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This book is an outcome of my bicultural experience as a student and teacher of psychology in India and North America. As a student in India, the psychology I learned in the classroom was totally Western in its perspective. A book on Indian economics, called Bharatfya Arthasastra, written by the late Pal)Q. it Dindayal Upadhyaya, inspired me to look into the sources of the Indian intellectual tradition for an indigenous per spective within the discipline of my training and research. The late Balsastri Hardas suggested K. K. Kolhatkar's Bharatfya Manasasastra, a book that translates and comments on Patanjali's Yoga sutras in Marathi, as a sourcebook of psychological concepts of Indian origin. My response to this initial exposure to Yoga as a system of psychology was one of bewilderment. Having been trained in psychology with Woodworth and Schlosberg's Experimental Psychology as the textbook of psychology, I could not comprehend how ideas so diverse as those of Patanjali and Woodworth and Schlosberg could be designated by a common label psychology! Obviously, it was necessary to sort out psychology's meaning in different sociocultural contexts, beginning with the most fundamental notions on which psychological concepts are based. This book represents an attempt to understand psychological concepts, especially those re lating to consciousness and the self, as they developed in the different intellectual traditions and cultural contexts of India and the West.
List of contents
1 Introduction.- Some Converging Trends.- Implications of the Development of Western Psychology as a " Science".- The Nature of Science and the Sociology of Knowledge.- The Cultural Relativity of Psychological Theories: A Perspective from Anthropology and Culture-and-Personality Studies.- Certain Criticisms and Limitations of the Sociology of Knowledge.- Notes.- 2 Search for Common Ground.- Assumptions regarding the Lawfulness of the Universe.- Assumptions about the Nature of Reality: Ontological Presuppositions.- Man's Relation to Nature.- Assumptions about Human Nature.- The Assumption of Egoism and the Value of Individualism.- Assumptions about the Human Condition.- The Ideal Human Condition.- Notes.- 3 Consciousness: Some Western Views.- William James and his Concept of the "Stream of Consciousness".- Structuralism: The Introspectionist Approach.- The Psychology without Consciousness: The Behaviorist Approach.- Psychology of the Unconscious: The Freudian Approach.- The Psychophysiological Approach: The Relationship between Mind and Brain.- The Phenomenological and Existential Approaches.- Notes.- 4 Consciousness: Two Indian Views.- The Yoga of Patañjali.- The Non-Dualist Ved?nta of ?ankara.- 5 Self and Identity.- Personality, Self, Identity.- Erik Erikson's Theory of Identity Formation.- What Accounts for the Unity, Continuity and Sameness in Man?.- The Unity and Continuity of the Stream of Consciousness: Self as Knower.- 6 Overview and Prospect.- On Consciousness.- On the Nature of the Self.- On Cross-Cultural Exchange in Psychology: Problems and Prospects.- Notes.- References.- Author Index.
