Суд над Бхагавад-гитой / Attempt to ban Bhagavad-gita

Discussions with Syamasundara dasa
Sigmund Freud



Prabhupāda: The Bhagavad-gītā says, (indistinct), by giving up this body, that is death, (indistinct).


Śyāmasundara: Do you attribute accidents and disease to a desire for self-destruction?


Prabhupāda: No. Ultimately we say there is no such thing as accident. Nothing can take place without God's sanction. So there is no question of accidents.


Devotee: If they would have some information of the three kinds of miseries, ādhyātmika, ādibhautika, ādi-daivika, they should stop circulating all these kinds of instincts, because they understand all these different things are categorizing...


Śyāmasundara: I thought I heard you say before that some sicknesses and accidents are caused by the person's desire—the person desires to be sick; the person desires to have accident.


Prabhupāda: (indistinct) person desires to be sick.


Devotee: Suppose somebody says, "Well, I want to be happy." So we say, "You just chant Hare Kṛṣṇa and join us, then you will be happy." So he is saying, "No. I want to keep my job. I want to do this or that." So when we can say that actually he is not serious about becoming happy. If he really were serious about becoming happy, he would join us. So in a sense he actually doesn't want to be happy. That's what he would say.


Prabhupāda: He wants to be happy but he is miserable. That is (indistinct). He wants to be happy but he is misguided in search of happiness. Everyone wants happiness, but when one is misguided, that is called illusion. He is searching happiness without any basis. (break—continues next day)


Śyāmasundara: We are discussing Freud still. It was his idea that every person has certain aggressive and destructive tendencies within them, and sometimes these are directed upon the self, so that one will have accidents or sicknesses which are self-inflicted. Does this happen?


Prabhupāda: When one commits suicide, that is not in sane condition. He is crazy. In sane condition nobody commits suicide.


Śyāmasundara: He observed, for instance, when someone came up against a massive task, that sometimes they got sick in order to escape the task—these kinds of things. He investigated slips of the tongue and different accidents. He said that a lot of times they are caused by the self, the psychic.


Prabhupāda: Yes, that is intention, not insanity.


Śyāmasundara: Another area of his investigation was the problem of anxiety. He says that the source of anxiety is the id, or the primitive instincts, which are always forcing us to do this and do that. In other words, desire. These impulses threaten to overpower the rational or the moral self. So there is always a tension or an anxiety produced.


Prabhupāda: Anxiety shall continue so long as you are in material condition. You cannot be free from anxiety in your conditioned life.


Śyāmasundara: It is because we desired something and we were always frustrated by that desire?


Prabhupāda: Frustration must be there, because you do not desire the right thing.


Śyāmasundara: So that is the basic cause of anxiety-desire?


Prabhupāda: Yes. Desiring something which is not permanent. That we call (indistinct). Suppose that I wish to live forever, but if I have accepted this material body, therefore there is no question of living forever. So I am always anxious when death should come. I am afraid of death, when the body will be destroyed. This is (indistinct). So therefore the conclusion is that anxiety is due to our acceptance of something which does not exist. This is the right definition of anxiety.


Śyāmasundara: He says that the ego develops strategies of defense against this anxiety which is entering from the id, and one of the strategies it develops is repression. Whenever there is some strong animalistic desire, the ego represses that desire in order to preserve itself.


Prabhupāda: Repression is always there. We make plans in so many ways, but by nature it is frustrated. That is repression.


Śyāmasundara: Is conscious repression advisable?


Prabhupāda: Conscious repression?


Śyāmasundara: Yes. Of my basic instincts, my desires. Should I consciously strive to repress these desires?


Prabhupāda: Just like if you are in a diseased condition and you desire to eat something which is forbidden by the physician. So consciously you have to repress in order to cure. That is the way.


Śyāmasundara: I heard you say once that we cannot really repress desire but we have to channel it, control it, into other objects.


Prabhupāda: Repression means, suppose you have a disease, you are suffering from typhoid fever, and the doctor says that you don't take any solid food. Now if you desire to take a paratha, you have to repress it: "No, I cannot take paratha." Suppose there is looseness of your bile(?), and if you want to take some condensed milk, you have to repress it. (indistinct) go against you, you have to repress. Repress means repressing something which is going against my welfare. So in this brahmacārī system also there is repression. He should not see young woman, he should not sit down with young woman. But he desires. The desire is that "I shall see young woman." He has to repress. So this is called tapasya, voluntary repression.


Śyāmasundara: Aren't these desires given outlet in other ways? Do we channel the desires to some other field? Instead of seeing a beautiful woman, we see the beautiful form of Kṛṣṇa, like that?


Prabhupāda: That is our process. From this (indistinct) if you have got better engagement, you give up inferior engagement. When you are captivated by seeing the beautiful form of Kṛṣṇa, naturally you have no more desire to see the beautiful form of a young woman.


Śyāmasundara: The Buddhists also say repress desires, but they mean total repression.


Prabhupāda: Yes. We don't say that. We just say that sometimes there is strong desire, we have to repress it. Just like my Guru Mahārāja used to say that while you get up from bed, you beat your mind a hundred times with your shoe, and when you go to bed, you beat your mind a hundred times with a broomstick. Then you will be able to control your mind. Sometimes, just like wild tiger, they have got him to control by repression. The circus players, they do that. Because it is wild tiger, repression is required. But when it is under control, there is no question of repression. You can play with the tiger; he becomes your friend. So repression is not always bad.


Śyāmasundara: Another field of investigation for Freud was the idea of projection. He said this is a technique for attributing one's own unconscious attitudes onto other people. In other words, X called Y a name, but actually Y is the object of that. In other words, for instance, X may regard Y as being jealous, but in fact X is jealous and he projects that attitude onto someone else.


Prabhupāda: That is accepted. (indistinct) Everyone thinks others like himself.


Śyāmasundara: So he says that this desire to accuse someone else of being the same is sometimes repressed and replaced by the opposite expression. In other words, someone may dislike someone, but they will inhibit that dislike and show overt symptoms of friendliness, where in fact there is no friendliness there but it is only a mock friendliness. This is one of the psychological attitudes he was studying. Sometimes someone who may have dislike for someone, instead of expressing dislike, may express just the opposite, extreme fondness, where in fact he dislikes the person.


Prabhupāda: That is called (indistinct), silliness. What is the meaning of silly?


Śyāmasundara: Silly means frivolous or superficial.


Prabhupāda: (indistinct) If the other party is silly, then you also become silly. That is human nature.


Devotee: Freud would give an example like this: The child three or four years old, and then a younger child is born in the family. The four-year-old child sees the younger child as a source of competition for affection, and he doesn't like the younger child, but then if he expresses dislike for the child he will be chastised by the parents, so he makes as if he likes the child very much in order to get approbation, but factually he dislikes the child. That is another mechanism that...


Prabhupāda: I don't think the older child dislikes the younger child. Sometimes.


Devotee: Yes. But he would say this sometimes occurs.


Śyāmasundara: You don't notice it very much in Indian families because they are so well-adjusted, but in Western families this quite often happens—the older child becomes jealous of the younger child's favors, but in order to gain the favor of the parents, he expresses overt love for the younger child, or...


Prabhupāda: I don't think children are so clever, that in order to win the love of parents they will treat like that.


Devotee: Freud put so much emphasis on children and the mentality and emotions of children—what one is experiencing, youth and so on—and it is all concocted, don't you think?


Prabhupāda: Children can be trained in a different way. As you train them, they become like that.


Devotee: Freud says that all children experience this if there is a younger child born in the family.


Prabhupāda: They imitate. Children's position is imitation. I have seen in other children, one child was two years old and another child was three years old, and they were imitating just like they had seen sexual intercourse of their father. I have seen it. They are playing, lying down, and the male child is laying upon her. I saw it. Imitation. They do not know what is sex, but they will imitate it. That's all.


Śyāmasundara: Freud analyzes that there are different defense mechanisms by which the ego protects itself.


Prabhupāda: The conclusion is that children generally imitate. They do not know what is the value, but they imitate.


Śyāmasundara: He would say there are instinctive defense mechanisms in the psychological make-up of everyone, such as repression, projection, excessive overt reactions of an opposite kind, different mechanisms which the ego employs to cover up, to protect itself from the impulses of the id, primitive impulses.


Devotee: Just like he says that from the social standards of conduct and moral codes, a person develops an ideal conception of himself. He wants to think himself ideal, and this ideal conception fits the standard of the society and his environment. Then from inside, from his more animal desires, sex desire, etc., he gets impulses which don't fit that standard, that he feels some sex love, but it should not be there, so he wants to say, "I don't really have that." So he tries to repress that desire either by repressing it or by saying, "I don't desire that. Somebody else desires like that," or in so many ways he tries to cover the fact that his own psychological make-up doesn't fit his standard. Therefore he calls it defense mechanism, a way to pretend as if I still am ideal, although I don't really have ideal desires and thoughts, like that. That's the (indistinct). So he postulated all these different mechanisms for defending the ego against the desires of the id or... [break]


Prabhupāda: You have seen that play?


Śyāmasundara: Tarzan?


Prabhupāda: Tarzan. Yes. He was brought up by monkeys. He was brought on... He has got the monkey habits. Children, if you keep them in good association, then they will come out very good. They will have psychological development in good way. And if you keep them in bad association, they will come out bad. Just like in Boston the priest regretted that these our American boys, they were so much after God, but they could not lead(?) them. Actually you American boys, before coming to Kṛṣṇa consciousness, there was no God consciousness; there was hippie consciousness. And now this has changed, due to association. So you are all grown-up, but even small children, if you keep them in good association, they come out nice. Demigods they come out. And if you put them in the demon association, they come out demons. So they are blank slate. As you write, it is written. That is real psychology. You can mold children as you like. They have got the capacity to... Therefore children are sent to a school for taking education, not old men.


Śyāmasundara: So there is no fixed pattern of development of children's personalities?


Prabhupāda: No. This is nonpsychology. You can mold them in any way. As you put them into the mold, they will come out. Just like you take a soft dough, and you can mold it-like parathas or capatis, kacaurīs.


Śyāmasundara: So actually Freud was speaking only of a certain set of children in a certain society, Western society, where they were all brought up a certain way.


Prabhupāda: That's all right. He has a got a one-sided experience.


Devotee: Yes. He has been criticized like that.


Śyāmasundara: You don't find these neuroses in Indian families.


Prabhupāda: No.


Devotee (2): They have studied subsequently primitive tribes and they have found that these neuroses were not there. They only existed in the social structure of Victorian Europe.


Prabhupāda: Therefore this is the conclusion—that if you put children in right association, they will go rightly, and if you put them in wrong association, they will go wrongly. They have no independent psychology.


Śyāmasundara: Perhaps his one contribution was that he said that behavior must be understood in terms of a person's whole life history, in the total...


Prabhupāda: That is why in our Vedic system it is forbidden that even a small child, before that small child, the husband and wife should not joking. They should not talk jokingly.


Śyāmasundara: To the child?


Prabhupāda: Before the child.


Śyāmasundara: Before the child.


Prabhupāda: Yes.


Devotee: To each other.


Prabhupāda: Yes. It is not that "It is a small child. They will not understand." But they can understand. So what to speak of having sex intercourse before the child? They will learn it. I've seen it. They do not know what is sex intercourse, but they have learned it from their rascal father and mother.


Śyāmasundara: So Freud, actually his psychology depended upon a rather pessimistic view of human nature—that we are all beset with these uncontrollable impulses...


Prabhupāda: This in not only pessimism, but due to poor fund of knowledge. He has no perfect knowledge, neither is he trained up by any perfect man. So he is talking all nonsense.


Śyāmasundara: His conclusion was that it was impossible to be happy in this material world, but we can alleviate some of the conflicts through this psychoanalysis. You can try and make the path as smooth as possible, but it is always...


Prabhupāda: That is one (indistinct) that you cannot be happy in this material world, but if you are spiritually elevated, spiritually trained up, then you will be happy. The same example. Just like iron is not fire, but you put it in the fire, it will act like fire. Similarly, although there is no possibility of happiness in this material world, if you are spiritually trained up, if your consciousness is changed into Kṛṣṇa consciousness, then you will be happy. (end)


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