Paranjpe - Self and Identity in Modern Psychology and Indian Thought

Some of the common questions that confront all of us are: What does it mean to be a human being? What makes us good and happy persons? And how can we attain happiness, or the highest possible good in life? These are common and yet profound questions that have been answered differently in different societies at different times. In the process of growing up within a specific cultural milieu, we tend to seek answers to deeply personal questions such as Who am I? or What is the best that can happen to me? in the light of accumulated wisdom of our forebears. As the 20th century draws to a close, the world is rapidly getting smaller, and many of us get exposed to the legacies of several cultures from around the world. The increasing exposure to varied cultures is both an opportunity and a challenge.

Born in India during the colonial days, I was exposed to a highly Anglicized educational system and a completely Eurocentric curriculum. The colonial mold of the Indian educational system has persisted throughout the five decades of the postcolonial era. As a student of philosophy in the rnid-1950s, I read such texts as Platos Republic, took courses in metaphysics and ethics shaped by thinkers of the European Enlightment, and earned my Bachelors degree with a philosophy major without having to learn a single concept of Indian philosophy. Graduate training in psychology in an Indian university in the early 1960s also bore a completely Anglo-American mold, such that the transition to research and teaching in a North American system was easy. Nevertheless, growing up in India inevitably involved exposure to the indigenous intellectual and cultural tradition. My father introduced me to the Bhagavad-Git, and the nationalistic movement brought home the relevance of traditional Indian ways of life, philosophy, and ideals. The dual cultural heritage ofEurope and India became a matter of personal concern and a constant battle when, as an immigrant to Canada, a sense of Indian identity continued to grow in proportion to the constant pressures for assimilation into the Western way of life. This volume is a product of an attempt to make sense of the dual cultural legacy of Europe and India.

Part of the exposure to Western models in psychology was an opportunity to learn Western theories of human development, first through books while in India and then under the tutelage of the late Professor Erik Erikson at Harvard University. After several years of studying and teaching Western theories of personality and developmental psychology, it began to dawn on me that lessons learned from the Indian tradition were in some ways very similar and yet in other ways profoundly different from their Western counterparts. The Erikson approach, true to its roots in psychoanalysis and the academic milieu, focused on pathological, as well as normal, ways in which individuals cope with inner and outer changes throughout the life span. Erikson speculated on what remains the same and is untouched by constant flux in a persons passage through the life cycle; he even hinted at the existential significance of the quest for the principle of sameness underlying the continual revision in ones sense of identity. However, in Eriksons work, as in contemporary psychology at large, the deeply philosophical and existential issues about self and identity get routinely excluded as unsuitable to the scientific and academic sphere to which psychology is inextricably bound. In my view, such restriction of the scope of inquiry into the nature of selfhood is an incidental product of the historical and cultural background of contemporary psychology. Such restriction did not apply to self-knowledge as pursued in the Indian tradition and there is no reason to regard such a conventional disciplinary limitation as either necessary or legitimate. Moreover, the philosophical and spiritual aspects of psychological thinking in the Indian tradition complement contemporary psychological thinking and offset some of its serious shortcomings.

Self and identity remain central topics ofinquiry in several related disciplines today: philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, along with psychology. The work presented in this volume is allied to, and yet different from, some of the recent publications in this broad field of studies. Consistent with the readership of this literature, which is spread across various disciplines, I have tried to address this book to an interdisciplinary audience. I also presume an international audience spread across the English-speaking world in the East as well as the West.

In terms of its scholarly and historical approach, this book resembles Charles Taylors Sources of Self (Harvard University Press, 1989). In dealing with the concepts of person and identity, and in viewing them from philosophical and psychological angles, it resembles Harrs Personal Being (Blackwell, 1983). However, unlike these works, which are framed almost exclusively within the Western cultural conceptual frameworks, the present work tries to integrate Western and Eastern perspectives. In this regard, it strikes a chord with Alan Rolands In Search of Self in India and Japan (Princeton University Press, 1988), but it does not adopt his clinical approach. Like Steven Collinss Selfless Persons (Cambridge University Press, 1982), it delves into Eastern traditions but deals with psychological issues more than philosophical ones. It shares some of the spiritual and transpersonal concerns of Eastern traditions that such authors as Alan Watts and Ken Wilber address, but it tries to connect more directly and critically with classical Sanskrit texts and their scholarly interpretations. Like David Loys Nonduality (Yale University Press, 1988) and Working Emptiness by Newman Glass (Scholars Press, 1995), this book considers the practice of meditation within the context of postmodern thought, but unlike them it focuses on Advaita Vedantic, rather than Buddhist, tradition.

It has been over 15 years since I prepared the first outline of this book. As could be expected, the project has evolved well beyond the contours that I had envisioned at the beginning. This work would not have seen the light of the day without the facilities provided by Simon Fraser University. The Universitys sabbatical leave policy allowed me to spend almost 2 years of full-time work on this project at different stages. In 1986, when this project was in its early stages, I was invited to give a series of lectures at the Allahabad University in India. I wish to thank Radhakrishna Naidu, Janak Pandey, R. C. Tripathi, Ajit Dalal, and other friends from Allahabad for giving me valuable opportunities to discuss various ideas. I am very grateful to Krishna S. and Mrs. Leela Arjunwadkar and Ashok Kelkar for guiding me in the right direction and for providing inspiration and encouragement year after year.

Teaching a senior undergraduate seminar in personality at Simon Fraser University gave me an opportunity to discuss a variety of ideas about the self, identity, self-actualization, and self-realization in the classroom. A similar opportunity was provided by a course on self and society that I taught as part of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at SFU. Numerous students in these classes helped me in articulating my own ideas and often made interesting comments. Although I cannot list the many members of the classes, I wish to thank them all. I must also thank my friends from the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychologists (WCTP) group, who provided intellectual stimulation and encouragement at our annual meetings in beautiful Banff. I have particularly benefitted from my discussions with Vaden House, Don Kuiken, Marvin Macdonald, Tim Rogers, and Hank Stam of the WCTP group.