According to Osho, psychoanalysis—Freud, Adler, Jung, even Assagioli’s psychosynthesis—is helpful yet superficial, touching only parts of the mind. Man’s fundamental problem is spiritual/existential, not merely psychological; hence analysis cannot resolve it. Only awakening eyes—through authentic religious insight and meditation—addresses the whole, restoring the living soul beyond dissected or stitched-together fragments.
Therapy can tidy the mind, but only deep spiritual awakening brings real, lasting peace.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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…
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 Osho, in the west, psychoanalysis has grown through freud, adler, jung and wilhelm reich, to solve the problems arising from the ego such as frustrations, conflicts, schizophrenia and madness. In comparison to your meditation techniques, please explain the contributions, limitations and incompleteness of the system of psychoanalysis in solving the human problems rooted in the ego.
What is happening? You have been operating; you have done many operations. And now what is happening? You cannot do it on your child or your wife because the distance is so little -- as if there is no distance. Without distance you cannot be impartial. So a psychoanalyst can help others but when he is in trouble he will have to take advice, he will have to be psychoanalyzed by someone else. And this is really strange that even a person like Wilhelm Reich goes mad in the end. We cannot conceive a buddha going mad -- or can you conceive of it? And if a buddha can go mad, then there is no way out of this misery. It is inconceivable that a buddha goes mad. Look at Sigmund Freud's life. He is the father and founder of psychoanalysis; he went on talking about problems very deeply. But…
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…
[A visitor said three years of Freudian psychoanalysis helped her, but also made things difficult.] That too is true, because all the analytical methods are in a way incomplete. They help you only to a certain extent and then they leave you in a limbo. One feels that something has happened, but much is missing. Something seems to be incomplete, hanging, suspended. But that is natural because analysis is a very new process. It just started with Freud; it is not even one hundred years old. And the whole method was developed by one man. It is on the way, it is growing. It takes centuries for a certain method to come to a completion, because so many people have to be experimented upon, and millions of people have to pass through the method. They help the method to grow.