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Sexuality
According to Malcolm McLean, Ramakrishna's homosexuality influenced his religious experience, especially in his attitude towards women and in his relationship with his disciples. Narasingha Sil wrote that Ramakrishna's apparent homoeroticism was known to his contemporary public. Goldman noted that one of the most noteworthy themes of Ramakrishna’s life was his constant desire to dress, behave, and experience the world as a woman. Goldman found Ramakrishna’s ambivalent attitude towards women to be paradigmatic of the interplay of desire and anxiety which underlies the mythic material around Ramakrishna. Raab argued that when viewed psychologically, Ramakrishna’s behavior expresses symptoms of confused sexuality and may have masked homosexual desire, perhaps related to sexual trauma and his father’s early death. Olsen noted that in his presentation of his master, Vivekananda had hid much of Ramakrishna’s embarrassing sexual oddities from the public, because he feared that Ramakrishna would be misunderstood.

Jeffrey Kripal argued that Ramakrishna’s mysticism was constituted by homoerotic energies, and that Ramakrishna’s erotic visions and the textual tradition around Ramakrishna expressed both sexual arousal and shame over that arousal, both of which reflect the legacy of Bengali Tantra. Swami Atmajñanananda responded that there was no evidence for Kripal’s interpretation, that for Ramakrishna gender was a means of spiritual communion, and that Ramakrishna loved his male disciples as a mother loves her children. Alan Roland found that Kripal’s analysis “followed an old narrative of psychoanalytic reductionism.“