Tantrism and Psychoanalysis. An anthropological perspective

Result of my studies of Sanskrit and thought of India with Fernando Tola after the course of my degree in anthropology during the last Argentine dictatorship in the 70s, this book hidden deep inside my site is a curious manifestation of reactive mimesis. I adopted in him a variety of extreme relativism combined with a kind of playful structuralism, both in the antipodes of the theory to which I would lean today. Now I would pretend that the text was intended to be parodic, demonstrative to the smallest of the details of the way in which structuralists, hermeneuts and other prisoners of pure discursivity usually reason: a kind of fraud in the style of Alan Sokal, only before litteram . But at that time I was not so sure. The theme is clearly established: on the one hand, the Reichian formulation of psychoanalysis (from the function of orgasm to the little man, with orgone accumulators between them); on the other, a religion of India that presents itself as transgressive, marginal, heterodox, and adopts as sacraments what for orthodoxy would be rather abominations. Nothing more opposite in appearance; nothing more analogous really. As shown in the figure, even the conceptions of the body are almost identical, or in any case more similar to each other than each other with respect to any psychoanalytic current or conceivable religion. But has it really been that way? Doesn't all this sound a bit indulgently douglasian? Isn't the apotheosis of coincidences between the phenomena studied too good to be true? In light of the philosophy of Nelson Goodman (I think today) a game of analogies and contrasts like the one I developed in this essay becomes deservedly questionable. And yet, even from an opposite perspective such as the one I am promoting today, the facts that in the document continue to be insinuating to me and their persuasive elaboration. Much more, in any case, than the tautegoric ethnology, caricature of phenomenology, the dogma of the time, against which this book in which I hardly believe was constituted in response.