According to Osho, psychoanalysis can offer limited help—preparing the ground, easing tensions, and giving some insight—but it only adjusts the mind to society’s averages. True self-knowledge comes through religion as meditation: aligning with the ultimate norm, godliness. Meditation transforms, gives wings, and leads beyond mere normalcy to authentic being; psychoanalysis is temporary, secondary, even risky for practitioners.
Therapy can help you cope, but meditation lets you truly know who you are.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Can't psychoanalysis help people to know themselves? Is religion really necessary?
Sugeet, psychoanalysis can help a little bit, it can prepare the ground, but it cannot be a substitute for religion. In the West it is becoming a substitute for religion, and that is going to destroy something immensely beautiful. Religion is a totally different phenomenon from psychoanalysis. Religion is not analysis at all, religion is meditation. It is not thinking, it is not analysis. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the mind and helping the mind to become adjusted to society, to whatsoever is thought to be normal. It may be, it may not be. Usually the average is thought to be the normal, but the average is not necessarily the normal. The word normal comes from 'norm'; norm means the law. Normal is one who lives according to the law, the ultimate law, the ultimate norm. A Buddha is normal, a Jesus is normal, a Zarathustra is normal, a Bodhidharma is…
Beloved master, cannot psychoanalysis solve man's problems? Is religion really needed at all?
For example, in India, sex is taboo -- you should not talk about it -- but death is not taboo. You can talk about it; in fact, all the religious teachers talk about death. They make people so much afraid of death, talking again and again and again about it. They create so much fear in people that out of fear people start becoming religious. All Indian scriptures are full of the description of death. Death seems to be one of the most talked about subjects in India -- not sex. Sex is taboo. Sex is life, and if you choose death you cannot choose sex -- either/or. Freud did a great service to humanity; he brought sex from the dark corners of the soul into the open world. But immediately death became taboo; he himself became afraid of death. They are polar opposites, and the total man will be…
Beloved Osho, what does the revelation of the unconscious, as in psychoanalysis, bring to humanity -- according to you?
Jung had come to India in search of someone, to find out what the East has done to create so many people like Gautam Buddha -- not one but hundreds who have gone beyond mind and all its troubles and problems, worries, anxieties. What is the secret? He was going to universities, meeting psychoanalysts, and everywhere he was told, "You are wasting your time. These people are not the right people. These people have gone to the West to learn psychoanalysis and they are teaching psychoanalysis in the universities. You have come to search and seek somebody who is absolutely untouched by the West. And there is a man." And there was a man -- Shri Raman Maharshi. Wherever Jung went -- and he was there for three months -- everywhere the same name was given to him. "Go to Arunachal in South India and meet this man who is…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, DOES PSYCHOLOGICAL THERAPY HELP TO GO BEYOND THE MIND? Even psychoanalysts are very embarrassed by the fact that there is not a single man in the whole world who has been perfectly psychoanalyzed. And I am amazed at their stupidity. Hoping that some day some man will be perfectly psychoanalyzed is exactly like hoping that some day some house will be perfectly clean and there will be no need to clean it again. It is absolutely absurd. The house will need cleaning continually, because as time passes dirt gathers. Even the cleanest mirror needs cleaning once in a while because dirt gathers on it, vapor gathers on it; it does not reflect clearly, it starts reflecting distortions. There will never be any man perfectly psychoanalyzed, because the process in itself is only of cleaning. Can you get your clothes cleaned forever, perfectly cleaned?
Is psychoanalysis really that useless?
No, not always. Sometimes it helps too. Meditate on this story. Felix Simons was a nice guy but a social flop. Although he was thirty-five, he had never conquered his childhood habit of bedwetting. Finally, one of his friends told him, 'Look, Felix, you might as well know the truth. We're all very fond of you, but nobody can stand to come into your house because it smells, and you're driving your wife up a wall. Why don't you see a psychiatrist about your problem? Enuresis is not too uncommon and it can be cured. Get it over with once and for all!' Felix was convinced. After six months of treatment he ran into the same friend. 'Well, Felix, did you take my advice?' 'Yes,' answered Felix, 'I've been seeing a psychiatrist three times a week for six months now.' 'Well, have you had any results?' 'Oh,' beamed Felix, 'great…