[Buddha-l] Re: The Dalai Lama on Self-Loathing

[jkirk]

Here’s an interesting piece from Alan Roland’s *In Search of Self in India
and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology* (Princeton, 1988):  

"One particular aspect of we-self regard and structural hierarchical
relationships is profoundly related to caste.  As Bhaskar Sripada . . . has
noted from reflections on his own psychoanalysis, the particular ego-ideal
internalizations of a Brahmin enhance his or her own self, we-self regard
being further supported by unconsciously splitting off and projecting any
poor aspects of self-esteem onto the lower castes.  In turn, the lower
castes split off certain idealized aspects of their own self and project
them onto the upper castes, further supporting the we-self regard of the
upper castes." (p. 247)


For us westerners, self-loathing seems to take place in a smaller "space",
within each individual.  In other cultures, the self-loathing might be
projected onto a larger, social "space."  Perhaps there are some cultures
that lack self-loathing completely, because they're not part of
industrialized culture.  I’m not sure about this, though.

Katherine Masis
========================
Roland's comment about projection of felt evil on to the Other (whoever or
whatever it might be), noted by Katherine above, is not limited to India. 
His book is one of the least credible studies having to do with the
self-concept in India, at least. 
Sudhir Kakar, Centre for Developing Societies, Delhi, has much more to offer
based on both insider (he's an Indian) and outsider (psychoanalytically and
anthropologically trained)perspectives.(Disregard his fiction publications,
where he seems to go off the radar screen.) 
See for ex.: _The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Childhood and
Society in India_(1978); _Identity and Adulthood_(1979). 
More recently, Sudhir Kakar (Author), T. G. Vaidyanathan (Introduction).
 _The Essential Writings of Sudhir Kakar_. OUP, 2001. 
	 
Here's a recent interview between an Austrian theologian and Kakar:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-09-18-hollkakar-en.html it mentions
kakar's latest book, _The Indians. Portrait of a Society_, 

Kakar's website has a photo of him,
http://www.sudhirkakar.com/links.htm,where he's posing behind flowering
plants, a favorite photo location in that part of the world, corroborating
for me his thesis of the fluid boundaries of self and the identification of
body with nature (no rigid inside/outside dichotomy of self) that he thinks
is typically Indian.
I suspect his characterizations apply as well to Tibetans (some scholars
I've heard say also to the Thai)--both of whom are Buddhist. 

Joanna



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