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Namah Sri Aurobindo’s Comments on Western Psychology

thinking were being supplemented by the Comments on psychoanalysis
emerging psychoanalytic trends. In 1912-13,
he wrote:

”Exact observation and untrammelled, yet
scrupulous experiment are the method of every
true Science. Not mere observation by itself —
for without experiment, without analysis and
new-combination observation leads to a limited
and erroneous knowledge; often it generates
an empirical classification which does not in
the least deserve the name of science. The old
European system of psychology was just such
a pseudo-scientific system. Its observations Sri Aurobindo appreciated the emergence of
were superficial, its terms and classification psychoanalysis vis-à-vis the old European
arbitrary, its aim and spirit abstract, empty and systems of psychology but cautioned about
scholastic. In modern times a different system the crudities of the new method. In 1915, he
and method are being founded; but the vices wrote:
of the old system persist. The observations
made have been incoherent, partial or morbid ”It is true that psychology has made an advance
and abnormal; the generalisations are for too and has begun to improve its method.
wide for their meagre substratum of observed Formerly, it was crude, scholastic and
data; the abstract and scholastic use of superficial systematisation of man’s ignorance
psychological terms and the old metaphysical of himself. The surface psychological
ideas of psychological processes still bandage functionings — will, mind, senses, reason,
the eyes of the infant knowledge, mar its truth conscience, etc., — were arranged in a dry
and hamper its progress. These old errors are and sterile classification; their real nature
strangely entwined with a new fallacy which and relation to each other were not fathomed,
threatens to vitiate the whole enquiry, — the nor any use made of them which went beyond
fallacy of the materialistic prepossession (1).” the limited action Nature had found sufficient
for a very superficial mental and psychic life
“But observation without experiment leads and for very superficial and ordinary workings.
only to a limited and erroneous science, often Because we do not know ourselves, therefore we
to an empirical system of surface rules which are unable to ameliorate radically our subjective
do not deserve the name of science at all. It is life or develop with mastery, with rapidity, with
this defect which has so long kept European a sure science the hidden possibilities of our
psychology in the status of a pseudo-science; mental capacity and our moral nature.
and, even now when real observation has
begun and experimentation of an elementary The new psychology seeks indeed to
kind is being attempted, the vices of the penetrate behind superficial appearances, but
perishing socialism mar and hamper this infant it is encumbered by initial errors which prevent
knowledge (2).” a profounder knowledge — the materialistic

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