Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
Life in England, 1879 – 1893

An Early Memory

I am not at all concerned about Nicodemus and what seems to me his stupid and ignorant question; he brings a fantastic physical notion across Christ’s teaching and I am afraid I must hold him partially responsible for Freud’s sexual meanderings and his craze for going back into his mother’s womb. I don’t myself remember any blissful sojourn in that locality in my case and I don’t believe in it and I am quite sure I never felt any passion for returning there. The great Sigismund must have had it, I suppose, and remembered that blissful period and felt a longing for beatific return and I suppose others must have had it unless its acceptance is only a result of a general acceptance of the papal infallibility of Sigismund in psycho-analytical matters, about which few people have any direct reliable knowledge or can form a truly independent conviction based on truly independent evidence. I believe the practical methods and evidence for the success of psycho-analysis are made up mostly of suggestion and auto-suggestion; for suggestion and auto-suggestion can do almost anything and can make you believe in anything and everything. Many of these suggestions seem to me quite artificial and their forced connection with sex to be quite groundless. For instance, there is the suggestion of the dream of being stabbed with a knife, which they say is a rendering by the subliminal of an actual sex-probe, and of that you can obviously persuade a patient who is under your influence. I myself had when a boy of 8 or 9 a vivid dream which I never forgot of myself alone in my bed — I used to be sent to bed much earlier than my brothers — and lay there in a sort of constant terror of the darkness and phantoms and burglars till my brothers came up

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