascetic, it is contradicting this tradition.”). tradition.”). From Sureśvarācārya's Brhadāranyakopanisadhdāsyavārtika, Poona: Ānandās'rama Series No. 16, 1937.

One of the few reliable facts that we know about Śaṅkara's life, reported in all the “biographies,” is that he lost his father when he was very young. Reports on his early life stress his closeness to his mother. I would guess, from the tenor of these legends, that the nursing experience was not very satisfactory; a legend recorded by Laksmīdhara in his commentary on the Saundaryalaharī, verse 75, has Śaṅkara sucking from the breast of the image in the Bhagavatī; temple. Note also the legend of the white deer who, on the day he leaves home, leads Śaṅkara's mother to a liiiga (reported by T. Ramalingeswara Rao in A Profile of Kalady, Madras: Ramaswamy Sastrula & Son, 1969). There is a curious exchange “recorded” (fantasied, invented, repeated?) in the Śaṅkaravijaya of Vyīsīcala (T. Chandrasekhara (ed.), Madras: Government Press, 1954) between Śaiikara and his mother. She tells him (II.12):

tvam tāta dīra vrata mā prayāsis tapo hi kartum tava nasti śaktib.

pancdbdamātrah. patitā na dantāh. kirn vadeyur jananīm akāle

“Child, do not wander far away. You do not have the strength to practise asceticism. You are only five years old. Your milk teeth have not yet fallen. What kind of mother will people think I am?”

5 Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, (1966 in French], trans, by Sainsbury, Mark, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970Google Scholar.

6 There is a quote in P. V. Kane's History of Dharmaśādstra, Vol. II, Part II, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1941, p. 933 n., which speaks of the “town” that is created when more than three ascetics come together. There is also the rather charming and wistful verse

rājavārtd tatas tesām bhiksāvārtā parasparam snehapaiśunyamātsaryarn saṃnikārsān na saṃsayah. which I translate as: “Then they begin to gossip about the king, and to chat about the alms they receive. Because they become close, they develop envy and malice and genuine affection.” And, of course, as with the formation of any society, no matter how small, rules of conduct have an important role. In this connection, we should take note of the enormous number of rules that the law texts provide as to precisely what the ascetic may not do. One wonders, as in the case of the Pali Vinaya Pitaka, of the need for such elaborate restrictions. Does the severity of the restriction testify to the strength of the urge?

7 Kosambi, D. D., Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1962Google Scholar.

8 I see no reason why trance phenomena should be absent from a study of Indian mysticism. From as early as the Rg Veda (10.36)—where the Muni is described as dwelling in the Western Ocean, roaming about the sky, drinking a potent drink, knowing secret desires, wearing long hair and soiled yellow garments—such phenomena form an integral part of mysticism, and deserve to be studied with the same detached curiosity that applies to the so-called ”higher” aspects of mysticism. Keith, A.B., The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads, 2 vols., Harvard Oriental Series, 32, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1925.Google Scholar

9 Masson with M. V. Patwardhan, Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta's Philosophy of Aesthetics, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969. See. also our book Aesthetic Rapture, The Rasādhyāya of the Nātyaśāstra, 2 vols., Poona: Deccan College, 1970Google Scholar.

10 “Musīla et Nārada: Le Chemin du Nirvārṅa,” Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques (Bruxelles: L'Institut Beige des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1937), V, pp. 190–222.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 190.

12 Przyluski, Jean, Le Concile de Rājagrha, Introduction à I'histoire des canons et des sectes bouddhiques, Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1926.Google Scholar

13 Poussin (n. 10 above), p. 218.

14 “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis,” II (1914), Standard Edition (London: The Hogarth Press) [hereafter SE], 1958, XII, pp. 145–56.

15 Zilboorg, G., “The Emotional Problem and the Therapeutic Role of Insight,” Yearbook of Psychoanalysis, 1953, pp. 199–217.Google Scholar

16 In Oeuvres de Gustave Flaubert, edited and annotated by A. Thibaudet & R. Dumesnil, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1951. See too R. W. Medlicott, “St. Antony Abbot and the Hazards of Asceticism: An Analysis of Artists' Representations of the Temptations,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, XLII (1969), pp. 133–40.

17 See Dutt, Sukumar, Buddhist Monks and Monasteries of India: Their History and Their Contribution to Indian Culture, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962Google Scholar. See also Chakraborti, Haripada, Asceticism in Ancient India, Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1973Google Scholar; this is a large work, but carelessly researched.

An interesting, if somewhat thin, treatment is found in Ludwik Skurzak, Études sur l'origine de l'ascŚtisme indien, Travaux de la Société des Sciences et des Lettres de Wroclaw, Series A, No. 15, Wroclaw, 1948. See also Dutt's earlier work: Early Buddhist Monachism, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, rev. ed., i960; originally written in 1924, it is still useful. For Jainism, see Deo, S. B., The History ofjaina Monachism, Poona: Deccan College Monograph Series, 1956Google Scholar. Nur Yalman's “The Ascetic Buddhist Monks of Ceylon” (Ethnology, I (1962), pp. 315–28) opens with an evocative description of the strange landscape of the Tapasa monks who live in caves in an isolated spot near Selave, on the coast of the Indian Ocean. See too Haradatta Sarma, ”Some Problems Connected with Brahmaijical Asceticism,” Archiv Orientalni, II (1930), pp. 284–92. The fullest source remains Kane's work (n. 6 above). On Buddhist asceticism, see, in particular, Ét. Lamotte, Histoire du bouddhisme indien: des origines à l'ère saka. Bibliothèque du MusŚon, vol. 43, Louvain: Institut Orientaliste, 1958, p. 59ff. A comparative study is Daniel H.H. Ingalls, “Cynics and Pasupatas: The Seeking of Dishonor, ' The Harvard Theological Review, LV (1962), pp. 281–98. For modern India see the chapter “Religion and Phantasy,” pp. 89–105 of Carstairs, G. Morris, The Twice-Born, A Study of a Community of High-Caste Hindus, London: The Hogarth Press, 1957.Google Scholar

Professor J. F. Richards has drawn my attention to the phenomenon of fighting ascetics, which is an intriguing one. I do not know much about the psychology involved, since the borderland of “group psychology” is notoriously refractory to psychoanalytic investigation, in spite of Freud's efforts in this direction. I know only one phrase that strikes me as applicable—a psychoanalytic “explanation” of war in two words: delayed infanticide. There are some curious details on the Hindu warrior sects in Sir Jadunath Sarkar's A History of Dasnami Naga Sanyasis (Allahabad: Sri Panchayati Akhara Mananirvani, n.d.). Tibet, too, seems to have a similar tradition, as Bacot demonstrated in the case of Marpa the translator, and his guileless (?) disciple, the famed Milarespa.

18 For the notion of living like a child ( “in faerylands forlorn”?), cf. Subālopanisjid 13.1. Gaudapāda's Āgamaśāstra speaks of “wandering the earth like a blind man, like an idiot, like a man who cannot speak” (andhavaj jadavac cūpi mūkavac ca mahīm caret). V. Bhattacharya, in his edition of this text (Calcutta: Calcutta Univ. Press, 1943, p. 45), refers to Śaṅkara on Brahmasūtra III.4.50. The parivrājaka who wanders off “lonely as a rhinoceros” brings to mind the literature on fugue states. See C. Fisher, “Amnesic States in War Neuroses: The Psychogenesis of Fugues,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly [hereafter PQ], XIV, (1945), pp. 437–68; also his “Fugue with Awareness of Loss of Personal Identity,” PQ, XVIII (1949), pp. 480–93. See too Daniel Lagache, “Fugue et fuite de soi-même,” Evolution Psychiatritjue, IV (1947), pp. 1–15.

19 I have used the well-edited text of Limaye, V.P. & Vadekar, R.D., Eighteen Principal Upanisbads, Vol. I, Poona: Vaidik Saṃ⋅odhana Maṇdala, 1958.Google Scholar

20 Masson, “Fratricide among the Monkeys: Psychoanalytic Observations on an Episode in the Vālmīkirāmāyana, “journal of the American Oriental Society [hereafter JAOS], XCV, 4 (1975), pp. 672–78.

21 , Masson, “Sex and Yoga: Psychoanalysis and the Indian Religious Experience,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, II (1974), pp. 307–20.Google Scholar

22 “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” (1911), SE, 1958, XII, pp. 3–84. See also W.G. Niederland, “Schreber: Father and Son,” PQ, XXVIII (i960), pp. 151–69; and Masson, Schreber and Freud,” a paper read before the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytical Association, Denver, 1974.

23 Masson, “India and the Unconscious: Erik Erikson on Gandhi,” International journal of Psycho-analysis [hereafter IJP], LV (1974), pp. 519–26.

24 The psychoanalytic literature that is strictly on asceticism is not large. The best work is an old one: Karl Menninger, Man Against Himself, New York: Brace & World, 1938, in particular the chapter entitled “Asceticism and Martyrdom,” pp. 77–126. Unlike much of the work that Menninger has done since, this remains a classic piece in the best tradition of psychoanalysis. Arnold L. Gilberg, “Asceticism and the Analysis of a Nun,” Journal of the Ameri- can Psychoanalytic Association [hereafter JAPA], XXII (1974), pp. 381–93, is interesting though slight.

25 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), translated by Cecil Baines, rev. ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 166–69. No particular study in the psychiatric or psychoanalytic literature has been devoted to adolescent asceticism per se; Anna Freud's classic statement remains the fullest account we have. But one can consult Anna Freud's book Normality and Pathology in Childhood, Vol. VI of the Writings of Anna Freud (New York: Int'l. Universities Press, 1965), as well as a book by another child analyst, Peter Bios, On Adolescence: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, New York: The Free Press, 1962. See also J. Lander, “The Pubertal Struggle Against the Instincts, ' American Journal of Orthopsychiatry [hereafter AJO], XII (1942), pp. 456–62.

26 “The Ego …” (n. 25 above), p. 170.

27 I once met Alexandra David-Neel in the south of France, at a time when her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet was all the rage in France and she was claiming to have been the first European woman to enter Tibet. She had related in the book an experience of conjuring up a man to serve her in the monastery where she was staying. I asked her how she did it; she told me why: “I was bored and lonely; you don't know what the days and nights can be like high in the Tibetan mountains. I wanted a young companion. He was very nice looking too.” Looking back on this, if we are not to regard it as some rather high-spirited nonsense, we can believe her account; the loneliness and sexual frustration must have been overwhelming to the point where she either hallucinated a young man (not an uncom- mon experience) or enticed one of the real young monks into her room and then defended herself against the realization of what she had done, by means of a focal psychosis.

28 A book extremely rich in clinical details is Oman, John Campbell, The Mystics, Ascetics, & Saints of India: A Study of Sadhuism, with an Account of the Yogis, Sanyasis, Bairagis, and Other Strange Hindu Sectarians, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903.Google Scholar

29 O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of S”iva, London: Oxford University Press, 1973.Google Scholar

30 See the essay by Tartakoff, Helen H., “The Normal Personality in Our Culture and the Nobel Prize Complex,” in Psychoanalysis—A General Psychology: Essays in Honor of Heinz Hartmann (New York: Int'l Universities Press, 1966), pp. 222–52.Google Scholar See also E. Pumpian-Mindlin, “Vicissitudes of Infantile Omnipotence,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child [hereafter PSC], XXIV (1969), pp. 213–26.

31 See, for example, Maurice Bloomfield, “On False Ascetics and Nuns in Hindu Fiction,” JAOS, XLIV (1924), pp. 202–42, especially the section on ”Stories of Wicked Ascetics Smitten by Love,” pp. 218–22.

32 Simeon, the stylite, refuses to see his mother after an absence of twenty years. She dies of grief waiting for him to emerge from his cave. The pious tradition then has the monk pray, and the corpse smiles. But we are left with the bitter taste of a sadistic son. The life of Simeon, so richly documented, is possibly the most elaborate source of the psychopathology of Christian asceticism. See A. J. Festugiere, Antioche paienne et chretienne: Libanius, Chrysostome et les moines de Syrie, Bibliothèque des Écoles Franchises d'Athenes et de Rome, Vol. 194, Paris: E. de Boccard, 1959.

33 Note the honest comment by Cioran, E., the Rumanian essayist: “When I spend days and days among texts concerned with nothing but serenity, contemplation and ascesis, I am filled with a longing to rush out into the street and break the skull of the first person I meet.” The New Gods (1969); translated from the French by Howard, Richard, New York: Quadrangle, 1974.Google Scholar

34 Depression is most common, both in men and women, shortly after the climacteric. It is interesting to observe that this is also the time prescribed for vānaprastha, to go live in the forest (Manu 6.2.: “When a householder sees his skin become wrinkled, his hair turn white and sees the sons of his sons …”).

35 The idea has a long history. In Maitrī 1.2., Bfhadratha, “feeling that the body is not eternal, felt disgust and left for the forest” (aśāśvataṃ manyamānah śariraṃ vairāgyam upeto rariyam nirjagāma); and Mundaka 1.2.12: “Critically examining the worlds won by action, a Brahmin should become detached (or disgusted with the world)” (parīksya lokān karmacitān brāhmano nirvedam āyāt).

36 The phrase, found in Jābālopanisad IV, begins punar avratī vā sriātako vāsnātako vā (“whether one has fulfilled his vows or not, whether one has ritually bathed or not”).

37 Bibring, Edward, “The Mechanisms of Depression,” in Phyllis Greenacre (ed.), Affective Disorders: Psychoanalytic Contributions to Their Study (New York: Int'l Universities Press, 1953), pp. 13–48Google Scholar. Also Gregory Rochlin, “The Disorder of Depression and Elation: A Clinical Study of the Changes from One State to the Other,” JAPA, I (1953). pp. 438–57.

38 SE, 1957, XIV, pp. 237–58. On p. 246 Freud makes this wise observation: “When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.”

39 There is a “category” of verses in the Thera and Therīgāthā that I find very moving, where the monk or nun writes of despair to the point of suicide being reversed by a sudden (protective) “illumination.” I quote from R. K. Norman's translations: “It is twenty-five years since I went forth. Not even for the duration of a snap of the fingers have I obtained peace of mind. Not having obtained intentness of mind, afflicted by desire for sensual pleasures, wailing with outstretched arms, I went out from the cell. Shall I …, or shall I take up a knife? … Then, taking a razor, I sat on the couch. The razor was placed around to cut my own vein…. Then the peril became clear; disgust with the world was established.” (The Elder's Verses I. Therīgāthā, Pali Text Society Translation Series No. 38 (London: Luzac, 1969), p. 43).

This time by a woman: “Afflicted by desire for sensual pleasures, … thin, pale, and wan, I wandered for seven years…. I did not find happiness. Then taking a rope, I went inside a wood. 'Hanging here is better for me than that I should lead a low life again.' Having made a strong noose, having tied it to the branch of a tree, I cast the noose around my neck. Then my mind was completely released” (Therīgāthā, No. 77, The Elder's Verses II, Pali Text Soc. Trans. Ser. No. 40 (London: Luzac, 1971), pp. 11–12).

These sudden visitations of insight seem to occur at moments of sexual temptation, as in the Theragāthā, p. 32: “Ornamented, well-dressed, wearing a garland, anointed with sandal, in the middle of the main road a dancing girl dances to music. I entered for alms. As I was going along I saw her ornamented, well-dressed, like a snare of death spread out. Then reasoned thinking arose in me; the peril became clear; disgust with the world was established.” Cf. also pp. 299–302, where Candana sees his own wife, “The mother of my child, adorned, well-dressed …”

40 The relationship between the parivrājaka (wandering ascetic) and the ultimate mahāprasthāna (the voyage north, continued until the body drops from exhaustion and lack of nourishment—cf. Raghuvaṃśa VIII.73–95) is clear in several stories from the Mahābhārata (see Kane (n. 6 above), pp. 924–28) and of course the book called Mahāprasthānikaparvan.

41 “On the Longing to Die,” IJP, XXI (1940), pp. 416–26. Also Bettina Warburg, “Suicide, Pregnancy and Rebirth,” PQ, VII (1938), pp. 490–506.

42 See Menninger (n. 24 above), pp. 203–50.

43 K. R. Eissler, “Some Psychiatric Aspects of Anorexia Nervosa, Demonstrated by a Case Remented, port,” Psychoanalytic Review, XXX (1943), pp. 121–45; and Hilde Bruch, Eating Disorders: Obe became sity, Anorexia Nervosa andthe Person Within, New York: Basic Books, 1973.

44 Felix Deutsch et al, “Anorexia Nervosa: A Psychosomatic Entity,” Psychosomatic Medicine, II (1940), pp. 1–16.

45 “Notes on the Psycho-analytical Investigation and Treatment of Manic-Depressive Insanity and Allied Conditions,” (1911), in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, D. Bryan & Alix Strachey (trans.), (London: The Hogarth Press, 1973), pp. 137–56.

46 SE, 1959, XX, pp. 70–178.

47 Edith Jacobson, “Denial and Repression,” JAPA, V (1957), pp. 61–62.

48 New York: W. W. Norton, 1950; reprinted in 1961 (New York: Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Inc.).

49 Ibid., p. 54. On p. 59, he quotes the case of a patient described by Helene Deutsch in 1933: “Her husband and lover both deserted her, she lost most of her money, and she experienced the melancholy commudestiny of mothers whose growing son deserts them for another woman. Finally, she had to accept the narcissistic blow of my telling her that she could not become a psychoanalyst. None of this was capable of disturbing her euphoria. She immediately found a way out, partly by belittling her losses, partly by finding at once new substitutes; thus she nipped in the bud any reaction to her frustrations and denied Anx them.”

50 H. Robert Blank, “Depression, Hypomania Camand Depersonalization,” PQ, XXIII (1954), pp. 20–37.

51 Lewin (n. 48 above), p. 53.

52 E. R. Dodds writes of Numenius, the secondprinted century Pythagorean who so heavily influenced Plotinus, “He compares the contemplative to a watcher in a high place who looks out across an empty sea and suddenly catches sight of a single tiny boat: ’In the same way,’ he says, ‘one must withdraw far from the things of sense and enter into solitary communion with the Good, where there is no human being nor any other creature nor body great or small, but only a kind of divine desolation which in truth cannot be spoken of or described, where are the haunts and resorts and pleasures of the Good, and the Good itself at rest in peace and friendliness, the Sovereign Principle riding serene above the tides of Being’ “(Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965, pp. 93–94).

It is the image here—rather than what it is compared to—that arrests our attention, and not, I think, exclusively for reasons of its literary qualities, considerable as these might be. I believe that the longing to be lost is one common to all ascetics: the retreat into the desert, or into the forest, or to a lonely mountain—any place devoid of human companionship. This seems to be inevitably followed by a desire, difficult to acknowledge, for precisely the opposite; it is this desire, met by a strong need to be repressed back into the unconscious, that creates the compromise symbol of the tiny boat. It is small, and it is far; but the implication is that it is approaching, and that it is manned, if only by one other person. This need to be found seems to be inevitably present in the desire to be lost. It is not unlike the child who tells his mother to leave, only to spend the rest of the night hoping for her return. A patient in analysis was in the habit of wandering about in a foreign city on a cold, windy night—observing the warm lighted houses on the top of the hill, longing to be inside them, yet enjoying in some curious way his own solitude. This masochistic enjoyment has a spurious quality to it. If the Indian ascetic wanders off into the forest by himself, he nonetheless soon begins to people his āśrama with all the denizens of his imagination. What Indian ascetic is not on the closest terms with a large number of gods and demons; is he not steeped in mythology? The tradition provides the lost ascetic with his hearth, and hence, I believe, the universal tendency for mythology to begin to concern itself with the family life of the gods. (See Ingalls, Daniel H. H., An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965.)Google Scholar

53 Selected Writings of Bertram D. Lewin, ed. by Jacob A. Arlow, New York: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Inc., 1973.

54 The recovery of these early ego states is a fascinating area within psychoanalytic theory. Paul Federn was t h e first analyst to concern himself with them (Ego Psychology and the Psychoses, ed. by Edoardo Weiss, N. Y.: Basic Books, 1952); and recently a very interesting case history has been described by Edoardo Weiss, giving clinical and theoretical importance to t h e recapturing of these early states and the attendant therapeutic benefit (“The Psychoanalytic Formulation of Agoraphobia,” The Psychoanalytic Forum, I (1966), pp. 377–98). See also Weiss' “Agoraphobia and its Relation to Hysterical Attacks and to Traumas,” IJP, XVI (1935), pp. 59–83.

55 Drugs in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 282.

56 SE, 1957, XIV, pp. 109–40.

57 “Libido and Reality in Masochism,” PQ, IX (1940), pp. 322–33; “On Some Psychodynamics of Masochism,” PQ, XVI (1947), pp. 459–71; “The Role of Object Relations in Moral Masochism,” PQ, XXVII (1958), pp. 38–56.

58 Berliner, “Libido …” (n. 57 above), p. 324.

59 Esther Menaker, “Masochism—A Defense Reaction of the Ego,” PQ, XXII (1953), pp.205–20.

60 “Maternal Influences in the Development of Moral Masochism,” AJO, XXV (1955), pp. 802–09.

61 Berliner, “Libido …” (n. 57 above), p. 331.

62 The bizarre practices of Haṭhayoga, where the vegetative nervous system is systematically beleaguered, is well known to students of such texts as the Haṭhayogapradīpika and the Gorakṣaśataka. Buddhaghosa speaks of dantavakkalikas who stripped of the bark of trees with their teeth, which reminds us of the accounts of wolf-children. Even if these latter are fantasies, it is interesting that ascetics tend towards acts which would bring into doubt their very humanness; no doubt the wild appearance of many ascetics today in India is the result of a deep need to appear inhuman. (Saṃnyāsopaniṣad 13 describes the ascetic who eats like the ajagara (boa constrictor), lying down and passively opening his mouth. It is a pathetic attempt to frighten—which conceals the deeper urge to be approached, wanted, and eventually loved. It is a type of counterphobic gesture so well described by Otto Fenichel in his classic article “The Counter-Phobic Attitude,” IJP, XX (1939), pp. 26–74.

63 “A Contribution to the Psychoanalytic Theory Masochism,” JAPA, V (1957), pp. 197–234.

64 Ibid., p. 226.

65 M. Brenman, “On Being Teased; and the Problem of Moral Masochism,” PSC, VII (1952), pp. 264–85.

66 Fliess, Robert, Symbol, Dream, and Psychosis, New York: Int. Universities Press, 1973.Google Scholar

67 Psychoanalytic studies of addiction have enabled us to see “addictive” features in many areas seemingly unrelated to pure drug or alcohol addiction. Compulsive sexuality can serve as an addiction, as can the practices of asceticism. It is striking that the main finding of addiction research is that the drug permits of a considerable degree of regression. This is precisely what we find in the case of the ascetic, for there can be no doubt that many of the practices the ascetic engages in have a markedly oral and anal coloring, a concern both with intake and with elimination. See t h e fine study by Ernest Simmel, “Alcoholism and Addiction,” PQ, XVII (1948), pp. 6–31.

68 Robert Waelder, “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Play,” PQ, II (1933), pp. 208–24.

69 Jacob Arlow, “Unconscious Fantasy and Disturbances of Conscious Experiences,” PQ, XXXVIII (1969), pp. 1–27.

70 PSC, IX (1954), pp. 218–41.

71 “Libidinal Phases, Ego Development, and Play,” PSC, IX (1954), pp. 178–98.

72 Ibid, p. 183.

73 Dines Andersen & Smith, Helmer, Sutta Nipāta, Pali Text Society, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1913.Google Scholar

74 PQ, XXXVII (1968), pp. 63–79.

75 Schiffer, I., Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society, Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1973Google Scholar.