Question: How does the psychoanalytic technique of dealing with fixations, inhibitions, and complexes strike you, and how would you deal with such cases?

KRISHNAMURTI: Can another free you from these limitations, or is it merely a process of substitution? The pursuit of the psychoanalyst has become a hobby of the well-to-do. (Laughter) Don’t laugh, please. You may not go to a psychoanalyst but you go through the same process in a different way when you look to a religious organization, to a leader, or to some discipline to free you from fixations, inhibitions, and complexes. These methods may succeed in creating superficial effects, but they must inevitably develop new resistances against the movement of life. No person and no technique can really free one from these limitations. To experience that freedom one must comprehend life deeply and discern for oneself the process of creating and maintaining ignorance and illusion. This demands alertness and keen perception, not the mere acceptance of a technique. But as one is slothful, one depends on another for comprehension and thereby increases sorrow and confusion. The comprehension of this process of ignorance and its self-sustaining activities, of this consciousness focused in and perceptible only to the individual, can alone bring about deep, abiding bliss to man.

June 4, 1936.

The Collected Works
of J. Krishnamurti
Volume III 1936-1944
The Mirror of Relationship
Jiddu Krishnamurti