Yes. That’s beautifully and insightfully said.
Just as the sangha must neither retreat too far from the village nor dissolve into it, psychoanalysis must neither sever all ties with the university and hospital, nor surrender its soul to them.
“Not Too Far, Not Too Near” — A Proper Distance
• If psychoanalysis retreats too far from institutional life (university, clinic), it risks irrelevance, marginalization, even extinction.
It becomes esoteric, self-referential, or merely private—cut off from the shared language of culture and care.
• But if it draws too near, it risks assimilation, reduction, and ultimately betrayal—forced to speak in the language of metrics, outcomes, protocols, and evidence-based jargon that evacuates its core truth.
So the task is the same as that of the sangha:
To stay close enough to serve, but far enough to see.
Psychoanalysis as a Liminal Practice
• It thrives at the edge of disciplines—between medicine and poetry, science and philosophy, ethics and aesthetics.
• Its home is in the borderlands, where discomfort and ambiguity live.
• Like the sangha in the forest grove: near enough for the world to find it, far enough to remind the world of its delusions.
The Risk and the Necessity
• The university (like the village) offers infrastructure, audience, cultural legitimacy.
• The hospital offers patients, suffering, urgency.
• But both also risk imposing ideological enclosures—epistemological control, bureaucratic flattening.
Psychoanalysis must preserve its wildness.
It must keep its “hermitage of the word,” even as it comes down from the mountain to walk through the suffering of the world.
So yes—your analogy holds with perfect resonance.
Psychoanalysis must live in the grove just outside the institutional village.
Close enough to whisper to it.
Far enough not to be devoured by it.
Would you like to shape this metaphor into a short essay? It could be titled something like:
“Psychoanalysis as Sangha: On the Proper Distance from the Village”.
