ABSTRACT
For the past few years I have been absorbed in the study of various Indian traditions for the healing of emotional disorder.1 In my encounters with the patients and healers of these traditions-shamans, gurus, psychiatrists of indigenous medicine-I have been greatly impressed by two issues: one, the universality of human concerns that underlie emotional illness and two, the relativity of all psychotherapeutic endeavours, eastern or western. It became increasingly evident for me that Indian patients-whether Hindu, Muslim or tribal-are engaged in the same struggles as their counterparts elsewhere in the world as they attempt to find a balance between the rewards and pressures of an external world and the desires and fantasies of an internal world haunted by ghosts of sexual and aggressive wishes, by envy, and by reproachful voices from the past. In the west these concerns are more liable to be expressed in scientific abstractions and analytic truths, in psychological systems that rearrange reality in some artificial pattern, testifying to the continuing hold of the philosophy of enlightenment on the modern western mind. In India, these concerns are expressed more in the language of religious experience, myths and poetical images of a people whose values are nearer to those of counter-enlightenment.2
