A.C. Paranjpe

Theoretical Psychology: The Meeting of East and West - Path in Psychology A.C. Paranjpe 1984 edition

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.