According to Osho, not just something but the essential is missing in Western psychotherapies: they remain externally oriented, treating behaviors and symptoms while ignoring the inner source. This is like pruning leaves instead of reaching the roots. Real healing begins when psychology turns inward and becomes meditation—entering subjectivity, touching the secret core. Without changing the source, therapies are patchwork; symptoms shift and return because the underlying poison remains untouched.
Western therapy mostly fixes what shows on the outside, but true healing happens when you look inside through meditation and heal the root cause, not just the symptoms.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Is something essentially missing in western psychotherapies?
IT IS NOT ONLY THAT SOMETHING ESSENTIALLY IS missing in Western psychotherapies -- THE ESSENTIAL is missing! The Western psychotherapies are still objective, from the outside. They have not yet come to the point where meditation becomes the MOST important thing in psychotherapy. They are still looking from the outside -- they are looking at the behaviour. Behaviour is the outermost expression of your psychology, but it is not the source. It is the outcome, the by-product. The Western psychotherapies are still pruning the leaves of a tree. By pruning the leaves of a tree you cannot destroy the tree. They have not yet reached to the roots; those roots are hidden underground. They are looking aboveground. When you look at the tree you rend to forget the roots -- they are not visible, they are not obvious. Roots are not so foolish as to be obvious; roots are not…
Osho, what is the relationship between meditation and patience?
If you sit to meditate to remove mental restlessness, you will keep looking back again and again: “Has it gone yet?” And the irony is that when you begin to meditate, restlessness will increase. Because what has been repressed will start surfacing; catharsis will begin. The rubbish you have kept hidden within and never allowed to express—meditation will break open those doors too. It will clean the house. Dust piled up for years, for births, will rise again; there will be gusts and storms. For a while even the little peace you had will be lost. Then you will panic: “I came for peace, and even what I had is gone.” Without patience, you could even become unhinged, because meditation brings such a great storm. The disease is not from a day or two; it’s from lifetimes. Meditation will break through all the layers to reach your innermost core. In…
In a different garb, different terminology, again the same game starts. And there are many people in the West whose whole lives are being wasted in therapy. Therapy can be very helpful but one needs to know its limits. If you know the limits you can be very helpful. If you forget the limits you can be very de'structive. Then psychotherapy itself becomes like an occupation for the patient he starts depending on it. It becomes an escape so he can avoid life, because he says that he is under therapy and he is not yet healed and there are a thousand and one problems yet to be solved. Unless they are solved, how can he participate in life? And that can become a disease in itself. Sometimes medicines can create a greater disease than what they were meant to cure.
Question: BELOVED MASTER, WHAT IS BEYOND PSYCHOTHERAPY? The being can see through the mind with great clarity, perception. Before the being's arrival it was always a question of either/or -- to do this or to do that, what is right, what is wrong -- and the mind was never able to decide. And, whatever it decided, it was always half-hearted; hence, repentance was always bound to happen. You were thinking to marry this woman or that woman... finally the mind has to decide. Wavering, it comes to a decision. By marrying one woman you come to know the woman in her totality, and a great repentance settles in: you have chosen the wrong woman. Nobody in the whole world has chosen the right woman, neither has any woman chosen the right man. It is very strange....
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…