According to Osho, the only real protection for psychoanalysts is deep meditation. Without it, patients’ poured-out madness provokes your own and drives you toward burnout or breakdown. Train yourself in long, daily meditations to become silent, cool, and collected—able to listen fully yet remain untouched. Root your work in witnessing awareness, not distancing tricks or pretense, so you can truly help without being harmed.
Practice daily meditation so you can hear people’s pain without taking it inside you.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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…
[A visitor said she had trouble becoming involved in the meditations here, adding that she could not stay much longer as she was a psychiatrist and had patients to see.] A psychiatrist needs to be meditative more than anybody else -- because your whole work is dangerous in a way. Unless you are very calm and quiet, unless you can remain unaffected by things that happen around you, it is very dangerous. More psychiatrists go mad than any other professional people and more psychiatrists commit suicide than any other professional people. This is something to be pondered over. The proportion is really too much. Twice as many people commit suicide. That simply shows that the profession is full of dangers. It is -- because whenever you are treating a person who is psychologically disturbed, in a mess, he is constantly broadcasting his vibes.
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…
[A therapist visitor says: It is very difficult for me to listen to myself. I can see problems for other people but I cannot for me.] That happens always to people who are helping others -- groupleaders, psychoanalysts, therapists. It happens to all such people because by and by they become too much other-focused. They listen to their problems and they try to solve them, but this whole effort may be just an escape from their own problems. This is my understanding because so many psychoanalysts, therapists and groupleaders have come to me. This is the problem for almost every therapist. You may have chosen the therapy as a deep occupation, a preoccupation; as an escape from your own problems. It is very easy to get involved in others'problems; very easy to become a messiah, very easy.
Beloved Osho, I feel like my mind is going crazy these days. It is as if it is trying to grasp anything it possibly can, especially during discourse as I sit in silence with you. It feels like it's having less and less to hold on to, less and less to think about, so it's creating the craziest things. Is this part of your work, or am I going mad?
The psychoanalyst tried to manage things in such a way that he wouldn't lose the patient because he was really a treasure, but he didn't want to lose his normalness either because then what would he do with the treasure? Then he would have to give all the money to other psychoanalysts to clean his mind. So he said to the rich man, "Because you need so much time, I cannot look after other patients. And you need that much time so I am not saying to cut it. I have found a way: I will put my tape recorder here so that you can go on talking as long as you want, and in the night when I am free I will listen to the tapes." The rich man said, "That is perfect. For me it makes no problem." The next day as the psychoanalyst was entering his office…