Page 22 - NAMAH-Jan-2024

error which bases the study of mind upon the the first time into our dreams with some kind
study of the body; the sceptical error which of scientific understanding, has established in
prevents any bold and clear-eyed investigation them a system of meanings, a key to things
of the hidden profundities of our subjective in us which need to be known and handled
existence; the error of conservative distrust by the waking consciousness; this of itself
and recoil, which regards any subjective changes the whole character and value of our
state or experience that departs from the dream-experience. It begins to look as if there
ordinary operations of our mental and psychical were something real behind it and as if too
nature as a morbidity or a hallucination — just that something were an element of no mean
as the Middle Ages regarded all new science as practical importance (4).”
magic and a diabolical departure from the
sane and right limits of human capacity and He, of course, pointed out that there were
finally, the error of objectivity which leads other sources from which dreams arise, which
the psychologist to study others from outside have not been probed by psychoanalysis. In
instead of seeing his true field of knowledge 1914, Sri Aurobindo also wrote:
and laboratory of experiment in himself.
Psychology is necessarily a subjective “The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in
science and one must proceed in it from the humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in
knowledge of oneself to the knowledge of modern Psychology (5).”
others’.
A comment which was made at a time
“But whatever the crudities of the new science, when there was an extension in the realm of
it has at least taken the first capital step without psychology from the Freudian unconscious
which there can be no true psychological to the Jungian collective unconscious. A
knowledge; it has made the discovery which comment that held the incipient seed-
is the beginning of self-knowledge and which ideas of the transpersonal movement in
all must make who deeply study the facts of psychology and which would appear after
consciousness, — that our waking and surface half a century. Incidentally, Sri Aurobindo
existence is only a small part of our being and was also particular about the `crudities’ of
does not yield to us the root and secret of our psychoanalytic thinking:
character, our mentality or our actions. The
sources lie deeper. To discover them, to know “It (psychoanalysis of Freud) takes up a certain
the nature, and the processes of the inconscient part, ... the lower vital subconscious layer,
or subconscient self and, so far as is possible, isolates some of its most morbid phenomena
to possess and utilise them as physical science and attributes to it and them an action out of all
possesses and utilises the secret of the forces proportion to its true role in the nature. Modern
of Nature, ought to be the aim of a scientific psychology is an infant science, at once rash,
psychology (3).” fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences,
the universal habit of the human mind — to
Sri Aurobindo also commended the psycho- take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly
analytic work with dreams, “…. the new and try to explain a whole field of Nature in its
method of psycho-analysis, trying to look for narrow terms — runs riot here….

22