Ramakrishna
Kali's Child

In 1995, Jeffrey J. Kripal in his controversial Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, an interdisciplinary study of Ramakrishna's life "using a range of theoretical models," most notably psycho-analysis, argued that Ramakrishna's mystical experiences could be seen as symptoms of repressed homoeroticism, "legitimat Ramakrishna's religious visions by situating psychoanalytic discourse in a wider Tantric worldview. Jeffrey J. Kripal argued that Ramakrishna rejected Advaita Vedanta in favour of Shakti Tantra.

Kripal also argued in Kali's Child that the Ramakrishna Movement had manipulated Ramakrishna's biographical documents, that the Movement had published them in incomplete and bowdlerised editions (claiming, among other things, hiding Ramakrishna's homoerotic tendencies), and that the Movement had suppressed Ram Chandra Datta 's Srisriramakrsna Paramahamsadever Jivanavrttanta.

These views were disputed by several authors, scholars, and psychoanalysts, including Alan Roland, Kelly Aan Raab, Somnath Bhattacharyya, J.S. Hawley, and Swami Atmajnanananda, who wrote that Jivanavrttanta had been reprinted nine times in Bengali as of 1995.

Jeffrey Kripal translates the phrase kamini-kanchana as lover and gold. The literal translation is Women and Gold. In Ramakrishna's view, lust and greed, are obstacles to God-realization. Kripal associates his translation of the phrase with Ramakrishna's alleged disgust for women as lovers. Swami Tyagananda considered this to be a "linguistic misconstruction." Ramakrishna also cautioned his women disciples against purusa-kanchana ("man and gold") and Tyagananda writes that Ramakrishna used Kamini-Kanchana as "cautionary words" instructing his disciples to conquer the "lust inside the mind."

The application of psychoanalysis has further been disputed by Tyagananda and Vrajaprana as being unreliable in understanding Tantra and interpreting cross-cultural contexts in Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali's Child Revisited (2010).
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