According to Osho, there’s no risk of psychological damage in his therapy groups because the real damage has already been inflicted by society’s conditioning; the groups don’t impose new beliefs but systematically uncondition you, reversing the shift from content to pure consciousness. By stripping away ideologies, ambitions, and identities, they help you recover your natural witnessing awareness, so participation cannot harm you—its whole function is to undo harm.
We don’t add more stuff to your mind; we clear out the junk others put there so you can be yourself again.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, thousands of people enter into your therapy groups to transcend their limitations and break through emotional barriers. What guarantee is there that they will not suffer psychological damage?
WHAT MORE PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE CAN YOU SUFFER? You have suffered it already. That work has already been done. You cannot be more ill than you are; you cannot fall more than you have fallen -- the society has done it already. We cannot damage you; it is impossible now. The damage has been done. What we are trying to do here is to undo it. You have been conditioned -- as a Hindu, as a Mohammedan, as a Jaina, as a Buddhist -- this is the damage. You have been conditioned as an Indian, as a German, as an Italian -- this is the damage. You have been forced to believe in things; you have been given all kinds of prejudices, superstitions. You have already been made schizophrenic; you have been cut into fragments. You have already been given the fever of ambition. You have been told that life is…
It is good that you don't feel it is therapy; it isn't. In fact the very word therapy is condemnatory. The moment you say therapy, you have taken the other as a patient, ill -- that s the condemnation. Nobody is really ill. In fact the society is ill, individuals are victims. Society needs therapy, individuals simply need love. The society is the patient and needs hospitalization. Individuals suffer because you cannot catch hold of the society; it remains invisible. When you try to catch hold of it, an individual is found and then he becomes responsible -- and he is simply suffering, he is a victim. He needs understanding, not therapy; love, not therapy. Society has not given him understanding, has not given him love. Society has given him strait-jackets, prisons.
Beloved Osho, is taking the role of a therapist dangerous to my own spiritual growth? Is it possible to help people and still let my own ego dissolve at the same time? I feel that a subtle fight goes on inside me between one part that is clear and another part that wants nothing to do with clarity. Under your guidance I have learned not to dominate others when I use my capacity to see, but am I still dominating myself?
But these people have not gone inside; they have looked from outside. And this is the problem: from the outside you can only see objects, and love is not an object, bliss is not an object, enlightenment is not an object, understanding is not an object, wisdom is not an object. All that is great in human existence and life is subjective, not objective. But from the outside you can see only objects. That gives a tremendous urgency to fill your hollow inside with any rubbish. There are people who are filling it with borrowed knowledge; there are people who are filling it with self-imposed torture -- they become saints. There are people who are beggars to become the prime minister, to become the president. Everywhere the hollow people are in tremendous need to dominate others. That gives them the feeling that they are not hollow. A sannyasin begins by…
But you have not done anything like a group, so how can you feel that they are not for you? No, that cannot be. But if you don't want to, there is no need to do groups. But if you listen to my suggestion, I will say that you do one so that you can really feel whether it is for you or not. That will be an experience. It is never good to decide beforehand, because it may be just a fear deep down. What you are calling your feeling that it is not for you, may be fear. I rarely come across a person for whom groups are not helpful -- and never a person who comes from the West. Centuries of repression are there. You may not be aware but it is in the unconscious. And that creates a fear, a fear of explosion.
With the old orthodox psychoanalysis, whatsoever can be done in years can be done in weeks in these groups. Of course psychoanalysts are not in favour of them because their whole trade, their whole business will be destroyed. Psychoanalysis has become a big concern, one of the richest professions in the world now, so too much investment is there. They go on guarding but the citadel is almost on the volcano and any moment it will explode. So those who are a little avant-garde, those who can see a little ahead, should start absorbing all that is happening all over the world. These groups are basically different from psychoanalysis and yet complementary. They are more active; psychoanalysis is a passive thing. The psychoanalyst remains almost an outsider, watching, observing. He is a voyeur.