You start loving and depending on your therapist like a parent or partner, and if they also need love, you both get stuck—only a truly wise, unattached guide can turn that love into growth.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, yesterday you spoke of psychoanalysis and the phenomenon of patients falling in love with their analysts. Analysis calls this phenomenon transference and tries to make it happen on purpose. Through this total projection of one's feelings of love onto the analyst, a person grows and learns to love in a healthier way. Is not this concept the same as that of surrender in the eastern tradition? Is it not possible that freud discovered its value through some esoteric leak?
Just like water seeks a level, a relationship seeks a level. If you fall in love with me, then there will be a struggle. Long or short, it depends on what type of a person you are, there will be a struggle. You will try to bring me down so that the equality is established. Nature likes equality. But if you can bring me down, then I cannot help you. So while you are trying to bring me down, I must try to bring you up to a higher state. And remember, to go to a lower state is very easy; to bring someone to a higher state is very difficult. It is a long struggle. When the doctor and the patient are of similar consciousness, only their knowledge differs -- not their being. One man has studied psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry: he is an expert. The other has not studied…
I am a psychoanalyst, but listening to the patients day in, day out, is driving me crazy. What should I do?
For a moment Jung was silent, and then he said, "You have lost it already. If you are so much afraid of being psychoanalyzed yourself, what kind of psychoanalyst are you?" And he was the father of psychoanalysis. He himself was never psychoanalyzed; he never allowed anybody to come that close. He was afraid really that if he came to know about his own unconscious he might never be the same man again. That's why we go on avoiding. But a psychoanalyst cannot avoid; hence your problem. You will have to learn to be so silent that rather than the neurotic assertions of the patient affecting you, your silence starts affecting the patient. You have to be more potential, you have to be more full of love and grace. And in fact, if you are full of love, that is therapy. that is healing. Love is a healing force. The…
Beloved master, you speak on the psychology of the buddhas, the psychology of transcendence, as the essence of the work happening here in the buddhafield. What is the uniqueness of this third psychology? Is there a psychotherapy of transcendence?
Meditation, awareness, watchfulness, witnessing -- that is the uniqueness. No psychoanalyst is needed. You can do it on your own; in fact, you have to do it on your own. No guidelines are needed, it is such a simple process -- simple if you do it; if you don't do it, it looks very complicated. Even the word 'meditation' scares many people. They think it something very difficult, arduous. Yes, if you don't do it it is difficult and arduous. It is like swimming. It is very difficult if you don't know how to swim, but if you know, you know it is so simple a process. Nothing can be more simple than swimming. It is not an art at all; it is so spontaneous and so natural. Be more aware of your mind. And in being aware of your mind you will become aware of the fact that you…
In intensive psychotherapy the patient may either be talking or listening, that is, trying to hear from within. Only the latter is of value. A good therapist, especially if love exists, will hit on many ways of heightening this process of listening for the unexpected. Is this a form of meditation? In fact, might it be said that ideally, both therapist and patient are meditating together?
Everybody is born to remain healthy and happy. Everybody is seeking health and happiness, but somewhere something is missing and everybody becomes miserable. Misery should be an exception; it has become the rule. Happiness should be the rule; it has become an exception. I would like a world where buddhas are born, but nobody remembers them because they are the rule. Now Buddha is remembered, Christ is remembered, Lao Tzu is remembered, because they are exceptions. Otherwise, who would bother about them? If there were a buddha in every house, and if there were buddhas all over the marketplace and you could meet Lao Tzu anywhere, who would bother? Then that would be the simple rule. It should be so. Lao Tzu says,'When the world was really moral there was no possibility of becoming a saint.' When the world was really religious there was no need for religions. People were…
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…