The study of various Indian traditions for the healing of emotional disorders has clarified two issues: the universality of human concerns that underlie emotional illness and the relativity of all psychotherapeutic endeavors, Eastern and Western. It is increasingly evident that Indian patients--whether Hindu, Muslim, or tribal--are engaged in the same struggles as their counterparts elsewhere in the world as they attempt to find a balance between the rewards and pressures of an external world and the desires and fantasies of an internal world haunted by sexual and aggressive wishes, envy, and reproachful voices from the past. In the West, these concerns are more likely to be expressed in scientific abstractions and analytic truths of psychological systems that testify to the continuing hold of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. In India, these concerns are expressed more in the language of religious experience, myths, and poetical images. A case study of one disturbed young Indian women and the traditional course of Indian healing she embarked on is used to illustrate the similarities and differences between Indian and Western conceptions of the individual and of mental disturbance. (IS)