Psychoanalysis

from the Indian Terroir

 PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES:
CLINICAL, SOCIAL, AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Series Editor
Michael O’Loughlin, Adelphi University

Mission Statement
Psychoanalytic Studies seeks psychoanalytically informed works addressing
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within psychoanalytic theory and in fields such as anthropology, education,
and history are welcome. Projects addressing conflict, migrations, difference,
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Titles in the Series

A Three-Factor Model of Couples Psychotherapy: Projective Identification,

Level of Couple Object Relations, and Omnipotent Control, by Robert
Mendelsohn
Psychoanalysis from the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Fam-
ily, and Childhood in India, edited by Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, and
Anurag Mishra
 Psychoanalysis
from the Indian Terroir
Emerging Themes in Culture,
Family, and Childhood

Edited by
Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar,
and Anurag Mishra

Foreword by Erica Burman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kumar, Manasi, editor. | Dhar, Anup, editor. | Mishra, Anurag,

editor.
Title: Psychoanalysis from the Indian terroir : emerging themes in culture,
family, and childhood / edited by Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, and Anurag
Mishra ; foreword by Erica Burman.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2017] | Series: Psychoanalytic
studies: clinical, social, and cultural contexts | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058174 (print) | LCCN 2017055696 (ebook) | ISBN
9781498559423 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498559416 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis—India. | Psychoanalysis and culture—India.
Classification: LCC BF173 (print) | LCC BF173 .P77536 2017 (ebook) | DDC
150.19/50954—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058174

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 Contents

Foreword vii
Erica Burman
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, and Anurag Mishra

PART I:   MOTHERS, THERAPISTS, AND MATRICIDE

1  When the Enthralled Mother Dreams: A Clinical and
Cultural Composition 3
Amrita Narayanan
2  Devi Possession: At the Intersections of Religion, Culture,
and Psychoanalysis 19
Sabah Siddiqui and Bhargavi Davar
3  Of Mothers and Therapists: Dreaming the Indian Infant 37
Urvashi Agarwal
4  Myth, Misogyny, Matricide 55
Nilofer Kaul
5  Sita Through the Time Warp: On the Ticklish Relationship
between Renunciation and Moral Narcissism in the Lives
of Young Indian Women 67
Shifa Haq

v
vi Contents

PART II:   FAITH, RELIGION, AND VIOLENCE

6  Terrors to Expansions: A Journey Mediated through Faith 85
Shalini Masih
7  Only Hindu, Also the Patient; Only Muslim, Also the Therapist:
Recovering the Historical Other 103
Zehra Mehdi
8  Disaster Diaries: Riot-Affected Children in Ahmedabad
and Hyderabad 119
Atreyee Sen and Manasi Kumar

PART III:  CULTURAL IDENTITY AND INDIAN

IMAGINATION
9  Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 145
Ajeet N. Mathur
10  Psychoanalysis, Culture, and the Cultural Unconscious 165
Sudhir Kakar
11  Imagining The Real: An Essay on Sudhir Kakar’s “Culture
and Psyche: A Personal Journey” 179
Alfred Margulies
12  As Psychoanalysis Travels: Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar,
and Anurag Mishra in Conversation with Sudhir Kakar 189
Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, Anurag Mishra, and Sudhir Kakar
13  Genealogies of Aboriginalization: Psychoanalysis and
Sexuation in Cultural Crucible 193
Anup Dhar
Index 209
About the Editors 213
About the Contributors 215
 Foreword
Erica Burman

This extraordinary collection highlights the emergence of a new strand of

critical psychoanalytic theory and practice that is debating how culture and
psychoanalysis mix and make each other. Each term in this cryptic title,
Psychoanalysis from the Indian Terroir, poses rather than answers questions.
It sets in play a terrain of inquiry that it refrains from fixing or stabilizing.
Terroir, a suitably technical name for the combination of climate, soil and
texture that allows for cultivation (of wine or other specialist food crop),
topicalizes the question of setting and outcome without presuming what its
constitutive elements are, or what it is they produce. Such technical obscurity
of terminology perhaps befits a practice that is typically seen as being as elit-
ist or inaccessible as psychoanalysis. This is notwithstanding the commitment
to free psychoanalytic provision that characterized the early institutionaliza-
tion of psychoanalysis in inter-war Germany from the 1920s until the Nazis
closed down (and repressed) the public psychoanalytic clinics, as well as
driving the psychoanalysts into—at best—exile. Further, the French allure of
terroir—that, to a British reader like me, conveys sophistication as well as
the requirement for delicate appreciation—speaks to the necessary specificity
of readings of psychoanalysis that are ever at play. But even if we encoun-
ter British or German psychoanalytic authors in this text, as well as Green,
Deleuze, and Lacan, their reading or “application” does not presume a mere
transposition from one geopolitical space to another, in the course of which
such spaces acquire a spurious reification. Rather, we are invited to explore
the how, the making and re-making of “psychoanalysis” in a particular, rich,
biopolitical environment, where psychoanalysis is as much what is grown as
what is imported.
Indeed the botanical metaphor is extended: the editors discuss the question
of planting as well as what is planted, and play with whether this process
vii
viii Foreword

is an implanting or something that becomes “home-grown.” Discussion of

hybrids could incite a previous or prior authenticity. But this would essential-
ize that which might be understood to be contingent, if not arbitrary. How
significant is it that psychoanalysis was developed in Judeo-Christian societ-
ies as, perhaps, an effect of the alienation produced by industrialization in
the late nineteenth century? Can, or should, we disaggregate capitalism and
modernity from what is sometimes called “westernization,” albeit that this
was resourced by as well as warranting colonial exploitation? How are we to
understand the forms of experience, including the distress and social suffer-
ing wrought by dispossession and social exclusion that were the underside of
the story of European “development”? How should we address shifts in fam-
ily dynamics, the (re)invention of the bourgeois nuclear family, the forms of
forced or elective migrations to cities, the intensifications and reformulations
of class/caste and gender divisions and relations enabled, produced, allowed
by such seismic shifts?
Clearly, the sun-lit hillsides of proliferating vines envisaged through the
trope of terroir are neither stable, nor are their limits enclosed. Indeed the
focus on (im)plantation seems also to evoke—albeit implicitly—questions
of violence, cultural appropriation, and perhaps even sexual/reproductive
manipulation; of surrogacy rather than conception, commerce or exploita-
tion rather than (only) intimacy. In his History of Sexuality: an introduction,
Michel Foucault writes of the implantation into bodies of forms of power/
knowledge relations around sexuality that owe their current forms to a secu-
larization and scientization of the practice of religious confession. Indeed it
is this incitement to self-knowledge and giving an account of one’s true,
innermost thoughts and feelings that form the conditions of possibility for
psychoanalysis. The “perversion” of this “implantation,” Foucault writes,
is not that aberrant impulses or fantasies should be silenced or erased, but
rather that the demand to speak of them in fact constitutes, stabilizes, and
naturalizes them. Thus the cultural-political terrain of and for the develop-
ment of psychoanalysis as a “talking cure” or at least a talking method, comes
to be situated in specific socio-historical and material conditions such that
its emergence or incursion into India calls for reflection and interrogation.
Questions of power are foregrounded, not only through topicalizing cultural
imperialism and class/caste privilege in what counts as “culture,” but also in
pursuing a psychoanalytic inquiry to explore why and how these power rela-
tions come to structure embodied histories that are inhabited, lived, and lived
out in particular geopolitical conditions.
Such themes anticipate much of the content of the chapters that follow,
with the focus on gender and women much discussed—whether in the social
imaginary, in dreams, in the cultural-religious appeal of female deities or
 Foreword ix

even the quasi-religious figure of the mother. All these structure gendered
patterns of relationships, including as they appear in the consulting room.
They are also embodied in the wandering, homeless women who sleep in the
New Delhi train station or the women pilgrims seeking healing and solace
at a Sufi shrine. Indeed women and children do not merely haunt this text,
they inhabit it. The only place where the question of masculinity forms the
overt, primary topic is in the (only jointly written) chapter exploring juxta-
positions between gender, trauma, and political violence across two different
catastrophic contexts.
This volume is, then, a response to as well as development of, the monu-
mental initiation of this field of debate of Indian Psychoanalysis/Psycho-
analysis in India (a half century after Girindrasekhar Bose tried to engage
Freud) via Sudhir Kakar’s 1970s study of the psychic development and life
of the Hindu boy child. Kakar’s field of inquiry has continued to expand, as
his contribution here indicates, moving from that earlier quasi-developmental
and gender and caste-specific account to a wide-ranging analysis of the ways
cultural-political nuances enter and configure individual psychic lives. His
presence in this book reflects a continuing project that has now been taken up
widely and in manifold directions, as these diverse chapters indicate. Perhaps
the most visible twenty-first century reconsideration of the earlier formula-
tions is evident not only in the primary focus on women’s gendered experi-
ences but also in the chapter on how Hindu-Muslim relations come into the
consulting room, as forms of transferentially invested, relationally produced
but socio-politically overdetermined forms of otherness, attention to which
not only inflects analyst/analysand dynamics but also forms a vital arena for
re-working these.
Here we see a different politics of psychoanalysis emerge—one that desta-
bilises psychiatric and psychological “truths” or notions of “mental illness,”
to show how the symptoms so displayed are not only individual. Rather, they
indicate not only the individual struggle with obstacles and constraints in
particular lives but, via the psychoanalytic dialogue which slows down and
focuses on processes of relational engagement (including defenses against, or
repudiations of engagement), a recovery of the “other” as always produced by
and as a disavowed part of the “self ” is made possible that addresses political,
as well as personal, transformation.
As the editors note, a key ambiguity or debate traverses the book’s thirteen
chapters: is its object an exploration of Indian psychoanalysis or a document
of Indian engagement with, and reflection on, psychoanalysis? Does psycho-
analysis require indigenization (to render it “Indian”?) or rather is “Indian-
ness” itself, what it is to be Indian and the relationship with the contemporary
nation state named as India that is rather under psychoanalytic scrutiny here.
x Foreword

Such questions are, of course, not only those addressed by this book, or in
relation to the status of psychoanalytic theory and practice in India, but also
those which exemplify the wider challenges posed by attending to the ways
culture, history, and biopolitical conditions write themselves onto bodies, into
minds, and are lived out as both singular and collective biographies.
The trope of terroir names land (terre) or turf without presuming its
ownership or territorialization. This mobilizes an attention to placed-ness
or specificity without falling foul of the kind of methodological nationalism
that characterizes so many transnational research encounters. What “India”
or “Indian-ness” is posed here as a question, a topic, rather than a founda-
tional assumption. As such, the book as much diagnoses the contemporary
(clinical) state of the national entity called India as its citizen-subjects. This
relationship between one’s own mental state and the cultural-political entity
end territory within which chronological, biographical lives are lived out is,
as the editors note, a troubled and troubling interface, articulating “cultural
questions in clinical contexts” with “clinical questions in cultural contexts.”
Its treatment here is beautifully composed, and illustrated.
 Acknowledgments

To think is to thank. To thank is to think. To think along Sudhir Kakar’s path

is to thank him. To think along Ashok Nagpal, Rachana Johri, and Honey
Oberoi’s works—who are the founders of the School of Human Studies and
the Centre for psychanalytic psychotherapy and long-term clinical work—is
to thank them. One also needs to thank the Indian Psychoanalytic Society
and the members of the Delhi Chapter. The editors would also like to thank
the Fortis Psychoanalytic Unit for their support during the 2013 conference
on Psychoanlysis in/from India. Urvashi Pawar needs to be thanked specially
for her assistance in the early days of bringing the papers together and giving
shape to the initial manuscript. Special thanks are due to to all the reviewers
for their constructive criticisms and for helping authors rework their chapters.
The process of internal review has sharpened the arguments of the chapters.
The editors would like to acknowledge the support of Michael Loughlin,
Kasey Beduhn, Becca Rohde, Meaghan Menzel, and Molly White at Lexing-
ton Books and Rowman & Littlefield for having dealt with the manuscript
with utmost care and close reading. Special thanks are due to Ram Ashish and
Manu Singh for editorial support. Finally we would like to thank Erica Bur-
man for cheerfully supporting us by extending the analogy of “psychoanalytic
wine in/from the indian terroir.”

xi
 Introduction
Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, and Anurag Mishra

This book is a critical reflection on the question and the somewhat trou-
bled interface of psychoanalysis and culture. It is a long-due reflection
on the “and” that connects psychoanalysis and culture. The book is also
a critical reflection on the mutually constitutive terms—“psychoanalysis”
and “culture”—that are connected by the uneasy “and.” Neither term—
psychoanalysis and culture—is taken as given in the book; they are rediscov-
ered, reinvented. Nor is the “and” taken as simply additive. The book is hence
a reconceptualization and a rewriting of both psychoanalysis and culture
through the mutual constitutivity or “overdetermination” (as Freud suggests
in Interpretation of Dreams) of each—a process of reconceptualization and
rewriting initiated in India under the proper name Sudhir Kakar decades ago.
Andre Green (1999) argues in the context of the question of the relationship
between psychoanalysis and culture:

. . . psychoanalysts today seem to stand out more particularly in terms of their

divergences, resulting from different conceptions about the mind, but also
because of the differences stemming from their cultural traditions. Lacan’s
work could only have evolved in France, and I believe that Winnicot’s work is
intimately related to what he owes to his native land [and perhaps, Bose’s work
could only have evolved in ‘India,’ from the YogaSutra, the Bhagavad Gita, and
the PuranaPravesa]. (Green in Kohon 1999: 4; italics/emphasis ours)

The book is hence premised on the research questions: what happens when
psychoanalysis—born in Western Europe, having Franco-German and
Anglo-American moorings, and in a largely Judeo-Christian milieu (i.e., with
paradigms stemming from its own cultural tradition)—travels eastwards and
meets a somewhat different cultural tradition, as early as the 1920s (Bose

xiii
xiv Introduction

1999). What happens when the psychoanalytic (im)plant grows roots in a

somewhat different soil, or what we would like to call a different terroir, per-
haps, having its own characteristic and moisture-mineral content, having its
own history, and cognitive-affective archi-texture? Does the (im)plant change
as a result of the interaction with another soil, or another terroir? Does the
soil or the terroir fundamentally affect the (im)plant? Or does the (im)plant
change the nature of the soil or the terroir, the book asks incessantly, some-
what obsessively? It also asks: how have European analysts made sense of
India? How have Indian analysts—Girindrasekhar Bose (1999)—made sense
of European psychoanalysis?
Put telegraphically, the book is thus an explication of clinical questions
in cultural contexts. Or perhaps cultural questions in clinical contexts. The
book is an exploration of what happens to the two determinate poles of clini-
cal work—diagnosis and cure—classification of suffering and approaches to
healing—when psychoanalysis finds itself immersed in another culture (in
this case India which in turn is not an undivided perspective), with its own
constellation of shamans, mystics, and (faith) healers (Kakar 1982; its own
nosologies of mental suffering; most importantly its own exegesis of parent-
ing, maternality, child rearing, gendering, intimacies (Kakar 1989); its own
hermeneutic of love, sex, and danger (Kakar and Ross 2011); its own ideas
of purity-pollution, shame-guilt, good-evil; its own “Totem and Taboo”; three
or more theories of Infant(ile) Sexuality; its own beyond to the pleasure prin-
ciple; its own structures of loss, recovery, and mourning, marked by “god of
small things” in a largely non-monotheistic milieu.
Sigmund Freud never completed “An Outline of Psychoanalysis” (Freud
1940 [1938]); returning yet again to an earlier project of providing an over-
view of psychoanalysis, Freud began writing in Vienna in 1938 as he was
waiting to leave for London; by September 1938 he had written three-quarters
of the book, which was published in 1940, a year after his death.
How does one complete the unfinished project of writing An Outline of
Psychoanalysis?
Can “The Indians” (Kakar and Kakar 2007) contribute to the completion
of the manuscript? How can The Indians contribute to the completion? By
providing case material, data, empirical content? Or by offering new theories
of mental life, as Bose did (1948). How does one write An Outline of Psycho-
analysis in India, from India?
Would it be an outline of Indian psychoanalysis, “Indian” not in a nation-
alist sense?
Or would it also be an Indian outline of psychoanalysis?
The chapters in this volume address the question of an outline of psycho-
analysis in India. In the process the authors also inaugurate (clinical) thinking
around an Indian outline of psychoanalysis. They also address the question
 Introduction xv

of difference; how India marks difference with respect to Freudian psycho-

analysis. Then the question: how is the Indian analysand different? How is the
Indian analysand with a history of Partition different? How is the Indian anal-
ysand with a history of Hindu-Muslim conflict different (see Zehra Mehdi’s
paper in the volume); the chapters in this volume make an attempt to place
psychoanalysis in a context other than the Holocaust; they also place psycho-
analysis in the context of partition and the Hindu-Muslim conflict—either
in the session or in psycho-social contexts. Mehdi shows how what Indian
political and social scientists have described as the “precarious relationship”
between Hindus and Muslims, where each carries the other’s rejected and
unacceptable parts, especially after Partition, and find themselves playing out
once again in the analytical space between a patient’s psychosis and a thera-
pist’s historical reality. The chapter attempts to comment on how a psychotic
state parallels the psychosis of the embattled Hindu Muslim relations. In that
sense, the analytical space becomes more than a space for recovering one’s
inner realities and psychic truths and could be in fact considered a space for
“recovering” the Other, the historical Other.
Atreyee Sen and Manasi Kumar in their disaster diaries offer a critical
interdisciplinary perspective to the narrativization of trauma among young
children affected by Hindu-Muslim riots in two different communally sensi-
tive urban areas in India. By drawing select strands from psychological and
anthropological approaches and relating it to the articulation of trauma among
small children, the authors attempt to review what trauma signifies among
children, how attachment and trauma frameworks are useful reference points
toward comprehending childhoods afflicted by brutal collective violence,
and how complex memories and discourses of physical disability and social
disconnection are developed and sustained by riot-affected children.
How is the Indian infant, how is the Indian mother, how is the Indian
infant-mother dyad different (see Urvashi Agarwal’s paper in the volume;
where an attempt has been made to describe “infantile feelings” in India in
terms of psychotic and borderline states; it has been further argued how in-
fantile feelings are elusive and formless and are hard to represent in language
and how they are often felt in the body in a “raw fashion” and largely “en-
acted out”; to listen to the body and bodily expressions becomes perhaps the
only way to access and know them; such an experience could be fundamental
to experiencing the analysand in the analytic setting). The volume thus asks:
if Freud’s experience of his analysands gave birth to his psychoanalysis, what
kind of psychoanalytic logic-language-ethos would be born from our experi-
ence with our analysands?
If Freudian psychoanalysis is born out of a largely Judaic-Christian-Hel-
lenic milieu, in other words, in a monotheistic milieu, what kind of psycho-
analysis would be born in a largely polytheistic milieu, with a long history
xvi Introduction

of non-theological non-scriptural forms of subaltern religiosity, marked at

the same time by a logic of the spiritual (see Sabah Siddiqui and Bhargavi
Davar’s paper in this volume: “how will psychoanalysis set up relations with
different forms of religiosity? What happens when psychoanalysis and reli-
gion come face to face? When and where do they come face to face?”) and an
equally long history of Other forms of healing of the mind: Yoga for example
(see Ajeet Mathur’s paper in this volume)? Mathur in his chapter titled “Two
Cultures? Frontiers of faith in yoga and psychoanalysis” holds up the tradi-
tions of Yoga and Psychoanalysis against the light to examine their “corre-
spondences, differences, convergences and divergences.” He notes that both
these practices arose in different cultural contexts and indeed their “commu-
nities of practice” are like “flag bearers of two distinct cultures” sometimes
treating each other as “untouchables.” In this paper he endeavors to bring
them closer together through looking at their common values (“empathy,
compassion, tolerance, human dignity”) and objectives of “human well-being
through increased self awareness” while at the same time being aware of their
distinct “evolutionary trajectories.” He looks at the importance of sound,
states of consciousness, meditation, yogic postures, the guru-chela relation-
ship, knowing and not-knowing and the Indian “bhava” and “rasa” theories,
and compares them to psychoanalytical concepts like transference and Bion’s
“virtuous imperative of dwelling in ambiguity and uncertainty” (Grotstein
2007), reverie, alpha function, and Bionian basic assumption groups (among
others). He remains aware that these are very different languages which resist
simple translations. They are based in different ways of experiencing and cul-
tures of knowledge generation and transmission and indeed having different
evolutionary trajectories, but both having to be rediscovered experientially
as an act of faith by each practitioner in their particular time and place. He
concludes that “Attention to spirituality can help the analyst exercise more
empathy and compassion whereas attention to the unconscious through psy-
choanalytic insights can expand the horizons of yoga to understand and use
the psychic force of “prana” in many new ways.”
While the focus of Freudian psychoanalysis was on the (Names of the)
Father, what kind of psychoanalysis and what kind of infant inner worlds take
shape in the “maternal-feminine nurturing continuum”? Does such maternal
enthrallment paradoxically foreclose the women-feminine? Do we need to
bring to dialogue clinical and critical/cultural thinking in psychoanalysis? Do
we need to think the psychic and the social as overdetermining and contradict-
ing each other? Amrita Narayanan in her chapter sees maternal enthrallment
as the cultural tendency of the Hindu male to idealize women as mothers and
to direct phantasy life toward the maintenance of this idealization. Narayanan
examines this process of idealization and this “culturally enacted phantasy”
 Introduction xvii

from the absenced viewpoint of woman in the patriarchal national polis and
the perspective of psychoanalytic feminism in her chapter. The perspective
of maternal enthrallment is problematized through the invocation of matri-
cidal phantasies in Nilofer Kaul’s chapter “Myth, Misogyny and Matricide.”
Kaul uses the myths of “Putana” and a Kannada creation myth along with a
patient’s unsettling dream to illustrate her hypothesis that “ordered, civilized,
patriarchal society must have been founded upon matricide”; Kaul argues
that misogynous oral myths may be far more foundational than the classi-
cal Freudian-Greek-Sanskrit myths of Oedipus-Ganesha, thus also making
a case for a more extensive examination of non-classical cultures and tradi-
tions in which one finds more primitive Kleinian matricidal defenses which
have not yet been “domesticated” into repression. Narayanan’s and Kaul’s
chapters produce a necessary dialectic between the clinical and the critical in
the volume. Most of the chapters also exhibit a sensitivity toward questions
of gender and culture. Shifa Haq, on the other hand, building on The Inner
World (1981), shows how Kakar makes a case for the powerful presence of
the Sita Ideal—standing as a symbol of chastity, wifely devotion, and self-
urrender—in the psyche of Indian women and men. Haq shows how the in-
ternalization of the Sita Ideal makes the repudiation of desires, including the
rebellion against “the constraints of impinging womanhood,” possible. Haq
however reflects on the Sita Ideal not as a motif emblematic of the moral
order it perpetuates in the Indian psyche, but more specifically as the psycho-
logical ground for the “will to renounce” in Indian women. The paper thus
approaches the Sita Ideal not from the angle of the dharma of a devoted wife
but the depressed and the renouncing Sita, who is an ascetic ideal or an ideal
of feminine asceticism, Haq thus explicates the journey of Indian women in
psychotherapeutic settings.
The chapters redefine the concept of the analysand by bringing into dis-
cussion the phenomenon of possession, specifically Devi-possession (see
Sabah Siddiqui and Bhargavi Davar, and Shalini Masih’s chapters). How
will psychoanalysis set up relations with different forms of religiosity? Sid-
diqui and Davar explore what happens when psychoanalysis and religion
come face to face in India. In the process, they also explore how the secular
and the scientific come to an encounter with the everyday praxis of faith and
healing—praxis that does not accrue either what is conventionally understood
as religion or science. They explore such interfaces in the context of the phe-
nomenon of possession, specifically Devi-possession. The chapter thus raises
a fundamental question: is the trope of Devi-possession at all a site where
science and religion come to a dialogue? Or is it something else entirely; an
algebraic ‘x’ which requires fresh thinking? Shalini Masih’s chapter is an
attempt to give the reader a “tiny taste of terrors” encountered by therapist-
xviii Introduction

researcher thrown into an uncanny culture of deities and demons, an uncanny

culture that is gazed at, rather precariously, from the familiar cliff of psychol-
ogy. The author argues that such an experience required that “all memory, de-
sire, expectation and understanding” (Bion 1967), attempts at making sense,
be abandoned and a stance of a “faithful devotee” be assumed in order to go
beyond one’s disciplinary and familiar clinical limits.
The chapter by Sudhir Kakar on psychoanalysis, culture, and the cultural
unconscious is an attempt at the “translation” of individual unconscious pro-
cesses and their reliance on the web of cultural unconscious processes and
mechanisms which is often ignored in mainstream psychoanalysis. The chap-
ter delves into the author’s therapy experience with a German analyst with a
view to interrogate how cultural alienation—a kind of ‘un-understoodness’
and unmetabolized otherness comes in the way of cure and insight into one-
self. The paper offers some critical interventions that a therapist/ analyst ven-
turing into cross cultural practice can take into consideration to work through
various elements of “unregistered otherness.” The response by Sudhir Kakar
in the chapter titled “As Psychoanalysis Travels” develops once again some
of the arguments developed in this chapter. Kakar was responding to the
questions posed by the editors of the volume; questions like: What happens
when psychoanalysis travels to India? How does the Indian analyst receive
psychoanalysis? How does the Indian analyst receive the Indian analysand?
How does one attune one’s knowledge-praxis of psychoanalysis to the needs
and idioms of the Indian analysand?
Alfred Margulies makes the argument that each culture imagines reality,
creating “factions” determined by its own socio-cultural history, “worlding”
if you may with a Heideggerian twist. Psychoanalysis too is such a culture
caught up in its Nachtraglichkeit as much as neuroscience, each presetting its
own imagination of reality. Not only do culture and the unconscious “co-cre-
ate” reality, but the “worlding” of reality is midwifed by the particularities of
time, place, and person. The occurrence of the Unheimlichkeit (the Uncanny)
opens an opportunity for empathy to apprehend the sublime in all its bestial
glory, but for empathy to be so operative it needs another culture to act as its
fulcrum whether the “culture” is of another part of the world (for example
India), practice (like psychiatry, psychoanalysis, etc.), religion (as beauti-
fully illustrated by “The Pieta” dream of the author), or the cultural “Russian
doll” that each person is. Empathy, as uncanny as the Uncanniness it seeks to
study, rooted in our internalization of other cultures from mother, to father, to
other people and cultures allows us a kaleidoscopic view of our wonderfully
“weird” world in all its sublime bestiality. The response by Sudhir Kakar (in
the chapter “As Psychoanalysis Travels”) to the questions posed by the edi-
tors also delves into some of these issues.
 Introduction xix

Anup Dhar’s chapter is a reflection on the two possible titles to this

volume: Psychoanalysis in Indian Terroir (which is a description of how
psychoanalysis has evolved, or got transformed in practice in India) and Psy-
choanalysis from Indian Terroir (which is an audit of the theoretico-practical
contributions of “India” and of Indian analysts like Girindrasekhar Bose and
Sudhir Kakar to the corpus of work called “psychoanalysis”). The chapter
asks: how does it matter whether it is “in” or “from”? How does it matter
what the preposition is? The chapter is thus a reflection on how the preposi-
tion matters; how it matters in the context of a particular question, the ques-
tion of sexuation; or it is in the context of the question of sexuation that this
paper explores how the preposition matters.
As editors of this volume we would like to add that all our contributors
have removed any patient identifiers from the case vignettes and pseudonyms
have been used.

REFERENCES

Bion, W. “Notes on Memory and Desire.” In Cogitations. London: Karnac 1992,

1967.
Bose, Girindrasekhar. “A New Theory of Mental Life.” Samiksha 2(1948): 108–205.
Bose, Girindrasekhar. The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in India: Bose-Freud Cor-
respondence. Calcutta: Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 1999.
Freud, Sigmund. “Abriss der Psychoanalyse.” Internat. Zschr. Psychoanal. Imago
25(1940a [1938]):7–67; G.W., XVII, 63–138; An outline of psychoanalysis. SE
23: 139–207.
Grotstein, J.S. A Beam of Intense Darkness. London: Karnac, 2007.
Kakar, S. The Inner World. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Kakar, Sudhir and Kakar, Katharina. The Indians: Portrait of a People. New Delhi:
Penguin-Viking, 2007.
Kakar, Sudhir and Ross, John Munder. Tales of Love, Sex and Danger. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
Kakar, Sudhir. Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. A Psychological Inquiry into India
and its Healing Traditions. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Kakar, Sudhir. Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. New Delhi: Penguin
India, 1989.
Kohon, Gregor. The Dead Mother—The Work of Andre Green. London: Routledge,
ed. 1999.
 Part I

MOTHERS, THERAPISTS,
AND MATRICIDE
 Chapter One

When the Enthralled Mother Dreams

A Clinical and Cultural Composition
Amrita Narayanan

As a woman, practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy with women in In-

dia, I am intimately concerned with the cultural backdrop of my patients’
stories. The Indian woman’s canvas is dotted with pictures: of individual
and groups of women in relationship to men and children; in between these
images peek blank white spaces in the canvas, marking the deprivation of
personhood for the Indian woman outside of relationship, a dream—or sen-
tence—of the Indian polis, that dates back to antiquity (Marguelis and Kakar
2014). Women, in the Indian male unconscious, exist only when they are in
relationship to a man: as mother, daughter, sister, or wife; Outside of these
relationships, a woman is no longer a subject but an object, available for use
by men (Marguelis and Kakar 2014). Given this canvas, there is a very strong
possibility that gender-located disappointments—often with accompanying
depressions—are normative, meaning expectable, for the majority of Indian
women (Kakar 1989a, 1989b). Hyper-visible amidst these normative disap-
pointments is the image of the powerful mother (Kakar 1978, 1989a, 1989b).
The narrative of this hyper-visible Great Mother obfuscates the invisible,
or barely visible, female narratives outside of motherhood and relationship
that nonetheless exist in Indian mythology, and therefore in the cultural
unconscious (Kakar 1978, 1989a, 1989b, 1995; Marguelis and Kakar 2014;
Narayanan 2008, 2014).
Paying close attention to the cultural backdrop is typical of the Asian
varietal of psychoanalysis, a varietal that has frequently been spoken of as
a tale within a tale (Dettbarn 2013; Kitayama 2013). Here, the stories that
arise within analytic space have their background, foil, or sometimes even
their genesis, in the cultural Grand Recits, the myths and Big Dreams of the
culture-as-a-whole. Psychoanalysts speak of cultural myths and stories that
are repeated, and eventually worked through, in these analyses, such that an
3
4 Chapter One

individual can place their personal story in some relationship to a cultural

story (Dettbarn 2013). Other, non-Asian, geographies have also acknowl-
edged that the cultural arises alongside the individual in the analytic situation
(Mori 2013). In Europe, analysts most often cite the World Wars as an ex-
ample of the social arising in the personal narrative, as war links are worked
through, sometime even generations later (Faimberg 2010).
Cultural narratives thus insert themselves as metaphor into individual nar-
rative, and the analyst-patient narrative takes on a cultural metaphor within
the analytic space (Akhtar 1999, 2000; Dastur 2013; Kakar and Kakar 2007).
A cultural unconscious shared by the majority of Hindu Indians1 (Kakar and
Kakar 2007), adds, for the analytical psychotherapist in the Indian terroir, a
layer to the archaeological metaphor that Freud invoked in Constructions in
Analysis. In this layer we might add that, in our geography, the construction
that the analyst makes “from remains found in the rubble” (Freud 1937) con-
nects not only to the patient’s family and early life, but also to the state of the
polis, the culture, in which the child (and often the analyst) was conceived
and raised. Since the unconscious is also composed of cultural elements that
pre-date infantile life, the analyst in the Indian terroir understands, in the
words of Alfred Marguelis, that “culture and the unconsciousness are co-
primordial” (Marguelis & Kakar 2014).
Part of the Indian cultural rubble is the circumscription of women’s subjec-
tivity to the relational realm. Since 2012, gradually escalating social protest
relating to violence against women in public spaces has made clear that, in the
Big Dream of Indian civilization, the only female subjects are mothers, sisters
and wives, women who are in relationships with men. As psychoanalyst Sud-
hir Kakar observes, the Indian Tale involves “a deprivation of personhood for
the woman who has stepped out of relational categories” (Marguelis and Ka-
kar 2014, p.1). The Indian female narrative is characterized by invisibility and
absence (Kakar 1989a, 1989b; Kakar and Kakar 2007; Kumar 2014), as well
as loss and disappointment (Kakar 1989b). From Kakar’s (1978, 1989 a,b,
2014) work on Indian women, can be culled a stage-wise structural model of
the process by which a deprived personhood occurs: at birth where the mother
experiences disappointment at delivering a girl; at puberty where the girl is
distanced from her father; at marriage which is an invariable disappointment;
and, at the birth of her first child, the closure of her erotic life.
How is such a trauma to the self endured by women? Three important
contributions come to mind, all suggesting the use of defenses, whether
primitive or higher level. First, Kakar (1989a, 1989b) who writes about how
Indian women accept life in a culture that allows only a circumscribed space
for them: on one hand embracing and seeking power in these spaces (in the
relational realm and in the kitchen), and, on the other hand, accepting the
 When the Enthralled Mother Dreams 5

inevitable and expectable disappointments of being a girl and a woman. Sec-

ond, Kumar (2014), who writes about an absence of imaginative capabilities,
verging on a discomfort with an individual fantasy life. In her study of the
post-trauma narratives of Kucchi girls, Kumar (2014) noticed that, relative to
the boys, the girls had a tendency toward concrete metaphors and a difficulty
with the open-ended quality of fantasy life or imagination. Kumar’s other
findings for this cohort of girls included a narrative of absence and invisibil-
ity, mental numbness and shame about gender/gender ideals, and gendered
identifications with domesticity and docility, a result of excessive exposure
to household work, to the extent of obstructing other potential functions, such
as knowledge seeking, education, hygiene, health, leisure activities (Kumar
2014). A third contribution concerns the efforts of young women to obfuscate
the trauma toward women through an embrace of consumer culture (Johri
and Sachdev 2009, Johri 2011). Johri (2011), a psychoanalytically oriented
psychologist and cultural researcher, analyzed models of global womanhood
offered via advertising to young women. In her work, she has located an “ir-
relevant mother,” in the contemporary Indian imagination, an older woman
and a homemaker who did not have the opportunities of the neo-liberal gen-
eration, and who is subtly presented in the consumer culture as obsolete. The
implication, from an analytical perspective, is of youth manically embracing
the new opportunities as a defense against an uncathected mourning of what
was lost in pre-liberalization India.
The work of the above three researchers, as well as my own clinical and
cultural experiences, presents a problematic regarding female autonomy out-
side of relationship. The problematic extends to both genders and particularly
to the relations between the genders, but in this essay, I explore a way in
which the problematic impacts women’s autonomous capability for eros and
a fantasy life.

MATERNAL ENTHRALLMENT AND

THE FANTASY OF THE “PERFECT” INDIAN MOTHER

From a theoretical perspective, central to the cultural backdrop in India is

a concept that Kakar (1995) calls “maternal enthrallment.” The term—that
Kakar describes as the dominant scene in the Indian family drama—arises,
as do many concepts in the language of Indian psychoanalysis, from a scene
in a myth. The myth of Ganesha has been reproduced in various places (see
for example Kakar 1995) and consists of several “scenes”: Parvathi’s creation
of Ganesha in Shiva’s absence; Ganesha standing at the closed doors to Par-
vathi’s bath (the oedipal scene); Shiva’s decapitation of Ganesha (fillicide);
6 Chapter One

the now elephant-headed Ganesha who, upon being asked to circle the world,
merely circles his mother and wins the prize, while his brother Skanda rushes
off to circle the world.
“That Ganesha's lot is considered superior to Skanda's is perhaps an in-
dication of Indian man's cultural preference, in the dilemma of separation-
individuation,” writes Kakar, “He is at one with his mother in her wish not to
have the son separate from her; individuate out of their shared anima” (Kakar
1989a, p. 358, italics mine). Kakar explores the concept of maternal enthrall-
ment from the perspective of the young boy, who, even as he grows into a
man, endeavors to preserve this oneness with the mother, and projects the
childlike wish for eternal reunion onto the mother as well. In Kakar’s words,
“a dominant motif in Hindu myths and other products of cultural imagina-
tion, is the centrality of the male Hindu Indian’s experience of the powerful
mother” (Kakar 1995, p. 2). The fantasy of a mother who could be a substitute
for the world, a mother so interesting that the world pales in comparison, is
a child’s fantasy (Chodorow and Contratto 1982). Yet, this child’s fantasy
forms the fulcrum of the Indian cultural scene, and is based in the belief in a
particular kind of female power that is rooted in a child’s fantasy.
Taking a fresh look at the notion of maternal enthrallment invites a return
to the scene of Ganesha walking around his mother, fixing and circumscrib-
ing her with his eyes, making her his world. The mother’s response depends
also on how the listeners to the tale in the Indian polis perceive Parvathi. If
listeners watch her with the idealization of the young Indian boy, a boy who
has most likely experienced his mother as unhappy in love, and whose fantasy
is that he has the pressure—and power—to satisfy her, then we succumb—as
have all patriarchies and most feminists—to the fantasy of the perfect mother
(Chodorow and Contratto 1982).
However, Kakar derived “maternal enthrallment,” not from the story of
Parvati but from the stories of his patients, who were the data for the presence
of the omnipotent mother. He then returned to the myth to shed light on the
cultural themes in his patients’ dilemma. Yet, the analytic situation provides
an opportunity not only for the analyst to witness the patient’s relationship
to the dominant scene, but also his or her relationship to the unplayed scenes
that nonetheless form part of the myth of Ganesha. What Kakar describes
in the polis—the socially sanctioned erotic renunciation for women and the
deprivation of their personhood—can also be “heard” in the narrative of
absence in the analysis with his male patients. The focus on the enthralled
mother who cannot bear to be apart from her child raises the question of
whether a mother exists who can take time and space for her own eroticism,
reverie, and imagination. Or, does enthrall connote the Latin origins of the
word, in-thrall, meaning, in-the-trap?
 When the Enthralled Mother Dreams 7

We return then to the less dominant motifs in Indian culture, the neglected
scenes in the Indian myths. What we hear, in large relief, as the myth of Ga-
nesha invariably involves the scenes of fillicide (Shiva beheading Ganesha)
and of maternal enthrallment (Ganesha circling his mother, Parvathi, his
“world”). However, the creation of Ganesha is a scene that remains largely
un-mentalized in the Indian unconscious with important parallels in the In-
dian polis. Parvathi’s creation of Ganesha from the soap scum on her own
body is a non-relational sexual act involving Parvati, her own body, and her
fantasy inner world. The unmetabolized narrative of Parvati before Ganesha’s
birth is congruent with a polis that holds, as its aspirational ideal, the perfect
mother, content with a circumscribed, relationally oriented world.
Prohibition and caution on women’s fantasy lives has been always been an
important part of Hindu culture since antiquity. The Manu Smriti, an ancient
text whose discourse continues to unconsciously regulate the lives of Indian
women across all income levels, associates the act of wandering into reverie
with loose women.2 Likewise, the sexual acts of a woman, outside of her rela-
tionship with the man to whom she is affiliated through marriage, are equated
with immorality. To ensure women’s chastity, the Manu Smriti suggests
“keeping them busy,”3 and encouraging and rewarding the acts of spending
money and performing household tasks, in the chapter on the “good wife.”
“Good” is a very critical word here. In a polis where narcissistic supplies
for women are available on condition of relational behavior, there is more
pressure on women to behave in a “moral” manner, that is, in accordance
with the ego-ideal of the society. The injunction of the 3 C.E. Manu Smriti
for women to be praised for domesticity and chastised for “wandering” is
eerily congruent with the present-day findings of Kumar’s (2014) cohort of
girls having gendered identifications with domesticity and docility, obstruct-
ing other potential functions. As maternal enthrallment is a central dominant
scene of the Hindu drama from the point of view of the Hindu boy, it hinges
on the Hindu woman, his mother, repressing her imagination, her auto-erot-
icism, and her sexuality, such that she (the mother) can cleave to the fantasy
of the child as her world, re-constructing as her world the shared fantasy of
the men and children of the polis.
Maternal subjectivity, and the lack of space thereof, is not of course an
Indian problem. The fantasy of the perfect mother is a phenomenon that
feminists worldwide struggle with, often without resolution (Chodorow and
Contratto 1982). Parvati’s narrative of absence and its converse, the “domi-
nant scene of the Indian family drama” described by Kakar, have in common
the problem that Chodorow and Contratto (1982) described with feminist
views of mothering: that is “the union of infantile fantasies and culturally
child centered perspective with a myth of maternal omnipotence, creating a
8 Chapter One

totalistic, extreme, yet fragmented view of mothering and the mother-child

relation in which both mother and child are paradoxically victim yet omnipo-
tent.” (Chodorow and Contratto, 1982, p.56). At the present time in history,
women fiction writers worldwide are bringing their pens to this topic of
mothering and its hues (Cusk 2015; Ferrante 2008; Koshy 2009; Offil 2014)
and in doing so perhaps, take a stab at the wish that Chodorow and Contratto
articulated over two decades ago “To begin to transform the relations of par-
enting and the relations of gender, to begin to transform women’s lives, we
must move beyond the myths and misconceptions embodied in the fantasy of
the perfect mother” (Chodorow and Contratto 1982, p. 20).

AT THE CONFLUENCE OF THE CULTURAL AND THE

INDIVIDUAL: A CASE OF NARCISSISTIC DISTURBANCE

My patient, a young woman who suffers from a lack of basic narcissist sup-
plies, is especially reliant upon the cultural self-granting apparatus to feel
any sense of self-worth. Lacking a foundational sense of self, she finds her
narcissistic supplies in the fantasy of the enthralled mother. Since she expe-
riences a sense of self only when in relationship, it is very difficult for her
to engage in solitude much less conceive of self-directed activity. Yet, she
enjoys painting and is interested in creating art, and deeply longs to be more
productive as an artist.
Agni4 entered therapy with the stated wish of “improving myself so my
husband can have a better life” and in the same breath added that she hoped
very much she could “make something of myself in life.”
Who this “myself” was to Agni was both an intellectual and affective mys-
tery. Her self was experienced in large part outside of her control and even
outside of her thinking. Agni felt “clear about myself” only when engaged in
household activities in service of the joint family into which she had married.
She felt a combination of dependence on these activities as a source of iden-
tity and “goodness,” a compulsion—that she located as external to her—to
perform them, and an anger about the externally located others who were
“putting pressure” on her. Some of Agni’s experience is resonant with the
findings of Kumar (2013, 2014) and Kakar (1995), on some degree of pattern
in the Indian female narrative, including a tendency to create self-worth and
value based on service and on relationships. Her symptoms—self-aware hy-
pochondria, clamors for attention both in dreams and in waking life, a sense
of feeling empty and, in her words, “mechanized”—bespoke narcissistic
vulnerabilities that were born out in the accounts of her history which sug-
gests her parents had been preoccupied during the time at which her primary
 When the Enthralled Mother Dreams 9

narcissism might have developed, leaving her with an unquenchable narcis-

sistic fragility.5
At the beginning of our work together, Agni expressed a desire to begin
and sustain attendance at a drawing class. Initially, she spoke for months
about her sense of duty or responsibility to her mother-in-law that prevented
her from drawing. Over time she slowly admitted that the problem was big-
ger than this and related to a “blank sense of nothingness” that she felt when
she was alone, making it difficult for her to produce a drawing. On the other
hand, she said that if someone—say her mother-in-law or husband—would
set aside the time for her to draw, then she was able to produce.
Agni spoke incessantly about her mother-in-law, describing her as a person
who could never relax, always striving for perfection in household tasks and
“looking at me whenever I am relaxed as if she is telling me to work.” Agni
experienced her mother-in-law as “wrapped up with my husband (her son)”
with “nothing better to do than see if he has clean underwear.” I focused on
Agni’s sense of feeling intruded upon, and penetrated by, her mother-in-law
and of her jealousies: not just her possessiveness toward her husband but also,
what I believed was a bigger driving factor, her jealousy that she had not had
such a mother as did her husband, a mother who was enthralled with her, and,
relatedly, an oedipal rivalry with her husband that was acted out obliquely as
an anger toward her mother-in-law, but was actually hurt that her mother-in-
law focussed on her son instead of Agni.
Numerous other personal factors are a part of this case. However I’d like
to focus on Agni’s difficulties in drawing that she initially presented as “my
mother-in-law who prevents me from drawing” and then moved on to “my
(biological) mother who never encouraged me to draw” before it showed up
in the transference. About four or five months into therapy, Agni began the
longed-for drawing classes and another month later began showing me her
work, reproductions commissioned by her teacher. I praised her easily, as
her drawings and paintings were technically good and saturated with color.
During this time period, Agni brought her very first dream to therapy. In the
first dream that Agni shared, a dream that she had about an hour prior to her
therapy, Agni said she was “being kissed and touched by another woman, and
feeling very aroused, really enjoying this, but so surprised I was enjoying it.”
I made the connection to her paintings, and to my enjoying of the paintings,
and to her enjoying my pleasure. She could not relate to my interpretations,
but returned to her own sense of surprise at her pleasure in the dream.
The mutual pleasure in that first dream was, and is, paralleled in the ses-
sions when Agni shows her artwork. Though I experienced this pleasure
during the sessions, I found it hard to stay with the sensation, experiencing
the pleasure as fleeting and thereafter unattainable as something to think
10 Chapter One

about. Interestingly, the fleeting session of pleasure was mirrored in my link

with Agni, which, during this period of showing me her drawings, did not
sustain between the sessions. Agni struggled at my non-availability outside
the therapy hour and she would frequently reach out to me via email or text
asking to “repeat what you said in a session.” When I could not gratify her
she would lash out and attack me. After struggling to figure out what was this
magic thing that I “said” in the session, I slowly realized that this was some-
thing I “did” in the session—admire her work—which was also something
the representation of me had “done” in her first dream, during which she was
completely passive as the woman pleasured her. I wondered also whether the
praise in the session or the pleasure in the dream both bespoke a promise, a
beginning of sorts, one that was not delivered on during the sessions.
A maternal tableau had been evoked by this first dream and its attendant
analytic environment. The tableau was a dense composition of the homo-
erotic feeling between mother and daughter, and between women, but the
analytic environment also held the cultural taboo against this feeling. In the
months that followed, this taboo would become enacted again and again be-
tween us, while evoking the lack in the early environment that was the root
of Agni’s narcissistic struggles. While I was not able to comment upon all
aspects of this tableau in the moment, what I did comprehend was Agni’s
inability—and related sense of helplessness— to give to herself the sense of
eros she looked for from others in her relationships, whether her husband,
mother, mother-in-law, or me.
Agni had a tendency to act out in envy and anger at those whom she per-
ceived as doing as they pleased. However she lacked the capacity to take
the initiative to do as she herself pleased. She often resented others after she
spent her energies pleasing them. Continuing the theme of pleasure from her
first dream, during an incident where Agni vouchsafed that she had spent
several days angry and upset with her husband—despite her better intentions
and logic—because he was “making himself happy with a Playboy in the
bathroom,” I intervened in this to ask Agni if she was able to masturbate.
She responded immediately: “You know I have tried, I start trying but then I
always stop quickly. Its weird to say but you know I think my mother would
not like it.”6 Here I remarked on the difficulty Agni had starting “but stop-
ping quickly” in many areas of her life, including her artistic work. I also
spoke to Agni’s sense of oedipal rivalry with her husband in the vying for
the attention of mother. “It feels so unfair,” I said, “that your husband can
have a life in which he can make himself happy, while his mother still goes
running after him, while you sacrifice your happiness, you miss your classes,
you work in the kitchen for her happiness and his mother still does not notice
 When the Enthralled Mother Dreams 11

you.” Agni’s response was to turn to me, her eyes brimming with tears as she
nodded emphatically.
Six months after she began the drawing classes, Agni dropped out of them,
stating that her mother-in-law did not like it. From here began an intense
series of sessions in which she talked incessantly about her hate and anger
toward her mother-in-law. She ignored my efforts to remind her of the paral-
lel to her frustrated masturbation, when I repeated her own words back to her,
“(you) stop (your art) quickly because you think your mother will not like
it.” During this period, she refused to be on the couch, choosing to face me
instead, an effort that I thought aimed to recreate the eye-contact of the lost
maternal tableau. It was unsuccessful. Enthralled and in-thrall collided; I felt
watched and monitored, as if Agni were “keeping an eye on me” and I was
without ways to imagine my way out of it. The analytic situation itself had
become the thrall, the trap. I was not able to mirror Agni enough about the
truncated pleasure of the earlier sessions, as I was not myself in touch with it.
Nonetheless, I was able to make the link to Agni’s truncated pleasure with her
mother-in-law, her constant efforts to establish the erotic link between herself
and her mother-in-law, and her frustration in seeing that her intended beloved
was occupied by her own son. She accepted this interpretation, adding that
she had dropped out of drawing in order to redirect herself to household tasks
and “give my mother-in-law what she needs.” I responded that she hoped for
a certain kind of love in exchange for her efforts in the kitchen, and was angry
and frustrated that it was not forthcoming.
The interpretations showed their effort in a regression. Agni escalated her
attacks and her demands that I give to her like I “once did.” For my part, I
experienced a dramatic reduction in my capacity for reverie, an essential tool
in the psychoanalytic way of working and making interpretations (Ogden
1997), perhaps a similar kind of blankness that Agni experienced in herself
when devoid of narcissistic supplies. During this time, Agni produced a draw-
ing; crude, unlike the sophisticated copies she made, but coming from her
own imagination: a sketch of a marionette, the puppet dressed in the garb of a
princess, and controlled by invisible hands that worked from behind a curtain,
also decorated with sequins and gold-dust matching the dress of the princess.
She submitted the drawing to me with the words: “this is how mechanized I
am.” Since I too felt cold and wooden during the sessions, I could relate to
the drawing, but initially, could not make the link to the cultural piece of the
picture.
I sought consultation for the case, finding the wooden feeling and absence
of reverie unbearable. During these consultations I experienced a parallel
process—and a moment of condensation—during my own experience of
injured narcissism with my supervisor. During the course of the consulta-
12 Chapter One

tion, when at one point I pointed out an intervention from the process note
and wondered aloud why the consultant had not praised this intervention,
she made two comments: “Perhaps I’ve been an Indian mother, who could
not say “shabash” (well done) to you” and later in the same session, almost
sotto voce: “perhaps you and I had the same kind of mother.” Following this
consultation, I recalled the voice of my own mother cautioning me against the
dangers of an overly rich fantasy life,, “don’t be lost in your own world” and,
painfully, my own shame while engaging in child-like fantasy play.
From this moment of condensation, I returned to Agni’s drawing of the
marionette as a picture of an ideal woman—Manu’s woman—whose inner
access to narcissistic supplies has been cut off, and who depends entirely on
the outside—notably her husband and the domestic sphere—for narcissistic
supplies, indeed for animation and movement. I understood my patient and
her mother-in-law’s obsessive mutual watching as a way in which unex-
pressed longing and eros is channeled (albeit unsuccessfully) between the
patient and her mother-in-law, as well as the patient and myself, and, in the
frozen space between each, I saw an unsymbolized, unacknowledged kind
of mother, one who is able to unashamedly take pleasure in her own female
eroticism—outside of utilitarian and relational functions—as well as in the
erotically tinged pleasure between herself and her girl child, and eventually
adolescent daughter (Chodorow and Contratto 1982; Irigaray 1990).
Bringing these insights back to the therapy, I made a slight shift in my ap-
proach. I started referring to the culturally dominant mother in the analytic
moment. I used a slight adjustment of language, that allowed me to keep
in mind not only the mothers in Agni’s life, but also the ones in my own.
For example, when I pointed to Agni’s sense of shame about how “mother”
would perceive each of these personal acts—relaxing alone,7 drawing, or
masturbating—I referred to the fact that “mother’s eyes” were everywhere.
I purposefully did not add the words “in law” after mother, nor did I add the
possessive pronoun “your” before “mother.” I found that my patient did not
correct me, and that during one of these sessions she spoke for the first time
of a new kind of loss: the mother she could have had, a mother who could
see her without watching her. She spoke also of the kind of mother she could
become, of her horror of becoming a mother-who-watches—whom she as-
sociated to her mother-in-law—a mother who depends upon the child for an
animating function and who becomes obsolete once her child is grown up.
The sessions unfolded into a series of sessions about Agni’s lack of female
role models and eventually the fantasies she had about my capacity to ani-
mate, to give life and pleasure. This reference was not only to her first dream
but also, in my mind, to Parvati’s narrative of absence, that Agni believed was
always accessible for me—and envied— but in fact had become inaccessible
in the transference until the consultant was able to make the link to mothers.
 When the Enthralled Mother Dreams 13

Agni’s “mother-who-watches” is related to Kakar’s “enthralled mother.”

As coda, I return from the individual case of Agni, back to the cultural “case”
of the Indian unconsciousness to explain this link: if the mother is enthralled,
she is also in-thrall, trapped, into a compulsive relationality with her child—
and also to Indian society itself—the kind of trap that though pleasurable at
times, proves a particular obstacle to a young woman already floundering
with a weak narcissistic foundation. The analytic hour is an opportunity for
a tale within the Tale, a chance to revisit aspects of Cultural Narratives from
an individual perspective (Dettbarn 2013). Agni’s case pushes for such a
tale, and mourns the absence of such a Tale, the missed attendance to the
inner worlds of the mothers and daughters, and the call for a different sort
of mother. Her struggles could be simply seen sociologically, of course, as a
new daughter-in-law trying to locate herself in her husband’s family, or from
the viewpoint of, say, a universalist model of psychoanalysis as a problem in
regulating narcissistic states of consciousness. It is richer however, and true
to the Indian terroir, to see the case culturally, from an Indian psychoanalytic
viewpoint where, in Agni’s struggles, we find not only individual narcissis-
tic concerns, but also an unsymbolized mourning in the composition of the
Indian daughter. Perhaps we can build on what Kakar (1995) wrote: “One of
the more dominant narratives of this culture is that of Devi, the great god-
dess, especially in her manifold expressions as mother in the inner world of
the Hindu son” (Kakar 1995, p. 355). To this I add, that in concert with her
manifold expressions in the inner world of the Hindu son, an equalling cultur-
ing force in the unconsciousness is the Goddess Parvati’s inaccessible, non-
dominant, invisible, or absent narrative in the inner world of the Hindu girl.
The loss and covering up of the loss of female erotic subjectivity in Indian
culture has been well documented, as the terroir has regarded women’s erotic
impulses outside of motherhood with suspicion since antiquity (Doniger
1991; Marguelis and Kakar 2014); Narayanan 2008). Perhaps not coinciden-
tally then, women’s erotic needs have not been well recognized by Indian
feminists in the post-independence generation (Lakshmi 1984, 2009, 2013) at
the moment when female individual needs were collectively sacrificed to the
national ideal (Kumar 2011). The unmourned, unacknowledged act of disap-
pearing the erotic mother, with her capacity for reverie, revives the control
of women’s physical bodies and sexual imaginations spoken of in the Manu
Smiriti. The lack of this acknowledgement, has, I believe, created a social
vulnerability for post-liberalization Indian woman (including my patient
Agni who is part of that generation), who knows that in a neo-liberalized
India, Kakar’s enthralled mother risks becoming Johri’s (2011) forgotten
mother.
Agni’s is a hesitant composition, against a backdrop where the majority of
girls’ primary narcissism is at risk. It is weighty with loss—and the need to
14 Chapter One

mourn—the uber-leitmotif of the boy-enthralled-Indian Mother (Kakar 1978;

Marguelis and Kakar 2014) and what it means for the Indian girl. Such a
mourning would offer, in the Indian terroir, a pathway toward a recognition
of women that nevertheless stays away from “mother-blaming,” the pitfall
of most feminist-psychoanalytic narratives (Chodorow and Contratto 1982).
From sharing the terrors of the enthralled mother (Kakar 1995), and the
forgettable mother (Johri 2011) comes a mourning, from which emerges the
figure of the subjective mother, one who has an available space in her own
mind, yet capable of caring for her child.
Diatkine (2015) writes that if we consider this kind of a mother one who
has Bion’s “capacity for maternal reverie” or Jessica Benjamin’s “the third
in the one,” this mother may be also considered an erotic mother, whose
reverie might include rest from her child alongside the resuscitating dream of
her sexual partner. The Indian terroir finds agreement with Diatkine, in the
oedipal narrative itself, in Parvati’s fantasies and dreams that she has in the
absence of both husband and children, the dreams before Ganesha was born,
the dreams in the bath when the doors to the world are closed: Parvati as the
erotic mother.
Listening to the great myths and repetitive family dramas of the culture
in the psychoanalytic moment, I wonder if there is a possibility of a differ-
ent kind of listening to the listening (Faimbeg 2010): that is, listening to the
coded and patterned ways in which we hear the cultural narratives and the
roles in it. In the case I briefly presented, without diminishing the layered
nature of the case, and the many factors at play, I “hear” the cultural absence
of the erotic mother being remembered, repeated, and worked through in
the clinical moment. In the clinic—and perhaps in the polis—accessing the
erotic mother, a young woman with a capacity for masturbation, a mother
with her capacity for erotic reverie, an older woman who is relevant for her
contribution, requires a mourning of a recessive female presence that is not
represented enough in the cultural imagination.

NOTES

1. I say Hindu Indians to make clear I am not conflating the notion of “Hindu”
and “Indian” under the rubric of culture. Muslim, Christian, Parsi, Anglo-Indian, and
Jewish women share some of these circumscriptions simply by inhabiting the same
physical polis and may find some resonance in the ways I speak of “Indians” as a
consequence of inhabiting a shared polis that is often dominated by Hindu voices.
They also have, of course, their own different sets of circumscriptions.
2. “Drinking, associating with bad people, being separated from their husbands,
wandering about, sleeping, and living in other people’s houses are the six things that
corrupt women” (italics mine) (Doniger, 1991, p. 198)
 When the Enthralled Mother Dreams 15

3. “No man is able to guard a woman entirely by force, but they can be kept
guarded by using these means: he should keep her busy amassing and spending
money, engaging in purification, attending to her duty, cooking food and looking after
the furniture.” (Doniger, 1991, p. 198)
4. Name chosen by the patient at the time of requesting permission to write about
her case.
5. My use and understanding of the word narcissism comes from Bach, 1977, who
to be precise speaks of narcissistic states of consciousness.
6. I have discussed this interaction in great detail elsewhere in a separate paper on
Indian women and masturbation (Narayanan, 2015) referencing the work of Freud
(1914), and Laufer (1968) that relate masturbation to basic narcissism.
7. Agni’s experience of shame about the act of relaxing is something I have no-
ticed in other interviews, such as the case of Darshana described in Narayanan 2015.

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 Chapter Two

Devi Possession
At the Intersections of Religion,
Culture, and Psychoanalysis
Sabah Siddiqui and Bhargavi Davar

There is “Religion” with a capital letter, but also religions. There are the big
ones, the major religions followed in India, which can be arranged according
to percentage of followers in the census data. This arrangement tells us
nothing about how they are situated vis-à-vis each other. That is one question.
By being juxtaposed against each other, they appear internally coherent.
But, within each, there are break-away sects and reform movements which
are trying to redefine “religion.” Already the concept is decentered! And
that is another question. Then there are the religious practices that evolve in
their own ways, away from the religious canon, the codified texts and the
priestly class. These are subaltern practices that can neither be categorized
nor codified. It is difficult to label them as customary or religious. They fall
somewhere, in common parlance, under superstition. And yet how many of
us really follow the canonical form of religion: living by the book and dying
by the doctrine? Religion becomes personalized as faith. However, in its
subaltern form, religion undergoes yet another transformation since it neither
frames a politics nor develops a science. It is only a religiosity, a way of
living, of becoming; in short, subaltern religions are asketic practices, which
we will come to presently.
How will psychoanalysis set up a relation with these forms of religiosity?
What happens when psychoanalysis and religion come face to face? When
and where do they come face to face? As a starting point, we can look to Sig-
mund Freud in the Future of an Illusion (2008 [1927]) in which he discusses
the psychical genesis of religious ideas. While he concedes that religion is a

19
20 Chapter Two

deep-seated need of all cultures to safeguard themselves, the primacy of intel-

ligence and the god of reason must hold sway over psychoanalysis. Nonethe-
less, Freud is struck by deep doubt, as evidenced by his preserving within
the text his other voice that protests this rejection of the value of religion in
culture. Thus, when he maintains that religion is an illusion but science need
not be—”our science is not an illusion,” he says at the end of the paper—
this should be read with at least as much caution as Freud himself has used.
However, the analyses of the Judeo-Christian roots of both psychoanalysis
and Freud are quite comprehensive. Then what do we mean by religion and
psychoanalysis? Are we talking about a religion other than the ones dominant
in the census data in the context of Europe? Or are we talking about another
form of praxis, of faith, and of healing that does not conform to what is con-
ventionally understood as either religion or science?
This chapter re-examines these assumptions in light of the phenomenon
of possession, specifically being possessed by a deity, which is a common
occurrence in certain religious cultures of India. This chapter emerges from
work carried out by the Bapu Trust for Mind and Discourse, Pune, on tradi-
tional healers in Maharashtra.1 For the purpose of this chapter we have taken
recourse to interviews with two respondents—Shivani Salve and Manasi
Ghule, both residents of high-density, low-income slums in Pune. Salve and
Ghule narrated experiences of being possessed by goddesses and therefore
identified themselves as Aradhis. The phenomenon of Devi-possession
makes us ask: what if psychoanalysis came face to face with something ir-
reducible to what is conventionally understood as either religion or science?

Interview with Shivani Salve

Shivani Salve was married when she was in the first standard to her father’s
sister’s son. At puberty (12 years), she went to live with her husband’s family
in the village2. By the time she was 14, she had one child—a son who lives
with her to the present day. The next year, there was drought in the village
and the family was suffering, when her husband was advised to marry another
girl who could bring money into the family. Salve left her husband and re-
turned to her parents’ house in Kashewadi (a slum in the inner city of Pune).
Her description of her married life in the village is bleak and full of strife,
and when her mother died a few years later, even after being pressured by her
father, she refused to return to her sasural (father-in-law’s house). When her
brother got married, her father forced her out of the house. She was supported
for a brief while by relatives and friends, before it was suggested to her that
she buy her own house. Borrowing from her employers in 1984, Salve bought
the house she is currently staying in for Rs. 2500. In that house she raised her
 Devi Possession 21

son, educated him till the 10th-11th standard, and, at the age of 20, arranged
for him to be married to a cousin’s daughter. She has a grandson now who is
seventeen years old. Her son has been unemployed for three years now and
is given to drinking in excess. She has described their relationship as very
difficult (chatees ka akda) since he is uncooperative and demanding. Until a
couple of months ago, she was the sole wage earner in the family, although
recently her daughter-in-law has been working as a domestic help to earn
a little money. Her relationship with her daughter-in-law seems to be more
supportive. Salve is over fifty years old and is concerned about aging and the
effect it will have on her ability to work. For the last twenty years, she has
been working in the anganwadi in the morning. At the time of the interview
in 2011, she was also engaged with nursing patients in the evening.
Salve is from the Matang caste, a Scheduled Caste of Maharasthra. She
brought the goddess into her house and her life seventeen years ago, after a
series of fortuitous events. She was handed, for safekeeping, a bronze idol
of Tuljabhavani3 which her Muslim neighbor had found on the ground. She
started to worship the idol, since Tuljabhavani was also her parents’ clan god-
dess. However, she did not believe in the gods very much at this time, perhaps
because times were very hard on her at this point. Her daughter-in-law was
undergoing a very difficult pregnancy around this time as well. Salve was
being supported at this time by Datta-bhau, a Jogati4 who recommended that
they should at least visit the Mira Datar Dargah in Ravivar Peth. Some days
after her daughter-in-law lost the child, an Aradhi who had come to collect
Jogwa (offerings for the deity), under the direction of Datta-bhau, indicated
that Salve also had the favor of Tuljabhavani for four years, although she
was not a believer. To understand this better, Salve went on a pilgrimage to
Tuljapur. Listening to the other devotees, she also wanted to offer flowers to
the goddess in the temple there. The event (that sounds almost mythic) that
kindled her belief in the goddess is best recounted in her own words:

There was 10 minutes left for 8 PM, and at that time, the temple gets closed.
The person over there said that everybody should go out as this is the time
of closing the temple. I said to God, I don’t bend (namaskar) in front of you.
I make fasts for you and worship you. Now I am going from your place, but
once I go from here, I will not turn back to you. If you are true then the priests
should take me inside the temple. Saying this I went outside the temple but the
priests announced that those who wanted to put flowers for the Gods could come
inside. So two other women and I went inside. The priest took two frangipani
flowers—one yellow and one white and he said that whatever you want to ask,
think about any one colour flower and keep that wish in mind. So I selected the
white colour flower and I said (to the Goddess), since last year I am not able
to prepare one cup tea in my home, I have not called you in my home, I have
22 Chapter Two

not urged you to my help. But somebody else has given you to me so I took it,
placed it in my home and started worshipping you, but you put me in trouble.
If you really want me to be happy and contented and you want to come to my
house then you should say it clearly, here and now. And within 40 days you will
have to show the result to me. Then only will I really establish you in my house
and I will perform a big function for you. I put my wish on the white flower and
the priest said that keep your hand below the statue of Goddess and stand here.
I did that and the priest put both the flowers on the Goddess . . . two times and
both the times the flowers rolled down from the sari of the Goddess. How it
will stay on the Goddess? It is bound to come down. So the priest said that you
have not wished from your heart, you should say it from the heart. So I put my
head on the feet of the goddess, and I rubbed my nose on it and again made the
wish. The priest put the two flowers on the goddess and I kept my hand below
the statue. The yellow flower fell into my hand and the white flower remained
on the sari of the goddess. So the priest said that whatever you have wished for
will come true.

With this, Salve decided to bring the goddess home, and in the procession
back from the temple, she had her first experience of possession by the god-
dess. While singing the aarti, her legs started shaking: “At that time I was
trying to control myself very much and pressing my leg hard that it should not
shake but I felt it was like fever and my legs were shaking continuously. How
you shiver with the cold in the fever of Malaria? I felt like that. Then there I
got possessed for the first time.” However, the celebration for this was carried
out in her brother’s place in Indapur, rather than her own home, some months
later. In doing so, she had neglected the resident goddess of Indapur—“Shiva-
chi Aai” or Mahalaxmi. Being possessed by two goddesses was hard work:

While I was getting possessed by Bhavani-Aai, the malas around my neck

would get thrown around. Not a single mala used to remain on my neck. Once
I had an episode of possession that I could not even sit or stand for eight days.
All my muscles from head to toe used to get stiff. I couldn’t even move my
neck an inch from here to there. I used to suffer a lot. That time my Guru-Aai
said that as she is suffering so much, which other goddess does she have now?
Then she observed me closely, she saw the mala and said that I also have the
goddess of Shiva-chi Mahalaxmi, ‘As you hadn’t offered her anything that time
she followed you.’ I was not ready to accept the Shiva-chi Mahalaxmi and fell
sick for four months due to cold and fever. I used to take Crocin tablet everyday
and then used to go for work.

It would seem that possession by gods/goddesses can be both a boon (var)

and a punishment. Salve says in the interview, “God doesn’t go to anybody
like this. The God goes to them whom he/she likes. Those people who want
(God) to possess them surely do not get that. [But also God goes to] those
 Devi Possession 23

who don’t believe in the God, who criticize the God, those who became angry
at the name of the God, those who deny the God . . . God definitely follows
such people.” She herself is an example of someone who did not believe but,
in time, came to be possessed by not one but three goddesses, although she
is most dedicated to Bhavani-mata. While the gods chose their mediums, the
Aradhis also choose the god they wish to institute in their houses, based on
whether or not they believe, as well as more practical concerns about if they
can provide for the needs of the god. Thus, Salve carries the mala and pardi,
ritual ornaments, for Tuljabhavani, but not for Mahalaxmi of Kolhapur or
Shiva-chi Aai.

Interview with Manasi Ghule

Manasi Ghule is a 28-year-old woman (in 2011), also belonging to the
Matang caste. She lives in a house in Lohiyanagar, an inner city slum of
Pune, which is next to her maher (her mother’s house), with her husband
and three children (two daughters are studying in the eighth standard, and the
sixth standard and a son is in the fifth standard). About five years previous
to this, she was living with her marital family in a slum in Dharavi, Mumbai,
but it was demolished for the sake of real estate construction and they were
offered a flat in the building. However, since they had financial difficulties
(especially her brother-in-law), they sold the flat and moved back to Pune.
Her husband was able to buy their present house with that money, which is a
great relief for Ghule since she reports that not having their own house, hav-
ing to worry about rent, etc., used to be a source of great tension (traas) for
her. Since then her husband’s job has stabilized as well, and things have been
proceeding more smoothly for them. Her sister-in-law also participated in the
interview and would speak for Ghule, often embellishing the details. They
seemed to share a cordial and supportive relation.
Sometime after moving into their current house, during an aarti in a neigh-
bor’s house in the honor of a son in that family who was also undergoing pos-
session, Ghule experienced possession for the first time. However, she was
not unaware of these matters since her mother is a medium herself, to whom
people come for answers to their problems. Her older brother used to be a
Potraj5, the tradition being carried on after his death by his son. Some months
after her brother’s death, Ghule fell ill and since even the doctors could not
diagnose what had gone wrong; she felt that the treatment was ineffective
and no improvement had been made. They began to consider other possibili-
ties, outside of those offered by medicine. She says, “After his death we did
not look after the goddess. Even my mother didn’t. At that time I didn’t cry
at all . . . I was swollen so they took me to hospital but there was no relief,
24 Chapter Two

so we went to a woman who looks into matters of the goddess (bai baghate
devache). And the woman said, ‘She (Ghule) has the goddess, it will come
and then only she will be fine,’ so we promptly submitted to the goddess
(patkarun dile devache). Meaning, we said that let the goddess come, we will
accept it and do it properly . . . we will worship the goddess.” Nonetheless,
when asked directly, Manasi does not connect the loss of her brother to her
first intimation of the approach of the goddess, in the way of her inexplicable
sickness.
As a medium to the goddess, Ghule seems to be happy and confident. She
is respected by those around her. When she is menstruating, all the work is
done by everyone else in the house. When the other women are menstruat-
ing, they maintain her sanctity by voluntarily not coming close to her. Her
husband will also not beat/kick her (as she claims happens in marriage) since
he has to consider that the goddess resides within her (angamadhe devaahe).
Nor will he demand sexual intercourse of her too frequently or impudently.
As a young woman, Ghule is content that the gods are looking after her and
her family. When she acquires a Guru, she will gain more knowledge (vidya)
and will become somebody, like her mother, to whom others may come for
help.

POSITIONS ON POSSESSIONS

The languages of expression in the interviews were Marathi with a smattering

of Hindi. Translated into English, the terms may appear deceptively similar
to regular English. However, attention to language is all the more important
in a culturally different text. One instance of vernacular terms not being eas-
ily translatable is the term hijra. Salve speaking of Datta-bhau, says, “No, he
is Jogati. You know those hijras? So he is of that kind. Those are different.
They belong to Yallamma Devi . . . hijras are of Yallamma Devi. They break
their bangles and become widow every year. They follow different science all
together.” The hijras do follow a different science or logic, even of gender-
ing, being neither male nor female.
In fact, the very word “possession” itself should make us pause. The Ara-
dhi of Tuljabhavani characterizes her experience as “angamadhe devaahe,”
the deity inhabiting the body. Possession has connotations other than this
apparently simple statement. In the clinical context, for decades since the
growth of psychiatric diagnostics, such phenomena were routinely diagnosed
as “hysteria” involving high degree of “suggestibility” and “attention seek-
ing” (Davar 1999). More recently, Indian psychiatrists have identified it as
a distinctive, culture-specific symptomatic cluster, which they refer to as the
possession syndrome (Addlakha 2008). With its entry into the lexicon of the
 Devi Possession 25

DSM—via the Culture-Bound Syndromes—it has been interpreted as a form

of dissociation. This phenomenon has also been called, more specifically,
the Devi syndrome (Sebastia 2009). The Devi syndrome can be observed
in “sacred” spaces of different religious persuasions sprinkled generously
throughout India that, for the lack of a term, have been grouped under “faith
healing.” However, this diagnostic and clinical formulation is neither descrip-
tive, nor prescriptive; this is the fate of the “culture-bound syndromes” or in
other words that which does not quite fit into the Western nosological system
of pathology. These new syndromes however still get accommodated into the
psychiatric lexicon far too easily as petty variations of more universal condi-
tions. An in-depth analysis of these cultural patterns is required to explore
their differences from the model proposed by psychiatric diagnostics, for
even in the domain of the “abnormal,” these do not quite fit. On the other
hand, being so neglected by the American Psychiatric Association may not be
entirely a bad thing, since the phenomenon does not get immediately reduced
to a psychiatric abnormality. Before the setting up of containment of the
phenomenon in carefully defended categories of illness and disorder, we can
still ask some different questions, which may open up another imagination of
psychosocial health or distress.
Psychoanalytically, though, possession has been understood as an episode
of neurotic outbreak. Freud in A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neuro-
sis (1957 [1923]) is reading the phenomena of possession, indeed all religious
experience, as strategies of the neurotic to access some safety and comfort
from threat, either internal, as in wishes that cannot be owned up to, or exter-
nal, as acceptance of a cultural prohibition on seeking out unlawful libidinal
satisfaction. He starts with the declaration that the neuroses of earlier times
came in “demonological trappings” and goes on to explain:

The states of possession correspond to our neuroses, for the explanation of

which we once more have recourse to psychical powers. In our eyes, the demons
are bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives of instinctual impulses that have
been repudiated and repressed. We merely eliminate the projection of these
mental entities into the external world which the middle ages carried out; in-
stead, we regard them as having arisen in the patient’s internal life, where they
have their abode. (Freud 1957 [1923]: 3996)

For Freud, possession is simply a case of pathological neurosis, the projecting

of an inner reality into the world, which was a commonly accepted exposition
of the distress experienced by the person in times of yore, but has since then
been surmounted by scientific explanations as offered by psychoanalysis. The
question for us is that, in the post-colonial consciousness, where both psychi-
atry and psychoanalysis are not without their problems of translation and rep-
resentation, how does one look at possession, specifically Devi-possession?
26 Chapter Two

THE HOME AND THE WORLD

Within the set of interviews presented here, Aradhis or the women possessed
by the Devi experienced possession, in time, as a benevolent relation with
their resident “spirits,” while the reactions of family members and neigbors
around them were different, which affected and altered their own experience
of possession. They identified themselves as belonging to the Matang jati,
identified by the Indian State as a Scheduled Caste. According to Dr. Mach-
hindra Dnyanu Sakate in his unpublished doctoral thesis A sociological study
of Matang community in Maharashtra (2010), Matang6 is considered to be
etymologically related to Mang,7 its Sankritic root. He states that “the Mangs
who were adivasis earlier and who lived a tribal life quite for sometime and
who were settled at the outskirts of the villages were incorporated in the list
of Scheduled Castes in 1961” (Sakate 2010). Matang religious practices seem
to contain several indications of their adivasi origin: “various practises and
beliefs in deities, Bhagat, impact of magic, method of sacrifice, method of
last rites after the death, all this goes very close to adivasi life style” (Sakate
2010). Indeed the Matang women have a sizable number of Aradhis amongst
them and the festival honoring Tuljabhavani in the month of April sees huge
numbers of pilgrims from this community making their way to Tuljapur.
Salve and Ghule found social support and encouragement in their journeys
as mediums to the goddess Tuljabhavani. They were prepared culturally for
the experience of possession, especially since possession brings the body to
the public domain, breaking gendered barriers. Before, during, and after pos-
session, the warmth of a helping hand is required and these women receive it
from the women around them. For instance, when Ghule is under the throes
of possession, her sister-in-law will straighten her saree and open her hair to
ease her movement. Like grooming preparations for a wedding or other such
public occasion, women assist in preparing the body for the possession. There
are usually people around to ensure that the Aradhi comes to no harm.
There are various ways of looking at the phenomenon of the body in a
trance. Trance for the Aradhis, very often, involves rigorous exertion of the
body, and many Aradhis report a feeling of being “refreshed” by the experi-
ence (Davar and Lohokare 2009). At the end of trance or possession, the
body has been put through strenuous exercise and there is a feeling of both
lightness and fatigue. A burst of concentrated body activity has the beneficial
effects of trauma release and the positive emotional changes related to it.
There is also the need for a Guru in becoming a medium fit for the gods.
The Guru is one, in Ghule’s words, “[O]ne who is good, who has knowledge,
and one who teaches well.” In the case of Salve this is the presence of her
Guru-Aai, a spiritual guide who is usually an older woman more experienced
 Devi Possession 27

in the matters of possession. The Guru-Aai directs her disciple in the matters
of the gods as well as vidya (knowledge or science), and the disciple responds
with reverence as well as dakshina (a tribute offered to the Guru/Guru-Aai
for their teaching). When Salve was undergoing an episode of possession
for the second time, lasting for more than a week, it was her Guru-Aai who
diagnosed the nature of the affliction; it was another goddess inhabiting and
dominating Salve in order to receive her due homage. In other circumstances,
where people do not have recourse to such explanations, Salve could well
have been referred to a doctor—a general physician or even a psychiatrist.
The presence of a second mother, in the absence of her own mother, stood
Salve in good stead. Similarly Ghule, who had not yet found her Guru, had
her own mother who was already knowledgeable about the ways of posses-
sion. So, when Ghule fell ill, although they travelled through the medical
route, they could look for other explanations for the disease and accept that it
was being caused because of the ways of the goddess.
In this manner, a new social organization occurs inside the community
around the one possessed. It is a kind of sisterhood within the women of the
community, which also takes into consideration the Indian concern of wis-
dom in relation to age and thus the importance given to the Guru-Aai. The
Guru-Aai and the other women in the community are there to support the one
possessed during moments when the goddess descends and takes control of
the body of the medium. Thus, possession creates around it a new network of
social support and local knowledge.
In the case of Salve and Ghule, being possessed provided them with some-
thing valuable in another way. Their resident spirits are venerable female
goddesses and thus not coming into conflict with their husbands (or the pa-
triarchal world that the signifier “husband” stands for). Salve had in fact left
her husband more than thirty years previous to this and had fended for herself
and her family on her own all this time. Her status as an Aradhi allowed her
to exist in society as a savashani, as married to the god, especially since Tul-
jabhavani and Mahalaxmi are both symbolic representations of women who
are married and performing their household responsibilities. It facilitated her
movement in a society that privileges married women. Salve says that she
does not usually attend big functions because people say a lot of things, un-
less she is invited as savashana. In this way, being the medium for the gods
increased her social capital, just as Ghule’s possession by the goddess ame-
liorated her position in the family and the community.
This draws our attention to the relation of the self of the one possessed with
the larger community and is important in understanding two processes; one,
the position of the possessed one in society, which includes how the vicis-
situdes of gendering is negotiated, as well as the more important question of
how the experience of possession increases or decreases the social capital of
28 Chapter Two

the medium (this is something we have been analyzing in the narratives of the
women up to this point); two, the ways in which a community organizes the
experience of distress and the management of crisis. How does a community
deal with individual expression, eccentricity, personal or social calamity?
We must also turn our attention to the function the one possessed plays in
the community.
Ghule speaks of the way in which the goddess’s shrine in her mother’s
house becomes the meeting place for many women who come with different
wishes, “Like mother’s colleagues come here and pray like, ‘may this happen
with me or that happen.’ Then after they pray and when they go from here,
it (the wish) gets fulfilled. Then they come of their own will and tell me, ‘I
said this to the goddess and it came true.’ [And] so on their own, they bring
coconuts and all as offerings for the goddess.”
Thus, while there are differences in individual experiences of possession,
there is also the shared experience of being the one marked, even specially
chosen, by the Other World where beings of preternatural status reside. This
is also something that needs to be taken on board to understand the phe-
nomena of possession; what we are referring to here is a human search for
the esoteric and extraordinary, and to bring it into the fold of everyday and
ordinary experience. What emerges is the way in which the mundane and the
transcendental are very much this worldly, rather than other worldly. That gap
is somewhat bridged through their grounded experiences that bring the self,
other, community, body, mind, spirit, etc., and all such divisions into the same
shared performance arena. Possession is very mundane in that sense, blending
into the everyday routines of the woman, family, and her local community. A
hyper-separation of the human and the divine is rejected in these narratives
of possession. For us, what has been interesting is the very “worldliness” of
gods, angels, jinns, demons, spirits, devis, etc., giving a more habitual ritual-
ized scope of incorporating the moral and spiritual, maybe also creative, ways
of dealing with life. Faith is healing in itself, and Devi-possession is one mo-
ment in the practice of faith-based healing. Faith healing, in turn, is part of
the corpus of the indigenous traditions in India geared toward understanding
and responding to pain, distress, and crisis. Belying the assumption that such
practices occur only in “backward, illiterate, rural or remote areas where there
is no development,” they are prevalent at large in urban spaces.

TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF

What connects the narratives of the Aradhis—Salve and Ghule—is that being
possessed allows them to feel that there is someone who accompanies them
wherever they go and can support them in whatever challenges of life they
 Devi Possession 29

face. Their resident spirit is a buffer between them and the misfortunes of life
and the spite of people around them. Salve expresses it very well,

I feel that I have somebody for me. What I can’t talk or share with anybody, I
can share in front of god. Sitting in front of you I can’t talk to you but I can talk
over there (in front of god), the thoughts I can share with her (god). Every word
of mine doesn’t become into reality, out of 10 times it may be true only for once.
If I am suffering a lot and if I say 10 words, then out of that one word will come
true. Or if I say something spontaneously to somebody, then it might come true.
[But] it is not the case that every utterance of mine will come true. God has to
look after the whole world, we are not the only ones.

It is particularly interesting to note that each of these women is more than

one in herself through her experience of possession. That is to say that her
experience of her own selfhood is manifestly plural; Davar puts this as the
Aradhi being a ‘virtual society of one person.’8 The medium is hosting one
or more spirit/deity and the relation of her conscious self to each inhabitant
spirit/deity is different. In fact, many mediums really do host more than one
spirit or deity within. To be inhabited by other perceived beings gives a relief
from self-responsibility all the time. To be somebody else, a more exalted,
powerful being, to occupy another ego for a while, is all part of the selfing
process. This was clear from Salve’s story; she hosted three goddesses inside
her body but had dedicated herself to the service of Bhavani-Aai first and was
less likely to perform all the rituals and pujas for Lakshmi-Aai and Shiva-
chi Aai who had come to her later. Thus, she would exert herself more for
Tuljabhavani but her expectations of this goddess were also more demanding.
From this we can imagine that the multiple selves of the one possessed are
also constantly in flux or are in transition depending on which stage she has
reached in realizing and expressing her relation to the Self. There have been
several theories proposed to discuss the relation of one to the Self; what it
amounts to is, in Michel Foucault’s words, a “Technology of the Self.”

Greek Askesis
Foucault calls the technology of the self that “which permit individuals to effect
by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on
their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to trans-
form themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom,
perfection, or immortality” (Foucault 1997). According to him, there were two
Greek principles in late antiquity that, although different, blend into each other:

• Epimelesthai sautou or “to take care of yourself,” “the concern with self,”
and
• Gnothi sauton or “know yourself.”
30 Chapter Two

Over time, in the west, these two principles were sundered and the sec-
ond stricture of gnothi sauton or “know the self” passed on into philosophy
through the Christian elucidation of it as exomologesis or “a ritual of recog-
nizing oneself as a sinner and a penitent” and thus the condition of knowledge
was asceticism. This is one route, while Foucault would like us to consider
one more that travels through “care of the self.” He says,

In Christianity asceticism always refers to a certain renunciation of the self and

of reality because most of the time your self is a part of that reality you have to
renounce in order to get access to another level of reality. This move to attain
the renunciation of the self distinguishes Christian asceticism.
In the philosophical tradition dominated by Stoicism, askesis means not
renunciation but the progressive consideration of self, or mastery over oneself,
obtained not through the renunciation of reality but through the acquisition and
assimilation of truth. It has as its final aim not preparation for another reality but
access to the reality of this world. (Foucault 1997: 238–39)

Foucault is inviting us to consider askesis as it comes to us from the Stoics,

as the philosophical burden of the subject, rather than the Delphic pronounce-
ment of “Know thyself” that becomes the theological burden under Chris-
tianity. Askesis does not necessarily mean the practice of self-denial. The
technology of the self that came to be almost exclusively practiced as self-
renunciation was the development of Christian asceticism. However, in its
other Greek context, the word simply meant exercise, as in training, practice,
or development. Foucault points out that exercising meant perfecting oneself,
developing one’s capacities, becoming who one is.

Buddhist Askesis
Obeyesekere (2002) develops the notion of the Buddhist askesis as a way to
both enrich and challenge Western thought, not because Western thought can
be overthrown in the social sciences to usher in the era of Asia by a simple
turn to culture, but because it can be revised and ameliorated. The Buddhist
ideal, mirrored in the Buddha myth, is theorized by Obeyesekere9 as a re-
nunciatory one in which deep meditative asceses10 open the way to salvation
(2002: 150). But what would social sciences do with salvation? It is necessary
here to disaggregate the concept of salvation and the actual phenomenon.
Obeyesekere uses Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist religion to open up
conceptuality, which is the very stuff of the social sciences.
According to Obeyesekere, the Buddha gave “primacy to knowledge ac-
quired through concentration which requires the abandonment and emptying
of the mind of discursive knowledge and its re-adoption after the experience
 Devi Possession 31

is over when he has to describe his experiences to his disciples or congrega-

tion” (2006: 20). The Buddha is a perfected being who willingly chooses to
live in the lower realm of the humans so as to impart his knowledge revealed
to him in visions, first when he observed the reality of the world and its suf-
fering through his own eyes in his foray outside the royal palace, and then as
a mendicant meditating under the Bodhi tree (the Peepal tree). These events
are two awakenings—one to the external reality and the other to an internal
reality, both of which come through the experience of visions. Obeyeskere
is conceptualizing that in the visionary experience of the Buddha, there is a
move from “it-thinking” to “I-thinking.” He turns to Nietzsche (1956: 24) to
conceptualize this move:

A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsifi-
cation of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the
predicate ‘think.’ It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is,
to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an immediate
certainty. (Obeseyekere 2006: 21)

There is an assumption that the “I” thinks and therefore there is the positing
of an ego as the agent that performs this function. It-thinking is characteristic
of only certain vital moments, like dreams and visions, hallucinations even.
In moments, it-thinking is like the function of the unconscious itself, but it-
thinking is the conceptuality of thinking itself, the thought of the thought.
This is the condition of the subject, which Lacan speaks of but in different
terms: “Even this between-the-two that opens up for us the apprehension of
the unconscious is of concern to us only in as much as it is designated for
us, through the instructions Freud left us, as that of which the subject has to
take possession” (Lacan 1977: 72). But what is “it”? It is not a being or an
entity, nor a location or a structure, very much like the mind. It is a function
that happens—it happens, thinking happens—outside of the subject’s agency,
or rather that agency isn’t the discourse of the subject11. This challenges the
Cartesian cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. At the least, moments of
it-thinking interrupt the (Cartesian) subject of its certainty of “being,” a being
that is premised on the condition of cogitation or conscious thinking. Obeye-
sekere’s intervention in this field, through the example of the Buddha, thus
displaces the conscious subject of the Enlightenment but also the unconscious
subject of Psychoanalysis.

Subaltern Askesis
This section argues that when psychoanalysis comes to India it confronts
something that does not conform to the canonical versions of religion, which
32 Chapter Two

psychoanalysis has always left out of its analyses. It shows that psychoanaly-
sis comes face-to-face with not Spirit but Self; not the transcendental Spirit
but the care of the self; not asceticism in the Christian tradition but subaltern
askesis. This is perhaps an opening to chart a relation between psychoanalysis
and religion in the cultural context of India, which is marked by a sensibility
that cuts across the usual ways of looking at religion and science, which have
become as if the questions of the East and West, respectively. We have tried
to read Devi-possession as a form of subaltern12 askesis.
The Aradhi’s possession of/by the Devi does not need to take recourse to
renunciation of desires and other earthly considerations but to negotiate with
them; rather than casting away her human bonds to other people, she becomes
a vital force in the community.
Thus, the Buddha as the Awakened One who moves between it-thinking
and I-thinking is a far cry from the narratives of the ones discussed in section
II, but we can see that in the case of the narratives of Salve and Ghule, (Devi)
possession is caught up in the discourses of mental health and illness. Juxta-
posed on the tropes of the “mad” and the “divine,” how can we understand
possession? Sudhir Kakar invokes the transcendental and mystical aspects of
“the spiritual” in Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World
(2008). Transcendence has been traditionally ascribed to the great “Awak-
ened Ones” like the Buddha or Osho. The Awakened Ones, to borrow the
term for Obeyesekere (2012), have grasped the reality of karma and rebirth,
and use it to bring our attention to the momentary point in time and space
when we have the choice to act virtuously, thereby changing forever the
course of moral actions. In his work on such personages, Kakar positions the
psychic as against the spiritual, which

“Incorporates the transformative possibilities of the human psyche: total love

without a trace of hate, selflessness carved out of the psyche’s normal self-
centeredness, a fearlessness that is not counter-phobic reaction to the fear that
is innate part of the human psyche. Yet spiritual transformation is not a once
forever achievement, even in case of enlightened spiritual masters and saints. It
remains constantly under threat of the darker forces of the psyche. One is never
not human. (2008: 5, italics in original)

In the narratives of the Aradhis, one could trace the negotiation between
the sacred and the profane being enacted, which is also the move between
spiritual striving for transcendence and the human condition of being bogged
down by the “darker forces of the psyche.” In the case of Salve and Ghule,
they would casually refer to the devotional work of an Aradhi; mediums to
the goddess must devote a great deal of time and labor to the care of the god-
dess, from dressing her to feeding her, sometimes for several hours every day.
 Devi Possession 33

The realm of the sacred demands exact care and promptitude. Furthermore,
the pujas and rituals may require financial resources that are already scarce
within the family. There are also other prohibitions and restrictions the devo-
tee must adhere to; the medium may not remarry, and during holy times of
the year not indulge in sex with their husbands. Menstruation in women can
cause a great deal of disturbance in their lives. Ghule tells us what happens if
she inadvertently touches another woman who is menstruating:

If suppose someone is menstruating and touches me, then what happens is that
my body starts itching, my head will ache, I will behave like mad, I will fight
again and again, will not talk properly to anyone till they bathe me with rose
water, gomutra [cow’s urine], neem leaves, haldi kumkum [turmeric]. Then I
feel very light, relieved that everything is gone.

This is the realm of the profane. Even the shadow of the woman menstruat-
ing must not fall on the idol of the goddess, for the sake of maintaining her
purity and sanctity. The Aradhi shifts between moments of transcendence
(the experience of possession by the goddess) and moments of immanence
(menstruation as defiling). Her transcendence is never complete since the
monthly cycle of menstruation will bring back to the mundane matters of this
world; “one is never not human.” Nevertheless, her attempt at transcendence
is so valuable to herself and the community that the women around her will
voluntarily not intrude upon her when they are menstruating.
Kakar brings the psychic battle within the subject to the spiritual quest of
the human. He distinguishes between “unitive imagination” and “connec-
tive imagination”; unitive imagination succeeds at uniting the knower and
the known and constitutes “an end point of a spectrum, accessible only to
individuals with extraordinary spiritual gifts” (Kakar 2008: 154) but it is
connective imagination that is the attraction of religious practices in which
“[an] imaginative world is created [that] is both shared and public in that it
is based upon, guided and formed by the symbolic, iconic network of [ . . . ]
religious culture” (p. 155). Thus connective imagination can be linked to the
phenomenon of possession that is an integral part of everyday occurrences of
India, reminding us that there exists “a god of small things” as well as subal-
tern practices of possession in a slum in Pune.
Nonetheless, Kakar sees spirituality as a possible expression of creativity
and wonder. However, for the practice to be asketic, transformation of the
self is meant not only as the result of the quest but the ethical condition for
the subject-medium of possession. What if the experiencing of possession of
the Aradhi is their relation to the question of Self and not Spirit? Within the
West, there are two trajectories as Foucault has shown—one that goes the
route of asceticism and will contend with the concept of the Spirit, the other
34 Chapter Two

that follows the route of askesis and will deal with the concept of the Self.
We would like to suggest that these cultural and religious practices living
and thriving in one corner of the East are one form of askesis that is geared
toward transformation of the Self of the medium-subject to access the truth
of her being in the world. If askesis is transformatory work on the self, the
Aradhi is performing this exercise by hosting more than one self and speaking
in other voices, which also means to host the differences and contradictions
multiplicity brings. The Self of the Aradhi is as chaotic as the body politic
of the nation.

CONCLUSION

Does the subaltern practice of Devi-possession come within the fold of

religion? This is a religion without a canon or the text; the Aradhi herself
speaks to the community in the voice of the Goddess. In this woman-to-
woman relation, Aradhi–Guru-aai–Devi, the priestly class cannot intervene.
The power dynamics between Aradhis and their husbands are reconfigured.
There is another relation to the Other and the Self. At once, the practice sets
up a religion without Religion as it has been understood, as well as a politics
of relating that will not become the politics of the University, Science, or
the State. It will require perhaps the birthing of a psychoanalysis that can
respond to the woman’s work on the self, the care of the self she is evolving.
This is a psychoanalysis that will need to orient itself to technologies of the
self hitherto overlooked. Or is psychoanalysis itself a technology of the self,
as Foucault (1982/2005) suggests in Hermeneutics of the Subject? How does
psychoanalysis make sense of subaltern askesis in India? What are the con-
ceptual detours psychoanalysis itself requires to make sense of such subaltern
askesis? What psychoanalysis does subaltern askesis give birth to?

NOTES

1. The interviews were conducted between August and September, 2011, by Dee-
pali Deshmukh, and Swati Shinde through the help of an interview guide prepared
by the co-author of this chapter, and as a part of a larger project on “Mental Health
and Development.” The project took into consideration the profile of the respondents
from basic demographics to a more nuanced inquiry into the respondent’s social net-
work. The interview guide focused on the journey the respondent underwent in her
experience of getting possessed, in terms of the personal (bodily and emotional), the
familial, and the communitarian; the attempt was to understand how the experience of
possession interrupted and intervened in the life of the respondent, its positive and/or
 Devi Possession 35

negative consequences as well as the ordinary and/or extraordinary aspects of being

possessed by a being considered superior to the self. There was also a preliminary at-
tempt to tease out the legends and myths that surround such beings and the part they
play in human affairs. This chapter discusses some of the ideas that were exchanged
between the authors to this chapter, over several months.
2. Names have been changed to protect identities of those cited in the interview.
3. The goddess Bhavani whose temple is in Tuljapur, Maharashtra, is called
Tuljabhavani by devotees.
4. The Jogatis in Maharashtra are devotees to the goddess Yellamma, a Hijra
community whose tradition of being dedicated to the goddess has been likened to the
Devadasi tradition.
5. Potraj in Maharashtra are devotees of the goddess Lakshmi who perform acts
of devotion in public spaces or community events to earn a living.
6. “The real meaning of the term Matang,” according to researcher [Sakate], “is
the son of the earth—the one who is brave and powerful. However, with the passage
of time the meaning is degraded and Mang is taken to be the one who indulges into
unfair deeds and the one who asks for food” (Sakate, 2010).
7. Sakate (2010) recounts the origin myth of the Matang people: “A myth goes
like this, when the lord Brahma started creating the universe, his work was hampered
by the winged horses. Consequently the making of universe was impeded. By that
time the Lord Mahadeo created the first ‘Mang.’ He was ‘Madhya’ [medium] after
which the whole universe was created. In short, the Mangs have contributed in the
creation of universe and he was created by the Lord Mahadeo himself.” This myth
requires to be fleshed out, the task of another research project in the future.
8. Voice-hearing people who have supportive or comforting voices do speak
about the “blessing” of being more than one within oneself, and to have “on call”
support so to speak!
9. This is the form of Buddhism popular in Sri Lanka, more particularly the
Sinhalese.
10. Obeyeskere has styled the spelling as ascesis. However we will be using
askesis, from the Foucauldian tradition, also to differentiate conceptually askesicism
and asceticism. The Buddhist askesis is ascetic and renunciatory according to Obeye-
skere. Asceses thus seems to combine askesicism and asceticism.
11. For instance, Oedipus’s predicament is not an issue of agency. In trying to
escape the prophecy of the Oracle, Oedipus fulfills it. To see this as the problem
of whether the human has free will or not misses the psychoanalytic moment of the
unconscious.
12. Subaltern, in the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is a position with-
out identity, or where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the
formation of a recognizable basis of action (An Aesthetic Education in the Era of
Globalization; Harvard University Press; 2012: 431). She warns us that we should
not be too quick to classify the subaltern: “Subaltern content takes on identity, names
itself “people.” People becomes a slogan too quickly. [ . . . ] outside of such politics,
subalternization does not stop” (p. 432–433). I heed this warning as that subalternity
cannot be made into a political call for action, or at least not the political in any con-
ventional sense.
36 Chapter Two

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Foucault, M. The hermeneutics of the subject: Lectures at the College de France
1981–1982. Burchell, G. (Trans.). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Foucault, M. “Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.” In The essential works of Michel Fou-
cault (1954-1984), Robert Hurley (Trans.), edited by Paul Rabineau, New Press:
New York Press, 1997.
Freud, S. “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.” In The standard edition
of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey
(Trans.). London: Hogarth, 1957 [1923].
Freud, S. The future of an illusion. London: Penguin, 2008 [1927].
Kakar, S. Mad and divine: Spirit and psyche in the modern world. New Delhi: Pen-
guin, 2008.
Lacan, J. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: Seminar XI. London: W.
W. Norton, 1977.
Nietzsche, F. Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future. R. J. Hol-
ligdale (Trans.). New Delhi: Penguin, 2003 [1956].
Obeyesekere, G. “Asian Studies and the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In What
about Asia: Revisiting Asian Studies, 15–29, edited by Josine Stremmelaar and
Paul van der Velde. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
Obeyesekere, G. Imagining karma: Ethical transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist,
and Greek rebirth. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California
Press, 2002.
Obeyesekere, G. The awakened ones: Phenomenology of visionary experience. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Sakate, M. D. A sociological study of Matang community in Maharashtra. Doctoral
dissertation. 2010. Available on Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET. Retrieved
from http://hdl.handle.net/10603/10010.
Sebastia, B. Restoring mental health in India: Pluralistic therapies and concepts.
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sachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012.
 Chapter Three

Of Mothers and Therapists

Dreaming the Indian Infant
Urvashi Agarwal

This chapter brings to focus two ideas central to the work with patients with
severe pathology, for example, psychotic and borderline states.1 Before I put
forth the ideas, I would like to add that I see this chapter as a continuation
and an elaboration of an earlier paper, The uncomfortable subject: Observing
the Indian girl child (Agarwal & Paiva 2014) which focused on an experi-
ence of infant observation. The paper explored how the observation of the
mother-daughter couple brought up acute emotions for the observer and how
she was able to use these feelings to understand not only what was happening
between the mother and the infant, but also could come to an understanding
of her own infantile parts. That paper, apart from highlighting the girl child
in India, touched upon the idea of the formless, nonverbal, infantile feelings
and the importance and value of counter-transference in working with these
kinds of feelings. I also see this work as a precursor of, and a foundation to,
a work which would address the centrality of the body, and how it is through
our bodily experiences that we begin to get located in our minds. I will briefly
come back to this point toward the end of this chapter.
In this chapter I will explicate the idea that infantile feelings are raw,
formless, acute, and cannot be represented. They often elude language and,
in this sense, the body and bodily expressions and enactments become the
only way to present, represent, and access them. The second idea that I will
take up is that of the value and integrity of counter-transference in working
with borderline and psychotic states. These states are regressed states, and
the anxieties and needs of the patient are heavily infantile. In order to make
sense of, engage, contain, and possibly work through some of these feelings,
the therapist must not only be in touch with her own infantile feelings, and

37
38 Chapter Three

be constantly attuned to her own bodily reactions and responses, but also be
open to not knowing, and allow herself to be changed by the therapeutic pro-
cess that takes place between her and the patient.
For this, I will describe how the experience of infant observation helped
me understand the nature of infantile anxieties and feelings and come closer
to them in my own self. This experience helped me to make sense of, and
changed my work with my patient(s) who presented psychotic and borderline
states. I will describe some of my clinical work with the patient(s) to show
how, when I became aware of my own infantile parts, I was able to receive
those patients differently, and more importantly, show how work with them
changed me as well.

THE INFANT AND THE BODY

As infants, the care that we receive and need is mostly of our physical and
bodily self, in terms of feeding, bathing, diaper changes, and sleep. In carrying
out these tasks, the mother or the primary caregiver holds the baby, soothes
her, touches her, and it is through these interactions between the mother and
the baby, that they come to recognize each other. Thus at the earliest stage,
the body is primary and is the medium of communication between the mother
and the baby, for example through the skin and the mouth. Thus what we re-
member is not images but textures and sounds and smells and tastes and these
remain embedded in us. These memories are bodily memories, hard to access.
One of the foremost thinkers about early infancy is Donald Winnicott
(1991). Winnicott, a pediatrician trained as a psychoanalyst, has described
infancy in detail, exploring the unique relationship between the mother and
the infant, and its importance for healthy emotional development and the ma-
ternal function. Winnicott writes that the self of the infant develops through
a handling and holding of the infant such that the psychical and the somatic
become intricately linked. For Winnicott, the fantasy, abstract ideas, and the
self all had somatic origins. “[T]he basis of self forms on the fact of the body
which, being alive, not only has shape but which also functions” (Goldman
1993, p. xvi). When I read Winnicott, what becomes clear is how the somatic
and the psychical are not separate and how not only does the somatic feed
the psychical but “every function is elaborated in the psyche, and even at the
beginning there is fantasy belonging to the excitement and the experience of
feeding” (Winnicott 1991, p. 53). His writings bring to us how infants might
experience their bodily needs. For example, he says that at the time when the
baby is hungry, “he is a bundle of discontent, a human being to be sure, but
one who has raging lions and tigers inside him. And is almost certainly scared
 Of Mothers and Therapists 39

of his own feelings . . . if you fail him it must feel to him as if the wild beasts
will gobble him up” (Winnicott 1991, p. 23).
Thus, Winnicott describes the infant as a bundle of instincts and it is only
through the relationship with the facilitating presence of maternal care that
the infant begins to develop his ego and eventually a self and relationship to
another. In the beginning, the mother, by her perfect attunement to the infant,
allows the baby to deal with the unthinkable anxiety that it stays at the edge
of because of the experience of an infiniteness of the anxiety. Slowly, the
matrix of the maternal environment allows the infant to begin to deal with the
failures of attunement, and it is in these gaps that reality potentially emerges.

THE PSYCHOTIC AND BORDERLINE STATES,

INFANTILE FEELINGS AND THE BODY

In the earliest phase of life, the infant and the mother form an inseparable
dyad. For the infant, any break in continuity of its being, whether it is hunger
or any other kind of impingement, is experienced as acute anxiety. This anxi-
ety is too much for the infant to bear and it is the mother’s body and mind
that serve as containers for his anxiety. The warmth of the mother’s body, the
textures, and the smells, all serve a containing function. Andre Green refers
to the mother’s body as a “framing structure” (Delourmel 2013) that contains
and gradually allows for the development of thinking, and for a thought pro-
cess to develop. The infant projects his or her needs and anxieties onto the
mother, who holds these for the infant and reflects feelings back to the infant,
in a way that she or he is not overwhelmed by them. This communication
between the mother and the infant is a felt communication. It is this that the
infant internalizes slowly, and this forms the basis of healthy emotional de-
velopment, and builds in the infant, and later the adult, the capacity to manage
feelings and anxieties.
In my experience with patients who present psychotic and borderline
states, there is usually a history of disturbance in early relationships. These
disturbances can take various forms, whether it is premature separation from
the mother, separations which were felt to be abandonments or rejection of
the self. For others, despite the maternal presence, the mother’s mind was
inaccessible; something that is often true with mothers suffering from post-
partum depression. In such cases, there is no active engagement with the
mother and the mother is unable to hold the infant in her mind. Without this
sense of being held, not just physically but psychically as well, the infant is
left to manage his or her own anxieties. At the same time, many times the
40 Chapter Three

mother’s presence is overbearing, such that the child continues to be an exten-

sion of the mother in a way that his or her own self fails to take shape.
The nature of infantile feelings is such that, though they are present in
all of us, they are nearly impossible to represent. However, in working with
psychotic and borderline states, we find ourselves in the presence of these
feelings. Winnicott has written about this and he says “the intensity of infant
feelings recurs in the intensity of the suffering associated with psychotic
symptoms. The infant’s preoccupation with feelings of a certain type, at a cer-
tain moment, reappears in the ill person’s preoccupation with fear of grief.”
(Winnicott 1991, p. 50).
In my clinical work, I have found that for some patients to put into words
what they are grieving is impossible. Very often, these patients come with
dissociated states or blankness and an inability to be alive to experiences and
feelings. The experience of the loss itself remains unlived, undreamt.
Working with patients who are non-neurotic is fraught with many difficul-
ties. I have had experience of long-term work with two such patients and
a shorter ongoing relationship with two more patients, all of whom can be
considered to fall in the category of borderline and psychotic. Here I am using
the definition of “borderline” defined by Green (Kohon 1999, pg. 37) as the
patient who belongs neither with the neurotics nor with the psychotics. Due
to constraints of confidentiality, I am unable to present in full my experience
with these patients. This was also my first engagement with anxieties which
were psychotic in nature and through the work, I grew much in my under-
standing of not only these states but of myself as well.
In this work and through my subsequent engagements with these states, I
came upon a particular fantasy in these patients. They find it difficult to have
a relationship with another person, and often the relationship that is formed
is tenacious, denies the reality of another person, and is based on a fantasy
of fusion with another. Separation is impossible to conceive, and there is a
great fear of it, as if separation means a loss of parts or an annihilation of
themselves. At the same time, there is a fear of loss of identity through fusion,
and dependency is terrifying to acknowledge and accept. The experience of
maternal containment, of mirroring, as well as curiosity and engagement—all
essential for us to know the self and to develop a relationship with our own
subjectivity—were missing for these people. Further, in order to relate to
other people, it is important to recognize one’s own subjectivity and to see
the other person too as a subjective being and not as an object. Thus, each
separation, whether it is the end of a session, or a vacation break, is hard to
negotiate and can be felt as rejection and abandonment. The security that the
other will keep them in mind is not there, and the internalization of the thera-
pist’s continuing presence also takes a long time to develop, if ever.
 Of Mothers and Therapists 41

Along with the fantasy of fusion, there exists a fantasy of omnipotent

control. For example, just as we imagine the baby to have the fantasy that it
has created the breast to meet its need, the fantasy here is that the therapist
is, and should be, available at all times. Contact outside of sessions is often
sought. In such cases, establishment of boundaries and maintaining the set-
ting becomes foremost and it is most often attacked. Any reminder, whether
implicit through the setting or stated in words, that the therapist and the pa-
tient are two separate beings is terrifying and can lead to anger and rage, often
expressed through devaluation of the work and the therapist, and through
missing of sessions.
The self, as well as the other, are experienced as split into good and bad
and thus there are constant shifts between idealization and devaluation.
There is also a movement between experiencing the self as bad, toxic, and
having paranoid anxieties of being attacked, watched, and manipulated by
the outside world. Often these stem from perceiving one’s own feelings
as acute and overwhelming—since the capacity to contain and hold these
anxieties is not developed—having never had a good experience of con-
tainment. I also feel that these patients experience their own feelings as so
destructive that they feel convinced that they could destroy the other. At the
same time, they might believe that their existence is only to the extent of be-
ing an object to the other, to being used. At the root of this fantasy is often
the experience of having had to deal with the mother’s own overwhelming
and unheld anxieties and feelings, and the infant-child had to adapt their
being in a way that suited and held the mother, rather than it being the other
way around.
I realize that patients with borderline and/or psychotic features are for-
midably attuned to the emotions of the other and their ability to identify the
other’s feelings is nearly uncanny. Whether it was sometimes my feelings of
anger or irritability, or when I would become defensive against the questions
about me, the patient would know the feeling. Yet there is a near blindness to
one’s own feelings. What I did realize was that rather than protect the analytic
space from these emotions and feelings, and to keep them away, I had to use
them as tools to understand the patient’s world of emotions, which was with-
out words and had no form. Many patients, especially those who are neurotic
in their presentation, have a story to tell about their lives, memories to share
and remember, and some sense of themselves that they carry. However, psy-
chotic individuals have lost the relationship to their own inner world, such
that what they present is a certain blankness—about their feelings as well as
memories. The feelings that I was experiencing in the sessions were often
feelings that the patients were unable to feel, or were feeling but were unable
to know or recognize as theirs, and to accept them.
42 Chapter Three

Every individual is unique. Even if we might categorize a patient, his or her

struggle will remain unique. Thus, what gets evoked in us with each person is
different and unique. I may have explored many parts of myself and yet find
myself in unknown territory with every new patient. In my work I discovered
my own states of blankness, withdrawal, and a desire to numb myself to the
onslaught of emotions. I always had difficulty in trusting my knowledge of
my emotions and, when one of the patients came for the first time with the
presenting problem of not feeling, I knew deep down that this work would
be a challenge for me, for someone like me who too struggled with not feel-
ing. However, at a conscious level it seems that I was unable to recognize
the similarity that lay between the patient and me. How could we be similar?
Now, I see how many of the fears and fantasies I have come upon are fanta-
sies I can identify in myself.
At the beginning, I often found myself at a loss. The setting and rules often
became a source of refuge. At other times, I found the therapeutic space to be
like a battlefield. Through my hurt, anger, sadness, confusions, boredom, and
feelings of being intruded on and manipulated, I realized how often we also
play into the patient’s fantasy of being available and to meet every need. My
defensiveness also arose from my guilt, as if the patient’s accusations that I
was not good enough, that I was like the devil and was purposely torturing
them, were actually true. As if I did have the power to give all that they need.
Writing on the dependency needs present in such patients, H. Searles puts it
as a wish for an omnipotent control that leads to feelings of grandiosity such
that what the patient might be saying is “if you would only give me enough,
I could assume my rightful place of omnipotence in the Universe” rather than
saying “I need you as a little child needs its mother.” (Searles 1965, p. 121)
Searles also says that “to the schizophrenic there is no distinction between
feeling and acting in the sense that he assumes that a dependency desire on
his part, for instance, to suck on the therapist’s breasts or penis will inevi-
tably lead him to attempt this in action. He senses that the therapist would
respond with hostility to such a move.” (Searles 1965, p. 121) Taking from
Searles’s thought, I would say that there were many occasions in my ses-
sions when fantasies did not remain fantasies for the patient, and were felt
as concretely real. My understanding of many of the fantasies, anxieties, and
feelings that I understood and have elaborated above, came through how I felt
in the sessions with the patient, where the transference was heavily erotic and
the needs acutely infantile. The feelings that were felt by me, my own and
the patient’s dissociated, undigested feelings, were felt even before I could
come to thinking about them. The patient’s need for and demand on me was
often physical, in terms of touch: a need to touch and to be touched. I did not
remain a whole person but it was my parts of my body, clothes, and objects,
 Of Mothers and Therapists 43

that became erotically charged, and which I saw as the desire for the mother’s
body, without there being a representation of it.
Another patient brought abstract thoughts, philosophy, and theories to the
sessions. My feeling with her was that I did not matter. Often I felt intimi-
dated by the iron-clad control she displayed. For a long time, I felt that noth-
ing was happening in the sessions. In the sessions that followed, I can only
recall a few sessions where I could see her feel any of the emotions which she
was talking about. She would talk about times when she was so distressed that
she could cry, but would not. Many times I felt that I was getting sucked into
an intellectual, abstract vortex with her and colluded with her desire to not
come very close to feelings. Understanding came too early, too fast, and left
little space for her own feelings. I said to her “I have not heard the angry you.
I am curious to know that person. Maybe others also wonder who this larger
than life person is.” She said that she was not being fake but she would still
put on a smile for the other and not let her true feelings show. I felt that this
is what was happening even in the sessions. I felt that what she also conveyed
through her smile was that “I am perfect and fine and the madness lies in you,
who is the other.”
And many times this is how I would end up feeling—somewhat mad. Other
than the boredom, I would usually find myself confused and slightly disori-
ented in the sessions. Trying to keep track of what she was saying was not
always easy, not because the content was too much or there was something
in the manner of her talking, but I felt that there was a general disconnect be-
tween the things that she spoke about. I think it was also likely that there was
a disconnect between what she was feeling and what she was expressing, or,
more likely, that the content was stripped of feelings. Often in the sessions,
I found her using the phone. In these moments, I would feel that she did not
really care for what I was saying and I wondered if she even heard what I
was saying to her.
For this patient there was a history of continuous sexual abuse at a very
young age. No one in the family was aware of it. These memories were
present but were lifeless and stripped of all emotions. My sense in the ses-
sions was that attempts at thinking were actually being blocked. Sometimes
analysis can itself feel like an invasion, and the disorganization that we keep
ourselves in, is in the service of fending off any organization that may lead
to an elaboration of thinking and feelings, and possibly reawaken memories
and associated feelings of trauma. As our work progressed, my continuous
feeling was that there was something happening in the sessions, but I was
unable to know what it was. I felt that it was like a pressure cooker waiting
to be released. While there were many missed sessions, what I began to note
was that she was seeking out a large number of boys for sexual contact and
44 Chapter Three

intimacy. Most of these contacts were virtual but with some of them, she also
had a sexual relationship. She went from one relationship to another, without
any acknowledgement of its effect on her, and as if one was easily replaced
by another. It was not about the persons as much as about the body. So much
was happening outside the sessions, and I felt that this was an acting out of
that which was not getting addressed and lived out in the sessions. The turn-
ing point of the work was when I, in one session, wondered if what she was
feeling for me, was anger at not recognizing and responding to her need to be
seen and held. She said that she experienced me as cold and indifferent and
what she was not getting in the sessions from me, was what she was seeking
outside.
The confusion I felt in the sessions with her was perhaps the confusion she
was also living daily. The indifference that I felt in her toward me was how
she had experienced the world around her as a child. Indifferent and unable
to see what was happening to her. Despite the helplessness that she felt in the
sessions, she was anything but helpless. Her control unnerved me. The will
and tenacity that she showed in her communications was, I think, her way of
overcoming the absence of her mother. In what she spoke about the mother,
she repeatedly pointed out that the mother never took any decisions and al-
ways referred everything to the father. What I sensed was a frustration she
felt in seeing the mother as being voiceless. But her own identity was fragile.
Both separation and fusion were acutely anxious positions and she struggled
to be indifferent and invulnerable to the world around her, even though it was
at a heavy price—at the cost of her own sense of feeling real. Reality would
destroy the other, but in this process she had given up a relationship to her
reality.

THE “UNLIVED” AND “UNDREAMT”

Toward the end of his life, Winnicott wrote a paper, possibly an incomplete
one, “Fear of Breakdown” (1974), that was published only after his death.
Winnicott’s paper is a beautiful piece of writing that is tentative, exploring,
and talks about a fear of a breakdown, but is not clear what this breakdown is.
Through his reading and re-reading of this paper, Thomas Ogden understands
this to mean that what Winnicott is referring to is to a “breakdown that has
already happened” (Ogden 2014, p.7), but has “not yet been experienced”
(Ogden 2014, p.7), that is to say that “we have ways of experiencing or not
experiencing the events of our lives” (Ogden 2014, p. 7).
What makes these papers remarkable is that they address early life trauma
and experiences that were too much for the infant’s psyche to elaborate and
 Of Mothers and Therapists 45

represent and were subsequently repressed. The impact of these experiences

is, then, not always possible to “remember.” As Ogden points out, Winnicott
in his paper is trying to extend the conception of the unconscious to include
“registrations of events that have occurred, but have not been experienced
. . . (and refers to) the aspect of the individual that carries one’s unassimi-
lated traumatic experience, one’s ‘undreamt dreams’” (Ogden 2014, p.9).
As long as the ego is not able to gather the original experience into its own
present-time experience and into omnipotent control, the experience cannot
be forgotten.
The therapeutic setting is one space where the living and dreaming of the
experience can happen, with the analyst. As long as we carry a sense of an
unlived life, we will not be able to feel complete, and all of us, according to
Ogden, carry this universal need in ourselves to “re-claim, or claim for the
first time what he has lost of himself and, in doing so, take the opportunity
to become the person he still holds the potential to be” (Ogden 2014, p. 10).
In this sense, Winnicott’s conception is closer to the French Psychosomatic
School, who believe that unlived experience, that which is not elaborated in
the psyche, is relegated to the body and may manifest as a somatic illness or
perversion.
This process of claiming the unlived parts of one’s experience is a pain-
ful process because it involves experiencing the pain of the breakdown and
of the primitive agony that results from the breakdown, which had not been
experienced the first time, and had caused the person to become a stranger
to himself or herself, to lose important aspects of self. While we may appear
to others and ourselves to be psychologically healthy, “there are important
ways in which we are not capable of being alive to our experience, whether
that be the experience of joy, or the ability to love one or all our children, or
the capacity to be generous to the point of giving something highly important
to us, or the capacity to forgive someone (including ourselves) who has done
something that has hurt us profoundly, or to simply feel alive to the world
around us and within us” (Ogden 2014, p. 11).
All of us make compromises in living. To live, we sacrifice some knowl-
edge of pain and suffering that we go through in the ordinary moments of life.
If we were unable do this, living itself would come under threat. But for some
people this compromise is too heavy. What they sacrifice is not just pain but
a relationship to the self, a continuity that makes them know themselves, an
aliveness that allows them to feel human, and a relationship to reality that
validates and creates experiences. What we are left with is a living that feels
incomplete, where experiences fail to come alive and the sense of self not
only comes under attack but is constantly questioned and felt to be without
an authenticity.
46 Chapter Three

AN EXPERIENCE OF INFANT OBSERVATION

As part of my training program I was expected to do infant observation for

two semesters. Infant observation involves observing an infant in his or her
family. It is recommended that we start observation from birth up to about
six months or a year. This involves setting up observation with a family and
visiting them once every week at a fixed time, and then afterwards writing in
detail what one observes of the baby. The experience of infant observation
was particularly difficult for me. It felt to me that the mother, for whom this
baby (Jaya) was the second child (her first was a son), was less attuned to
Jaya’s needs, and it seemed that she had a difficulty in keeping the baby in
mind. There were various factors which perhaps affected their relationship,
including what I thought was the gender of the baby, the mother’s own infan-
tile anxieties that came to the forefront in looking after a baby girl, and the
lack of familial support. However, infant observation is based primarily on
the observations of the observer and on how she feels while she is observing.
The observer becomes a container of many projections and at the same time
her own infantile anxieties may be powerfully evoked.
I experienced difficulty in setting up observations, and each week felt like
starting all over again, introducing myself over and over again. Eventually
after the first three visits, I did not go back to the house for four months and
it was only when I was able to process my distress at being in the house, be-
cause of what I observed, that I was able to contact the family again. I realized
that I had felt ignored; I felt the mother did not keep me in mind. When I look
back at my experience of the observations, I have this gnawing sense that
my presence in the house was barely registered. When I explore this feeling
further I realize that this feeling is most acute vis-à-vis the mother.
I think this experience then was significant for me in several respects. The
profound distress that I experienced during the observations and my subse-
quent inability to go back to the observation setting came to my notice more
sharply because of the persistent discomfort and irritability that I felt during
the infant observation seminars and later in writing about it. Clearly, there
was a reason this was becoming so difficult. I knew I was identifying with the
infant—the helplessness that I experienced her as feeling and her rejection,
which was reflected in her mother’s lack of attunement. For the first time, I
became aware, acutely so, of the infant that I was. That before I became an
adult, I was an infant. But this is a matter of fact. Why then do I need to state
it like this? Maybe because the infant me feels like another existence—an-
other person. As I become curious, I search for memories—what I come upon
is only a mass of sensations, formless yet full.
 Of Mothers and Therapists 47

Winnicott says early descriptions of body states also become like early
descriptions of emotional states. There is no thought and they exist at the
level of sensations (Winnicott 1991). So these parts exist in me, so familiar
yet so forgotten, in my bones and in my body and it is this which has allowed
me to think about the infant that I was, the girl child that I became and the
woman that I am.
Rustin says that “where the choice has already been made (to be a thera-
pist), the exposure to intense feelings, the impact of feeling oneself drawn
into an emotional force-field and struggling to hold one’s balance and sense
of self, the encounter with the probably unfamiliar confusion and power of
infantile emotional life, are especially valuable aspects of infant observation
for beginning therapists” (Rustin 1989, p.8).
Antonella Sansone in her book Working with Parents and Infants: A Mind
Body Integration Approach (2007) writes that one of the most important
aspects of infant observation is the impact it has on the observer’s emotional
life. In newborns we see the most vulnerable state of a human. This can make
infant observation a hard experience, but also valuable, as it prepares the ob-
server for re-experiencing the intense feelings of primal life . . . The capacity
to “feel,” to “listen” to the body’s feelings, to “think” about them, and to give
them “meaning” leads to an integrated psyche soma in the observer and the
prospective clinician. (Sansone 2007, p.139) She further writes that “you can
think about feelings if you can truly experience them with all your body. This
kind of mental frame requires a capacity to tolerate anxiety, uncertainties,
fear, helplessness, and discomfort. A therapist needs these capacities to make
the psychotherapeutic work effective” (Sansone 2007, p. 142)

(AT)TUNING IN AND USING THE COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE

In work with severely disturbed patients, as in infant observation, the trans-

ference and counter-transference matrix is swamped with primitive, infantile
feelings. Just as the presence of the maternal mind is essential for the diges-
tion and internalizing of these feelings for the infant, the therapist’s mind
also has to become an accessible maternal space to hold the infant patient.
Psychoanalysis is a unique form of treatment. In treatment, the therapist-
patient’s relationship becomes the route for the powerful fantasies, patterns,
and feelings to emerge, to be felt and in course to be thought through. Adam
Phillips, in his introduction to “Wild Analysis,” a collection of papers writ-
ten by Freud, writes “psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to
each other if they agree not to have sex” (Phillips 2002, p. xx). However,
48 Chapter Three

for the most part Freud considered counter-transference to be something that

interfered with the treatment process and something that needed to be kept
out of the therapy. As psychoanalytic understanding and writing has grown,
there has been a recognition of counter-transference as being integral to the
treatment process. I feel that in working with patients, especially those who
are severely disturbed, whose sense of self is poorly developed, patients
who can be categorized as psychotic or borderline, counter-transference
becomes the key to gaining awareness of the psychic self of the patient. In
these patients, it is not only that the link to the reality and self that is broken,
but more often the self is not there to be found. In other words, the task of
therapy is no longer to uncover the unconscious, but it needs to concentrate
on helping the patient form representations for that which is present and that
which is absent.
In psychoanalytic therapy, it is through the unique relationship with the
therapist that many of us find ourselves finally being able to mourn. Inside
the therapy room, time moves differently. The means and end of the work
is affects. The past and the present intertwine, like the many creepers on
the forest floor. Feelings that have become muffled and lost in the present
are dangerously, longingly, alive in the past. Therapy seeks to unearth these
feelings and to help the person in the here and now feel the person he or she
was in the past. The task of the therapist is balancing the health and the mad-
ness of the patient, to see the meaning behind madness, not to take away the
madness. It is in this process that we help the patient to form a relationship
to his own madness and through that to himself. Often the trap we fall into is
to explain away the madness and in this process create a further dissociation
between the patient and his or her inner world. As a patient myself, I have
often expected therapy to help me recover memories that would explain how
I was, and therapy becomes a search for answers or a process of forming
links. However, while therapy is both, a search as well as a process of forming
links, I think it is more than anything else a space that allows for feelings to
be lived. Therapy is as much about the story the patient brings to us as about
how he talks and does not talk of the story.
Delourmel, writing on Green’s work, says that the work of analysis and the
patients’ incapacity to use this work is a traumatic experience, and one which
is kept at bay by “resistances which immobilize their psychic life and which
they will maintain as long as they are convinced that only this state of non-
life has the power to prevent the danger of a mental breakdown” (Delourmel
2013, p. 153). He further writes how the traumatic experience is actually a
repetition of infantile reactions and “the traumatic return of this return of the
past stems from the fact that the traces inscribed in the mind at a time when
‘the infant could hardly speak’ could not be constituted into memory traces,
 Of Mothers and Therapists 49

and have therefore remained unpresentable and inaccessible to memory”

(Delourmel 2013, p.153).
Ogden (2014) says that Winnicott (1974), in his paper “Fear of Break-
down,” has written how the only way to allow the patient to experience
breakdown is through transference and counter-transference. Winnicott says
that only a therapist, who has experienced her own madness and known it,
can help a patient to live the unlived (Ogden 2014). Further, Fisher (2006),
writing on the K function, says “the opening up of the analyst to the emo-
tional experience of wanting to know the patient, thus making possible by
the patient’s internalization of this relationship, a wanting to know, and be-
ing able, to know oneself, is surely the essence of psychoanalysis.” (p. 1235)
In this kind of work, it is not only coming to an insight, but the process
that develops between the therapist and the patient, the therapeutic alliance,
that leads to understanding and growth. The setting—in terms of space, time,
and fees—protects this process and makes the work of therapy possible.
However, more than the outside frame that is needed, what affects the work
is the internal frame of the therapist, which refers to the therapist’s counter-
transference, their own analysis, and the theory that the therapist roots her
work in.
Andre Green “recommends using the setting as a transitional space” (De-
lourmel 2013, p. 154). For him, the analyst-patient couple forms the heart
of the treatment and he “suggests that the transformational processes of the
session are intersubjective as well as intrapsychic” (Levine 2009, p. 247) and
he assumes that there is a difference between that which can be represented
through language and that which cannot yet be represented, and which mani-
fests as impulse and action. The therapist’s role becomes integral to making
sense of what cannot be represented in speech. Green (Levine 2009) suggests
two concepts—transference onto speech and transference onto object. The
capacity for transference onto speech is a consequence of good enough at-
tunement, availability and responsiveness of the object, and repeated good
experiences which allow for binding and representation. On the other hand,
transference onto object occurs as a result of an inability to create representa-
tion, and can result in enactments, raw feelings, and somatic reactions, in re-
lation to the analytic relationship. This “disorganization is a result of repeated
and/or traumatic experiences of failed drive satisfaction and when there is
a “failure of representation, object attachment and associative links maybe
weakened or severed and the fabric of the psyche may be torn, so that self
continuity, object constancy, and meaning itself may be severely disrupted”
(Levine 2009, p. 248). Thus, taken together, “transference includes not only
the repetition of the past but also a creation of that which has not yet been
fully experienced, that is, that which has not yet been or only weakly been
represented or symbolized” (my italics, Levine 2009, p. 248).
50 Chapter Three

Therapy is difficult. It brings us close to parts of us that are most painful

and to realities that render us helpless and are impossible to change. I saw my
patients’ difficulty with therapy as a resistance, and something that we needed
to work through. While this is also true, I think it was only when I could
form a relationship to loss in my own life that I realized how slow and subtle
this process was. It could not be evoked, it had to be borne. Separations are
acutely painful, especially when they are premature. Sometimes, the separa-
tions are felt as losses. And very often we do not even know what is it that
we have lost. The loss, the absences, though sometimes subtle in themselves,
leave a deep impact on us. Through the experience of infant observation, I
understood that, despite my effort to locate the exact nature of this absence,
what I had was only feelings. Feelings that had to be felt and not understood.
I had to be patient with myself, to wait for them to unfold in me. As I worked
with a patient toward termination, I realized that I had to analyze my own
relationship to separations. Many separations that happen in our lives are not
out of choice, whether it’s weaning from the mother’s breast or later, separa-
tions from family, friends, school, and college. Most of these separations we
don’t process. Now as I looked, I saw how my body had become a medium to
express the acute anxiety that I had felt in some of these separations, whether
through an upset stomach, headaches, fever, body ache, uncontrollable cry-
ing, restlessness, and even panic attacks.
As infants and children, the process of separation comes after a period of
good-enough contact with the mother. The comfort and security that we re-
ceive and internalize of the mother’s body forms the blueprint for the holding
that we often search for in later adult life. Sexual experiences are so powerful
because they are reminiscent of our first most intimate contact with a body,
the body of the mother. The heavily erotic transference that my patient had
toward me, as well the search for sexual contact outside the sessions for an-
other patient, were, I think ways to recover the lost mother and to deal with
premature, painful separations and losses that they had not processed.
When I was able to come close to my own feelings, it helped me not only
in understanding what was happening with my patients but also allowed me
to open myself up to the patients’ feelings and projections. Where often the
relationship to the loss itself was lost, what the work had to be was not only to
recover memories, but also to begin to know the feelings and create a repre-
sentation of them in the psyche. I became deeply aware how this kind of work
requires a great deal of capacity for the therapist herself to stay with patience,
not knowing, misunderstanding, being with uncertainty, and not being in a
hurry to know and understand. The therapist too has to wait and then wait
some more. Feelings cannot be hurried and like a deer in the forest, they flee
at the smallest signs of danger, here the danger being a threat of fragmenting.
 Of Mothers and Therapists 51

The intensity of feelings that borderline and/or psychotic patients feel is

often overwhelming. However, in order for the patient to reach any kind of
awareness it is essential for the therapist to allow for the fusion to happen. If
we ourselves are terrified of it, for the patient to come to his own differenti-
ated and whole identity is impossible. A perception of the self and other,
actuality and fantasy, inside and outside, develops only with time and, to start
with, there is no absolute differentiation. I am helped in my formulation by
Marion Milner’s classic work The Hands of the Living God (1969) and the
subsequent commentaries on her work, particularly by Nina Farhi (2010), and
the symposium held on her work by others like Dodi Goldman (2010). What
Milner puts very clearly for us, and what is highlighted by Farhi’s works, “the
rhythm of oscillation between submergence and emergence, the reciprocity
between differentiation and fusion, is what animates new insights. This in-
volves perceiving something common in structures that beforehand had been
seen as only different and discovering difference in what previously had only
been perceived as the same. When the mind settles into one position, be it
differentiation or its opposite, no growth can occur” (Goldman 2010, p. 509).
It is worth thinking about how so many of us chose to work with patients
that invade and affect us. I wonder what is it about us that makes us seek
such a contact, and are we also then not looking for something with these
patients? The work of psychotherapy is around suffering. We are all carrying
parts in us that elude expression, elude meaning and which remain elusive
until found, and sometimes even despite being found, whether as patients
or therapists, only the degree of suffering is different. In therapy, the patient
is the center but the work is created in between the two people and without
the involvement of any one person, the work will fail to come alive. Within
the boundaries of the psychoanalytic setting, the boundaries between the
two people become hazy, taking various forms and sometimes merging. The
relationship formed is like no other and its impact becomes a part of the be-
ing—like the mother’s touch—never to be forgotten.

CONCLUSION

Through this chapter I hope to have emphasized the central link between the
psyche and the soma and how the capacity to experience and reflect belongs
to an integrated psyche-soma. Effective clinical work, especially when work-
ing with severely disturbed patients, depends on this integration. To come to
an integrated psyche-soma requires us to be open to our own feelings, to have
the capacity to bear uncertainties, not knowing, helplessness, anxieties, and
52 Chapter Three

fears. Only a therapist who has been able to stay with her madness and mad
anxiety will be able to help the patient come to his own, to not be scared of
it and to live it, mourn the loss that may be felt despite remaining unknown.
In psychoanalysis, the mother and the maternal function is given a special
place, with the therapist’s role often being equated with that of the mother.
The emphasis on the mother in psychoanalytic theory, and the primary role
that she plays in the health of the baby’s emotional development, has often
led to placing an undue burden on the mother and the full responsibility for
the child’s emotional health at her doorstep. In this chapter, I have tried to
highlight the need for the therapist to be attuned to her own infantile anxiet-
ies and to allow her to be used and changed by the patient. Furthering this
thought, I would like to say the crucial need then is for us to listen to the
mother and her own infantile needs. In order to look after the baby, it is es-
sential for the mother to have an integrated sense of herself and to have the
capacity to deal with her own anxieties that flood her when she becomes a
mother and has to take care of her baby.
Sudhir Kakar has provided us with a description of the mother within the
Indian ethos. Through his writings, that draw not only on clinical experience
but that also depend heavily on Indian mythology, legends, and folk culture,
he brings out a coherent description of the Indian girl and woman and then
highlights why and how motherhood is an imperative and seemingly inevi-
table choice for the Indian woman. According to Kakar, an Indian woman,
irrespective of caste, class, age, and regionality, “knows that motherhood
confers upon her a purpose and identity that nothing else in her culture can.
Each infant borne and nurtured by her safely into childhood, especially if the
child is a son, is both a certification and redemption.” (Kakar 1997, p.56) The
Indian girl is born a daughter, and once married she becomes a daughter-in-
law, a wife, and finally a mother. Cultural anthropologists universally have
noted how there is an obvious improvement in an Indian wife’s social status
once she becomes pregnant and the belief is that pregnancy is a woman’s
ultimate good fortune.
To be the mother of a girl child in India is often a matter of shame,
guilt, and depression. For a mother to look after an infant is a challenge,
but even more for the girl child since her identification with the baby is
more and evokes her own anxieties and fantasies. Amidst the idealization
of motherhood, the mother as a woman having her own identity and needs
is forgotten. And, in all the celebration associated with birth, the mother’s
depression is overlooked and she is expected to think only about her baby.
What I suggest then, as further research and an elaboration and continua-
tion of my present thinking, is to explore maternal depression in India, to
look at the mother-daughter relationship, how she is differently affected in
 Of Mothers and Therapists 53

giving birth to a girl versus a boy, and to imagine possible interventions at

the earliest stage in the mother-infant dyad. The shame and depression that
the mother feels are unknowingly passed on to the daughter and the vicious
cycle that develops shatters hope for being different and for any real change
to happen not only in individuals but in a society as a whole. I feel that there
is a significant link between the mother’s depression and the daughter’s
sexuality and unless we can address the mother and help her recover her
own relationship to herself, the body and the mind will remain split, and
the sexual and the maternal aspects will always remain split aspects of the
culture. We all then become carriers of this melancholic depression—so
intimate, yet so strange.
Lastly, I would like to say that, in India, mental health and seeking help
remain shrouded in shame. One of the most acceptable forms of expression
of suffering is through the medium of the body. The hospitals here are full of
people walking in with unexplainable symptoms and diseases. Research on
the psychosomatic disorders, where thinking and feeling are evacuated into
the body, is bare. Psychosomatic disorders are the most radical and extreme
form of psychic reduction that not only affects the emotional well-being of
the individual but his physical well being as well. I feel that in order to ad-
dress that which is silenced, that which has not been mourned, we need to
listen to the bodies that are talking. Otherwise the body and the mind will
continue to be split and the idea of emotional suffering always shameful.

NOTE

1. This chapter in a modified form was presented before publication at the First
Annual Psychoanalytical Conference, 2013, New Delhi, as “Remembering, Repeat-
ing and Working Through: The Indian Girl child.”

REFERENCES

Agarwal, Urvashi and Paiva, Nupur Dhingra. “The uncomfortable subject: observing
the Indian girl child, Infant Observation.” International Journal of Infant Observa-
tion and Its Applications 17(2014):151–166 DOI: 10.1080/13698036.2014.937925.
Delourmel, C. “Andre Green: An introduction to the work of Andre Green.” Interna-
tional Journal of Psychoanalysis 94(2013): 133–156.
Farhi, N. “The Hands of the living god: ‘Finding the familiar in the unfamiliar.’’
Psychoanalytic Dialogues 20(2010): 478–503.
Fisher, J.V. “The emotional experience of K.” International Journal of Psychoanaly-
sis 87(2006): 1221–37.
54 Chapter Three

Goldman, D. “Letting the sea in: Commentary on Paper by Nina Farhi.” Psychoana-
lytic Dialogues 20(2010): 504–509.
Goldman, Dodi. In One’s Bones: The Clinical Genius of Winnicott. New Jersey:
Jason Aronson Inc., 1993.
Kakar, S. The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Kohon, G. ed. The Dead Mother: The Work of Andre Green. London: Routledge,
1999.
Levine, H. “Representations and their Vicissitudes: The Legacy of Andre Green.” The
Psychoanalytic Quarterly 78(2009): 243–62.
Milner, M. The Hands of the Living God: An account of a psychoanalytic treatment,
(Reprint). London: Routledge, 1969.
Ogden, T. “Fear of breakdown and the unlived life,” International Journal of Psycho-
analysis 95(2014): 205–23. DOI: 10.1111/1745-8315.12148.
Phillips, A. “Introduction.” In Wild Analysis, edited by S. Freud. London: Penguin
Books, 2002.
Rustin, M. E. “Encountering primitive anxieties.” In Closely observed infants. Edited
by L. Miller, M.E. Rustin, M.J. Rustin, and J. Shuttleworth. London: Duckworth.
1989.
Sansone, A. Working with Parents and Infants: A Mind-Body Integration Approach.
London: Karnac, 2007.
Searles, H. F. “Dependency in schizophrenia.” In Collected Papers on Schizophrenia
and Related Subjects, edited by H. F. Searles. London: Karnac, 1986[1965].
Winnicott, D.W. The Child, the Family and the Outside World. (Reprint). London:
Penguin Books, 1991.
 Chapter Four

Myth, Misogyny, Matricide

Nilofer Kaul

In Figure 4.1 we see the mythological figure Putana, who suckled the infant
Krishna with poisoned breasts, an act which led to her own death. The birth
of Krishna was a threat to his uncle, a father surrogate, Kansa. The word
“putana” in Sanskrit literally means “putrefaction,” “smelly,” and also “the
one without virtues.” Several versions of this myth exist, as the tale is told
and re-told in Hindu scriptures. In some versions, she is sent by Kansa on a
mission to kill; in others, murdering infants is her own mission; and in yet
others, it is her longing for suckling an infant.The Putana myth recurs in sev-
eral texts across centuries.In the earliest textual version, Harivamsa, of late
third century C.E, she comes to the child as a bird. She is often depicted as a
bird, in sculpture as well as myth. In the Bhagwat Purana, between the sixth
and tenth century C.E, there is a fuller account of her assuming the form of a
woman (Gordon White 2006, 52). She is closely associated with pustulence
and the sores of chickenpox, and owes her name to the smell associated with
the disease. She is mentioned in medical texts and is also supposed to have
gotten a boon from Shiva to eat little children (Gordon White 2006, 51). One
can see her, amongst other things, as a personification of the dangers that
beset newborn infants. What is significant is the way in which this threat
resembles the mother. Sudhir Kakar (2002) in his work on Krishna myths
draws attention to a whole spectrum of interpretative possibilities that emerge
from locating this at a later phase in Krishna’s life. He suggests for instance,
that the Putana tale can be read as incestuous fears experienced by the child
who feels himself caught in a threatening stranglehold with his mother who
entangles him in this erotic, hostile, part-seductive, part-sacrificing relation-
ship, from where he finds himself unable to move out (424–5).
What emerges through all the different versions and interpretations possi-
ble is the idea that Putana represents an undesirable aspect of the mother, and
55
56 Chapter Four

Figure 4.1.   Putana with the baby Krishna, mid-twenieth century.

Reprinted with permission from Crafts Museum.

Figure 4.2.   Putana with the baby Krishna, mid-twenieth century.

Reprinted with permission from Crafts Museum.
 Myth, Misogyny, Matricide 57

the interpretation would depend on in which phase of Krishna’s life Putana

appears. The repetition of the figure is in itself significant as echoes from the
unconscious that will not fade. In most versions her poisoned breasts are to
end the threat the infant Krishna poses to his uncle’s empire. In an omnipotent
twist to this oedipal tale, she dies after suckling the infant, who “aggressively
consumes the cruel mother” (O’Flaherty 1982, 102).
What is interesting in this particular rendering of the myth is the way it
condenses sequence: it is rather “action-packed.” But it also creates a peculiar
frisson between splitting and fusion. The sequence here is not self-evident. It
could be read in the reverse: the dead mother who comes alive while feeding
is an obvious mis-reading that the image lends itself to. The most obvious
and repeated idea in both the myth and its representation here is of “split-
ting,” but almost equally suggestive here is the darkness of the story, that in
fact they are fused, the “hateful siege of contraries” is eloquently dramatized
(Milton 2003, Paradise Lost, Book IX, 121–2). That even as Putana is the
“dark and demonic” aspect of the mother who needs to die, she is suckling
the baby, bringing him to life, holding him not with hate, but tenderness and
intimacy. The representation belies the splitting that certain versions of the
story enforce.
Melanie Klein (1946) persuasively imagines the infant’s universe as not
sanguine, but troubled, where helplessness is coupled with neediness. The
infant needs the breast but experiences its powerlessness over it. The big-
ness and the potency of the breasts are replete with fantasies of its magical
properties—it can poison, drown, choke, as well as give life, fullness, beauty.
This makes the infant apprehensive of the breast. Confronted with an object
that seems indecipherably desirable and sinister, the infant deals with this
unexpected situation by keeping these two sets of feelings apart from each
other and this is how Klein understands splitting. The good breast that feeds
it needs to be kept very far from the bad one that deprives it or chokes and
suffocates it. If these two come close, he fears losing the good with the bad.
Putana is the bad mother who poisons the baby and this is an embodiment of
the infantile fantasy of the poisoned breasts (Klein 1948; O’Flaherty 1982).
This would entail the idea that this is a demonic, bad aspect of the mother,
which is split-off; and by implication, there must be a good mother tucked
away somewhere.

MYTHS: PSYCHIC TELEGRAPHS

Myths, like dreams, may be read as condensed carriers of unconscious mes-

sages. The oedipal myth (Freud 1900) is the one that remains paradigmatic to
58 Chapter Four

psychoanalysis and if we put that at the center, we can see both diachronically
and synchronically how it plays itself out in Greek gods, in Satan and God,
in Adam and God. Here and elsewhere, in Freud it is the murder of the father
which is usually the best kept secret, akin to the secret attic of the gothic
novel, the origin of the taboo (Freud 1913). Repression—intrapsychic or
cultural—was the key to his reading of myths and their equivalents. Repres-
sion is the word Freud uses almost synonymously with defense: unconscious
ways of disavowing parts of the self that threaten the coherence of the self.
If we follow the economic model of the psyche, then we might argue that
the psyche maintains its equilibrium by bearing down on certain unwanted
parts. On the basis of what Freud says here, as well as the way in which they
have been read, it may be fair to surmise that myths are narratives that carry
echoes of a cultural unconscious, and that is how they get repeated, retold,
reinvented.
A.K. Ramanujan (1971), writing about the oedipal myth in India, points
out the absence of the actual patricide, and how Indian variants run along the
negative (son surrenders to father) rather than the positive (son kills father)
oedipal pattern. For instance, the Putana myth is an offshoot of the oedipal
scape of the Kansa-Krishna rivalry which has resonances with not only Oedi-
pus Rex but also Kronos-Zeus, Christ-Herod, and Satan-God amongst others.
Yet we note that Kansa is not Krishna’s literal father; but he stands for the
law of the father. About the absence of the real father, Ramanujan admits this
as an unresolvable question even if we “explain away the Indian pattern as
only a projection, a reversal, a transformation of the Greek one; or assert that
Indian tales manifest a cultural repression . . . so deep that the killing of the
father is entirely absent; or insist that the child projects its own desires . . . on
to his or her father or mother . . . if that is the case, we still need to ask why
it is that Indian tales are more like ‘screen memories’ and the Greek one is so
straightforward” (p. 393).
Ramanujan gets to the horns of the dilemma here when he poses the
chicken-and-egg riddle of culture and psyche. What shapes who and how and
why? Certainly as long as we pose it like this, it remains unresolvable. All too
often, we theorize the universal and the cultural in an either/or, losing sight of
the intersecting and perhaps even concentric, nature of the two circles.
However the idea of invoking this essay here is with an eye to making a
connection between the presence of matricide and the absence of patricide.
There emerges a possible connection between the need for a castrating father
and an incontinent, incestuous, lawless mother. Extrapolating from Kakar’s
argument that Putana represents a threat from the lawless mother, the child
desires an omnipotent father who will defend him from (his) incestuous de-
sires. Without really questioning the centrality of the oedipal myth, one can
 Myth, Misogyny, Matricide 59

ask the question as to how as psychoanalysts, we strain to find the oedipal

trellis under the overgrown thicket of human relationships. Amber Jacobs
quite persuasively argues that the dominance of Oedipus has also relegated
the Oresteia to the margins. That silencing can be read symbolically as
matricide. I would like to suggest that perhaps, what Ramanujan is pointing
toward is the inadequacy of repression as a key to opening all locks; that in
fact, Putana harks back to a pre-oedipal psychic structure where splitting and
projection rather than repression appear to be psychically more consonant. In
psychic history, more primitive defenses appear before repression.
Any story that gets preserved and retold (hence reinvented) must carry
echoes of what one may term “dangerous knowledge”—of which the forbid-
den tree is the best-known signifier. As opposed to a generalized notion of
repression, I am going to argue that this kind of splitting is a pre-eminent
defense used in myths, particularly when it comes to women. In splitting, the
emphasis appears to be on keeping things far apart, very much visible and
present, but located outside. Semantically, one may say that splitting is the
equivalent of an oxymoron which coincidentally recurs constantly in poetry
that laments the coldness of the woman. In poetic traditions ranging from Pe-
trarchan to Urdu, the inaccessibility of the cloistered woman is interpreted as
coldness; who being “icy fire” causes the man to “burn and freeze.” (Forster
1969). Coldness, being a manifestation of hate and cruelty, is projected into
absence and inaccessibility. Could we see this as continuous with the figure
above, for instance, which can be seen as representing an imagined moment
in the psychic life of the infant?

BREAST MOTHER, TOILET MOTHER

The informed viewer here already knows that Putana is not the mother. She
is a usurper, a demoness masquerading as a “breast mother.” Here I use the
term to indicate yet another way of articulating the split that the infant/child
performs. The breast mother is the good mother who feeds, while the toilet
mother is the one for whom he leaves his dirty, fecal parts, the degraded
mother (Meltzer 1967). One kind of splitting is already in existence in the
myth. The good mother—in Krishna’s case this is complicated because he has
a biological (Devaki) and a foster mother (Yashoda)— is preserved through
the split. What this particular image does is embody unconscious split-off
wishes. By fusing together both the poisonous and the poisoned bad mother,
it participates in dyadic intimacy and its dangers. The sequence is not self-
evident, which complicates our reception of the image. As mentioned before,
the demonic figure is both split and fused. It is therefore both a vanquishing
60 Chapter Four

of the danger as well as a lingering on of it. That I feel is the power of this
image. However this chapter is not an analysis of this image alone, fascinat-
ing though that may be.
By emphasizing splitting and projection, Melanie Klein reduced the ubiq-
uity of repression. As opposed to the hydraulic implication of repression, she
went to more primitive states that were more expulsive, chaotic, evacuative:
the unconscious in more primitive states throws out, splits off, projects states
of mind and objects that it cannot own. It is not a psyche that has arrived at
the capacity to repress, but throws the bad parts out, expels them into the
other and thereby keeps those parts very much alive, not bearing down on
them, but actually casting them out, vomiting them, putting them out into
another. Here I use the term “matricide” to include the real, the imagined or
the symbolic killing of the desired mother. And that this ultimate enactment
of hate can be seen as a retaliatory response to the projected hostility of the
mother, that is, the violence of emotion stirred up in an immature psyche is
experienced as emanating from the other, and such an object must be snuffed
out along with Othello, with the rageful “Put out the light, and then again,
put out the light!”

BREAST GODDESSES AND TOOTH GODDESSES

Ramanujan (1986), as he emphasizes the plurality and cross-currents, the

dialogic encounters in the landscape of Indian myth and religion, plots at least
two broad influences that run counter to each other. He sees Sanskritized lit-
erary tradition as being contrapuntal to folklore versions that democratize the
same narratives or use often the same form for a different content. The San-
skritized narratives abide by the law of the father while they grant a domesti-
cated status to the women deities—“breast goddesses,” as opposed to “tooth
goddesses” of folklore. The distinction between what Ramanujan refers to
as “tooth goddesses” and “breast goddesses” is another instance of splitting.
He seems to indicate that if culture is a whole, a gestalt, like the psyche, then
scriptural and oral, or more accurately, the Sanskritized and the folk, become
split parts of this whole object. In Sanskritic myths the male gods give the
goddess her powers, while in the oral traditions this need not be the case. In
Sanskritic myths, father figures lust after daughters; in folklore, women too
have their share of desire. Goddesses in anthologies are consort goddesses,
like Lakshmi and Parvati; their shrines are subordinate to their spouses. These
goddesses are mild. But village goddesses are often cheated into marrying
untouchables, raped by a local villain, killed and buried by cruel brothers, and
require animal sacrifices (498).
 Myth, Misogyny, Matricide 61

This fierce aspect of the feminine seems to have affiliation with the Matri-
kas: the cluster of goddesses that were worshipped together, and represented
frightening aspects of the feminine. Kinsley (1998, p. 151) notes how, in their
earlier avatars, these goddesses had more threatening aspects which changed
over a period of time. There is an assimilating of these inauspicious female
deities that seems to divert their violence outward, directed toward protection
of the family, rather than to devouring it. Nevertheless, these savage aspects
require appeasement. They are known to murder babies, drink the blood of
the dead, dance on corpses, and cause smallpox. Their physical appearance
varies from being beautiful and soft, to savage with protruding teeth, long
nails, carrying corpses around their neck. The different Puranas offer vary-
ing accounts of the origin and function of these female deities. That they are
distinct from consort goddesses is common, but what differs in the stories
is whether they serve a protective or a destructive role. Their potency for,
and affiliation to, destructiveness is never seriously in doubt. Once again,
this lurking presence in the midst of the pantheon is a reminder of the dark,
uncanny force that resides in the woman and must be placed far away from
the “good” mother.
In Ramanujan’s instance of Kannada folklore which is discussed next, the
savagery is, interestingly, very much located in the mother. This primordial,
rather threatening figure, is exorcised by the scriptures—those texts that
acquired authority. In fact, while I agree with Ramanujan, that the variants
on the oedipal story do end up differently in Indian versions, and that the
castration actually is carried out by the father, what I would like to focus on
is how this exorcising—this hushing of plurality and the dominance of the
ur-text—is not only to uphold the authority of the omnipotent father over the
unruly sons, but also to exorcise the disquieting, unruly aspects of the mother,
feared and fantasized by the infant.

WHO’S AFRAID OF INCEST: SETTING THE MOTHER ON FIRE

Ramanujan (1988) speaks of one such Puranic folk song which is sung cer-
emonially in Karnataka every year by several bardic groups. This begins
with a creation myth, and we can see how antithetical its shape, form, and
texture is from the Edenic story of creation. I will recount this briefly. The
primordial goddess is born three days before everything else, which indicates
the primacy of the womb, hinting at a matriarchal, rather than a patriarchal
society. This goddess grows up very quickly, attains puberty, and wants a
man to satisfy her. Finding no one around her, she creates one out of herself,
and this one is Brahma the eldest. This incestuous, unboundaried, lawless
62 Chapter Four

mother in the absence of father, asks him to grow up quickly and sleep with
her. He pleads with her invoking the incest taboo. She calls him a eunuch and
burns him. This cycle repeats itself next day with Vishnu. Then finally on the
third day, Shiva is born. The wily Shiva outwits the mother. He buys time and
asks her to let him grow up. Finally he plots the murder through the powerful
dance of seduction and destruction. It is the fantastic cosmic dance. Matching
him step for step, she bursts into flames. Incestuous desires are experienced
with horror by the primitive psyche and must be expelled and cast into the m/
other. A matriarchal society is rife with dangers.
I am going to cut to the chase: interestingly, once the mother is got rid of,
Shiva sets about work, establishing a world. For this he revives his brothers
and recreates the world. Women are now needed for the womb function, to
populate the world. How do they get them? Shiva now goes to the heap of
ashes he had reduced his mother to, and creates consorts by dividing the
ashes of the mother. The domestication is also through the splitting of the
mother. One reading of this would be to see how the authority of scriptures is
built upon an edifice of destroyed mothers, or, more accurately, the demonic
mother is split off and evacuated. It can also be read as how ordered, civilized,
patriarchal society must be founded upon matricide: in the hands of Shiva, the
world is felt to be safer. He takes charge of the mother who is unruly in her
sexuality and therefore law-less. Patriarchy seems to restore order which is
under threat from the essential but law-less matriarchy that precedes it.
Matricide, in this context, is the murdering not of the mother, but projec-
tively of the incestuous and matricidal desires that will otherwise destroy
civilization. But these desires are not owned, they are not repressed; they
are cast out, violently put outside, into the desired—and therefore feared and
hated—other. If along with Klein, we imagine the infant’s universe to be tur-
bulent and frothing with incomprehensible but overwhelming emotion, it fol-
lows that this infant has no capacity to keep this within himself. He must cast
them out into the object which evokes these in him. The historical primacy
of the relationship to the maternal object casts a shadow over the future of
the infant’s dyadic relationships to women. The immature psyche, yet unable
to bear the strain of violent emotion carries this ghostly pall, often shaping
future relations with women in general. What I am reiterating here is that
misogyny (and one of its most primitive expressions, matricide) corresponds
with the unpreparedness of the psyche to contain.

RESURRECTING FROM THE ASHES

Putana is vanquished and she is not really owned as a mother; she is demonic,
like the stepmother of fairy tales, like the surrogate father Kansa—she too is
 Myth, Misogyny, Matricide 63

cast away, an aberration. The Kannada creation myth appears bolder in its
acceptance of the incestuous, murderous mother; however, matricide leaves
a cavity, which must be filled again. Then while she is partially resurrected,
she is pared down, reduced, contained: a pale, domesticated shadow of the
fiery original. In certain pockets we have versions of her local female deities
who are protective but also terrifying, castrating like Shitla mata, the small-
pox deity. She is worshipped, appealed to, deified and then immersed, laid
to rest. So the contrast I am drawing here is between Putana split-off part of
the mother, killed off by the omnipotent, suckling infant—and the mother
of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, who is killed and then re-invented through divid-
ing her into three lots. This relatively obscure version of the myth seems to
bear the weight of acknowledging the terrifyingly bad mother who must be
outwitted by Shiva and reduced to a heap of ashes. The incestuous, promiscu-
ous, murderous mother is resurrected, but in order to build civilization, her
scattered ashes must be divided. Depending on the vertex from where we
interpret the myth (preoedipal or oedipal), the maternal seems fraught with
dangers that seem almost too terrifying, and patriarchy with all its concomi-
tant constraints seems almost preferable. This choice seems to reverberate
through the absence of patricide as much as it does through the misogynistic
figures that are either devouring or devoured.
The Kannada creation myth is an interesting variant on the omnipotence of
Krishna, who unabashedly kills the bad mother and introjects her goodness
(milk). In fact one can see how the baby Krishna embodies oral greed and
hunger for the mother by being a butter thief; butter itself being a concen-
trated and enriched form of milk/breast/mother.

MADONNA AND THE WHORE

In the final section of this chapter, I am going to discuss the dream of a patient
A. The specific details of the case are really irrelevant to the purpose here,
as I felt while listening to his dream, that it carried within it a collection of
whispers from many dreams and myths:

I was in a room with M and she starts pushing her bum on me, like a lap dance
on me. She then takes off her clothes and becomes Beyoncé. It is as if she were
saying: Is this what you imagined me to look like? I was quite surprised. Then
the show’s over. Does a show and then it’s over. There’s no sex. She’s back on
her computer. She’s telling me 5 guys and I’m done. Now you and one more. I
ask her why, why does she need to do this? She says to earn money. I say, but
not like that! Then O walks in. M gets up and gives him a lap dance. It seemed
so plausible. He’s not malicious at all. He exits. She starts screaming at me:
64 Chapter Four

what are you going to do? How would you react if during the world cup, I were
supporting my ex-lover’s team? It would make you feel I am thinking of him.
I’m confused and angry. She’s the one that’s angry with me. Her shouting is
how the dream ends.

In his associations M represented someone erotically desirable but unat-

tainable. O in all probability represents the patient’s father who is seen as
more endowed and with whom he has a deep rivalry.
This tantalizing girl is withholding her Beyoncé-like sexiness. She is only
offering a lap dance and does not actually allow sex. This in fact makes A fu-
rious, and he needs to degrade her by saying she is a whore after all, providing
the same service to other rivals. The dream catches the connection between
the inaccessible and the reviled: the wish to degrade the rejecting object.
It seems as if this dream condenses the male fantasy of the enigmatic
woman: she is the Madonna (does not have sex) and the whore (renders the
same service to several). What is interesting about the dream is the way it
both retains and discards the splits. The woman he desires and thinks of as
sublime disappointingly turns out to be whorish. This echoes the discovery of
the oedipal child: but my mother does not love me alone, there is/are others.
This is almost too painful and the dream endeavors to make this pain bear-
able, by giving voice to the woman. The woman M turns to him at this point
and her words are consoling, even if the tone appears not to be:

“no matter what I do, you will always suspect me of being unfaithful”

The dream attempts to make containable what is experienced as uncon-

tainable. The pull toward the prohibited woman/mother is experienced with
unbearable intensity and the dream suggests different containing jars that
might help to make this desire bearable: she titillates everyone by offering lap
dances indiscriminately, she withholds from everyone including the ultimate
rival O (so that I am not the only rejected suitor), she is whorish (she does it
not for pleasure but money), and she has a history that predates my existence
(but that does not mean she does not love me).
This dream brings together different aspects of the mother experienced by
the desirous, overwhelmed child. While this patient was a young man, it is not
by any means exclusive to men. Here are threads of different, often irrecon-
cilable feelings that lie in close proximity but which, in our conscious minds
we attempt to keep apart. Several feelings—fear of the woman’s unknowable
sexuality, her prehistory, her desirability as well as her arbitrary boundaries
perplex the little, terrified infant who has several kinds of fantasies. This
dream is singularly eloquent in the way it brings many of these fantasies
together.
 Myth, Misogyny, Matricide 65

CONCLUSION

My bringing it up in this section of the chapter is to foreground the enigma of

the mother, as experienced by the child who is confronted by a larger-than-
life figure with an incomprehensible rhythm that appears cruel, perverse,
terrifying, and also perhaps extraordinary, magical, beautiful, or perhaps a
peculiar combination of both. Whatever its response may be, the infant can
barely fathom this presence. This unfathomable other—perplexingly terrify-
ing and seductive—seems connected to misogyny. The linguistic register that
is used for women is all present in this dream: she is a virgin, a whore; she
is omnivorous, indiscriminate, frigid. There may be different ways of under-
standing this. One is to see misogyny as a way of dealing with the projected
hatred that is provoked in the infant at what must feel like a rejection by her in
the fantasies. Another way of looking at it would be, to use Donald Meltzer’s
term, an apprehension of beauty (Meltzer 1988, p.16). From the moment of
its birth, the infant is drawn not into the battle between life and death instincts
but into the conflict between love and hate for the mother Meltzer terms the
“aesthetic conflict”:
Winnicott’s stirring little radio talks of many years ago on The Ordinary
Devoted Mother and her Baby could just as well have spoken of the “ordinary
beautiful devoted mother and her ordinary beautiful baby.” He was right to
use that word ordinary, with its overtones of regularity and custom, rather
than the statistical “average” (16).
The infant is struck by the ordinary, beautiful mother and responds to this
with fear and even terror. This magical, beautiful mother evokes an exces-
siveness of unmetabolized feelings in the tiny infant who can respond only
with awe, itself an experience which combines terror and beauty. Yeats
(2008) incantatory refrain from “Easter 1916” captures this dimension as ev-
ery stanza ends with the oxymoronic refrain “a terrible beauty is born.” The
capacity for tolerating a psychic paradox may emerge later if all else goes
well. But I might hazard here that the disposition of the infant coupled with
the mother’s capacity to contain this excessiveness shapes the baby’s capacity
to relate to others, and misogyny is frequently a consequence. In sum, I am
suggesting along with Freud, Klein, and Meltzer, that hate is perhaps easier
to accommodate than love as a response to uncertainty and perhaps the awe.
And also that loving brings with it depressive anxieties of losing the loved
object; the infant’s recourse to the paranoid-schizoid position—to hate—is a
way of fending off the unconscious fears of loss. The seed of misogyny may
well lie here, and later on, other fears of incest and castration may contribute
their bit to this form of “othering” of the woman.
66 Chapter Four

REFERENCES

Forster, L. W. The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1969.
Freud, S. Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-
logical Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 4. London: Hogarth and The Institute of
Psychoanalysis. 1900.
Freud, S. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 13. London: Hogarth and The Institute of Psycho-
analysis. 1913.
Gordon White, D. Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” and in its South Asian Contexts.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006.
Jacobs, Amber. On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Kakar, S. “Cults and myths of Krishna.” In Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and
Interpretation, edited by G.N. Devy. Orient Blackswan: India, 2002.
Kinsley, D. Hindu Goddesses: Vision of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious
Traditions. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998.
Klein, M. Contributions to Psychoanalysis 1921–45. London: Kluckhohn, 1948.
Klein, M. Envy and Gratitude. London: Hogarth Press, 1946–63.
Meltzer, D. Harris Williams, M. The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic
Conflict in Development, Art and Violence. Perthshire: Clunie Press, 1988.
Meltzer, D. The Psychoanalytical Process. London: Heinemann, 1967.
Milton, J. Paradise Lost. Book IX, 121–2. London: Penguin, 2003.
O’Flaherty, W.D. Women, Androgynes and other Mythical Beasts, 101–2. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Ramanujan, A.K. “The Indian Oedipus.” In The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan,
edited by Vinay Dharwadekar, 393. Delhi: OUP: 1971[1999].
Ramanujan, A.K. “Two Types of Kannada Folklore.” In The Collected Essays of A.K.
Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwadekar. Delhi: OUP, 1986[1999].
Ramanujan, A.K. “Who Needs Folklore?” In The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanu-
jan, edited by Vinay Dharwadekar. Delhi: OUP, 1988[1999].
Yeats, W.B. Easter Rising. Collected Poems. London: Vintage, 2008.
 Chapter Five

Sita Through the Time Warp

On the Ticklish Relationship between
Renunciation and Moral Narcissism in the
Lives of Young Indian Women
Shifa Haq

Sudhir Kakar’s works, such as Culture and Psyche (1997), The Inner World,
and The Indians, have built a corpus of knowledge on psychoanalysis in
India.1 I find myself to be a rich heir, astonished by the enormous wealth of
ideas. Yet in the stories I tell and the stories I hear, I find myself at a loss
when considering the experiences and the psyche of young Indian women.
As a woman born in the wealth of Kakar’s ideas and the wealth of her own
doubts, I would like to delve into one such concern—the inheritance of the
“Sita Ideal” in young Indian women. Kakar establishes the Sita ideal as a
powerful cultural motif in the Indian psyche, producing patterns of choices
and behavior through which ideal feminine qualities and expectations are
rendered eternal. What happens when the “ideal” enters the clinic and leaps
out of the unconscious like a wandering ascetic? How do we listen to the pres-
ence of Sita in the voices or experiences of young women, their preoccupa-
tion with the notion of “good woman,” and the “will to renounce”? The paper
re-reads the renunciatory principle of the Sita Ideal, written most persuasively
by Kakar in The Inner World (1981), in hope of reflecting on the undisclosed
riddles of the internal battleground borne by women.

KAKAR AND THE SITA IDEAL

For Kakar (1981), as for Winnicott (1971), the sensory presence of the mother,
marked by a devoted involvement in the care of the infant, is the hallmark
of human relationships. Whether held in deep regard by psychoanalysts or in
myths and folklore, a child’s relation to her mother is an indivisible shadow

67
68 Chapter Five

against which many adult aspirations take shape. Kakar notes that childhood
in India is an idealized part of the cultural imagination and, to an Indian
woman, motherhood confers a purpose and an identity that nothing else in her
culture can, especially if that child is a son. The gestalt of mothering in India
is a complex interplay of the mother’s own unconscious repository and her
place in the social matrix that inscribes on her identity roles and expectations,
so that she exists in her relationships with others. A young woman I worked
with, Amrita, described her childhood in a village on the outskirts of Delhi as
follows, “There was my brother, who had a glass full of goat’s milk, and my
younger sister was little so she needed nourishment too. As the middle child,
the milk for me was diluted to make the glass full. It felt like I was being
punished. At other times, I thought my body did not need so much. I thought I
needed to support my brother and my sister.” On listening to this, I felt deeply
troubled by the leaps her mind had made in a few swift movements. At the
age of 24, she came for therapy for she did not know how to respond to her
lover who had slept with her close friend. She said that though she had many
mature responses to this event, she was looking for “appropriate” anger. [One
could ask why not “proportionate,” “legitimate” instead of “appropriate.” For
the time being, let us preserve these gaps.]
Kakar, in The Inner World (1981), writes, “one would expect the prefer-
ences for sons, the cultural devaluation of girls, to be somehow reflected in
the psychology of Indian women. Theoretically, one possible consequence of
this kind of inequity would be heightened female hostility and envy towards
males, together with a general pronounced antagonism between the sexes .
. . I do not have sufficient evidence to be categorical; yet my impression is
that these phenomena do not, in general, characterize the inner world of In-
dian women” (p. 59). While there may be proclivities within Indian women,
raised in a patriarchal society, to turn the aggression inwards into feelings
of worthlessness and inferiority, strong identifications with the mothering
persons and the secret passage to spheres of femininity through domesticity
or cultural ideals offer an alternative to young girls so that their silences take
on puzzling meanings.
The Sita ideal, in the psyche of Indian women and men, represents a
powerful presence. Standing as an epitome of chastity, wifely devotion, and
self-surrender, it runs deep in the psychic substratum. We are familiar with
the legend of Sita—her marriage to Rama and the adventures and hardships
of their exile. The Ramayana narrates Sita’s kidnapping by the demon-god
Ravana who is slain by Rama. Doubting Sita’s fidelity, Rama puts Sita
through the agni-pareeksha (trial by fire). The fire god himself testifies to her
purity and they return to Ayodhya. Unable to put his suspicion to rest, Rama
banishes Sita again. Dejected, Sita embraces an ascetic life and gives birth to
 Sita Through the Time Warp 69

twins. The twins grow up and return to their father. On seeing his sons, Rama
repents and asks Sita to return to Ayodhya. However, he asks her to take the
trial by fire again, to prove her purity, leaving Sita to embrace her death wish;
she calls upon mother earth to swallow her.
While her faithfulness and chastity are celebrated in many social and
religious interpretations of the myth, the myth influences the identity and
character of Hindu women regardless of their caste, class, or education. The
internalization of the ideal, notes Kakar (1981), makes the repudiation of
desires, including the rebellion against “the constraints of impinging woman-
hood,” possible (p. 63). In other words, the subject learns to govern her own
behavior to guarantee other’s approval of her (Kakar, S. and Kakar K., 2009).
She must therefore be the guardian of her morals and pride. I am concerned
with Sita and her “will to renounce.” I will refer to this as the renunciatory
principle of the Sita ideal.2 I am interested in the Sita ideal not as a motif
emblematic of the moral order it perpetuates in the Indian psyche or the so-
cial functions it establishes such as the construction of femininity in Indian
culture, but the will to renounce as I have come to see it in the lives of Indian
women, where wanting and feeling are experienced as violent invasions in
the serene waters of the feminine. I wish to approach the Sita ideal not from
the perspective of the dharma of a devoted wife but as the depressed Sita who
actively abandons.
While, in the Valmiki Ramayana, Sita is said to have been discovered in
a furrow by King Janaka who adopts and raises her, in Adbudht Ramayana
(2001), Sita’s birth is elaborated and describes her mother’s torment.3 Ruth
Vanita, in Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile (2005a), narrates this legend as
follows:

Mandodari, Ravana’s wife, neglected by her unfaithful husband, tries to commit

suicide by drinking the blood of sages that he had collected and told her was
poisonous. But the blood impregnates her instead of poisoning her. Afraid that
she will be accused of adultery, she aborts in a field. The foetus develops into
the baby Sita, who is found and adopted by Janaka. Thus, Sita is the product
of a neglected and suicidal wife’s despair. The male element in her birth is an
ascetic one (p. 230).

Sita, then, carries the autonomous principle of feminine creativity as well

as suicidal despair. There is a potential to realize the ascetic ideal as well as
the tendency toward dark crevices of depression—like two strings in the do-
tara, the folk instrument, running parallel to one another.
While many thinkers, including Kakar, have written about the enliven-
ing presence of the Indian mother whose sensory presence is legible on the
psyche-soma, my attempt is to throw light on the experience of maternal
70 Chapter Five

depression in Mandodari, who abandons Sita, and Sita, who disavows her
rage at devaluation. I wish to trace the relevance of psychic deadness and
moral narcissism as defense against anxiety caused by sexual impulses and
maternal failures as they are illuminated inside the clinic. Let us consider a
fragment from a life, which may help uncover this grand cultural schema a
little further.

DEVIKA: A CLINICAL VIGNETTE

Devika came to me when her short but intense relationship with Manish came
to an end. She explained that she carried an intense urge to cry and broke
down often when she was with him.4 This troubled Manish deeply. On being
asked by Manish about what made her cry she offered no answer. In therapy,
she introduced herself similarly. She came to sessions but was unable to utter
a word. It took us a few months to understand her need to cry in the ambit
of wordlessness. She recalled that soon after her relationship began, she felt
restless and confused. She cried whenever Manish left for work, went out of
the city, or when a beautiful evening together came to the expected end. This
astonished and challenged Manish to a great extent. Devika was not behav-
ing like the girl he wanted, “independent, confident and sure of herself,” his
first impressions of her. On the contrary, she appeared deeply dependent,
unhappy, and ill. Ironically, to Devika, her not voicing the unbearable pain of
separation offered a veneer of independence and self-respect that she held on
to precariously. Unable to deal with Devika’s bouts of tears, he became less
and less affected by her states, and chose work over her until he could no lon-
ger live with her. I struggled to understand Devika’s difficulty in expressing
longings and the need for dependence to her lover. Being in love had become
an impossible affliction and an exercise in exile.
At the age of 12, Devika had lost her mother to what seemed like a sud-
den hemorrhage. She rarely reflects on the loss of her mother. According to
Devika, her death was “nothing new,” for her depressed presence cast a heavy
shadow on their relationship. Recounting one of her earliest memories, she
shared, “I remember going with my mother to a park outside our house. I was
perhaps 4 or 5 years old. I fell from the gate I had climbed. I looked to my
mother as I hit the ground. She did not come to pick me up.” With no word
uttered or feelings exchanged, the child learnt the grammar of a depressed
mother. Many years later, Manish mysteriously echoed the same indifference
preserved in the memory. For Devika’s mother, marriage and motherhood
did not become an inspired labor of love but a natural or pre-ordained turn
for women. She recalls feeling a deep unease when at home, and escaped to
 Sita Through the Time Warp 71

neighbors and friends for refuge. Therapy became an occasion to understand

and rework the story of her mother’s depression, while she asks hesitatingly,
“Is it important?”5 In the wake of the mother’s death, Devika became a “help-
ful” child to a grieving father who relied on his “little soldier” to rebuild
their lives.6 She views this as a natural progression and when touched upon
in therapy, she asks “so what?” While words escaped us, her body commu-
nicated unambivalently through severe fatigue, panic, restlessness, insomnia,
and shifting pains. These states are reminiscent of intense primitive anxiet-
ies of a baby, needing a devoted container or the facilitative environment
expressed in Winnicott’s thoughts and Jamini Roy’s paintings—held in the
warm embrace of a mothering person who nourishes and protects the baby
from primitive anxieties let loose by rejection and abandonment.
A year into therapy, Devika sat overwhelmed with regret for having had
sex with a suitable man she met two days before. She announced, to him and
to me, that it was a mistake and that it shouldn’t have happened. She added
that she acted “like someone else,” someone she did not know. Contrary to
her admission, the man reminded her that he did not force himself and that
she was the same person he made love to the night before. Swamped with
guilt, she asked me what I thought about it. It seemed to me that she was
waiting for my reproach or disapproval that it was too risqué or too reck-
less of her. Instead, I responded, “You are getting to learn new things about
yourself.” She was relieved as well as disappointed by my response. A little
later, emerging from deep thought, she added, “It wasn’t that I had sex with
a man. But that I do not want him in my life.” I asked, “Like it never hap-
pened?” She was quiet. During the silence, I was reminded of another patient
I worked with a few years ago who experienced cuddling with her lovers as
far more sensuous and intimate than sex. I reflected back to Devika, “Some-
times sex is not as intimate as we think,” communicating to her that perhaps
she hasn’t betrayed her private self, which is unwilling to allow entry to the
man in question.
There is a lot to think about our interaction here. By becoming a permis-
sive object, I came in conflict with the immaculate Sita, incapable of impure
feelings. While renouncing the pleasurable delights of adult sexuality comes
to her as an obvious choice, one might ask whether psychotherapy is com-
plicit in freeing (or alienating) the subject from her traditionally held values,
into the horizons of modernity and its disputatious internal revolutions. Am
I freeing sex from the burden of “true love” or puncturing the taboo subject
of women’s sexuality that, through repetitive cultural performativity, in the
lives of mothers and daughters, conceals the lack of, as well as the desire for,
mutuality, tenderness, and love? We find that Devika carried a sense of guilt
and the fear of discovering a sexual self, but more importantly, she was bent
72 Chapter Five

on renouncing any possible connection with a real object. What does the wish
to expunge a possible relationship imply?
In the course of therapy, a pattern emerges. She yearns and struggles to
form lasting bonds. She has begun sensing the intensity of her need to belong
to someone, to make a home, but her neediness remains unexpressed in the
façade of maturity. She gravitates toward nurturing women, feels restored in
these relationships but, unfortunately, her wish for closeness, in the context
of these relationships, is experienced by her as illegitimate “demands.” She
fights bitterly to not repeat the mistake or give rise to expectations within.
Instead, she chooses to withdraw; that is, to renounce the need to have or to
belong, until wanting seems alien and its fulfilment unnecessary. In therapy
too, she actively recreates the fort-da between us, with episodes of disap-
pearances, abating my feelings of love and concern for her7 (Freud 1920).
Her predominant feeling remains that of homelessness, which breaks her
down, yet at the same time liberates her. In therapy, she is able to articulate
the wish to be independent and free from the bonds of love. In an uncanny
improvisation, she becomes the independent woman of Manish’s desires. She
articulates this as: “One should not have to ask to be taken care of. The other
should know. It’s humiliating to have to ask. Now I don’t even want it.” She
continues to describe her feeling as: “I feel as if I am floating. I am either on
a cloud or behind a thick fog. I feel that something crawls into me and it sucks
in all that there is—like a black hole.”
In one session she struggled to describe the feeling she knows too well
but cannot speak of. She said, “I feel choked and constricted, like there is
something around me, holding me down . . . restraining me.” At this point,
she gestured with her hands, making a circular motion. I responded, “Like a
serpent coiling itself around you, squeezing and breaking your bones.” Re-
lieved to get a metaphor, Devika replied, “The serpent is not squeezing me. It
is more like it is right there and one cannot do much about it.”
I reflected on that and said, “So the serpent is a disciplining force? The
baby wants to explode, be spontaneous, but the serpent hisses and controls.”
Devika retorted, “Why do you think it’s a baby?” and I replied, “Why not?
Why do you resist being a baby?”
“I have a friend who is mollycoddled, often indulged by everyone around.
She enjoys it and complains about being made into a baby. But that’s not the
case with me. I am seen as extremely responsible, mature and independent.
I wish somebody saw the baby in me. (pause) You should be careful. I am
over-demanding.”8
Seeing her articulate the conflict of wanting and fearing the emergence
of the child, I prodded, “That’s very judgmental of you, just like the serpent
disciplining the baby. Whose side are you on?”
 Sita Through the Time Warp 73

With much relief, she added, “I am on the side of the baby.”

The fragment of the session carries significant questions in its labyrinth.
How do we make sense of the serpent in the room, a silent presence that she
feels around her all the time? Is the serpent coiled around her, a symbol of
wordless dread, the image of maternal depression that constitutes Devika’s
inner world? Green (1986a) suggests that a chronically depressed or emotion-
ally absent mother transforms the inner vitality of the baby into a psychically
dead child. The coils of the serpent do not nourish like the umbilical cord
connecting the baby to her mother, but become a punishing maternal pres-
ence refusing to acknowledge the baby’s narcissistic needs. Green imagined
this as “murder without hatred” (Green 1986a).9 The serpent and the baby
together allude to the failure of mutual recognition through which autonomy
and relatedness become a vital source of play (Benjamin 1988). Furthermore,
the image of the serpent as a disciplining figure is a testimony to the abridged
childhood of a girl child in India. It is an allusion central to the gendering of
the baby. The restraining or binding experience, through the use of domina-
tion and consequent compliance, forfeits embracing a spontaneous explora-
tion of the self, which Winnicott (1965) referred to as the “true self.”10 It is
within the feminine identity formation in the Indian context to make peace
with the cultural ideal while changing the force of her instinctual life. Kakar,
in The Inner World, writes, “Any inner shift towards, or desire for, autonomy
arouses the most severe of the culturally supported anxieties: the fear of isola-
tion or estrangement that are visited upon the completely autonomous human
being” (p. 36). At one level there is the patient’s individual history, the story
of her mother’s depression and her inability to mirror the growing child’s vi-
tality; on another level, there is an ever-looming imprinting of the Sita ideal.
The hissing snake also represents Devika’s disavowed anger at empathic fail-
ures, living side by side, incommunicado, while she loves and laughs. What
would it mean for her to let it be seen, to be known not for her patience and
care, but for her poisonous fangs, indiscriminate in their ruthlessness? Will
my women patients wish to find out this side to them?

RENUNCIATION AND MORAL NARCISSISM

Much has been written about submission, masochism, and women in psycho-
analytic literature. Instead of recreating the polyphony of voices from what
seems like a rich dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism, I would
attempt to argue that, in the constellation of observations I have tried to illu-
mine through the clinical case, there is a creative tension between what Freud
called moral masochism and what Green developed as moral narcissism.11
74 Chapter Five

What does it mean to renounce pleasure? Similarly, what is the relation

between masochism and renunciation? What guides the will to create a sov-
ereign self, free of its dependence on the object? What is the predicament of
lives where the ceaseless erosion of the self or the disappearance of desire is
held as an ideal? Freud in “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924)
writes, “If pain and unpleasure can be not simply warnings but actually aims,
the pleasure principle is paralysed—it is as though the watchman over our
mental life were put out of action by a drug” (p.159). What one sees is not
a simple co-occurrence of two forces—life and death—but their “fusion and
amalgamation” in varying proportions (Freud 1924, p. 164). Our proclivities
and “taste buds” for the complex fusion of instincts is developed through
early experiences (Eigen 2010). Freud considered that the destructive instinct,
guided by pleasure-unpleasure, seeks mastery either by the will to power,
sadism, or the will to submit, masochism. A masochist pursuit, through the
negation of pleasure and a passionate search for unpleasure, rediscovers a
rich tie to the object. In the fantasy of submission or domination, there is an
unrelenting and near impossible search for surrender. Ghent (1990) suggests
that object usage, transitional experiencing and the “longing for something in
the environment to make possible the surrender, in the sense of yielding, of
the false self” are deeply intertwined (p. 109). Just as for Ghent, surrender is
possible in the presence of another person who devotedly creates facilitative
conditions; renunciation, the way I see it, is a repudiation of the desire for the
other’s presence, where self-overcoming or disbelief in the other is the raison
d’être.12 While true surrender may remain elusive, object relating may still
happen through submission, resignation, and, I believe, through renunciation.
Rosenfeld (1971) observes this shift as a narcissistic state of defused destruc-
tive impulse seeking to destroy “the caring self, his love, forever and there is
nothing anybody can do to change the situation” (p. 173).
While a masochist, according to Freud, “always turns his cheek whenever
he has a chance of receiving a blow” (p. 165), there is, however, another
kind of self-punishment that seeks not the pleasure involved in masochistic
fantasy, but the punishment involved to save one’s honor, a substratum of
narcissism called “moral narcissism” (Green 1986b, p. 118). According to
Green, “the true moral narcissist always volunteers himself whenever he sees
a chance of renouncing a satisfaction” (p. 119). While masochistic fantasies
revolve around being beaten, dominated, or reduced to passivity in relation to
an “other,” for a moral narcissist, it is matter of being pure or free of pleasure
and displeasure through the active renunciation of one’s ties with the other.
Here, the vow of endurance and willing absorption in solitude, destitution,
and poverty or even hermitage is held dearly.13 While Freud imagined the
masochist as the one who desires to be treated like a child,14 the aspiration of
 Sita Through the Time Warp 75

a moral narcissist is just the opposite. He desires to imitate the parents who
have no trouble dominating their instincts. The megalomanic self overcomes
instincts and surrenders only to the ego-ideal.15 What we have is not a child
tormented by desires but a grown-up, held together by impressive wisdom
and principles. Compared to a masochist who maintains a rich tie to the object
passionately involved in producing the pleasure-unpleasure in the masochist,
a narcissist tries to abandon it.16 Here, the pain is bound to the knowledge
or the experience that one’s satisfaction runs through a “willing” object and
frustration arises when the object disappoints. Green adds, “To resolve this
conflict the narcissist will attempt increasingly to impoverish his object rela-
tionships in order to reduce the ego to its vital object minimum, thus emerg-
ing triumphant. This attempt is constantly frustrated by the instincts which
require that the satisfaction pass through an object. The only solution is a
narcissistic cathexis of the subject, and we know that when the object with-
draws itself, is lost, or disappoints, the result is depression” (p. 121). Seen
from this position, the rise of excitement is better left untasted, the push and
pull of desire better left undiscovered.
The renunciation of attachments to the object, or the reform of the ego with
asceticism as a mode of being, forces the ego toward a progressive shrinking,
replacing the excitement of wants with a logic of needs. The subject evacu-
ates pleasure and embraces survival. Like a devoted worker, engaged in the
passion of labor, the self or the body is immersed in work, of caretaking,
removed from the trappings of the exciting object (Fairbairn 1952). Interest-
ingly, the use of renunciation may operate as an ego ideal not only for the
subject torn by desire, but also for cultures that privilege the ascetic self or
ascetic living. It is important to situate the two shades of renunciation here.
Renunciation, or the willing abnegation of material comforts and attach-
ments, has been considered an important resolution in many religious societ-
ies. Renunciation, in the Indian worldview, is believed to be an act of giving
up or relinquishing one’s ties with objects of possession toward a spiritual
pursuit of joy in transcendence. Considered within the frames of the spiritual
realm, the abandonment of worldly pursuits, objects of desire or possession,
and the self defined in relation with others, is actively sought to present lib-
eration or moksha and inner tranquility. In the Indian cultural imagination, the
state of abandon is a powerful fantasy for individuals, whether they nurse it
into reality or are deeply guided, in their psyche, by its romantic escape. The
renunciatory ideal that I am interested in resides not in the streets, the holy
banks of great rivers, or a hermitage in great mountains and their forests. It is
the secular ascetic ideal, the quest for a sovereign self, carried in the crevices
of the psyche, to accomplish a world devoid of connections or instinctual
gratifications. Women’s identification with the ascetic ideal, defined here by
76 Chapter Five

the renouncing Sita, makes the admission of instincts into their consciousness
dangerous and frightening. As Green points out, “there is a refusal to see the
world as it is—that is the battle ground upon which human appetites indulge
in an endless combat” (p. 125). Unlike the spiritual renunciation through
which surrender or the transformation of the self is sought and desired, renun-
ciation, in moral narcissism, repudiates desires, the object’s presence, and the
recognition of mutuality in the service of a defensive sovereignty of a pure
self (Benjamin 1988).
There is, of course, a prevalence of asceticism in the Indian cultural context
wherein women’s opting out is a legitimate question. Ruth Vanita (2005b)
cites a curious case of a woman who left marital unhappiness to join the
Brahmakumaris. The vow of celibacy, taken under the ascetic order, brought
a closure to conjugal relations with her husband. She lived amongst her fam-
ily while incorporating the changes brought by her vows. Soon the family
found the special food she cooked unpalatable and she started cooking only
for herself. Despite clear resentment about her new lifestyle, they found it
hard to forbid it. Ascetic life, surprisingly, brought access to mobility, as
well as a way to imagine life unconstrained by filial trappings. While there
are women who, through a strong religious identification, come to embrace
asceticism, the modern subjects who frequent psychotherapists are, however,
largely unmoved by passionate religious ideals and renounce not the worldly
affairs but love affairs with desired objects. Their quest is not a spiritual one
through which overcoming the self is transformed into splendid joy; it is
rather an impressive domination of the cauldron called instincts.17 Renuncia-
tion, as my work with young women shows, implies that a loved aspect of
the self is surrendered or repudiated in the service of the ego-ideal. This is
an inevitable journey for many young women, mothers and daughters, whose
lives witness repetitions, if also a possibility of remembering and working
through, of Mandodari’s renunciation of her daughter and the beginning of
an ascetic self in Sita.
In the portrayals of the mother–daughter bond, their connection to or the
inheritance of the ascetic ideal, there is an opportunity to understand genera-
tional continuities and fractures. For Kakar, the image is a hopeful one where
the young daughter, through her identification with the women, internalizes
the Sita ideal to negotiate with the new—marked by challenges of identity
transitions, sexuality, and relationships, and the search for the self—thereby
finding her roots through the many fluctuations in fortune (Erikson 1964).
But is this journey to renunciation, the submission of desire in a young girl,
experienced as the tender caress of the maternal tethering of the self, circum-
scribing spontaneity?18 We have, for long, admired Sita giving up worldly
pleasures and comforts; but Sita, the one enamored by the golden deer, still
 Sita Through the Time Warp 77

awaits our approval and compassion. The journey I hope to attempt in psy-
chotherapy with young women is the one where “giving up” and disavowal
are questioned before their fortuitous idealization.
A daughter’s familiarity with maternal depression, such as we know in
Devika, and the theft of the self that ensues this mutative experience, acts
as a veil concealing feelings of hurt, disappointment, and deep depression
(Bollas 2012). An empathic exploration of young women as daughters can
unlock currents of mourning if one waits long enough and bears the afflic-
tion of “wanting” for both the daughter as well as the mother.19 The isolation
of mothers in the confines of urban cities and the lack of contact with other
female kin deprive the young girl of other possible secure mothering pres-
ences. Nancy Chodorow (1999) adds that the extreme need of emotional
support in daughters in an ambit of very few intense relationships distorts
the expectations from a romantic relationship into an ideal of total emotional
sustenance.20 Love is experienced as a menacing affliction. On the one hand
is the wish to possess a loving object for one’s psychic survival; on the other,
wanting is experienced as humiliating. Phillips (2012) asks, “Which of them
is the tyrant, the mother who doesn’t deliver, or the frustrated child? What
are the preconditions for tyranny? How does it become such a handed-down
misery? Does the proud will frustrate, or is it the product of frustration, pride
being a state of mind, a way of being organized as a self-cure for certain kinds
of frustration? It is to this first deception and making void that we need to
turn” (p. 16).

CONCLUSION

To return to the beginning of the chapter, Amrita, in her third year of ther-
apy, found herself overcome by fatigue and pain in her body. The unsettling
pain was not a testimony to depression but a consequence of malnutrition
and calcium deficiency, as exposed by the elaborate medical examination
undertaken by Amrita to get to the root of the problem. Relieved to learn
that the pain was not a prelude to an illness but a case of severe deficiency,
she shared the news with her family. Her father expressed disappointment
in her spending money on tests only to find that she had no illness. From
the asymmetry of father’s devaluation of her and a self not so pulverized,
she replied, “If I go through medical tests and find out that I don’t have a
disease, it is not money wasted. It should be a moment of joy.” Through
the therapeutic journey, from not knowing how to react, to confronting the
father’s devaluation of her, she learns to choose enunciation of the self over
renunciation.
78 Chapter Five

I ask to consider what it might mean to dream the “poorly conceived”

Indian women. How can psychoanalysis contribute to their lives, made and
un-made by “narcissization” ensued by new cultural shifts (Alizade 2010)?
The staccato in the not-yet-free associations asks the therapist to invite the
asymmetry of lived and unlived lives so that one day the neuroses and the
ideals may begin to converse with each other. To make culture audible to
psychoanalysis, as suggested by Kakar, requires new wanderings. It calls for
a departure from the politics of the “inherent” to a space of “inheritance.” Sita
will perhaps remain inimitable for the Indian psyche but, as she travels time,
will she appear different?

NOTES

1. Parts of the chapter were first presented at a symposium organized by the Psy-
chology Department, Christ University, Bangalore, January 2015.
2. In the “will to renounce,” one may find an uncanny re-occurrence of Nietzsche’s
“‘will to power” through “self-mastery” or “self over-coming.”
3. The birth of Sita, as recounted in Adbhut Ramayana, offers the possibility to
imagine a complex mother-daughter relationship which we do not find in other ver-
sions about her birth. Sita, through this tradition, is both an abandoned child and also
a goddess with female powers or Shakti. In foregrounding this version of the popular
myth, I wish to locate inner unrest in Sita’s character.
Adbhut Ramayana is traditionally attributed to Valmiki and carries 27 chapters in
which Valmiki narrates the story to Rishi Bhardwaja.
4. The case presented here is an ongoing clinical work at a university-based low-
fee clinic, Ehsaas, run by CPCR, Ambedkar University Delhi. Through the low-fee
clinics, the center hopes to provide psychoanalytic psychotherapy to socially and
economically challenged sections of the society.
5. Maternal depression, to me, is a complex phenomenon not only for the baby
who is deprived of the capacity for mutual recognition in the mother-child dyad, as
emphasized by relational psychoanalysts, but also for the mother who is a subject in
her own right, as suggested by Jessica Benjamin and Adrian Rich, stifled or supported
by circumstances.
6. Devika continually feels talking to her father about the states of anxiety and
panic as difficult. She felt that it was more important that she worked on these states
in therapy with me than give a hint to the father and “add to his worries.” Her choice
to live in another city provided a neat separation precluding his involvement. Here,
the migration to another city is reminiscent of the childhood escape from the “gloomy
house,” carrying the promise of happiness and uprootedness, both at the same time.
7. While in many relationships her wanting and needing remained unfulfilled, it
is now, in the third year of therapy, that needing my presence is becoming a source
of pleasure and delight for Devika. In the transference, she sees me as an indulgent
maternal presence, biased and protective toward her desires and blind to her faults. I
 Sita Through the Time Warp 79

see this as an interesting caricature of me which she both ridicules as well as enjoys.
It’s a site of playfulness—a potential space for self love and self-cohesion.
8. The word “over-demanding” is a reflection on the perceived illegitimacy of
her desires or feelings in the absence of empathic recognition from the caregivers.
One hears similar echo in psychoanalytic theory about gratification, when excessive
or lacking, in usage such as “over-gratification” or “under-gratification.” Such a con-
ception mystifies self-other relationship by reducing the baby to passive receiving of
caregiver’s ministrations.
9. Larkin in his poem, “This be the verse” (collected poems, 2001), offers his
rendering of what Green calls ‘Murder without hatred’ in utterly uncomplicated
fashion as:

They fuck you up, your mom and dad.

they may not mean to, but they do.
they fill you with the faults they had
And some extra, just for you.

10. Here, it is important to ask whether the journey to the true self, in the analytic
treatment, means the same for different genders. Masculine and feminine experience
of spontaneity and aliveness are shaped and reinforced according to the sexual hier-
archy prevalent in our societies.
11. I am grateful to the contributions made by my colleagues from the Psychology
Colloquium, Ambedkar University Delhi. Their ideas and insights helped me during
the writing of the working document, I hope I have been able to attend to some of
our “collective ranklings” pertaining to the questions of gender, culture, and psycho-
analysis.
12. Ghent (1990) suggests that inability to surrender is akin to failure of faith or
failure of object-seeking.
13. Anna Freud (1936) was also interested in this profound asceticism and saw
this as a defense mechanism common to adolescence in the normal development of
an individual.
14. Also, a “naughty child” (Freud 1924).
15. Freud (1924) wrote “the sadism of the super-ego and the masochism of the ego
supplement each other and unite to produce the same effects” (p. 170).
16. Kundera, in the novel Life is Elsewhere (2000) writes about the careful pre-
meditation of the one who abandons, “ . . . he must not take part in the rigged game
in which ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not
take part in the rigged game called love” (p. 64)
17. The inner world of Indian patients, women and men, is replete with presence
of sages and saints. In clinical work, these figures are invoked in their associations
as an unfailing, boundless maternal presence. The ascetic life of the sages and saints
inspires and provokes them to reflect on on relationships, unbearable conflicts with
greed and attachment as well as offers the fantasy of relief from suffering.
18. Benjamin, J. (1988) writes, “The psychic repudiation of femininity, which
includes the negation of dependency and mutual recognition, is homologous with the
80 Chapter Five

social banishment of nurturance and intersubjective relatedness to the private domes-

tic world of women and children” (p. 185)
19. The surfacing of little girl’s unconscious anger and bitterness toward her
mother is an important juncture in psychotherapy. It is through this slow process, of
working through, in which the sacred tie with the mother is risked, ambuscaded, and
repaired. The journey to mother’s subjectivity, particularly in psychotherapy, cannot
be completed without empathy for the self that feels deserted, unmothered, or carries
what Adrianne Rich (1986) calls, fantasies of the “unhealed child” wishing to have
“an infinitely healing conversation with her, in which we could show all wounds,
transcend the pain we have shared as mothers and daughters, say everything at last”
(p. 224)
20. The works of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Juliet Mitchell, Adrianne Harris,
and Susie Orback point that there may be other domains too, such as body, autonomy-
separation, and morality, where the feminine experience carries the stamp of a com-
plex gendered developmental trajectory.

REFERENCES

Alizade, M. “Trauma and Positivity.” In Psychoanalysis and Positivity. London:

Karnac, 2010.
Benjamin, J. The Bonds of Love—Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of
Domination. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Bollas, C. The Christopher Bollas Reader. London: Rutledge, 2012.
Chodorow, N. Reproduction of Mothering—Psychoanalysis and Sociology of Gen-
der. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Eigen, M. Madness and Murder: Eigen in Seoul. Vol 1. London: Karnac, 2010.
Erikson, E. “Identity and Uprootedness in Our Time.” In Insight and Responsibility.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1964.
Fairbairn, W.R.D. Psychoanalytic Studies of Personality. New York: Rutledge, 1952.
Freud, A. “The Ego and the Mechanism of Defence.” In The Writings of Anna Freud,
Vol.II. London: Hogarth Press, 1936.
Freud, S. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 18, 1–64. edited by J. Strachey. London: Vintage
and Hogarth Press, 2001[1920].
Freud, S. “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19, 1–64. edited by J. Strachey. London:
Vintage and Hogarth Press, 2001[1924].
Ghent, E. “Masochism, Submission, Surrender-Masochism as Perversion of Surren-
der.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26(1990): 108–136.
Green, A. “The Dead Mother.” In On Private Madness. London: Karnac, 1986a.
Green, A. “Moral Narcissism.” In On Private Madness. London: Karnac, 1986b.
Kakar, S. The Inner World. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Kakar, S. Culture and Psyche. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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Kakar, K. and Kakar, S. The Indians: Portrait of a People. New Delhi: Penguin India,
2009.
Larkin, P. High Windows. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.
Kundera, M. Life is Elsewhere. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
Nagar, S. ed. Adbhut Ramayana. New Delhi: B R Publishing Corporation, 2001.
Nietzche, F. Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, edited by R. J. Holling-
dale. New York: Vintage, 1968[1901].
Phillips, A. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. London: Penguin Books,
2012.
Rich, A. Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1986.
Rosenfeld, H. “A Clinical Approach to the Psychoanalytic Theory of Life and Death
Instincts—An Investigation into the Aggressive Aspects of Narcissism.” Interna-
tional Journal of Psychoanalysis 52(1971): 169–178.
Vanita, R. “Thinking Beyond Gender in India.” In Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile—
Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005a.
Vanita, R. “Sita Smiles: Wife as Goddess in the Adbhut Ramayana.” In Gandhi’s
Tiger and Sita’s Smile—Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture. New Delhi:
Yoda Press, 2005b.
Winnicott, D.W. “Ego Distortions in terms of True and False Self.” In The Matura-
tional Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emo-
tional Development. New York: International UP Inc., 1965.
Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971.
 Part II

FAITH, RELIGION, AND VIOLENCE

 Chapter Six

Terrors to Expansions
A Journey Mediated through Faith
Shalini Masih

THEORETICAL FOUNDATION

Hailing from a family of healers and exorcists, and having formed a life-long
relationship with psychology, I often wondered if the domain of psychology
would ever be able to expand enough to include, and cater to, those experi-
encing terrors ensuing from loss of agency over mind and body, culturally
understood as spirit possession. My journey in the enchanting yet terrifying
terrain of spirits was initiated through Kakar’s (1982) work, which offered
windows into insecurities and vulnerabilities that plague the Indian psyche,
and for which, perhaps intuiting a need for some kind of resolution, culture
makes available a language populated by the “supernatural.” I wondered if
such a person would ever walk into my clinic, or if the clinic could reach
out to such a person. What would be challenges that one would face? Would
psychoanalytic technique remain the same? If not, in what ways would it
alter? If the possessed person’s self is broken, how can a therapist “work in
the trenches”?
In the lives of possessed individuals, early maternal abandonment, abuse,
physical punishment, and punitive presences in the household were common
features. I noticed that before a healer diagnosed them as possessed, many
patients reported experiencing dread, nightmares, and night-terrors. Terror
has a certain brutal suddenness or abruptness. I wonder if it is abruptness of
an experience that makes it brutal and evokes terror. I have found help in the
thoughts of various psychoanalytic thinkers who have reflected on terror as
ensuing from loss of distinction between subject and object, and consequently
an inability to carry on psychological work. Whether terror forecloses think-
ing, or is set off because of the inability to think, is a question which cannot
be easily answered. I am counting on you, the reader, to ally with me in
85
86 Chapter Six

this state of terror, where it is as if all capacities to think are eaten up, and
there is a desperate groping for an Other, from whom some comfort can be
received. By giving credence to the “baby” (which still lingers in all of us),
psychoanalysis keeps the fear of being eaten up and swallowed as basal.
More actively, Winnicott’s (1971) pursuit of the baby in us has explained
that the mother, by intuiting what the baby wants, gathers the scatter and the
inside processes can be formed. Without the mother’s facilitating presence,
“the infant’s experiences take place in a psycho-social void, and his devel-
opment is likely to be severely disturbed.” (Kakar 1981, p. 54) It is in this
“void” where terror envelops, germinating from a failure in gathering; from
mis-links, mis-alliances, or mis-recognition of an infant’s state on the part
of the mother. Drawing on Winnicott, Green wrote, “If the mother is away
over a period of time which is beyond a certain limit measured in minutes,
hours, or days, then the memory of the internal representation fades. As this
takes effect, the transitional phenomena become gradually meaningless and
the infant is unable to experience them. We may watch the object becoming
decathected.” [Winnicott 1971, p. 15, quoted by Green 1999, p. 209] Eigen
(2010) elaborates on the same line of thought and writes about a Z dimen-
sion which a child enters if the mother returns after X+Y+Z time. It is in this
dimension or state where he “undergoes a change, a permanent alteration,
damage. Something tight, angry, something wrong, something withdrawn.
Spontaneous recovery doesn’t happen. In therapy with certain people more
than others, it’s the Z dimension we focus on, a dying out we don’t return
from, that we live around, develop paranoia around, or anger around, or with-
drawn around” (p. 28). Kristeva (1982), and later Mitrani (2001), as quoted in
Akhtar 2009), through their notion of the “abject” and the “jettisoned object,”
talk about states of ruptured omnipotence, following brutal separation with
the subject, where the distinctions between the subject and object are lost, and
subsequently adhesive identifications emerge, throwing the self into a state
of collapse. The object, rather than eliciting desire or hate and thus forming a
link with the subject, creates a pull toward a terrifying gaping void between
them. This dread that one will fade away in the object’s eyes is best reflected
upon by French psychoanalysts Botella and Botella (2005) who go a step
further with their theory that trauma lies in imagining one’s own absence in
the object’s eyes, that one is not invested in.
Who contains the terror? Bion’s (1962) imagination of the mother with her
transformative alpha-function answers this question. In the lives of research
participants1 with foundational experiences that evoked difficult feelings and
with a failure of the environment to contain and process the same, whatever
was evoked seemed ego-alien. States evoked remain unthinkable, inchoate,
ghostly, and, like an apparition, evoke fear and revulsion, and are to be evacu-
 Terrors to Expansions 87

ated via splitting, projection, or in body and actions. “Non-representation is

experienced by the ego as an excess of excitation; and if the mind does not
arrive, by virtue of a transformation, at an experience of intelligibility acces-
sible to the system of representations, the ego will experience it as traumatic”
(Botella and Botella 2005, p. 113).
Kakar’s (1982) thinking helps in understanding that the first feeble attempt
at representation of terror is facilitated by culture, and begins to happen in
the form of bhuta or samkat. Ordinarily, we do not know how to move closer
to the terror. How to touch someone who is absent to herself? Who can
touch this blazing vacuum of the unthinkable? In its attempt toward whole-
ness, psyche, with whatever slim capacities and accompanying ambiguities,
does try groping for it, with psychic limbs giving it whatever form they can.
Among the feeblest forms is a nightmare, the space where that which had
been banished from “psychic work” is brought in purview. Based on my
reading and experience, I like to think of a nightmare as an implosion caused
by the emerging ego, bringing the psyche, to confront its limits and also “per-
chance,” to notice the “unthought knowns” (Bollas 1987).
Although experiencing, let alone working with, part of the truth of one’s
being can throw one off balance, Eigen (2004) stands to remind us that “the
horrific has its own beauty, its own ecstasy and we ought not walk around it
as if it were not there, no more than we should become one with it” (p. viii).
Religion, too, urges us to confront the truth. Christ, for instance, said to the
Jews who believed in him, “know the truth and truth shall set you free.” It is,
however, part of coming to terms with our own human-ness, when we recog-
nize that although our own truth liberates us but it does so not without scaring
us. It is not easy to confront that which has never been represented, thought
about, and so remains un-assimilated. How can psyche work with that which
is not represented and so cannot be formed into images or thought? Botella
and Botella (2005) accord a “conceptual place to the experience of absence of
representation” (p. 31). by showing that in meeting the terrors in the autistic
gestures of a child at the end of the hour, the analyst meets the terror by being
forced to think about circumstances in his own life. He recalls his life experi-
ences in a mode of thinking but is unable to extend them to create a meaning
and communication between patient’s terrified gestures and analyst’s own at-
tempt to connect, heal, receive. In this struggle a playful enactment is created
which is completely involuntary to the analyst’s judgment.

Faced with this pale, immobile, haggard-looking child, the very picture of ter-
ror, the analyst himself had, as it were, a nightmare. He then said to Thomas:
‘Grrrr . . . grrrr! Are you afraid of the wolf?’ And without thinking about it,
he spontaneously imitated the nasty beast that bites and claws. Terror stricken,
Thomas signaled to him to stop, but his disarray disappeared and he was able to
88 Chapter Six

leave. The intervention was ‘a flash of the analyst, a work of figurability’ giving
a meaning to Thomas’ terror evoked by separation and his limited capacities for
elaboration. ‘By naming and mimicking the wolf, the analyst was not evoking
the meaning of a phantasy in the face of loss, but was soliciting in the child a
psychic work comparable to his own.’ The ‘wolf-image’ served the function
of containing distress that had not been represented and was provoked by the
menace of losing the object. In the absence of the function to elaborate, the
intervention entailed expansion of ‘preconscious formations susceptible of at-
tracting, one day, other representations, of serving as manifest content. (Botella
and Botella, 2005, p. 33)

Their work was revealing of nightmarish states into which one can get thrown
when engaging with fragmented states in others. Tested, attenuated and dis-
turbed by the non-representation, the therapist’s ego will react. The image of
wolf from fairy tales was “created found,” facilitating some work of repre-
sentation in the patient-child. “From the terror of the nightmare to the marvel-
ous world of the fairytale, the fundamental distress of non-representation is
demolished” (Botella and Botella 2005, p. 34).
One way we reach our truth/s is through the other and the other through us.
We are always reaching out and being reached. The caregiver functions as a
double, who validates, accepts, and calmly reflects the child’s states. In an
analytic setting some analysands come with a lack of narcissistically stabiliz-
ing childhood experiences of similarity and affinity with parents. This double
echoes with oneself and one has no hesitation in echoing more than what the
double echoes. It can be a best friend we are possessive about, a lover, or a
guru. It picks on, unbeknownst to itself, that which remains non-represented
and so, not thought. He is similar enough or in tune enough with one’s states
to echo parts of self which one did not even dream existed in oneself, he is
different enough to articulate or represent what one cannot. It is more like a
divine task that one came upon this person who was not there. Freud (1938)
wrote, “Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it” (p. 299). The idea of
an analyst working as a double to a patient struggling with the sense of void
has found elaboration in the work of the Botellas. The double may be said
to emerge in response to the fear of psychic death, in response to the risk of
confronting the meaningless void. “A feature of this mode of relating is that
an area of the psyche of which the subject was hitherto unaware strives to find
its way into consciousness” (Botella and Botella 2005, p. 67). The double, by
validating our experience, opens psyche to possibilities, to fresh perspectives
on relationship with self and the other.
Confronted with and receiving primitive states as Ruhi’s double for a pos-
sessed girl I will be calling Ruhi in this paper, I was required to give up my
frantic attempts at rationalizing and interpreting, with a faith that sooner or
 Terrors to Expansions 89

later, the “god-head” of emotional truth would rise. Sitting in “next-ness”

with culture, the interventions were elicited while leaning on the cultural,
appealing to the preconscious, which Kakar (1981) has informed, is largely
constituted by one’s culture.

CASE STUDY

I sat under the Peepal tree, taking in the climate of vibrant Samadhi Sthal 2
of the Balaji temple. A young girl came and sat next to me. She swayed
mildly, watching me from the corner of her eye, pale face partially vis-
ible behind a cascade of pitch dark scattered hair, lips curled into a sinister
grin. Terrified and disgusted by the bhuta in her, I averted my gaze. My
first encounter with Ruhi was with her grimacing face, swaying toward and
away—drawing me in one moment, pushing me out the next. Carrying fears
tinged with curiosities, I treaded toward knowing her. Twenty-five years
old, Ruhi belonged to a middle-class Hindu family in Amritsar. Extremely
talkative, beautiful, and delicate, Ruhi had sharply chiseled features and
managed a small beauty salon. Her father worked in a transport company,
was extremely authoritative, and did not allow Ruhi’s mother to work af-
ter marriage. The mother remained a silent presence and rarely surfaced in
narratives. The sexually bold elder sister eloped from the confines of home
and got married to her lover. The younger brother, as interfering as the
father, is preferred and given freedom by parents. At the age of two, Ruhi
was displaced by her younger brother’s arrival. The birth of the desired son
after two daughters was celebrated with great fervor. Thereafter, the mother
began to remain unwell and was advised to rest. The repercussions of the
mother’s early unavailability were found in the little girl Ruhi’s persistent
whining and clinging, cognitive lag, and destructive aggression. Father and
brother persistently controlled Ruhi’s life, not letting her even stand close to
the window, and mocked her attempts at being independent. Her symptoms
surfaced when her elder sister eloped with her boyfriend and Ruhi too was
developing fondness and closeness with one of her teachers. The hurt father
threatened Ruhi that he would “break her legs” if she dared follow her sister’s
footsteps. Consciously, Ruhi was determined to focus on running her salon,
or else “parents’ money would be wasted.” Throughout possession, sexual
images and sensations were denied and attributed to samkat.3 According
to her, her aunt (the father’s sister) was envious of Ruhi’s beauty, and her
growing career as a beautician and caused her to be possessed by making
her consume kheer4 infused by black magic. That very night Ruhi began to
experience excruciating pain in her body. One day she was working in her
90 Chapter Six

salon when suddenly her body turned cold and she fainted. On becoming
conscious she resumed work and fainted again. Her hands contorted and
froze. She was scared. She did not know what was happening to her or why
she could do nothing to control her body. Her work suffered. She became
irritable and withdrawn. Many medical investigations were done over three
years. On a doctor’s advice the family took refuge in Balaji temple. When
she first drank a few drops of Balaji’s holy water, images flashed before her
eyes—a couple in intercourse followed by an extremely ugly child5 wander-
ing inside her body. She was diagnosed as being possessed by a Masan.6
Possessed, Ruhi spoke in a baby voice, hurled abuses, got violent, threw
tantrums, and became gluttonous. Often during a possession state the sam-
kat repeated that its buddhi (wisdom) was blocked—it did not remember
anything about its whereabouts, like Ruhi who faced difficulties of memory
and thinking. The aunt and sister were envied (although the envy remained
unconscious) because they were closer to their needs—the aunt established
her luxurious life based on help she extracted from her brothers and sister was
sexually expressive. Both had the drive to get what they desired, an attribute
Ruhi lacked and was not allowed to nurture.
For the purpose of this chapter, through three crucial moments in my rela-
tionship with Ruhi, I will try to depict shifts and expansions in her and also in
me. The first moment was when I met her after my marriage. For a long time
she kept admiring my looks and body. I was surprised to know that she per-
ceived me to be a Sardarni.7 She then moved to sharing her fear—“If I ever
get married . . . so the relation that is to be established after marriage with
the husband . . . I feel I will not be able to fulfill it . . .” This happened just
before the evening worship. I eased her anxieties and told her that we would
talk about it in detail later. In the evening worship she entered the frenzy state
with me right behind her. The temple bells rang, the climate became charged
with devotion, and echoes of hands clapping and cries of “Balaji Maharaj
Ki Jai”8 filled the atmosphere. Ruhi stood with her back to me, opened her
hair, held the barrier, and began swaying slightly. Her eyes were open and
glassy, gazing up at and beyond the evening sky, her hair being tossed from
one side to the other and her face pale. Almost suddenly she entered a state
of frenzy. Her body twisted beyond recognition and rhythm. Watching her
body-container crumble, scared, I wished for a goddess-like-omnipotence.
If only I had multiple hands (like the Hindu Goddess Kali, with a ferocity
to equal Ruhi’s) so that I could catch hold of all the crumbling pieces and
put the Humpty-Dumpty back together again, back from formlessness into
some form. I stood there, receiving her, as her body fell on me, at me, against
me. It was, as if I became the couch she could fall on repeatedly, enact her
misery and frustration, and, perhaps, see if I could withstand the magnitude
of her emotions. The body that otherwise looked timid and constrained, now
 Terrors to Expansions 91

seemed like a cauldron exploding with aliveness! Although communicating

her refusal for active relatedness with me and her self, like a child’s back held
against the mother’s arms and body, perhaps, her self sought holding. After
this experience, I had a series of dreams in which I saw myself as a man.
While, surprisingly, a corresponding shift in her was—“ . . . recently some-
thing happened . . . One day I was alone at home . . . I felt, as if, something
was walking behind me . . . standing next to my bed . . . it was a Sardarni . . .
she stood on the threshold of the door . . . ” Her admiration and compliments
were, as if they were directed toward someone who, like a Sardarni, had the
drive to successfully establish sexual intimacy in marriage. Her deepest fear
coincided with a bodily sense, which was perhaps that the penis would enter
the body, tear it apart, and damage it, like the baby-samkat who, she felt, ate
her insides. A Sardarni could handle the feared penis. This Sardarni haunted,
but also tempted with a chance for sensuous and alive body experience that
opened the body to numerous sensations and the mind to exciting images but
also to corresponding palpable fears. She represented attributes Ruhi lacked
and desired. By entering a bodily experience with me, the Sardarni, was she
trying to evoke in me the Sardarni she perceived me to be? Receiving her
need at an unconscious level, I sensed a certain loosening in my own body
and mind as well. I threw my limbs while walking, became more vocal,
upfront, opening in our conversations various vistas of experiences which I
could invite her to experience and talk about. While Ruhi experienced heavi-
ness in body, fainting spells, aches, but with space given to body in peshi,9
and our conversations, the ability to work, returned as she felt empowered
and stepped out to attend beauty seminars and trainings. At this point, there
emerged a promise of the metabolizing of destructive impulses, as Bal Brah-
machari10 Balaji announced that only Goddess Kali can consume the sexual
and hostile samkat. Subsequently, samkat emerged in the form of a penis,
shifted layers below, from inhabiting the stomach to pulsating her genitalia
with sensations of aliveness, trying to force itself out during urination. Her
forbidden desires were opening up. Now she was not holding herself back.
A second moment came with a surge of sexuality in images and sensations,
and there was unleashed a deeper sense of being damned, worthless, good-
for-nothing. In my attempt to contain this part, I offered a maternal lap to the
samkat, to connect with the lack of parental love. Shoving my attempts aside,
samkat said—“It says . . . I don’t have parents . . . I am an orphan . . .” I
then tried to enhance her self-feeling, binding the damning force with life,
while this devilish force persisted, posing a difficulty for me. Bypassing all
my attempts she jumped to narrating an incident where accidently her envy
was lived out by making a to-be-bride customer ugly, resulting in panic, soon
replaced by guilt and self-spoiling. I had reached my limits and listened to her
92 Chapter Six

helplessly. I told myself—We had to patiently wait for Balaji to unlock her
“buddhi.” Entering the state of a faithful devotee, I gave up frantic attempts
at helping her. For me, this faith meant what Bion considered a “psycho-
analytic attitude,” faith in stream of unconscious to take us where emotional
truth would raise its head, when frantic attempts at mastery, at helping, are
given up. In prematurely appropriating what was felt as ugly, the price I had
to pay was in the limits I came to face in myself. Two nightmares emerged
at this turn. In the first one, I experienced that a force possessed me making
me immobile. I had reached a psychotic moment, not moving or screaming,
no sound or words. Through this dream, I came closest to being possessed
as opposed to “knowing” possession. The next night, I dreamed, “I am in a
strange village as a researcher to understand the lives of the children there. I
formed a bond with one boy who managed a shop of candies. We walk the
entire day talking about his life. In the evening we reach his shop and he
gives me some candies. From a distance two women—one young, the other
old—are watching the two of us interact. The younger one says to the older
one—‘We told her not to venture in this village. We told her not to come. Now
she would need to be taught a lesson.’ In the dream I woke up startled and
went on scanning the house. I stepped out of my room to find a woman feed-
ing on a little boy’s corpse. She raised her head. She had my face.” I woke up
again, terrified, disoriented, and not knowing if this time I woke up for real.
Momentarily the distinction between reality and dream was erased, causing
me to experience terror I had not known until now. In internally letting go
and shifting from “knowing” to “being,” (Eigen 1993) I was confronted with
my own split-off part—the young boy. While I could not make sense of these
nightmares and grappled with sheer meaninglessness and terror, some repre-
sentation began to happen in Ruhi—“ . . . Last time . . . two days after talking
to you I began to see a child . . . he was very filthy . . . dressed only in un-
derwear . . . looked starved and from a poor family . . . When I am asleep he
stands beside my bed . . . it is a very filthy thing . . . and shows filthy images . .
. ” Was it a mere co-incidence that a boy emerged in my dream, was eaten up
or assimilated by me, and now appeared in Ruhi’s images? Through the im-
age of this split-off boy part, both I and Ruhi had become intertwined in our
histories. It was this male-part, split-off, that caused both of us to feel damned
and cursed, perhaps as being born as women in a culture which favored male-
children. When, in the nightmare, I turn to the corpse and eat up parts of the
body, in life this male part helped me to venture to healing sites alone, carry
on the research work in a site where, as a woman, I was constantly exposed to
threats of various kinds. This is, insofar as my dreaming comes to become the
first imprint, the first layer where the terror of the possessed person, coursing
through the images, as the communication between the two of us happening,
 Terrors to Expansions 93

is yielding some images in me through which the dream is formed. Mediated

by the male-part in me and our close relationship, in which she was allowed
to talk about anything, some assimilation of the split-off male-part, began to
happen in Ruhi—“ . . . the other day samkat began to act, throwing tantrums,
‘I don’t have a mother . . . I don’t have a father . . . I am three years old . . .
celebrate my birthday . . . My name is Ranjeet Kaur . . . I am both a girl as
well as a boy . . . ” On another occasion —“Didi, my samkat has revealed a
new form . . . one day after dinner everyone was just sitting . . . a girl began
to speak from within me . . . began singing—“My name is Chameli, I have
come from far far away” . . . Oh Didi, she began hailing filthy abuses at papa,
mummy, brother, Balaji . . . papa made me sit in the temple . . . she abused
all the deities . . . She had a heavy voice.” The feared penis-samkat was now
procreative-penis, taking many forms, indicating that the process of psycho-
logical work was ongoing at some level. In emergence of Chameli,11 who
was as bold as the character in this song, challenging the hostile father-Balaji
himself, there was a movement toward evolution, as the child-samkat now
took form of a seductress. Eros had begun to be embodied, which facilitated
in her taking the stance of an analysand, questioning her motives—“ . . . the
day samkat showed its new form, it was abusing me as well . . . sometimes I
think —Do I say these things on my own?” At this point I eased her doubt,
saying that it was okay even if she did.
The final moment came when, after having understood my dreams and
driven by my wish to nudge her toward healing, I sought help from culture,
as represented in a bhagat12 I knew. The image of couple in intercourse, boy-
child, my nightmares, and samkat’s wish to transform into a duta13 made me
wonder if this couple would ever transform into peaceful coexistence of the
parental (and the tendencies bound with it) as seen in religious iconography;
for instance, of Hanuman14 revealing his heart to Lord Rama as proof of
his love, the image of Rama-Sita (the ideal Indian parental couple) residing
within him. The elaboration in Ruhi’s experience was describable and left a
tension to be metabolized by me. It was only after becoming familiar with the
work of Green (1986) and Botella and Botella (2005) that I understood that
primal scene images bring into frame the logic—“Mother not there because
of the father” (Botella and Botella 2005)—and make the mother’s disappear-
ance thinkable. The image became “thinkable” for me. I think it was my inter-
nal letting go in faith that led to an unbinding and threw me into a quagmire of
terrors. My first dream of sense, of bodily immobility, showed my identifica-
tion with Ruhi’s feeling of being damned, of not being able to do anything.
This sense evoked in me the urge to go closer to the father which was satisfied
by becoming the “tomboy” of the second dream. It has been my struggle with
Ruhi of bringing the father closer to her in a non-threatening way. Leaning
94 Chapter Six

on my Balaji—thinkers, supervisor and analyst—I began to realize that for

the birth and nurture of the male-part, it was necessary that the distant father
and the silent, hostile mother came together, erotically investing in the Self.
I could make use of my intuitive sense when her bhagat consulted me and
asked for my advice. I shared that Ruhi could benefit if both her parents could
somehow be made part of her healing. Thereafter, he recommended that she
should recite Hanuman Chalisa and Hanumat Kavach with her mother and
visit the temple with her father every Saturday, where he was to circle some
offerings around Ruhi’s head seven times before offering them to Balaji.
Now, the distant and punitive parents were part of healing enactments, in-
vesting in their daughter. Perhaps, through me, she had managed to get the
parental couple together—facilitated by maternal warmth and the reflective
paternal function I tried to bring in. In addition to this, both of us together
framed a prayer for her to recite—“Oh Almighty Balaji . . . please come into
my heart, so we may together face this force . . . please transform all harmful
forces in me into benevolent ones . . . ” In the stance of prayer, the notorious
samkat-Ruhi could be her vulnerable self. The prayer was framed with the
hope of resuscitating the image of strengthening the paternal element and “the
transformative maternal” one (Bollas 1987). A week into praying—“ . . . after
talking to you the last time I had made up my mind that I will try to be happy
in all situations . . . I used to get scared and this let samkat dominate me.
. . . I decided not to be afraid. . . . I will do what samkat stops me from doing.
. . . I stepped out of the house also two-three times . . . and it has been a week
that samkat has not possessed me. . . . I have told father to take me to temple
everyday . . . it makes me feel relaxed. . . . Everything is fine, but whenever I
sit down to pray, samkat flashes before me images of penis against the idols
of deities. . . . ” She was coming close to the father-Balaji, sexually. At that
time I could not think of anything to say to her and told her that I would speak
to her later. As had happened on many occasions, her state worsened on not
receiving the desired response from me. Her difficulty was an inability to
imagine herself not invested by the other.
At this stage, another form of samkat, a heavy man, emerged, followed by
Ruhi finding her voice and asserting herself for the first time with a customer
who was not paying Ruhi her due for services she offered. Being assertive for
the first time made her anxious and she repeatedly asked for my validation
to the birth of this new part in her, leading to more openings in her–penis-
images, images of naked men and women, pulsating sensations in the vagina
spreading through and shaking her entire body. I received the surge of sexual
content as her body was increasingly brought into the world of words. The
in-dwelling of soma in psyche had begun to happen, depicted in the confi-
dence with which she was planning her future, in dreaming, doing (the male
 Terrors to Expansions 95

does), and in admiring her beauty. More healing images emerged in her duta
part, which, in stark contrast to selfish bhuta, came with empathy, concern,
and a wish to guide and help other possessed individuals in the Balaji temple.
There was greater ease in dynamics between Ruhi and her brother and he had
become more supportive. Watching another possessed girl being beaten by
her younger brothers led Ruhi to a realization—“Didi, I was thinking that on
one side is my family . . . my samkat has slapped Mummy, N (elder sister)
and M (younger brother) . . . abused everyone, but they did not leave my side
. . . they kept standing beside me. . . . It is true that ever since I have been to
Balaji temple my eyes have opened. . . . I got a chance to see a lot about the
world . . .” She was now beginning to appreciate survival of her objects from
her destruction. From fear of the penis (fear of establishing sexual intimacy
in marriage) and the consequent reluctance to even entertain the idea of a
love relationship, she was now treading toward an imagination of the right
man for her. Interestingly, her Mr. Right had attributes which stood in stark
contrast to her own father—open-mindedness and understanding toward her
need for independence. She did not want to suffer like her mother. The wish
was for a man who would not invade her inner space, but would embrace,
love, and enhance her. A few days after following the healing ritual recom-
mended by the bhagat—“. . . Early morning, after taking shower, cleaning
the temple, the minute I began chanting Hanumat Kavach, Babaji removed
all those images . . . and then I finished the prayer without any disturbance.
. . . Now, every day, I worship Balaji, look into his eyes and share all tensions
. . . and he listens . . . I feel very relaxed . . . I work the entire day without
any trouble . . . ”
Today, samkat manifests itself only in the form of headaches. Both the
father and the brother are encouraging Ruhi, helping her establish her salon,
investing time, money, and energy in publicizing her work. However, the
mother is yet to come alive to her needs. She still remains silent and distant.
She has constituted her own perfect parental couple by worshipping Balaji
and goddess Kali—recites Hanuman Chalisa, and Durga Saptashati. In her
world I was experienced as the “duta” sent by Balaji. Ruhi said in a moment
of gratitude—“ . . . you have explained me so many things . . . truly, you have
really helped me . . . It is true, I now believe completely in Balaji, that he
sends someone or the other . . . He sent you for me . . .”

REFLECTIONS AND VISIONS

Terror emanated from being thrown in what Eigen (2010) calls the “Z-dimen-
sion.” Owing to a lack of external and internal transformative function, Bion
96 Chapter Six

would say, no thought was possible and one “would go straight from an im-
pulse to an action . . . into the body, or into the external world through action”
(Symington and Symington 1996). The shadow of this terror fell on failure
in psychic work, and was manifested in states of collapse and fainting spells
or as Eigen said, it can also go “into the head as hyper-mentation, seeing
devils or other spirits, often bad ones, or being trapped by an eye-mind rather
than body-mind. The evacuated, still born sense of trauma can be hidden,
imprisoned, trapped in the body, making some dimensions of the body itself
a prison” (Eigen personal communication 2013). It is in the cultural category
of samkat that terror, precipitating from atripta or unmetabolized states, gets
organized. We owe it to Winnicott (1963) to enlighten us that an impinging
environment leads to the constitution of a righteous and socially compliant
false-self, split from the true-self, which preserves, among other things, hos-
tility and sexuality. In possession, joy remained preserved with the true self
in its incommunicado, and yet, disaster was averted as the true-self parts were
found by the samkat. It is then placed at God’s feet, who is believed to gather
the scatter, like a djinn in a bottle, so fusion can be restored. Balaji fostered
living of atripta (unlived) true-self parts by implicitly saying—“You can be
free with whatever desires you have . . . I am here . . .”
As musical instruments are beaten, rhythmic chants envelop the possessed
person, like the mother’s hand rhythmically pressing against body, ushering
one into a sleep-state, twisting beyond recognition; the body is thrown back
to a state where it was only becoming, not-yet-embodied. The body-mind link
is gradually established, in defiance, in breaking away from the collective, in
giving body to atripta or unlived self-parts. Multiple chances are afforded in
peshi where the body can move freely, making forms and poses, life flows
through unclogging veins not known by the body in a suffocating household.
Eigen (2011) wrote, “a ball player can make a great catch one moment and
drop the ball the next. One moment, alpha body, the next a beta moment, one
moment flowing, the next blocked, paralyzed” (p. 120). For Eigen, spirit or
affective attitude, facilitates the transition from beta to alpha body. In pos-
session, faith, music,15 and spirit of impulses makes this transition possible.
“Impulses, like spirit, link mind-body.” The body, which collapsed when
faced with demands to process emotional content, became a cauldron over-
flowing with emotional aliveness, in the frenzy of possession. Prayers like
Hanuman Chalisa and Durga Saptashati request for strength, intelligence,
and true knowledge as tools which can relieve one’s pain. Each recitation
of Hanuman Chalisa establishes him as a repository of learning, an ardent
listener and understanding parent, whose bravery is unparalleled. He removes
all pain and suffering, cures all diseases, grants all happiness, worldly and
divine comforts, and, most importantly, alleviates all the fear that one’s own
 Terrors to Expansions 97

destructive urges may evoke. Achreja’s (2013) reflections on Durga Saptas-

hati were very helpful in order to see the proximity of Bion’s thinking to In-
dian philosophical notions concerning distress and its nivaaran (resolution).
Swami Satyananda Saraswati of Devi Mandir in his acclaimed translation of
Chandi Patha has recognized asuras (demons) as “thoughts”— thoughts that
occlude sentient beings from perception and realization of their own inher-
ent divinity. Truly, such psychic demons are enemies of our realization of
godhead and, hence, they are enemies of devas. In a similar vein, devas may
be understood as forces that combat thought-demons, that is, forces of clear
perception. This prayer is to that part of the maternal which facilitates evacu-
ation of unthinkable states, of “she who tears apart thought.” It acknowledges
the worshipper’s slim capacities to process emotional states. Perhaps through
its repeated recitation, Ruhi wishes to be granted a boon of reinstatement of
family like the King in the prayer and knowledge for self-realization to liber-
ate her from the grief associated with the unending cycle of death (destruc-
tion) and life (resurrection) that goes on in the internal object world and reach
a capacity to forgive the object who brings death with its disappearance and
appears again with sparks of life. Could it be that multiple recitations of these
prayers cleared her perception and she came to appreciate her objects better?
In my family, praying for every need was a common thing. The experience
of praying before sleeping was of being gently enveloped by a safety net.
“Where mother could not be, God was.” Gradually I learned to use just the
right words, to express, ask, connect with others, and even address distur-
bances in relationships. Use of prayer to help Ruhi was an attempt precisely
to bring her in touch with her needy self, to help her ally with the tenacious
father and transformative mother in God. However, as a psychodynamically
inclined therapist, I am also inclined to think of parts of the self that are swept
under the carpet, only to emerge later, grimacing, creeping into the territory
of dreams, disrupting the psychic processes, and causing nightmares. Some
psychological work is attempted, in the shift from terror to splitting. For the
purpose of discussion here I would like to focus on splitting in “being” and
“doing.” The male element in its excess is a reckless doer, divorced from its
relationship with the being or its need to know the being. This reckless male
element evokes extreme thrill which cannot be inhabited by the body and thus
catapults the body into great fear. It was the fear of the male element which
cultural values reinforced, and which yet provided space in possession to be
a male. It was this which sought to be diluted. Recurrent sexual images and
fantasies latent in them were worked out in our dialogues. In becoming part of
a containing process, I was required to take on the role of a mother who could
ease the fear of penis and say—You should live this experience . . . there is no
danger in it . . . only ecstasy.
98 Chapter Six

FROM THE EYE/I OF THE “DOUBLE”

As therapists, the emphasis during our training is on articulation of psychic

distress into words. Eigen (2011) calls the idea of putting one’s feelings into
words an “odd locution.” He asks, “How does one do that? Can you picture
it? Sometimes I think of drawing feelings from a well and pouring them, a
little at a time, into buckets of words. Often we do the reverse. We try to fill
the well with words. Instead of drawing from a deep and bottomless well, we
pour words into it. We lower word buckets down, hoping to catch something,
often coming up with more words. Some of these words are juicy enough,
some dry. But we fear that what we pull up is what we put in, missing living
water.” Eigen invokes Winnicott’s attention to wordlessness: “Some babies
specialize in thinking, and reach out for words; others specialize in auditory,
visual, or other sensuous experience, and in memories and creative imagina-
tion of a hallucinatory kind, and these latter may not reach out for words.
There is no question of the one being normal and the other abnormal. Mis-
understandings may occur in debate through the fact that one person talking
belongs to the thinking and verbalizing kind, while another belongs to the
kind that hallucinates in the visual and auditory field instead of experiencing
the self in words. Somehow the word people tend to claim sanity, and those
who see visions do not know how to defend their positions when accused of
insanity. Logical argument really belongs to the verbaliser. Feeling or a feel-
ing of certainty or truth or real belong to the other” (Winnicott 1992, p. 155)
as quoted by Eigen 2011, p. 59–60).
Such training leaves out that aspect of experience which is not represented,
which will not go into words because it will not go into thought. How are
representations arrived at? In earliest infancy, the world is perceived through
sensory experience. When the object disappears, the infant responds by a
wishful hallucination that denies the object’s absence and retains the feeling
of pleasure. When this hallucinatory satisfaction fails, a word-presentation of
the object may emerge, the object can now be thought about in its absence.
“It is now possible to put into words what it means for the object to be there
or not and to reflect on whatever multiple layers of significance for the person
the object may have. An object-relationship can develop because the object
has become internally representable” (Botella and Botella, 2005, p. xxii). The
consistent and satisfactory presence of the object creates a link between im-
pulse and meaning. However, if the object, in turn, fails to mirror or achieve
a psychic representation of the baby, the traumatic effect may be that the baby
cannot then achieve its own representation of itself. In mother, as infant’s first
“double,” the infant may discover itself reflected in her gaze. “The infant will
experience in her what he already potentially has in himself.” In the clinical
 Terrors to Expansions 99

situation the analyst working as a double to the patient opens his or her own
psyche to a regressive movement, from words to non-verbal experience and
sensory, hallucinatory kind of perception that reflects the predicament of the
patient’s psyche. He picks up, at an unconscious level of awareness, the pa-
tient’s experience of non-representation.
In my interactions with Ruhi, the body increasingly entered the world of
words. Since I went through similar processes or was concurrently going
through those processes, the unbinding happened first in me. The forcible
coming apart of the subject and object in my mind is an equivalent of the
terror of my nightmare. Being in the territory between dreaming and real-
ity, I experienced the crippling fear of the unthinkable. The fear of ghosts is
indeed the fear of the unknown, not-represented and un-metabolized by the
psyche which evokes horror. The cultural category of samkat was not avail-
able to me. I had to learn to carry the tensions evoked in me and wait for the
metabolizing maternal in Kakar, Botella and Botella, and Eigen to grant me
some alpha moments. In telling myself “to patiently wait for Balaji to unlock
her buddhi,” I took a stance of a devout bhagat. I had experienced sufficient
internal letting go, to move from knowing to being. Psychic work was facili-
tated, through an unconscious to unconscious process, testified through states
of nightmares in me, which were in line with disavowed parts of Ruhi, and
resulted in creation of new images in her. Expansions in me, desire to facili-
tate comparable evolution in her within our close relationship, led to a stance
of an analysand in her, doubting her motives.
Like the wolf for the Botellas, Hanuman, through my use of prayer and
bhagat’s use of the ritual, solicited psychic work (not to the degree aimed at
in clinical work) while the “right not to communicate” is preserved. In look-
ing at it as possession, although the distress is made culturally figurable, it
was up to me to try and make it increasingly intelligible.
For Ruhi the part that remained non-represented and evoked terror was the
male-part—the Masan which possessed her. The mother not only became
unavailable but also was perceived as investing more in her son. What was
unthinkable was the idea that “she was not-invested in by the parental couple,
because she was a girl born in a culture which favored the boy.” Her pos-
session by spirit of a boy was as if saying—“So here you want a boy, here
it is, so this is the kind of boy I would become!” Later on, in being a double
for Ruhi, picking on the unthinkable part of her experience, when I eat up
this boy, by first making him into a candy, a candy-selling boy, it is as if
this allows or liberates Ruhi to envision him in the leftover gandagi that she
would like to cleanse. The boy that I eat up parts of, and subsequently the boy
that emerges in the images of Ruhi, became somewhat harmless. The candy
part—the oral greed part, the threat that I would be thrown out of this village,
100 Chapter Six

they are all symbolized in this child, and have now gone inside. I wonder
whether the child, divested of his dangers and toxins, has now gone to Ruhi
through an unconscious to unconscious communication, allowing her to be
assertive with the father, brother, and her customers, gradually embracing her
beauty and her skills as a beautician. She now successfully manages a beauty
salon at home, is finishing her graduation through correspondence, and from
moment to moment invests in her beauty.
At first, I was anxious because I did not share Ruhi’s language. I was wor-
ried that I may, knowingly or unknowingly, commit what Winnicott (1963)
considered a “sin against the self,” by penetrating a long way into her per-
sonality, and perhaps, threatening her “need to be secretly isolated.” While
remaining situated in the trenches between “culture and psyche” I learned that
she was putting across her fear that if revealed, the world would exploit her.
Drawing spirit from Eigen (2012), from my faithful father who serves God,
and engaging with primitive states in myself and Ruhi, taught me, the hard
way, that confrontation with such moments in the other calls for “an ethic
of godliness”—to surrender being omniscient and omnipotent and shrink to
make space for life that is struggling to be born, in the Self as in the other.
Here an attempt has been to share a vision of a clinical model marked by cul-
tural sensitivity, using elixirs of life from rich resources of culture found in
myths, legends, and folklore. But, we must first begin asking ourselves how
ready are we to be looked at as the duta sent by God who bows in front of life.

NOTES

1. This chapter is part of a doctoral research which aimed at understanding the

phenomenon of spirit possesssion and exorcism among traditional healers and indi-
viduals possessed by spirits in churches of Delhi and the temple of Balaji, Rajasthan.
2. The grave site of Ganeshpuri, first and most charismatic priest and healer of
Balaji temple, Rajasthan.
3. “Samkat” is a Hindi reference to possessing spirit.
4. An Indian sweet dish made of milk, rice, and nuts.
5. 3–5 years old.
6. Masan refers to a child-ghost which feeds on fetuses.
7. “Sardarni” refers to a Sikh woman, known, in Punjabi culture, to be able to use
her body well to wrestle her way into making possible an intense sexual experience.
8. “Balaji Maharaj ki Jai” means “Hail the Almighty Balaji.”
9. “Peshi” is a local reference to state of frenzy in which the possessing spirit
manifests itself.
10. “Bal Brahmachari” is how the celibate Balaji or Hanuman is often addressed.
11. This song is from a Hindi film–“Raja aur Runk” (Pratyagatma, 1968). The
lyrics translated in English are:
 Terrors to Expansions 101

My name is Chameli (Jasmine), I am an indifferent gardener,

I have come alone from Bikaner,
Oh Policeman speak on, just open the door,
I am waiting here on your door from a long time

12. Hindi word meaning a local healer.

13. A “duta” is a messenger of God.
14. Hanuman is the Hindu monkey-god, also referred to as Bal Brahmachari/celi-
bate Balaji, blessed with fearlessness and power over evil.
15. “Music creates experience but also plays a role in processing experience . . .
Dance creates experience and catalyses body processing of it at the same time” (Eigen
2012).

REFERENCES

Achreja, V. “The Speaking Tree: Who Are The Demons That Devi Slays?,” Delhi:
Times of India. 2013.
Akhtar, S. Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books
Ltd., 2009.
Bion, W. “A Theory of Thinking.” In International Journal of Psychoanalysis
43(1962): 306–310.
Bollas, C. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Botella, C. and Botella, S. The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States without
Representation. Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge, Taylor and Francis
Group, 2005.
Eigen, M. “The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan, and Bion,” In The Electrified
Tightrope. NJ, USA: Jason Aronson Inc., 1993.
Eigen, M. Personal communication. November 20, 2013.
Eigen, M. Contact with the Depths. London: Karnac Books Ltd., 2011.
Eigen, M. Eigen in Seoul: Madness and Murder. London: Karnac Books Ltd., 2010.
Eigen, M. Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books Ltd., 2012.
Eigen, M. The Psychotic Core. London: Karnac, 2004.
Freud, S. Findings, Ideas, Problems. S.E., 23. London: Hogarth, 1938 [1961].
Green, A. “The Intuition of the Negative in Playing and Reality.” In The Dead
Mother: The Work of Andre Green. New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 209.
Green, A. On Private Madness. London: The Hogarth Press Ltd., 1986.
Kakar S. Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. New York: Knoph, 1982.
Kakar S. The Inner World, Second Edition. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1982.
Mitrani, J. Ordinary People and Extraordinary Protections. London: Brunner-
Routledge. 2001.
Pratyagatma, K. Raja Aur Runk. India: Prasad Productions, 1968.
102 Chapter Six

Symington J. and Symington N. The Clinical Thinking of Wilfred Bion. London:

Routledge, 1996.
Winnicott, D. W. Psychoanalytic Explorations. Eds. C. Winnicott, Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press. 1992.
Winnicott. D. W. “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of
Certain Opposites.” In The Maturational Processes and The Facilitating Environ-
ment. London: Hogarth Press Ltd., 1963[1965].
Winnicott. D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications, 1971.
Woman with Birds
Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar
Erotik
Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar

Man and Woman with Birds

Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar
Woman with Birds 2
Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar
Mother and Child
Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar
Erotik 2
Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar
Man and Woman with Flower
Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar
Bath Subar
Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar
Women and Mirror
Image by Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar
 Chapter Seven

Only Hindu, Also the Patient; Only

Muslim, Also the Therapist
Recovering the Historical Other
Zehra Mehdi

The syncretic culture which nurtured both Hindus and Muslims within the
broader cultural identity of “Indians” was ruptured by the Partition of the
country in 1947, leaving them as predominantly Hindus and Muslims. They
moved from the point of surviving with each other to not being able to sur-
vive each other (see Nandy 1983, 1987, 1990, 2002, 2013). Alan Roland
(2014) finds the two communities suffering a shared history of silence, which
continues across generations where both Hindus and Muslims born after the
Partition become carriers of this history which functions like post memory.1
Indian professor of psychoanalysis Ashok Nagpal writes, “In a wounded
town . . . people find it difficult to relate to each other . . . since they are beset
with the articulation of pain and trauma . . . they recover each other in the
clinic” (p. 168, 2006). His words remind one of Wilfred Bion’s famous writ-
ing, “When two personalities meet, an emotional storm is created” (1979, p.
321 ). Bion’s use of the word “personalities” opens psychoanalytic fantasies
as to what constitutes an emotional storm (Eigen 2005, p. 29)2 and thereby
offers one of several conceptions of what happens inside the clinic. Simply
put, two people survive each other by surviving what happens to them when
with each other. By surviving with each other and through each other they
come to what Nagpal calls “recovering in the clinic.”
If these two generational “personalities” were to meet in the analytic space,
what would they say to each other? What emotional storm—what psycho-
analytic fantasies would a Hindu and Muslim bring for each other when they
meet as a patient and a therapist? In the process, how will they survive and
perhaps recover each other?

103
104 Chapter Seven

Partition did not just part the subcontinent into two nation states, but cre-
ated “parts” of each other. Born out of a shared history of Partition what do
Hindus and Muslims recover of each other in the analytical space?
Analyzing the narrative truth of psychosis in which a Hindu patient and
a Muslim therapist meet each other in an analytic space—not only as patient
and therapist but also as patient and therapist and pursue a dialogue where
they only talk as Hindu-Muslim but also talk as Hindu-Muslim.3
This chapter distills the case to arrive at a few conjectures about this con-
versation and explores through it a place where history recovers “the Other”
of, and for, the two communities.

MUSLIM IN THE MIND

From Idealization to Persecution

A 22-year-old female, Rupal, pursuing a postgraduate degree in English,
came with symptoms of obsessive thoughts leading to compulsive rituals,
distressing her for the last two years before she came for therapy. She had
decided to go for therapy after a year and a half of being “unable to manage
them on her own.”4 Our therapy lasted two years (November 2011-December
2013) where I saw her two times a week in face-to-face psychoanalytical
psychotherapy.
For the past year, she said, she had experienced repetitive intrusive
thoughts about sexuality and violence around her body, which distressed her
immensely. Whenever she had felt she looked good she would “get thoughts”
accusing her of being sexual and threatening her that, as a consequence, she
would lose the parts of her body that she admired. Sometimes “they told her”
she would die or be disabled because she was so sexual. She called them
“negative thoughts.” She felt scared by them and would engage in long hours
of washing and scrubbing the admired body parts until she caused a rash.
She felt she had created evidence through her blistered skin to answer back
to the negative thoughts which accused her of being “sexual” every time she
admired her body. However, she continued to be tormented. She did not relate
to any affect and remained intellectual about the question of sexuality.

NEGATIVE THOUGHTS: PARANOIA

Exploring the nature of these negative thoughts and compulsive rituals

revealed an underlying psychotic personality.5 Her description of getting
thoughts had obsessive traits that seemed to have a psychotic structure.
 Only Hindu, Also the Patient; Only Muslim, Also the Therapist 105

Though she said they were thoughts, she felt they would speak and experi-
enced them as voices. These voices were neither outside nor did she experi-
ence them coming from within her. She simply said that “negative thoughts
came to her as voices.” Later, in therapy, she shared how she felt it was the
voice of other women which was causing these negative thoughts. These
other women found her admiration of self a sign of pride, implying sexual
desire which they disapproved of, and cursed her through negative thoughts.
She tried to show them how she was ugly by scarring her skin through repeat-
edly scraping it. However, they remained unconvinced. They would spare
her for some time only to reappear, telling her that her experience of pleasure
was filled with sexual suggestion, triggering the whole obsessive compulsive
cycle again. Manifested in an obsessive pattern, where temporary relief was
provided through compulsive rituals, her experience of negative thoughts as
voices of other women cursing her was clearly psychotic. Her skin eruption
was a direct manifestation of her delusion of persecution, which to me sug-
gested a weak link with reality as she alienated herself from her own inflic-
tions upon her body. It was the curse of other women which was causing her
skin to peel and not her own compulsive rituals. She experienced her body
only through the envy of the other women, to the extent that primary narcis-
sism around the body was taken over by paranoid fears.
Nancy McWilliams (1994) writes how “paranoid states are bound by expe-
riences of envy through shame” (p. 208). The paranoid states use denial such
that their shame remains inaccessible and their envy projected. It was through
this disavowed envy that Rupal recovered her body, but the shame around
it continued to be denied. Her delusion of persecution can be explained by
Freud’s (1911) account of paranoia of a psychotic variety. The experience of
her body as shameful was defended through reaction formation, making it a
source of pride which could not be accepted and was thus projected onto the
other woman as envy.6

“BEING SEEN”: SHAME AND DOUBT

It was gradually revealed that shame around the body was especially related
to her relationship with her mother, which was fraught with violence. In the
clinic, she brought a long-standing history of a disturbed relationship with
the mother, beginning with childhood.7 She remembered being beaten as a
child in public, sometimes with such viciousness that the neighbors had to
intervene. It left her with a distinct feeling of “being seen.” She did not re-
member what caused such a punishment, but recalled how her body turned
blue after every incident of such physical abuse.8 Erik Erikson writes how,
106 Chapter Seven

when a sense of control over one’s body cannot be experienced, the virtue
of will—exercising free choice as well as self-restraint is replaced by expe-
rience of shame and doubt in infancy (1964, p. 119). Suspended autonomy
compromised her ability to choose or let go—or have a distinction between
outside and inside, beginning with her body. While she experienced shame
with respect to her body, she was unable to determine if it was hers (inside),
or belonged to someone else (outside). She was unable to determine if her
“negative thoughts” were hers (inside), or were voices in her head (outside).
Rupal recalled being told as a child how, if she did anything naughty, it would
tell the world that her mother was horrible. Rupal’s earliest childhood memo-
ries around the mother were dominated by her rage, bitterness, and a constant
sense of distrust around people.

SEXUALITY

It became increasingly clear in the clinic that Rupal’s views on sexuality

were determined by her mother’s views, which seemed rather distorted. On
one hand, her mother incessantly elicited sexual details in conversations and
described the woman’s body as one that is consumed by sexual hunger. On
the other hand, she would accuse Rupal of being perpetually sexual and would
ask her to strip, scrutinize her body, and disapprove of her various body parts.
Despite sharing such details of undergoing abuse at the hands of a psychotic
mother she remained unconscious of its link with her afflictions.9 As I tried to
link her interactions with her mother with her current symptoms, I was met with
strong resistance in which she accused me of calling her mother, and by (impli-
cation) her, crazy. I used this to illustrate how, in her experience, she and her
mother were fused, where if either one were to be crazy, it would hold equally
true for the other one. This interpretation was met with similar resistance.
A considerable way into the sessions, she said that she had been in a re-
lationship for the past few years with a Muslim man. Upon probing why it
was never mentioned in sessions before, she hesitantly admitted being unsure
about my reaction to her dating a Muslim since I was one too. She believed
that I would have envied her, hence she had to keep it a secret from me.10 This
was the first of many such moments in the clinic that intrigued, surprised,
and, later, even shocked me.
That day, I was intrigued by her reference to my religion. Suddenly, I was
reminded I was a Muslim.
Rupal’s account of her relationship showed that it was largely one-sided.
It wasn’t a sexual relationship at all and appeared to be unconsummated.
She thrived on it being superior in thought, categorically away from indul-
gent sexuality. On suggesting to her that intellect could have been a defense
 Only Hindu, Also the Patient; Only Muslim, Also the Therapist 107

against sexuality, she got very angry and accused me of running down her
relationship by “calling it sexual.” She insisted that her love was “pure” and
‘beyond sexuality.’

BAD MUSLIM: GOOD MUSLIM

In the second year of therapy, she began to develop paranoid ideas about me.
She was convinced that I was a bad Muslim because I wore a bindi, did not
cover my head, and wanted to speak about sexuality. It appeared as if she
had ideas about what being a Muslim meant, while I had none. This thought
discomforted me, making me wonder about the links between how she saw
me as a therapist, and how she saw me as a Muslim. Until now, I had kept
them separate.
I went on to explore her fantasies about Muslims, which were enumer-
ated thus: Muslims were better people because of their faith in Allah who
was the powerful, merciful and benevolent11; Muslim men were exceedingly
aesthetic (reciting Urdu poetry; exhibited an etiquette in behavior (adab);
and respected culture and tradition (by following tameez and tehzeeb). They
loved their women dearly and treated them with politeness (by referring them
to them as aap). They also protected them from the “evil, desirous” eyes of
other men by keeping them in the veil. Muslim women were exceedingly
beautiful primarily because they wore the veil. They were also generous
because they did not fight over their husbands and shared them with other
women (referencing Sharia allowing a Muslim man to have four wives).
There was something about her description of Muslims which felt odd.
She spoke with a certainty around it which could not be questioned and, if
challenged, was met with agitation. She reiterated that as I was a bad Muslim,
I did not understand her. Her idealization of Muslims led her to believe in
Islam as a faith where Allah was more powerful than gods of other religions.
Asking her to elaborate this idea elicited a cryptic account of her paranoia.
She claimed that Allah had told her, through signs and messages, how He
would protect her if she was in a relationship with a Muslim man and if she
believed in Islam. She did not elaborate further, saying how she didn’t want
to share it with a kafir (non-believer) like me who did not observe Ramzaan12

HISTORICAL PERSECUTION

Her idealization of Muslims was in absolute contrast to her mother, who de-
spised Muslims. Her mother had shared with the stories her mother had told
her about Partition. For Rupal’s maternal grandmother Muslims were sexual,
108 Chapter Seven

violent, dirty, and distrustful. They were responsible for the Partition and
continued to instigate communal violence in the country. Her children were
not allowed to speak to Muslims, and in case they did, they would be doomed
to an eternity in Hell. Given this hate for Muslims, it was understandable why
Rupal kept her relationship a secret.13
What was the relationship between Rupal’s idealization of the Muslim and
her mother’s hatred of them? Was it mere coincidence that she had sought a
therapist who was Muslim? If not, then how did it play out in her relationship
with the Muslim therapist and what did it indicate about her relationship with
her mother? Further, did it bring the Muslim therapist and the mother in a
relationship with each other in the session?
Rupal explained her idealization of Islam in the face of her mother’s hate
for Muslims as an attempt to show her mother the goodness of Islam and tell
her how she had been wrong about Muslims. It seemed, however, that Islam
as religion and “Muslim,” as a historical category, were used to primarily
escape the mother’s psychosis. This analysis enraged Rupal and she lashed
out at me saying how I was insistent on proving her mother crazy and that her
mother had been right about Muslims inciting violence.
Her accusation that I was a violence-inciting Muslim took her back to her
mother. Following this altercation between us, she did not return for therapy
for two weeks. She returned in the third week with accentuated symptoms of
paranoia. Her apparent relationship with the Muslim man was over, leaving
her scared about not being protected by Allah anymore, so much so, that she
had become fearful of Muslims. In her fear, she identified with her mother’s
version of the Muslim, and found them violent, sexual, distrustful, and bear-
ing hatred for her. All her ideas had turned completely around in about two
weeks’ time.

HATE AS THE HISTORICAL OTHER

While I was seen as a bad Muslim in relation to Islam, in relation to history, I

was seen as the persecuting Muslim. She directed the wrath of her psychotic
rage, in which she was convinced that I was “out there to get her.” She ac-
cused me of hating her because she was a Hindu, and hence I was the one who
had dared to take away “my man.”14 Her increased skin rashes were attributed
to an idea that I had cursed her solely because she was a Hindu and thus
she “could not be more beautiful than me.” She accused me of being overly
sexual and having caused her relationship to break by calling it sexual. On
several occasions, she accused me of things which happened in the outside
world such as the Batla House encounter, alleging how all Muslims were
 Only Hindu, Also the Patient; Only Muslim, Also the Therapist 109

terrorists and I had helped them to kill the police officer who was Hindu.
Anything I said to her in sessions was experienced by her as persecutory. On
enquiring how she imagined any further clinical work with a therapist like me
who was causing her harm, she said that I was the reason for her being sick
so it was now my responsibility to witness her “breakdown” and to see what
I had done to her “as a Muslim.”

DEATH OF THE MOTHER;

KILLING OF THE HISTORICAL OTHER

Ten months into our final year in therapy, which had been more or less filled
with her psychotic rage around me, our therapeutic work was once again
interrupted. She called me at five in the morning one day to say how she had
lost her mother to cancer and she had wanted me to know. She was awfully
calm and assured, in contrast to my emotional response to the news, by saying
how she was fine and would be coming to see me after some weeks. I was
deeply upset about her mother’s death.
She resumed her sessions with a sense of calm. She spoke of how her
mother had been suffering from cancer, a fact no one had known except her
father.15 Her mother had been in and out of hospitals, but that had been un-
derstood as usual medical afflictions. Although she had been at her mother’s
bedside when she died, Rupal couldn’t believe that her mother was dead.
While everyone wept in her family, she had been unable to shed a tear. It
was in sessions that she had cried for the first time after her death; however
she felt “nothing” after crying. On pointing out how it was not that she didn’t
feel, but perhaps that she felt too much, she quietened, saying how she “just
couldn’t feel so much,” and announced her discontinuation of therapy. On
asking her to take her time and reconsider later, she replied that I had killed
the mother and, by continuing to come for therapy, she couldn’t betray her
mother anymore. That was our last session.
Her departure affected me immensely. I was distraught and felt miser-
able for a couple of weeks. I kept thinking she would return for therapy and
wondered what I had done, for her to disrupt our clinical consultation. While
presenting her case in a psychoanalytical group supervision, I found myself
concluding how her departure had made me feel that she had been right about
me killing her mother. Besides peer reflections about my identifying with the
part of the patient that felt it had killed the mother, the clinical supervisor
asked me “Zehra . . . How do you feel you killed the mother?” He didn’t want
me to answer, rather he wanted me to think about it. He initiated a process of
reflection. My immediate thought was “hate”—I had killed the mother with
110 Chapter Seven

hate. It sounded like I was identifying with projections of the patient on me

as the persecutory Muslim. However, it did feel that the feeling of hate was
my own. On keeping my supervisor’s question in mind over several weeks
I arrived at an odd thought. There was something about the way he said
“Zehra” which made me feel how Muslim my name was! It struck me that
my feeling that I had killed her with hate had something to do with my feel-
ing of how Muslim I was. I realized how I was responding from a history of
Hindu-Muslim relations, which was essentially psychotic.

HINDU-MUSLIM: A PSYCHOTIC RELATION

Hindu-Muslim relations in India are fossilized around the Partition of the

country. Salman Akhtar (2005) explains how the British served as a common
enemy for both Hindus and Muslims, whose removal after Partition plunged
both communities into what he called “villain hunger.” It is the primitive
need to blame someone for one’s hardships which takes one away from sad-
ness such that one doesn’t have to mourn one’s losses. Hindus and Muslims,
caught in an inability to mourn the unresolved grief of loss of land and relo-
cation, sought each other as villains, attributing the fault of the Partition to
each other’s community. Sudhir Kakar (1996) writes how, in situations of
communal violence, the two communities constructed each other as contain-
ers of what was unacceptable in themselves, and saw each other as possessing
rampant sexuality and essaying fervor of violence. In Shaman’s Mystics and
Doctors (1982) Kakar presents a cultural study of shamanism in India and
explains states of possession, where a Hindu possessed by a Muslim spirit (a
jin) and a Muslim by a Hindu spirit (devi) live out states which earlier had
been dismissed and projected onto the other. In states of trance, for example,
a Hindu woman would crave meat while a Muslim woman would worship an
idol. These behaviors are never identified as one’s own, as one is out of trance
and continued to belong to the other community.
Ashis Nandy comments on how Hindu-Muslim relations in India moved
from splitting and projecting in Partition, to annihilation in the Gujarat riots,
indicating how hate was not enough, and one needed to destroy what is hated
in order to feel omnipotent. This relationship between Hindus and Muslims,
operating through the primary defense of splitting and projection, is a reflec-
tion of one’s own fear for the “safety of the psyche” (Frosh 1989, Rustin
1999, Elliot 1994, Clarke 2001) which ubiquitously translates as “safety of
the community,” rendering the other community as a threat to this endan-
gered survival. This was seen in rumors collected in cities of Gujarat after
communal violence in 2002, where Hindus and Muslims with their projec-
 Only Hindu, Also the Patient; Only Muslim, Also the Therapist 111

tions around sexuality and violence, were seen as threatening to each other’s
survival; Hindus feared being castrated and Muslims feared being converted.
Large group identities of Hindus and Muslims are maintained through
“externalization of discrepancies within themselves onto the other,” explains
Vamik Volkan (1997), such that both groups’ identities are bereft of similarity
and premised on difference. A Hindu is what a Muslim is not. An antithetical
polarization needs to be fueled, to continue to see each other as the enemy.
It is only by destroying the enemy one can get past one’s own fear of death.
Essentially located in phantasy, and expressed through paranoia, Hindus
and Muslims enthrall each other in a psychotic relationship.

HISTORICAL TRUTH: MUSLIM AS THE OTHER

Constantly reflecting her idealization as well as persecution around Muslims

to her internal world, I understood Rupal’s response to me as a Muslim, as
part of the transference dialogue. However, every time she made a reference
to me being Muslim, looking at her like a Hindu, although with delusional
content, I felt it was very close to the historical view of the Muslim and Hindu
which was premised on paranoia as well. The awareness of this historical
relation made me conscious in sessions about being Muslim. I felt my his-
torical location interfered with my countertransference reactions, leaving me
confused; was I responding like a therapist by being a Muslim in her head, or
a Muslim sharing my historical truth with her?
Donald Spence, in his book Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (1982)
explains that historical truth is different from narrative truth. Psychoanalysis
in the sessions constructs a narrative which, even though it claims to be a
reconstruction, goes on to assume complete power of the construction, such
that one’s narrative of one’s life becomes true to an extent, that it replaces the
possibility of an external objective reality. Narrative truth becomes the his-
torical reality; the truth of history, which is the way things are, is considered
neither true nor real in the session.
My confusion about responding from the historical position of being a
Muslim was that it had no place in the psychoanalytical frame. It was a matter
of history, if anything, but of no relevance to Rupal’s narrative in sessions.
It could be explored in my own analysis in relation to my inner world where
it might have emerged as my historical reality (Abbasi 2008). However, in
her inner world my historical location was neither real nor true. In sessions, I
could only speak as the Muslim in her head, which was her reality. It was this
conflict between her historical reality, in which she saw me as a persecutory
Muslim, and my historical truth, where in the construction of the Hindu I was
once, which made me unsure about my feelings for her.
112 Chapter Seven

This speculation was less dominant when she made references to my reli-
gious and cultural identity as a Muslim. Her idealization of Islam and her fas-
cination for Muslims was not a source of conflict for me, primarily because I
am less anxious around issues of religion and culture. My views around them
emerged from personal experiences, and didn’t carry a baggage of conformity
which was predetermined. My adherence to Islam, and participating in the so-
cial and cultural imagination of being a Muslim, was a dialogue for my inner
world that I engaged in my personal work. It was my historical identity as a
Muslim, which was as if determined by Partition and was re-invoked in in-
cidents of communal violence. As a historical Muslim, born from an identity
of splits, I held myself in doubt with respect to the Hindu. It was here that I
believed I had indeed killed the mother.

KILLING THE MOTHER IN HISTORICAL REALITY

I wondered about the psychoanalytical meaning of this killing and its rela-
tion with my historical identity. In the assessment of Islam, while her mother
hated Muslims, Rupal tried to separate it from her fused identity with the
mother. However, this idealization was also based on her fused identity with
her boyfriend, who was Muslim. In all, she tried to replace one fused identity
with the other, and when it didn’t succeed, she regressed to the first fused
identity with the mother and like her, hated the Muslim. While I was able to
reflect upon her fusion with the mother, whom she didn’t find abusive, her
idealization of Islam and fascination with the Muslim was premised on fu-
sion with a Muslim, I was unable to reflect upon her regression to her mother.
In hindsight, I realize how it was her mother who had been my historical
other. Being a first-generation Partition survivor, she was the first born to a
psychotic Hindu-Muslim relation and perhaps was trapped in it as well. As
a second-born, I had, perhaps through psychoanalysis, gone past it and yet
continued to remain in its grip; under this influence I felt I had killed her as
a Muslim, her historical other.
Though psychoanalytically developed, this killing of the Hindu as a Mus-
lim is the historical truth that has not yet entered the “in” narrative and con-
tinues to lie outside the historical reality of the session. Unable to interpret
her regressive fusion with the mother effectively, I had lost the opportunity
to save the mother in Rupal’s inner world. Her anger toward me was in fact
her anger toward her mother. It wasn’t that she saw me as the mother. Instead,
she saw me as her mother’s historical other; a Muslim in whose historical
location she could evoke and justify her projections, never facing her anger
toward her mother. Had I been able to interpret her persecution against my
 Only Hindu, Also the Patient; Only Muslim, Also the Therapist 113

being Muslim using my historical location of the other; making her explore
my possibility of hating her mother, my historical other—the Hindu, I might
have created a space in session where her mother could be separated from
her, could be hated, and hence have a chance of surviving internally. I felt I
killed the mother outside the sessions because I had failed to kill her inside by
consequence had been unable to save her in Rupal’s inner world.

CONCLUSION: RECOVERING “EACH OTHER” IN HISTORY

Freud writes in Constructions in Analysis (1937) how delusions appear as

equivalent to constructions which we build in the course of the analytic treat-
ment—they are attempts at explanation, and cure, though under the condi-
tions of psychosis, can do no more than replace the fragment of reality that
is being disavowed in the present, by another fragment that had already been
disavowed in the remote past. In the construction of analyzing the psychosis
of the patient, the delusion of being hated by the Muslim, attempts to explain
how the disavowed aspects of self are replaced by the disavowed aspects of
a community. This delusion of being hated by the Muslim carries a kernel of
truth, where it brings a return of the past—the historical truth of Muslim as
the Historical Other. Inserted in place of a rejected inner psychic reality, a
delusion of being persecuted by the Muslim recovers Hindu as the Historical
Other.
The attempt of this chapter was to explore how Hindus and Muslims con-
verse with each other given their historical relation in an analytical setting.
Hindus and Muslims meet each other in the delusion of the patient. The Mus-
lim exists in the historical conversation with the Hindu, forgotten through Par-
tition and repeated in the mind. The chapter is about how the therapist “makes
out” that which has been forgotten, in the conversation between Hindus and
Muslims, is what is repeated in the mind. The work of the therapist is to allow
the Muslim, as the Historical Other, to recover the Hindu as the Historical
other, who speaks to the patient that keeps Hindu and Muslim in her mind.16

ENDING NOTE:

It has been two years since Rupal discontinued therapy and I have thought
about her often. A few months ago, she messaged me saying how she had been
miserable and wanted to resume therapy but was afraid of me hating her be-
cause of what the right-wing Prime Minister was doing to Muslims; she made
references to arrests, communal remarks, beef bans, and love jihad. I wondered,
114 Chapter Seven

every time she placed her delusion in the context of the politics of the country,
about who was really psychotic? Though she continued to speak locked in the
idiom of the historical relationship, wasn’t she carrying on a crucial dialogue
on the behalf of the two communities in her delusion?
As Jacqueline Rose posits “It’s not who speaks in the unconscious but what
speaks in it”—It is not a Hindu or a Muslim in one’s unconscious but what
becomes Hindu and Muslim in one’s unconscious.

NOTES

1. Mariana Hirsch writes in Generation of Post Memory: Writing and Visual Cul-
ture (2012) about the notion of “post memory” which describes the relationship of
the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their
births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute
memories in their own right.
2. Eigen in his book Emotional Storm (2005) departs from the Bionion notion of
personality and quotes “people in its place”; “When two people meet an emotional
storm is created.” He understands emotional storm as crucial to human development
and relatedness and including all aspects from longing to blind rage as critical for
psychic growth.
3. The statement by the use of “only and also” concerns itself with the theme of
inside and outside both being different and similar at the same time. It falls under
the rubric of concepts such as “Me-not me” and “Subjective Objective” (Wininicott,
1945,1953) and is eloquently expressed by Botella’s (2005) formula: “only inside;
also outside.”
4. She was referred to me by a colleague who had seen her for 10 sessions of psy-
chotherapy, informed by analysis though not psychoanalytical. He had to terminate
work with her as his consultation was increased according to the hospital policy,
making it unaffordable for the patient. I had just started private clinical practice and
was working with patients on a low fee. I began psychoanalytical psychotherapy with
her twice a week face to face.
5. Nancy McWilliams (1994) explains how the essential nature of human being
cannot be understood without the appreciation of two distinct interacting dimen-
sions—developmental level of personality and the defensive styles within that level
(p. 40). It relates to degree of pathology and the expression of that pathology. In the
present case while the symptom of obsessive compulsive was an expression of pathol-
ogy, sessions in the future determined the degree of pathology to be psychosis.
6. I love you is replaced by I hate you (reaction formation) where it becomes
you hate (projected) in relation to the other (Screber’s case details; Freud’s psychic
mechanism for Paranoia).
7. During a heated argument the mother had slapped her and ripped off her clothes
in front of her father and brother demanding her to do openly what she was pursuing
on the sly—seducing the men in the family. She had gone on to explain how it had
 Only Hindu, Also the Patient; Only Muslim, Also the Therapist 115

been a familiar scene since childhood following which she described her childhood
experiences with the mother.
8. Her father was unable to stop the mother and explained to her instead how she
must never make her mother unhappy or else be prepared to deserve such a fate. She
realized now how her father was scared of her mother and avoided all possible com-
munication with her especially in public spaces lest she said something embarrassing.
9. While the dynamic of the relation continued to be unconscious, the relation-
ship with the mother came in sessions at the end of the first year following a physical
assault at the hands of the former.
10. She shared how she felt understood by me and did not want to disrupt it by
becoming the object of my envy.
11. It was the literal translation of BisMillahIrRehman-ir-Raheem, which is recited
before any significant work is carried out.
12. It is the Islamic month of fasting, considered pious and integral to Muslims of
all sects. She had seen me drink water in the month and concluded how I was a kafir.
In reality I did not observe Ramzaan.
13. Her mother did eventually got to know of her relationship. Hell broke loose!
She accused her of being his mistress, openly cursing Rupal saying how she was
impure (apavirta) and was doomed to hell. She wanted to see where all she had been
touched saying which she tore her clothes yelling how all her mothering had gone
to waste, all she had told her for so many years about Muslims had been futile, and
the bastards had polluted her daughter. She alleged her for conspiring against her by
seducing her husband and her son. While the son and the father had been spectators to
the violence her [whose?] sister had intervened dismissing Rupal’s answer as a silly
prank assuring her how it was impossible. She made Rupal apologize and since then
her mother made it a point to humiliate Muslims, insisting Rupal affirmed it.
14. A reference to her previous boyfriend who was Muslim.
15. She had been in and out of hospitals but nothing was revealed of her illness.
Rest of the family was under the impression of it being a regular medical checkup.
16. I express my gratitude to Shifa Haq for her comments on the first draft of the
paper; Karuna Chandrashekhar and Sayandeb Chowdhury for their editorial recom-
mendations.

REFERENCES

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Patients.” In The Crescent and the Couch: Cross Currents between Islam and
Psychoanalysis, 335–50, edited by Salman Akhtar. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson,
2008.
Akhtar, S. “Hindu-Muslim Relations in India: Past, Present and Future.”In Freud
along the Ganges. New York: Other Press, 2005.
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Society.” February 1979. Reprinted in Clinical Seminars and Four Papers (1987).
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Botella, S and Botella, C (2005) The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States
Without Representation. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Clarke, M. (2001). “The Klenian Position: Phantasy, Splitting and the Language
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289–297.
Eigen, M. Emotional Storm. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
Elliot, A. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell: Oxford, UK and Cam-
bridge: M.A., 1994. Reprinted 1997.
Erikson, E. H. (1964). Insight and Responsibility New York. W.W. Norton & Com-
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Freud, S. (1911) Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case
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Freud, S. Constructions in Analysis, 258–9, (S.E. Vol. 23, 1937).
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Hirsch. M. (2012) The Generation of Post Memory: Writing and Visual Culture after
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Kakar, S. Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Kakar, S. Shamans, Mystics Doctors: A Psychological Enquiry into India and its
Healing Traditions. New Delhi. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Lerman, A., H. Moore, S. Frosh, S. Chaudhuri, and A. Sen. Conversations with Jac-
queline Rose. New York: Seagull Books, 2010.
McWilliams, N. Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding the Personality Structure
in the Clinical Process. New York: The Guilford Press, 1994.
Nagpal, A. “Clinical Reflections on Forgiveness.” In Wounded History: Religion,
Conflict, Psyche and Social Healing, 165–172, edited by John Chathanatt and
Manindra Thakur. (Delhi: Media house, 2006.
Nandy, A. Intimate enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi.
Oxford University Press, 1983.
Nandy, A. Regimes of Narcissism and Regimes of Despair. UK: Oxford University
Press, 2013.
Nandy, A. Time Wraps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion.
London: Hurst, 2002.
Nandy, A. “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance.” In
Mirrors of Violence-Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, 69–93, edited
by Veena Das. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Nandy, A. Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Rustin, M. “Conclusions: A New Culture of Warfare.” In Welfare and Culture in
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Chamberlayne, Andrew Cooper, Richard Freeman, and Michael Rustin. London:
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Spence, D. P. Narrative and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psycho-

analysis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982.
Volkan, V.D. Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. New York: Farrar,
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97.
 Chapter Eight

Disaster Diaries
Riot-Affected Children
in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad
Atreyee Sen and Manasi Kumar

DISASTER DIARIES: EXCERPTS FROM FIELDNOTES

Manasi Kumar
Akram is 12 years old, studies in class 7 in Ahmedabad city where he lives
with his maternal family since his father was killed during the 2002 riots.
His paternal grandmother threw them out of their house (mother, him, and
his younger sister). He works part-time as a mechanic in a garage where he
earns 3000 rupees which comes in handy for the running of the household.
He describes himself as someone who laughs a lot and loves to visit different
places with his sister. He loves to ride bikes and watch movies and really
wants to sit in an airplane. He shared that his relationship with his mother
was good and he always did what she asked him to do. He also says that he
gives her money whenever there’s a need. He gets worried about marrying
off his sister now that his father is no more. Shortly after his father’s death,
his maternal grandparents died of shock (perhaps there was some illness too
that was not known to him). He appeared like a very chirpy boy who got quite
anxious and sullen when some of these troubling experiences were recalled.
He shared that obeying his mother was important and he followed her advice
carefully but that she became upset and distant when he did not listen to her.
Shera is 10 years old and has the most disturbing appearance, as she looks
extremely unwell, thin, and morose. During our meeting, she rarely made
eye contact; in fact she squatted on the bed with her face bent down, rarely
looking up when I asked her anything. She stays with her mother and four
siblings—one elder brother and sister, the others younger. Her father was
shot dead in the riots. Her mother makes incense sticks. She described herself
as someone who loves playing with her friends, especially hide & seek. She

119
120 Chapter Eight

told me that her mother gives her money when needed and helps her with her
studies. She and her siblings make “rakhis,” Hindu armbands that girls tie to
their brothers during a rakhi festival. The payment received for this laborious
work is extremely low but she doesn’t complain. She mentions that the family
has had several misfortunes since the father’s death. She herself suffers from
a broken ribcage and Chikungunya (a viral infection), which makes her weak
and inefficient at work both at school and home. Though she would like to
be a teacher, she doesn’t know if she can pursue her education, as the family
income isn’t enough.

Atreyee Sen

Arshed, 10, who lives with his parents in a Hyderabad slum, says:

In December 2003, riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims in the northern
quarters of Hyderabad. Our slum area was particularly affected by the rising
tensions. I was sent off for safe-keeping to my uncle’s house in another part of
the city. My brother, a six-year-old, remained behind as my parents were sure
that a small child could be hidden in a box or a barrel if communal antagonisms
escalated into violence. I returned to the slums after a few weeks and found my
mother sitting at the doorstep of our small family shack; she had a glazed look
and held her head in her hands. My father sat on a creaky bed, swaying from
side to side and whispering “he is gone, he is gone (chala gaya, chala gaya).”
My neighbour walked up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said “come
and say goodbye to your brother.” He walked with me to the cemetery. He said
my brother was struck on the head when trapped between rioters on the streets,
and had finally died after two days. The neighbor pointed toward a freshly
covered grave. When I bent over and touched the earth my hand were caught in
the stringed net of flowers resting over the grave. My small brother was tugging
at my arm. I couldn’t save him. My uncle said, “You are all that your parents
have right now, you will grow up and be their crutch.” I said, “Let me grow up
first.” That evening, I was summoned by the local vigilante group. It constituted
of other riot-affected slum boys. Everyone was angry, everyone was concerned
about the survival of young children during violence. Without offering a word
of consolation to my grieving parents I went off to meet them. In the dying light
of the day, I was given a crude sword by one of the older boys, “for your self-
protection” (tere suraksha ke liye). I realized I was officially a member of the
local patrol, there was no looking back (peeche mudke na dekha).

Alam, 10, who lives with his uncle in a Hyderabad slum says:

So many children die during the riots. One day you are playing with them,
football, flying kites, running around, going to work together, going to school
together. And then they are gone, poof, they turn into small graves. You walk
 Disaster Diaries 121

past the cemetery every day and you cannot forget the riots. Or they don’t have
a leg and can’t play football anymore. They don’t have an arm, they can’t hold
a cricket bat anymore. You see them limping around on crutches, and they avoid
making eye contact with you. One of their pajama legs is usually flapping in
the wind; they become concerned whether it can be neatly folded and pinned to
their waist so that it doesn’t get trapped in their crutch or get dirty . . . . Conver-
sations also change among the children you know. Everyone wants to talk about
the violence. . . . We become scared at night that the ghosts of dead children
will haunt us because we survived. I once stole some marbles from Mehr. He
died during the riots; he was strangled. Now he knows I was the thief, what if
he is thinking about revenge? My parents said “Think about revenge against
the Hindus, forget about Mehr’s revenge.” But I think Mehr will come after me.

Trauma can be a subject of direct or indirect inquiry in any disaster research.

This chapter will offer a critical interdisciplinary perspective on the narrativ-
ization of trauma among young children affected by Hindu-Muslim riots in
two different communally sensitive urban areas in India. By drawing select
strands from psychological and anthropological approaches, and relating it
to the articulation of trauma among young children, the authors will attempt
to review what trauma signifies among children, how attachment and trauma
frameworks are useful reference points toward comprehending childhoods
afflicted by brutal collective violence, and how complex memories and dis-
courses of physical disability and social disconnection are developed and
sustained by riot-affected children.
The theme of trauma symbolized the core of psychoanalytic theorization.
The traumatized psyche was conceptualized as registering blows to the psyche
outside the domain of ordinary awareness, with hypnotic methods working
to provide release of repressed material by a cathartic method (Breuer &
Freud 1895). The later psychoanalytic focus (from 1890 onwards) shifted to
repressed memories of sexual trauma and how trauma was internalized (Leys
2000). By 1897, Freud disregarded his thesis of seduction trauma and focused
attention on internal processes and unconscious metabolization of trauma.
Laplanche (1999) drew attention to how Freud problematized the origins of
trauma by pointing to the phenomena of “deferred action” (nachtraglichkeit)
or “afterwardsness” as Laplanche terms it. The trauma, as constituted by a
relationship between two events or experiences: a first event that was not
thought to be traumatic (because it came too early in a child’s maturation
to be understood), and a second event that was not inherently traumatic but
triggered memories of the first one and colored the memory with traumatic
hues (van Haute & Geyskens 2004). Freud rejected a straightforward causal
analysis of trauma in which assaults from outside affected the human being.
Freud’s thesis complicated the understanding of trauma as he highlighted the
122 Chapter Eight

role played by traumatic memory and unconscious motivations where the

memories become unstable by virtue of the presence of a vivacious fantasy
life.
The study of traumatic neurosis for Freud became a theoretical problem de-
manding an exploration of repetition, processes of mourning, defenses of the
ego and, above all conceptualization of his dual-drive theory life and death
drives. Ferenczi can be credited with working on similar themes focusing
on the transfer of trauma from adult to child and the differences in their lan-
guages and organization of trauma. Despite this turning toward mechanisms
of defense and ego functioning, the problem of trauma kept coming up in the
form of the role of external reality or impingement of the external environ-
ment on human instincts (Leys 2000). Henry Krystal (1978, 1985) on anxiety,
affects, and trauma, Khan (1974) on cumulative trauma, Ilse Grubich-Simitus
(1984) on “concretism of metaphors of traumatized,” and Oliner (1996) on
“psychotic like breakdown in trauma survivors,” among others, provided
some account of the internal ramifications of excessive impingements from
outside.
However, World War I revived “shell shock” and combat trauma, and
PTSD came into the picture. Trauma inflicted from outside was revived once
again. The understanding of anxiety as both cause and cure of trauma (Leys
2000), in its ego-protective function and subsequent seeping into the human
protective shield, provided opportunities to study various shades of anxiety.
Trauma thus comes to be understood both as a breach in the protective shield
or unbinding (Freud 1926) as well as a certain kind of mimetic identification
(lack of memory of trauma as opposed to repression of it, resorting to mecha-
nisms such as identification with the aggressor, where there is susceptibility
and openness to all identifications).
The later work of Caruth (1995) and van der Kolk et al. (1996a) (later also
with the work of Dori Laub (2005) and Shoshana Felman (1995), provided a
bridge between empiricism and deconstructionism for trauma theory to argue
that the “literal” speech and symptoms of the traumatized were the (literal)
repetitions of the trauma (Leys 2000, pg. 229). It was argued that the memo-
ries emanating from trauma are not “explicit” or “declarative,” but rather
“implicit” and “procedural non-declarative,” associated with different parts
of the brain (and classically conditioned responses). Herman (1992) returned
to flashbacks, dissociative states, intrusions, nightmares, etc., by arguing for
their recollection and integration back into the inner world of her abused child
subject’s memories. However, with these developments, Frankel (1994, cited
in Leys 2000, p. 243), raised an important concern: is the remembered trauma
historically true or is the recall of historically true trauma necessary for
healing? Even within psychoanalysis, analysts such as Andre Green (2000),
 Disaster Diaries 123

Roy Schafer (1980), and Donald Spence (1984) deliberated on the historical
truth, hermeneutic interpretations of remembered events and memories, and
their relevance to the practice of psychoanalysis in clinic and public/research
domains. Van der Kolk et al. (1996b) evidence for structural deficit or a
wound created by trauma, and the performative theory of traumatic theory of
Caruth, undermined the radical nature of Freud’s unconscious repression due
to their stress on the literality of trauma. Political events such as the Vietnam
War, and the radical feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, provided
an immense playground for PTSD and literary examinations of trauma with
the issue of culpability, testimony of violence and trauma (Das 1990; Butler
2003) drawing interest in understanding the consequences of these events in
the public domain.
The science, and consequent poignant portrayal, of this “literality” of
trauma provided a boost toward understanding passivity and the end of rep-
resentation, but it also ran into an epistemological quandary of not finding
sufficient ground to account for Freud’s “perpetual recurrence of the same
thing” (Leys 2000), since, by repeating trauma, one becomes a subject of it
and not merely a passive victim (van Haute and Geyskens 2007).
Freud’s idea of the death instinct emanating from traumatic neurosis con-
tinues to remain contested. However, his insistence on studying the problem
of death instinct provided vital links between the origins of life, such that it
is the original hilflosigkeit of early childhood. Since then, the primacy of the
child became the hallmark of psychoanalytic thinking (Kristeva 2002). It is in
this sense that Widlocher and Fairfield (2003), and van Haute and Geyskens
(2007) pointed to the unresolved tension between primacy of trauma versus
that of attachment within psychoanalysis as the old debate between life and
death instincts, sexuality, and attachment got revived. While many analysts
(e.g., Anna Freud, Winnicott, Klein to begin with) championed the ideas of
security, transmission of external-internal threat, the critical importance of
early mother-child relations, remained closest in terms of linking external
traumatic influence on early development (see, Fonagy 2001, Gullestad
2003). Threatening to displace the primacy of sexuality, Bowlby’s thesis of
the centrality of attachment and primal helplessness provided a great impetus
in rethinking the hierarchy and ontology of human needs. Those engaged in
assembling the attachment-trauma puzzle posed by Bowlby point to its con-
nection with earlier debates between Freud and Ferenczi, and later additions
by Laplanche (1999 ) and others (particularly Stein 2003, Leys 2000, Widlo-
cher and Fairfield 2003, Geyskens and Van Haute 2004, 2007).
Seen this way, the death instinct was reinterpreted in the form of the pri-
macy of the child—of hilflosigkeit—and helplessness and dependency were
understood to be the beginnings of all beginnings as well as at the heart of all
124 Chapter Eight

traumatic neurosis and loss. It is to Melanie Klein that the desexualization of

the child’s trauma can be attributed, though she upheld the banner of universal
primacy of the child and trauma in her writings (which Laplanche explained
well by calling her work “ipsocentric”—otherness enters in an unexplained
way in her theory). Van Haute and Geyskens (2007) argue that Klein reduced
the child’s need to the most basic—that of hunger and thirst. Both negative
experiences were conceptualized as the driving force of the human baby.
While Anna Freud, in her theorization, refused to see the needs of the child in
isolation, Bowlby argued that the initial helplessness, need for love and safety
were the bases of attachment (bringing in “positive” experience as drivers of
self-sustenance and development). Attachment and loss belonged to the do-
main of normal development with the need for proximity to the mother and
separation anxiety resulting in its absence or emanating from it. What Freud
attributed to a secondary instinct or need was shown by Bowlby to be primal
and immediate in its own right. Curiosity, a sense of mastery, aggression, and
repetition of trauma were then phenomena explained by these early experi-
ences with a significant other (this happened along with the impetus provided
by other object relations theorists) (Laplanche 2001; Geyskens and van Haute
2004). Though Bowlby’s view of temporality was rather linear, and the dis-
tinction between normality and pathology not as radical as Freud’s, it was
his contribution that “attachment became an original dimension in the life of
the instinct” (van Haute and Geyskens 2007, p.108). Direct harm, abuse, and
neglect of children, direct observational work and intervention with families
and children brought out the debate of the real influences on the child’s de-
velopment vs. those psychic influences with which psychoanalytic practice
was concerned. The study of how external events mapped on to the psychic
reality have become, since then, areas of intensive research.

NATURE OF EXTERNAL REALITY: PSYCHIC VS. REAL

In reconciling the impact of traumatic events such as disasters and looking

at their impact on a child’s attachment, a key question is the nature of reality
that will be studied. While attachment tools tried to elaborate dominant men-
tal states and internal working models which sustained those states, the reality
of the external environment is also a compelling factor that needs some ac-
countability. In psychoanalysis, trauma has essentially been understood as a
relation between the external event and a concomitant internal reverberation,
provoking large-scale disturbance in the functioning of the individual. Freud
(1921) and many of his followers visualize the trauma process by using the
concept of “protective shield,” a barrier between the outer and inner mental
 Disaster Diaries 125

life that is perforated by psychic overload. This equation is indicative of a

complex relationship marked by the temporal sequences in which trauma re-
curs and re-presents (disturbance in memory function) itself in painful ways
(Freud 1921). Thus, it is as if the trauma did not occur a long time ago, but
as if it is happening again and again every day. Winnicott (1971) suggested
that there should be some grading of external environment in terms of the im-
pingements it makes on the parent-child world. Freud and Burlingham (1943)
were pioneers in calling attention to children’s psychic experiences during the
war and systematically studied environmental trauma and defenses used by
children to endure it. In the late 1960s and 1970s Anna Freud turned her in-
terest to the psychoanalytic categorization of childhood symptomatology and
to the problems of technique in working with emotionally deprived and so-
cially disadvantaged children including those with non-neurotic disturbances:
various forms of developmental delay and deviation (Edgcumbe 1983). She
advanced the idea that disturbances needed to be studied more in the nature
of personality stunting or deformation acquired in the process of adapting to
an inadequate or malignant environment.
Along with understanding the confusion of tongues between an adult and
child, there is also a need to integrate the gaps in external and internal envi-
ronments. By thinking that only psychic reality is the domain of unconscious
motivations, repression, and all things deep, the exposition of a human mind
would not be adequate. External reality which includes social conditions—
both facilitating and adverse conditions—has have to be better understood
(LeVine 2001, Altman 2005). Hence, anthropological enquiry into trauma
pulls away from reviewing traumatic experience as a deep psychological
process; anthropologists develop multiple perspectives on comprehending
trauma as a cultural construct, which determines the ways in which both
adults and children who have suffered from trauma reconnect with the fam-
ily, community, and adopt various moral pathways of healing and reconcili-
ation. Lester (2013), for example, while developing a critical anthropology
of trauma prefers to use the language of “re-tethering” instead of attachment,
and makes a case for local responses to traumatic events. She states:

People find ways to go on living—not just by resolving deep psychologi-

cal conflicts or by reorganizing their experience to meet existing categories,
but through ongoing, iterative, continuous processes of meaning-making that
emerge in relationship with others, across a variety of levels and contexts, and
through time. (2013, pg. 754)

We also emphasize the suffering that people undergo when faced with sud-
den and brutal ruptures in everyday life, and yet our research highlights how
126 Chapter Eight

actors continue to bridge the gap between their ontological isolation and
wider practices of human relatedness, especially after surviving a disaster.

PSYCHOLOGICAL TERRAIN AND

SOCIAL REALITY OF EVENTS UNDER INQUIRY

There are areas of overlap between natural and human-induced disasters. Sen
(1999) argues that famines are usually caused by a lack of purchasing power
or entitlements and are not necessarily caused by drought and consequent
food shortage; in effect, famine is the result of human actions rather than
entirely caused by a natural phenomenon. Natural disasters and complex
emergencies can occur concurrently (Spiegel 2005). Similarly, violence
unleashes complex and difficult life conditions. Survivors carry the impact
of both the increasing persecution and violence and of threats such as mass
killing or genocide, in extreme cases. Their basic needs for security, for
feelings of effectiveness and control over important events in their lives, for
positive identity, for positive connections to other people and communities,
and for a comprehension of reality and of their own place in the world have
all been deeply frustrated (Staub 1989, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2006; Staub
and Pearlman 2001, 2006). With the exception of anthropologist Veena Das’
work (1990; also see Nussbaum 2007) on the Sikh community affected in the
1984 Delhi Hindu-Sikh riots, there are few contemporary scholarly studies
on childhood adversities, child trauma, or social impact of collective/critical
events on young children. The challenge before the authors, therefore, has
been enormous in terms of finding new ways of conceptualizing the problem
of complex disasters, their long-term effects on children, and post-disaster
adversities. Thinking through the anthropological enterprise of participant
observation as a way of understanding children and their struggles becomes
the next concern.

FIELD WORK IN
PSYCHOANALYTICALLY MINDED RESEARCH

The main hurdle after a golden period of interaction between psychoanaly-

sis and anthropology, from Mead to Malinowski (1928-1950), came in the
form of universalistic bias and an apathy toward cross-cultural sensitivity
or exchange on childhood and child development issues. While the neo-
Freudian influences used the field observations to criticize developmental
formulations (e.g., Kurtz 1992, LeVine and Norman 2001), thorough and
 Disaster Diaries 127

in-depth cultural explorations within psychoanalytic developmental theori-

zation did not become popular. Obeyesekere (1990) points out that in both
the disciplines of psychoanalysis and anthropology it is well recognized that
some of our insights in fact come from our subjects/informants and this is a
situation impossible in natural sciences (p. 238). Therefore an ethnography
or anthropology of childhood is meant to be a descriptive account, based on
field observations and one involving interviews of participants, of the lives,
activities, and experiences of children in a particular place and time, and
also involve the social, cultural, institutional, and economic contexts that
make sense of their behavior there and then (Patel and Kleinman 2003). The
fieldwork has to uphold the plasticity principle and human variability forms
the main tenet of the research. The anthropology of childhood and psycho-
analytic anthropology have suffered from the chronic instability of dominant
theories concerning the child’s psychological development during the twenti-
eth century (Piaget’s universalistic accounts came under attack from Shweder
and LeVine [1984]; similarly, Kohlberg’s cognitively based model of moral
development [1984] was similarly criticized by Shweder and LeVine [1984];
Carol Gilligan’s conception of gender differences in development was chal-
lenged by Miller [1994] and the Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment theory have
also been criticized for their universalistic bias by LeVine & Norman [2001]
and by Burman [2007]). It can be said that the relations between anthropol-
ogy, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis on issues of child devel-
opment have been distant and sporadic.
In doing field work, the necessity of transcending those opposing perspec-
tives was established very early; the field worker must remain open to native
views while simultaneously seeking an academic understanding; a balance
must be attained between description and explanation, between the idio-
graphic and the nomothetic. And this entire discussion leads us to the ques-
tion of our own fieldwork(s) which involved studying both the social and the
psychological, sometimes barely managing to capture both.

STRANDS OF FIELDWORK
IN COMMUNALLY SENSITIVE AHMEDABAD

The Gujarat riots that took place in February 2002 and continued untill
March-April of that year were some of the worst riots in the history of social
violence in India. Communal violence broke out in the capital city of Ahmed-
abad and in surrounding areas, over the gruesome burning of Hindu activists
(travelling by train) in the town of Godhra (Gujarat) early in the morning of
27 February, 2002, and continued for the next four months. Over 2000 Mus-
128 Chapter Eight

lims and 254 Hindus were killed; 20,000 Muslims and about 10,000 Hindus
were displaced and property worth 5 million rupees was destroyed (Mehta,
Vankar, and Patel 2005). International Human Rights Watch Report (2002)
reported over 1000 cases of rape and mutilation of women and children.

Case 7: Deepak, 12, lives in Ahmedabad city, where he was interviewed in the
SEWA’s regional office inside the old city quarters. His father was killed in the
riots and his mother remarried. Unfortunately, his mother was unable to keep
him citing that he was aggressive and violent with her and often rejecting of his
step-father. He lives with his paternal grandmother and uncle and aunty, both of
whom Deepak said were a bit rough with him. He felt abandoned by his mother
and his violent outbursts were about making some contact with her, which were
met with cold rejection. During the interview Deepak was quite cheerful and
talked about a number of things like running away from the hostel, the loving
care his granny gave, and the harassment from mother, uncle, and aunty. He
described himself as someone who played and shared with everyone and can be
funny, often making his cousins laugh. He shared a lot about his life and when
we started talking about the relationship with his mother and separation from
her, he got up, crying incessantly, saying that his stomach was aching. I felt
quite shocked and unable to comprehend initially, however later I could recog-
nize how hurtful his mother’s rejection of him was. I organized another meeting
to understand what happened with him that day and to complete the interview.
He shared how difficult it is to talk about his mother.

For the riot-affected children, the actual loss was more palpable and responsi-
bilities felt more from their end than forced on them by their parents. Despite
the fact that more than five or six years had elapsed after the riots, when first
contact was made with the children in the riots sample, several children and
their families were still fighting for compensation for the lost parent, sibling,
or other relatives and also for the physical damage to property. The missing
people were not yet declared dead so there were children who spoke about
their parent/relative or sibling as if they were alive and many were waiting
for the parent to return, so clearly the fact that the loss was a permanent
one had not yet sunk in. Since the riots became a matter of national debate
and furor, as well as being a deep embarrassment for the State government
(see National Human Rights Commission Report 2003–04, Patel and Klein-
man 2003, many civil society organizations as well as the National Human
Rights) Commission went back time and again to record testimonies of the
survivors. The children spoke to the researcher about feeling very burnt out
and disturbed about narrating their loss and experiences during riots time and
again to different people.
Apart from this, the children in this sample were working for more than
five to eight hours a day after attending their schools, to supplement their
 Disaster Diaries 129

families’ income. The researcher had to interview at least 18 children at their

work place—typically a carpet factory on the outskirts of the city, or visit
their homes or employer’s home where they made bidis (local cigarettes),
kites or rakhis (armbands used in a Hindu festival), or did embroidery work.
The wage earned was just about 80 pence–1 pound (about 60–85 rupees) per
week and it involved working strenuous hours in extremely dilapidated set-
tings. The interview videos with some of these children are a witness to the
kind of setting alluded to here.
In their descriptions of life after the riots, the children spoke and wrote (in
the riots’ trauma assessment questionnaire) about feeling an overwhelming
sense of guilt of surviving the ordeal while their parent(s) or sibling(s) per-
ished and a great moral sense of duty to serve the family. Young girls were
found saying that they did not want to get married and wanted to stay with
their parents, helping and serving them in their later life.
Listed below are a few factors that provide a roadmap toward understand-
ing the long-term import of the two events under study:

Varied Degrees of Relational Deprivation

Both events, despite being different in origins, present a set of relational depri-
vations that are yet to be fully understood. As in the previous DMHR research,
the violence presents greater vulnerabilities for children and families alike
(Norris et al. 2006, Catani et al. 2008, 2009) than instances of natural disasters,
though the rural context in many developing countries presents greater hard-
ships and lack of resources in comparison to urban areas. In this research the
earthquake-affected sample from the Kutch largely represents the rural, and the
riots represent urban Gujarat. Therefore, social exclusion and lack of resources
emanating from both events seem to have competing disadvantages.

Active and Passive Exclusion

The riots in Gujarat present active social exclusion where a deliberate attempt
is made to exclude people from accessing resources, asserting their basic
rights and freedom, and resulting in various transgressions and violations
of their personal and social boundaries (Sen 2000, Butler 2003, Nussbaum
2006). On the other hand, in rural Gujarat in the aftermath of the severe earth-
quake, the more passive form of exclusion, in social conditions that foster
deprivation, is demonstrated (Spodek 2001, Mehta 2001). The critical ques-
tion in this research is then to see if children recognize and get differentially
affected by the active seclusion in the context of riots or the more passive
exclusion in case of earthquake.
130 Chapter Eight

THE HISTORY OF COMMUNAL VIOLENCE

AND THE ROLE OF CHILDREN IN HYDERABAD

In the long history of communal discord in India, the voices and narratives of
children being tortured, maimed, killed, or being orphaned has been largely
missing. While their experiences have been enmeshed with the despair of
their parents, siblings, and extended families, the children, especially, have
been victims of violent conflict. Their agency, initiative, and independent
aspirations to overcome and address their loss and anxieties through their
own ideas and actions have remained marginalized in academic and policy-
related analysis. My anthropological investigation into the lives of a group
of Muslim slum children who have been affected by sporadic, yet ruthlessly
violent, outbreaks of communal riots in Hyderabad revealed that young male
slum children were far more dependent on each other for physical survival
and emotional and economic sustenance than either on their families or on
post-conflict NGO intervention. My ethnographic landscape was Sultanpur,
a Muslim-dominated ghetto in the northern quarters of Hyderabad, where
large sections of impoverished boys (aged between 9–14 years) conspired
to form local child squads, and made violent attempts to claim and control
peripheral, public spaces, for the safety and mobility of riot-affected children.
The coordinated actions of these child squads, which preferred to align them-
selves with the terminology of “soldiering,” brought forth the significance of
Sultanpur as a complex urban turf that spawned and sustained a new culture
of child belligerence.
Unlike Ahmedabad, Hyderabad is not a city which has been on the pri-
mary radar of communalist politics in India. Yet it has a legacy of prolonged
enmity between Hindus and Muslims which has been traced far back to the
period of Asaf Jahi dynastic/Nizami rule (between 1724 and 1948). Even
though colonial heads of state had often admired the lack of conflict in the
princely state, historians have shown how Hindus across caste beliefs and
backgrounds organizsed resistances against Muslim domination in the city.
The nature of inter-religious tensions came to a head at the beginning of the
twentieth century, especially with the formation of a radical Muslim orga-
nization, Majlis-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen in 1929. “Between 1937 and 1940,
Hyderabad’s much vaunted communal accord was irreparably shattered by
a series of bloody riots and political demonstrations culminating in a nine-
month campaign of civil disobedience by over 8,000 Hindus against the Dar-
bar” (Copland 1988, pg. 784: 88). Majlis leaders spent the initial years trying
to unify all classes and categories of Muslims on the same platform, but with
a change in political leadership, the organization donned a brutal garb against
minorities in the city. Through the 1940s, the paramilitary wing of the Majlis,
the Razakars, spread a network of violence and terror in Hyderabad and its
 Disaster Diaries 131

surrounding areas. The newly independent Indian Union, still in the process
of negotiating the annexation of Hyderabad, expressed concern about the
extreme chaos in the state. In September 1948, the Indian Army invaded the
city and incorporated Hyderabad into the Telegana region in the southern
part of India (later consolidated into the state of Andhra Pradesh). Besides
setting a temporary ban on the Majlis, this invasion, also known as the “po-
lice action,” had an enormous impact on the culture and configuration of the
city. Several scholars highlighted the sudden marginalization of an important
urban center within its surrounding rural, Dravidian society. For example,
due to the domination of Telegu speakers in the region, Urdu, the primary
language spoken and shared by affluent and underprivileged Hyderabadi
Muslims, became increasingly insignificant. For several years, this form of
symbolic and social assaults largely impacted young school-going Muslim
children, especially when they were crudely taunted for speaking the official
language of Pakistan. A decade of political, linguistic, and cultural battles led
to the revival of the Majlis in 1957, and the new leaders gained a foothold in
the rapidly expanding urban slums. The party developed a particularly strong
base in the Charminar constituency of the old city (where I conducted my
fieldwork), and eventually inspired the rise of other parallel radical organi-
zations in Hyderabad (such as the Darsgah Jihad-O-Shahadath) which suc-
cessfully mobilized large groups of slum children into their movement. Their
most successful campaign carried an image of a small child in paramilitary
uniform holding a poster saying “The Quran will be the constitution of Allah,
and I will be the soldier of Allah.”
The national level communal politics and the rise of Hindu nationalism
deeply affected fragile religious relationships in Hyderabad. Communal po-
larizations in electoral politics became more acute when Hindu nationalist
groups such as the Bharatiya Janata Party, (BJP), infiltrated into old city areas
and pitched themselves against the local Majlis cells. The nature of rumor-
mongering (Kakar 2005) and electioneering in these constituencies (Engineer
1991) hierarchized social and political practices in most of Hyderabad’s
housing colonies. Naidu’s (1990) study of inflammatory communal rela-
tions and urban decay in the old city further suggests that the post-partition
influx of Hindu refugee families coupled with rural-urban migration from
Telugu-speaking areas significantly impacted inter-community relations. In
addition, various political parties re-invented themselves as “anti-social ele-
ments,” especially as the land mafia, resulting in high levels of crime in the
old city. Corporations began to wonder about the impact of such communal
tensions on younger children when several missionary schools, especially
run by charitable groups for the poor, stopped offering admission to children
from the old city as they could not attend classes during riots and curfews.
Between 1978–84, Hyderabad saw a number of communal riots (sparked off
132 Chapter Eight

by issues ranging from a Muslim woman being raped in a police station to

conflict over the immersion of idols during Hindu festivals). In 1990, when
Hindu nationalists made their first attempt to tear down the Babri Masjid in
the temple town of Ayodhya (claiming that the historical mosque was the site
for the birth of a mythological Hindu god, Ram), Hyderabad witnessed over
a fortnight of crippling riots which left over a hundred people dead and many
more critically injured. An NGO (COVA), which acted as a peace mediator
during the riots, reported that stabbing became an important mob strategy,
and knife edges were dipped in cyanide for more fatal attacks. Even though
the communal element of the clashes was highlighted in the press and the
media, most old city dwellers described the riots as a battle between Hindu
and Muslim land sharks. “The BJP and the Majlis usually work together for
land grabbing, often giving each other commissions. They probably had a
fight over sharing profits which led to the communal battle,” said Javed, a
senior citizen and old city dweller. During the 1990 riots, however, mobs
specifically attacked male children; boys were targeted, maimed, or killed
with swords, spears, and stones, and hung from doorways to send a mes-
sage to enemy communities (the police reports do not divulge information
about the community backgrounds of these children). According to my child
informants, however, it was poor Muslim boys (“we knew all about it”) and
this “trend” has continued over two decades into more recent times. Over
the years, the slums got increasingly re-organized along communal lines
and turned into what within urban anthropology has come to be understood
as “hyperghettoes” (Wacquant 2010). Some of the public areas, especially
the bazaars, once breathing spaces for inclusivity and sociality, came to be
known as the Indo-Pakistan Line of Control. Flueckiger’s (2006) ethnography
of the life of a healer in Hyderabad showed how sections of urban Muslims
retained nostalgia for the days before the “police action” when knowledge
of other cultures was welcomed within most communities. Aroma, the chief
protagonist in Flueckiger’s account, remained worried that children growing
up in segregated colonies encountered tensions and vulnerability, without any
experience of inter-faith camaraderie that often characterized times of peace.
According to the inhabitants of Sultanpur, this ghetto, located close to the
Charminar, one of the city’s chief tourist attractions, housed approximately
10,000 Urdu-speaking, Muslim families (even though periodic surveys by
NGOs, housing figures, and census operations by the local municipal corpo-
ration pegged the number closer to 30,000). The area was organized into a
neatly structured mosaic of enclaves and shanties, and relatively well main-
tained lanes and by-lanes. For many generations, Sultanpur was the primary
home and hub of craftsmen and traders who operated out of the nearby bangle,
fabric, and pearl bazaars. Over four decades, Sultanpar saw robust, sporadic
 Disaster Diaries 133

spurts of communal clashes with middle- and lower-class Hindus, usually

living in residential neighborhoods around the Charminar. Sultanpur-wallahs
described how these conflicts, at times sparked off by narrower issues such
as slum-dwellers siphoning off water from Hindu-dominated housing estates,
were resolved speedily by negotiations among community leaders. Over
time, these quotidian clashes became more violent expressions of religious
discontent, involving burning homes, looting shops, and physical attacks on
small children, eventually driving a deeper wedge into local Hindu-Muslim
relations. Also, the lack of state control over religious processions and the
subsequent lifting of a ban on loudspeakers increased the scope for speeches,
slogans, and communal incitement in public (Naidu 1990). Sultanpur also
saw bouts of rioting in 1992 (when Hindu nationalists successfully tore down
the controversial mosque in Ayodhya), and again in 2003 (when local Hindus
tried to restrict Muslim residents from publicly marking the tenth anniversary
of the destruction of the mosque). In 2007, a pipe-bomb blast near the Mecca
Masjid and serial blasts near the Charminar killed several residents of Sul-
tanpur, including children, and the ensuing blame game between the BJP and
Majlis members brought the communal tensions in the area into the media
limelight. Hence, the history of communal violence in Hyderabad remained
deeply imbricated with the nature of physical and symbolic attacks against
children from the minority community.
The local residents (and various concerned NGO workers active in the
Sultanpur area) suggested to me that child soldiering was a consequence of
escalating communal antagonisms. Unlike Bombay, where I saw the small
birth and rapid development of child aggression in the year and a half that
I spent in a Hindu-dominated slum (Sen 2007), when in Hyderabad, I was
directed by local NGOs to Sultanpur where child hostilities had intensified as
a problem. Hence, for me, urban spaces in India were rendered comparable
through the trope of male child violence. When I arrived in Sultanpur on a
sultry afternoon (uncomfortable in my Hindu identity), I was surprised to be
warmly welcomed within the community. I discovered that the local slum
dwellers were also eager to gain deeper insight into the troubled rationale of
child vigilantism. Despite their encounters with unpredictability and violence,
Sultanpur-wallahs felt “children used to be children” (bacche to bacche the).
Within what appeared to be the dominant cultural understanding of an ideal
male childhood in the slum, boys spent time with their mates, balanced their
lives between work and studies, maintained a certain standard of hygiene and
religiosity, and most importantly they respected elders (baro ki izzat karna).
Further, the boys were admiring and afraid of their fathers, affectionate
towards their mothers, playful with their older and younger siblings. “Who
were the worst child offenders? The boys who smoked a bidi and we could
134 Chapter Eight

pull their ears if we caught them,” said Aiyaz, one of the slum dwellers I met
in Sultanpur. This reminiscence of an idyllic, gentle childhood lost to com-
munal violence remained the official parental discourse in the slums.

Dreading the Dead: The Turn toward Child Violence in Sultanpur

While conducting research in Sultanpur, I attempted to design a local, more
intimate history of riot-affected boys through the voices of children them-
selves. My extended research on the violent expression of child vulnerability
has been debated, discussed, and published over the years. For the purpose of
this chapter I will remain focused on the experiences of children who turned
toward collective violence mainly as a response to the trauma of being vic-
timized during the clashes. While chatting with the boys about forming child
protection squads, I discovered that their initial decisions to fight violence
with violence were related to being faced with their own mortality, maut ke
mooh dekhne ke baad (after seeing the face of death). A number of boys lost
their friends in the riots. While only a small group of boys discussed having
seen children being attacked or killed during the riots, most of them talked
about being absent during the actual violence (hidden in a box, or running
away, or being taken to the homes of relatives living elsewhere, or getting
on a train to leave for their native villages) and then returned to see and
experience the physical absence of their friends. They spoke of their memo-
ries of walking through the piles of burning debris from homes and shops,
hearing the sounds of grief-stricken wailing, and peering through clouds of
thick smoke in search of other familiar or friendly child faces. “Even though
some of the children were not hurt or dead, they were often not coming back
to Sultanpur for the fear of death,” said Aslam, 10, one of my informants.
Thus, some of the choices made by slum children to turn toward organized
violence, centered around the direct experiences of riots (mobs targeting male
children, children seeing the funerals of their friends and families, “touching
fresh graves and imagining what it felt to lie under it,” hearing about the
death of children in past riots, etc). Most of the children also suffered forms
of displacement (children being sent back to the villages for safe-keeping,
taken out of school, having their mobility restricted and kept at home, etc). At
times, what the children identified as trauma and scarring was related to lack
of answers to their questions about loss: such as wondering in vain about the
whereabouts of missing best friends (not identified as dead) as after the riots
most parents became increasingly suspicious, and secretive about children
who were kept away from Sultanpur.
This constant state of fear and flux, especially while negotiating commu-
nally tense public places, also made the boys acutely aware of diminishing
 Disaster Diaries 135

numbers of male children in the slums. The loss of friends through death,
displacement, or disability, and dread of the dead, preoccupied the male
children. Significantly, my informants showed less fear of being haunted by
angry adult ghosts and far greater anxiety about the malevolent spirits of dead
children rising from the dead. The fear of vengeful child ghosts was quite
common as the children often shared guilt of survival, and talked quite inces-
santly about their resentful friends who didn’t get a chance to simply enjoy
play, toys, and jokes; “the latter could never cross over as their lives were
cut short too early” said Aziz, 12. Thus, the children were touched by various
experiences of violence even if they did not see rioting masses or were not
subjected to physical assaults. To contest these various experiences of trauma
and rupture, the children decided to “take matters into their own hands,” and
a few of them initiated a system of armed night and day patrols in the slums.
The boys felt safer in groups, collected crude knives and swords as their
weapons, showed plenty of internal bonhomie, and used persuasive tactics
of recruitment of other children. The fact that these strategies eventually at-
tracted more child troops into everyday vigilantism underlined the collective
experience of child trauma and its collective response in Sultanpur. While
the child retribution squads were considered morally reprehensible by adults,
amongst the children, the act of saving their own lives and the lives of other
children was a form of attachment to the act of living itself, and was tethered
to their constant aspiration to survive the fragility of childhoods in violent
poverty and grow into the adult world with physical security and emotional
integrity. At the same time, the reiteration of trauma, scarring, loss, and fear
in child discussions and child conversations, whether it was about the absence
of friends or the fear of haunting, was also an attachment to a past when the
child world was less vulnerable to violent threats from the incomprehensible
politics and religious debates in the adult world.

Some Concluding Comments: Social Vulnerabilities

and Childhood Studies in India
The focus on children in the context of everyday life under conditions of
vulnerability holds great promise for enriching our understanding of how dis-
putations over culture and forms of belongingness are enacted repeatedly and
undramatically: culture becomes a breathing, living form rather than a fixed
one (Das and Reynolds 2003). Most states in low-income and middle-income
countries simply do not have the resources to craft comprehensive welfare
policies for the poor. Thus, the impact of chronic poverty on the survival of
children presents extremely pressing problems in these countries (Scheper-
Hughes 1992). Cohen (2001), in a cross-national survey of child’s labor in
136 Chapter Eight

India, Canada, and Norway concludes that there is a continuum—from chil-

dren who appear not to contribute to the domestic economy to children whose
contribution is so substantial that the household survival depends on their
earnings. Challenging the dominant conception of children as passive and
dependent, proponents of a new sociology of childhood have massed careful
data to demonstrate the variations in children’s contribution to domestic work
and care, to family earnings (Das and Reynolds 2003), and to other forms of
market-mediated work activities (Burman 2005). In low-income communi-
ties, children’s work is equally important for sustaining the household as well
as for providing access to new opportunities through schooling (Cohen 2001).
The deterministic theories that postulate a single trajectory of children’s
moral development have been challenged in the field of child psychology
(Kakar 2001). For instance, Erik Erikson (1964) looking at the development
occurring over the lifespan and Carol Gilligan’s (1982) work on gender
identity. There are several debates arguing that truth about suffering should
be recorded and made public (Butler 2003). Hence, it becomes important to
determine which standards of descriptions should be employed in recounting
events of this nature (Das 1995). In the current study, the child attachment in-
terviews are put to multiple uses: ranging from interviews as the testimonies
of children of their everyday life struggle to an elaboration of their parental
and familial attachment networks.
What is important is how and whether the real and felt negative effects can
be overcome over a lifecourse and/or between generations, and if not, what
is it that prevents outcomes (Harper, Marcus, and Moore 2003, pg. 4). The
Capabilities approach developed by economist Amartya Sen insists that we
should focus on the real freedoms that people have for leading a valuable life
(Robeyns 2003, pg. 61). The approach refuses normative judgments made
exclusively on income, commodities, or material resources. Capabilities are
people’s potential functionings. Functionings are beings and doings (Sen
1982). And thus, as a means of enhancing the well-being of its people, a so-
ciety also needs to focus on the freedom to achieve the intrinsic capabilities
of individuals. Attachment can be seen as a function of a child’s capabilities
that are intergenerationally nurtured and passed on. Psychologists think chil-
dren are endowed to look for secure attachments, though, at the end of the
day, it is also the mother, father, family, and our social milieu and culture
that instill and reinforce secure attachment. So there exists a dual process of
initiation of the capability for secure attachment—one which a human being
is programmed to strive toward (like love, trust, empathy, etc.) and on the
other hand it is also to be harnessed and developed in the course of one’s life
through socialization. It is in this domain that these young girls and boys are
contesting their struggle for survival, identity, and freedom to achieve what
 Disaster Diaries 137

they desire. Achieved functioning is also an index of deprivation capabilities

and helps us access which capabilities are marred or not allowed to develop.
In the context of the fieldwork conducted by both authors, disability and
its relationship with trauma is a flexible and contested subject. Not only is
it intimately linked to physical suffering and mobility, it also reinvigorates
the category of social disability. The latter remains consistently related to the
fear among riot-affected children about their inadequacy as complete human
beings, and their incapacity to return to social and familial “normalcy” in the
aftermath of riots. Physical disability not only causes trauma to the children
who have been impaired or deformed during the outbreak of violence, it also
has a severe impact on children who have witnessed attacks on their family
members and friends which have led to disability. Young boys and girls be-
come increasingly aware that their friends are lost to them as active children,
they suffer from guilt and anxiety of possession and hauntings as physically
undamaged survivors of violence, and through the presence of disabled
children within the community they are reminded of their own physical and
sexual vulnerability during future outbreak of riots.

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 Part III

CULTURAL IDENTITY
AND INDIAN IMAGINATION
 Chapter Nine

Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in

Yoga and Psychoanalysis
Ajeet N. Mathur

INTRODUCTION

Psychoanalysis and yoga have a lot in common.1 They are both practices that
enable you to experience yourself from another point of view and to value
outcomes for human well-being brought about through increased self-aware-
ness. They both accept the notion that lived reality involves multiple layers/
planes of consciousness; that the body and the mind affect each other; that
emotions and affective states involve unconscious processes which impact
conscious thoughts, feelings, and actions; that sleep and dreams have impor-
tant restorative functions; that dreams contribute to our understanding about
ourselves; and that a person’s identity provides the continuity acknowledged
by others. Yet, despite the precession of yoga in the Indian terroir, and the
subsequent emergence and import of psychoanalysis from the West, the two
traditions stand apart as if they are untouchables for each other.
This is intriguing because they both value human well-being through
increased self-awareness, both have been confirmed as worthwhile and are
well subscribed—often, by even the same persons! Yoga and psychoanalysis
are distinguishable by differences in the beliefs, norms, values, and attitudes
surrounding their practices because they have evolved from assumptions and
methodologies unique to their evolutionary trajectories. Each, in its various
hues, has been impregnated with social rituals, customs, and traditions akin
to those in religious systems. Their communities of practice come across as
flag-bearers of two distinct cultures. Yet, neither would be possible without
some modicum of faith in humanity and in the capacity of self to function
as an instrument and interlocutory container for emotional, psychological,
and spiritual processes. This paper focuses on the correspondences, differ-
ences, convergences, and divergences at the frontiers of faith in Yoga and
145
146 Chapter Nine

Psychoanalysis, both of which hold out extraordinary promise of experiential

insights and self-learning for human well-being. Such an endeavor by its very
nature invites inaccuracy because it is impossible to take out elements from
the two traditions without attention to their distinct trajectories.
As practices, psychoanalysis and yoga are both enactments of faith in
the sense that knowledge and experience about them is not enough for their
practice. They draw on four common values: empathy, compassion, toler-
ance, and human dignity. At the frontiers of faith is a common core belief
in both that minds are like parachutes—they function best when they are
open! Any journey involving experiential learning can be of value only by
participating in it. Questions of coping with anxieties and defending against
anxieties arise throughout life. Life without some trust and faith would be an
unbearable burden marked by extreme anxiety and unease. Faith can thus get
easily distorted from its essence as a spiritual attitude—signifying endeavor
toward adherence to the trappings of systems including religious systems as
defense against thanatos anxiety. Spirituality is about purpose, place, mean-
ing, inspiration, and wisdom and not about religion. In this sense, it may be
said that spirituality begins where religion ends and reality is experienced
when spirituality is also transcended.
Kakar (2009) notes that any engagement with the spiritual in psycho-
analysis has been regarded with considerable suspicion. This is despite
considerable evidence from many non-western societies that spiritual no-
tions of intimate connections between self and not-self are at odds with the
supposedly rational insistence on an enduring separation between the two
instead of working at integrating spirit and psyche. Might spirituality en-
hance a psychoanalyst’s capacity for empathy? Do spiritual mentors actively
fostering idealization with their disciples breed unhealthy dependency, or
do they inculcate a healthy alliance for facilitating self-awareness? Kakar
raises intriguing questions. Ghoshal (2013) raises a concern that the guru-
shishya parampara may hinder expression of the negative transference, while
conceding that there is no evidence that the course of psychoanalysis in the
Indian terroir has hindered transference per se. This leaves us wondering how
many shades of attachment there might be that Bowlby (1988) missed. If the
attachment system is regarded as having a function to provide proximity to a
caregiver, its functions in affect regulation involve interfaces with fear sys-
tems and exploratory systems too. Ogden (2009) maintains that psychological
work with live emotional experience may be unconscious, preconscious (as
in a patient’s free associations and an analyst’s reverie), or conscious. Thus,
Winnicottian space, Bionian containment, and Loewaldian eye on the patient/
disciple’s well-being each have their own value.
 Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 147

The core fabric of the existential puzzle contained in the question “Who am
I?” (Laing 1960) was answered by Laing as “I am what I make myself to be”
but the answer was reached through phenomenological methods. Any psy-
chological method (psychoanalysis or psychotherapy) involves taking care of
the mind. Hoch (1993), after practizing psychiatry and psychoanalysis in In-
dia, ceased distinguishing between taking care of the “soul/spirit” and taking
care of the mind, and regarded psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as spiritual
endeavors. According to her, what is important is the source of distress such
as bhaya (separation anxiety/fear of a cosmic kind, rather than the Freudian
notion of separation from mother) or shok (sorrow) arising out of karma, moh
(attachment), delusions, or ignorance. Vaidyanathan and Kripal (2002) have
also drawn attention to the connections between psychoanalytic thinking and
Indian traditions. Freud’s desk was littered with archaeological artefacts from
many cultures. Freud admitted that he drew inspiration from these as muses
because he believed his work was like archaeology, plumbing the depths of
the human mind and the stirrings of the human spirit.
There are elements comparable to the analyst-analysand relationship in a
yoga shikshak-abhyasi relationship or Guru-chela relationship (Neki 1973).
There are also differences. Yogic practices such as Trataka, Pranayams, Mu-
dras, and Yoganidra have been distinguished from hypnotic states because
in these consciousness is maintained in a waking state under control of the
self. They are also different from pychoanalytic cathexis. So, while there
are overlaps, there are also practices unique to yoga and unique to psycho-
analysis. The connections between body and mind are worth mentioning. The
effects of yoga have been scientifically studied to demonstrate changes in
metabolism, hormonal secretions, transcriptional gene regulations, endocrine
activity, intracellular DNA and RNA, and on the sympathetic and parasym-
pathetic nervous systems (Mangaltheertham 2013). One cannot do meditation
any more than one can do “transference.” Meditation is a state that is reached
through dhyana after withdrawing the senses into oneself. Transference is an
outcome when a therapeutic relationship is established. Both are processes,
both are journeys, and neither has an assured cause-effect timeline for mea-
surable outcomes.
The Indian taxonomy of emotions, the bhava system, distinguishes feelings
of envy and hatred that trigger projections and transferences as a separate
category called sanchar bhava (transference). This first known attempt by
humanity at understanding processes of projections and introjections formed
the core of notions around which concepts such as vyabhichari bhava (tran-
sitional anxiety states of being, numbering 33 according to Bharat Muni and
52 according to Buddhists), rasa (essence/chemical juices tasted in the body
148 Chapter Nine

aroused from chemical changes in the body following an emotion or jouis-

sance), and mudra (poses and gestures correlated with cultivation of specific
bhavas or emotion-states ) were introduced. This distinction was missing in
the Aristotelian taxonomy of emotions built around the dichotomous notion
of pain or pleasure supplemented by the reality principle in psychoanalysis.
The theories formulated and the practices derived for the performing arts,
notably music, drama, and dance, documented in the Natyashastra, were an
early acknowledgement of what was much later termed as “emotional labor”
(Hochschild 1983).
Language has always been important in psychoanalysis and there continues
to be considerable resistance in psychoanalysis to expanding the notions con-
nected with the unconscious to include implications arising from new knowl-
edge of neurological and neuropharmacological insights, bodily resonances,
and yoga. Yogic traditions always regarded the body, mind, and spirit to be a
holistic unit and conceptualize vortices of energy that connect transmissible
impulses and manifest in myriad ways. At the risk of some oversimplifica-
tion, there is a difference between believing “I am in the body and have a
mind and body” versus the notion that “the body is in me.” The significance
of sound on a physical plane was discovered by the influence of sound vibra-
tions in healing. The Rafai Sufis found that the resonance of sound at a cer-
tain pitch of vibrations makes the body invulnerable to cuts and burns (Khan
1988, p. 108). Vocal musical sounds for healing are used in many traditions
around the world ranging from ragas to Gregorian chants to hymns.
The distinction between consciousness while awake (jagrata) and while
dreaming (swapna) led to recognition of the unconscious (sushupti) state.
Consciousness and mindfulness interested those who valued reflecting and
learning from experiences. The notion of vitarka (assumptions or supposi-
tions) as preparatory to clear vision about phenomenan was termed vichara.
This has etymologically diffused to other Indo-European and Ugric language
traditions, where the tradition of dwelling on the day’s experiences at sunset
in reflective contemplation (and meditations for cleansing residual impres-
sions of the day) is known as vecher, vespers, vespera, and viisaus. The ca-
pacity to forget, eschew desires, and not hanker after understanding (dwelling
in not-knowing) are common to both traditions, yoga and psychoanalysis.

THE EVOLUTIONARY TRAJECTORIES

OF YOGA AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Natural phenomena as understood require assimilation in a culture to engage

in practices even when they concern libidinous energies and polyvalent
 Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 149

drives. To wonder is to inquire into what sustains life, the significance of

breathing, what is inside the mind, what is behind the senses, and whether
we all share some common sensations and perceptions as part of inalienable
dignity. To quote Kakar and Kakar (2007, p. 75): “The Kamasutra’s most
valuable insight is that pleasure needs to be cultivated, that (even) in the
realm of sex, nature requires culture” (parentheses mine). The way in which
people reinforce norms, values, beliefs, and attitudes in a given context is
what provides a common outlook or culture for inter-generational recipes.
This culture of what is understood of nature requires to be encased in a liv-
ing tradition, to be experientially verified by every contemporary generation.
Without that, any insight would become ossified as an artefact, historically
endowed with fixed, discrete, and outdated meaning. Inter-generational conti-
nuities of lived traditions involve both continuity and change. Herein lies the
genesis of the difference between yoga and psychoanalysis in their evolution-
ary trajectories. The trajectory of yoga was characterized by discontinuities
whereas psychoanalysis, once established, was never lost despite its myriad
variants of practice.
From trying to observe, mimic, and understand nature arose the first ex-
perimentations of working with postures and breathing. This enabled getting
in touch with the nature of choices and lived authority vesting in human na-
ture, as part of larger nature. Thus arose the traditions of working with prana
(life force) in Tantra and Yoga. The Tantrikas (those who followed Tantra)
contributed to the thinking about what made the universe tick. Experiential
Learning developed their thinking that humans are part of nature and the rest
of nature is not something antagonistic to be subdued. They conceptualized
universal forces as manifesting in two complementary divisions, prakriti,
the feminine aspect, and purusha, the masculine aspect. Psychoanalysis de-
veloped similar notions about anima and animus. But tantra and yoga went
further to develop a postulate that when purusha and prakriti come together
in an act of cosmological creation at the macrocosmic level, and biological
procreation at the procreative microcosmic level, in both instances they are
joined by prana. Conception occurs when a space is created for prana to
enter at the time when a sperm (shuklam) and an ovum (shonitam) come
together and unite igniting yoga, the joining. There was no religious claptrap
to clothe these beliefs until after the Manusmriti cast aspersions on the status
of women.
The concepts of “immanent dualities and dyadic encounters” were fur-
ther developed through yoga (Chattopadhyaya and Mathur 2012). Inquiring
minds create and discover inquiry frames as an eternal feature of relating
to the world (Mathur 2004). In their quest for good health and longer life,
the potential tantrika yogis (yoga practitioners) explored their experience
150 Chapter Nine

of nature by observing thunder, lightning, rain, snow, animals, trees, wind,

soil, water, and fire. They noticed that tall palm trees of the Palmyra family
withstood gale force winds when other trees fell. They saw seeds sprout and
grow to great heights and cope with cyclones. Imitating this in practices and
exercises gave rise to the tadasana (the palm tree posture) and the tiryaka
tadasana (the dynamic or sideways moving palm tree posture). They noticed
how eagles fly, how cats remain supple, and how snakes raise themselves
by straightening their backbones. These experiences were applied in creat-
ing the garuda asana (eagle posture), marjari asana (the cat posture), and
the bhujanga asana (the snake/cobra posture), respectively. Anthropologists
noted this but could not explain the logic of how practices were evolving
(Ingold 1994). The notion of unifiable life forces and mobilizable psychic
forces in nature meant that every living entity was somehow a microcosm that
contained the macrocosm in it. This was also the germinating idea underlying
transference in psychoanalysis later on. The word psychoanalysis itself was
coined by Freud to draw an analogy for the chemical analysis of elements for
the study of psychic phenomena.
Many millennia after the origins of yoga, convergence in praxis, the core
traditions, relevant insights, and useful recipes were noted in verses composed
with astronomical markers to signify their chronology (Kak 2000). These
passed on inter-generationally as the early verses of the Rig Veda (smriti)
through chanting (from which the significance of bodily resonance of sounds
was discovered) and listening by the ear (shruti) what the rishis (“seers,”
those who had experienced enlightenment) spoke. The fixity of Panini’s San-
skrit grammar, perfected three millennia ago, has remained unimproved to
our times (something unparalleled in any other language tradition). This en-
abled shruti to be transmitted without distortion. Patanjali’s yoga sutras have
been inter-generationally communicated and verified with the contemporary
experiences of practice in every generation since then. While commentaries
on the yoga sutras have continued to proliferate, the yoga sutras themselves
have had no additions or modifications or revised editions!
The word veda signifies an approach toward comprehending the knowable
infinite which cannot be bound. Everything inter-generationally passed on
was supposed to be tested for relevance through what was experienced by,
thought about, and revealed for each living generation before being further
passed on, after suitable modifications. In this sense, Veda is the continuous
process of inquiry into all kinds of phenomena and the reduction of any aspect
of the inquiry to a fixed discrete form is no more than a text describing inter-
mediate outcomes or routines or procedures noted or committed to memory at
a discrete point in time. To fix it in form, and consider the form sacrosanct in
meaning, would be antithetical for the spirit of inquiry. In an exploration into
 Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 151

the Spencerian question, “What knowledge is of most worth?,” it was noted

that this quest had been part of the Vedic traditions, and was elaborated upon
for curricular design implications in education systems from this perspective
(Mathur 2000). In working with transference, psychoanalysts constantly ask
themselves what kind of knowing is juxtaposed with not-knowing; in other
words, that which needs to be discovered and unravelled. Grotstein’s “beam
of intense darkness” also draws attention to the virtuous imperative of dwell-
ing in ambiguity and uncertainty that Bion valued (Grotstein 2007).
Very little is known about the living traditions of experiential learning
through which yoga was transmitted from about the fifth century AD to the
sixteenth century AD (until the time of the poet-philosopher Kabir), except
for the fact that Sufis were also among its adherents (Khan 1988). Both the
Tantrika and the Vedic traditions went underground. These started resurfac-
ing in a limited way in the late nineteenth century and more openly in the
twentieth century. Kaivalyadham in Lonavala, Sivananda Ashram in Ri-
shikesh, followed by the Bihar School of Yoga in Munger, were among the
earliest institutions to be established in yoga, whereas the Girindrashekhar
Clinic and the Indian Psychoanalytic Society were the first institutions in
India for psychoanalysis. The Girindrashekhar-Freud correspondence and the
Romain Rolland-Freud correspondence bear testimony to the encounter of
psychoanalysis with Indian mysticism and its concept of five sheaths of hu-
man existence which are realizable. Despite Freud’s rejection of the “oceanic
state,” there is now considerable agreement among psychoanalysts that self-
explorations of identity can enable people to identify with the cosmos inside
of themselves (Saarinen 2012).
The indigenous ideas and the methodologies were known as darshan,
referring to that which has been seen or experienced. This is precisely what
Rolland claimed and also what yogis have been attesting all along in the nar-
ratives of attainable states of self-awareness, when the me and not-me divide
vanishes. During the medieval and colonial periods of Indian history, the
invaders needed to see their own reflections in a space that had a different
culture. Inter-group distrust has a tendency to manifest in defenses to oblit-
erate the other as a means of protecting one’s identity (Mathur 2007). The
Freud-Einstein correspondence on the inevitability of war arising from the
need to demarcate the other, as part of identifying who “we” are from who is
“them,” brought this out very clearly. As in the case of many other Sanskrit
words, darshan was incorrectly translated by Max Mueller as “philosophy,”
thereby stripping it of its basis in experiential learning. The word darshan
was only occasionally used to connote philosophy as received wisdom, and
the equivalent word for philosophy was shastra. Unfortunately, shastra was
translated into English as “scripture,” or more specifically “Hindu scripture.”
152 Chapter Nine

This mirrored the European tradition (as in the Oxford English Dictionary) to
portray “scripture” as “Bible”! Neither the brahmins nor the animists had any
scripture. There was no ideology tracing its behavioral or spiritual norms to
prescriptions or proscriptions from an unapproachable supreme being.
During the later Vedic period, experiential learning traditions, through
which yoga was transmitted, are recorded in dialogues of the Upanishads.
Many of these dialogues were not conversations of interaction that occurred
in a single conversation on a particular day. Rather, they represented en-
gagement with inquiry by seekers over long periods of time. In gurukulas
(educational communities of habitat organized around renowned scholars
known as acharyas and gurus), students/disciples in the age group of eight to
eighteen were helped over long periods of time to learn by experiencing the
living methodology. They learnt various skills and concepts through actual
experience. It has been estimated that there were over 130 Upanishads. Only
thirty-five Upanishads are available now. The practice of experiential learn-
ing methodologies is mentioned in the Taittiria Upanishad (Gambhirananda
1989). The idea that a hermeneutic endeavor can be structured as a normative
primary task can be traced to these experiential learning traditions where the
gurukula was an institution emphasizing experiential learning rather than
rote learning or instruction. This stance also informed apprenticeship for ad-
vancing learning in arts and crafts and performing arts and other vocational
streams. From this also arose notions of what belonged to the commons, what
could be privately appropriated as property or endowment, and the nature of
multiple belonging, affiliations, rights, and obligations.
An important aspect of experiential learning was in understanding nature,
including human nature and universal forces. In the twentieth century, quantum
mechanics has revealed that “all things in the universe that we see” are different
configurations of elementary particles. Yet, we are not capable of actually see-
ing these dynamic configurations forming and dissolving because of perceptual
limitations (Bohm and Basil 1933). The idea of transience is conveyed by the
word maya for reality, not for illusion. Maya is the abbreviated form of the
expression “Mati Iti ma, Yati iti ya” to describe the measurable reality that is
passing away or disappearing even as it is measured, because it is transitory.2
The Bhagwat Geeta explains Maya in Chapter 18 by using metaphors.
The concept of anu-bhava (the Sanskrit word for a unit of experience) con-
tains the idea that miniscule impressions constitute emotional, aesthetic, and
psychological crystallizations of experiences. The process of experiencing
(anu-bhava) produces transitory emotional impressions (vyabhichari bhavas)
recognized in the Indian system of bhava (sentiment), which coagulate into
durable states of primary emotions (the nine rasas of the Rasa Siddhanta).
These undergo transformations in group dynamics to manifest psychologi-
 Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 153

cally as Bionian basic assumption groups (Mathur 2009). It is noteworthy that

the Tavistock Institute that pioneered the study of group relations based on
Bionian basic assumptions using a psychoanalytic approach has lately added
a yoga event (from the Indian terroir of group relations work) in its group
relations conferences in recognition of the correspondence between yoga and
psychoanalytic frames.
The search for experiencing the cosmic force through yoga revolved
around the idea that consciousness occurs in five planes or sheaths of hu-
man existence. One of the paths was through some of the branches of yoga
known as kriya yoga, kundalini yoga, etc. Those who undertake to practice
these branches of yoga are told that they would never get anywhere near ex-
periencing their identity with the cosmic force unless they gave up, entirely,
the desire to experience it and memory of attachments that controlled their
behavior which resided in bodily responses. Instead, they were encouraged
to experience and reflect on the eight dimensions of the yogic experience
to reach complete self-awareness without preconceptions and without the
hankering to merely reach higher awareness levels for sensory gratifications
or sharper sensory perceptions (siddhis). This is reminiscent of Bion’s idea
of “without desire and without memory.” The Bhagwat Geeta can also be
regarded as an account of how Arjuna’s neurosis was treated when he, as the
analysand, underwent analysis with Krishna, and the dialogue that constitutes
the Bhagwat Geeta is a record of Arjuna’s transference to Krishna and its
resolution (Chattopadhyay 1997).

METACULTURE OF INDIAN
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING TRADITIONS

The hallmark of Indian experiential learning traditions has been the emphasis
on revelation through experience, and not on a politics of salvation. The Bud-
dha never claimed that he could take anyone to self-awareness, only that, like
himself, others too could practice and attain self-realization. The revelation
was about experiencing identity with the all-pervading cosmic force. This
meant, at a metacultural level, some idea, however vague, of non-difference
between not only human beings, but also between human beings and all other
kinds of things in the universe. The emphasis on empathy and non-violence
arose from this notion of non-difference. There is a general belief, in India
and abroad, that spirituality is to be found within various cultures of India.
This sense of spirituality manifests through cultural traditions like hospitality
to strangers, welcoming guests as divine (atithi devo bhava), sense of neigh-
borliness outside the metropolises, with villages reflecting a feeling of being
154 Chapter Nine

self-contained (as containers of ethos), and the spirit of the joint or extended
family system extending to communities, even the entire world community
in the dictum “vasudhaiva kutumbakam.”
These values and notions got distorted in the later eras and transformed
into politics of salvation for relief from thanatos instincts. Many charlatans
have set themselves up as gurus in various locations in India (and abroad) and
changed the mode of spiritual quest, from revelation through experience to
salvation through following the guru’s leadership for their hordes of foreign
followers and a sprinkling of gullible Indians (Mehta 1993). The idea of a
Supreme Being to be worshipped as Bhagwan by followers of the so-called
Hindu religion was invented and taught in line with the Judeo-Christian no-
tion of a Supreme Being. In Sanskrit texts, Bhagwan is anyone who has cer-
tain characteristics. These are integrity, courage, beauty, wealth, etc., together
with the capacity to remain non-attached to all of these. Krishna has been
referred to as Bhagwan in the Bhagwat Geeta, not because he represented a
plenitude of divinity, “but because he was a great yoga master who possessed
characteristics necessary to be known as Bhagwan” (Chattopadhyay 1997).
The Bhagwat Geeta has been translated into English as the Song of God or
Divine Song (Huxley 1946). However, it is really a song of non-attachment
which explains maya, and that prana is indestructible which can neither be
pierced nor burnt, and that it is only the transitory body that perishes. As
noted by Chattopadhyay and Mathur (2012), when Christian missionaries
arrived in India, Hinduism began to be regarded not as a way of life but as
as a religion to convert “Hindus” to Christianity. In the nineteenth century,
the British introduced a new education system and good jobs in British India
became available only to those Indians who were educated in the new system
taught through the English language. The loss of the experience-based educa-
tion, and of the opportunity to realize through it one’s identity with the all-
pervading cosmic force left a deep void. While, in the past, the struggle had
been to reach out to as many people as possible to develop self-awareness and
skills to live harmoniously with respect for nature, the worship of Mammon
ushered in an era of envy, competition, religious divides, and subservience to
feudal and governmental authority.

WHAT REMAINS IN INDIA OF

THE EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING TRADITIONS?

The earliest subcontinental philosophies of praxis and methodologies that sur-

vived by going underground for many millennia re-emerged only in the early
1960s (i.e., about a decade and a half after the last of the colonizers left). These
 Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 155

are Vipasana, Tantra, and Yoga. In Indian metaculture, the notion of reciproc-
ity in inter-generational relations has been strongly present. By itself, this
has kept the living traditions alive to the extent that sadhakas (seekers) and
advanced practitioners of experiential learning (self-realized persons) have
reason to value both connaissance and savoir, and the capacity to establish
temporary or permanent learning institutions that cherish experiential learning.
The human life-span in Indian culture is regarded as comprising four stages
(Zimmer 1951, p.106): brahmacharya, the stage when jijnyasa (curiosity) is
to be cultivated through education and socialization (nought to twenty-five);
the grahasta stage of adult working and family life (twenty-five to fifty)
in which vivek (discrimination, conscience) is to be exercised; vairagya
stage (fifty to seventy-five) non-attachment to fruits of effort through one’s
working life; followed by vanaprastha stage of disengaging from worldly
responsibilities, cultivating dispassion, and an end to all formal roles, and
practicing sanyam (self-control from which the word sanyas arises) focusing
on spiritual growth. This does not mean that normatively predominant activi-
ties of different stages are binding. They are indicative of the understanding
of what is considered more important in the different stages of human life.
Implicit in this framework is the notion that family and society can support
such trajectories.
Succession in experiential learning traditions (both yoga and psychoanaly-
sis) involves the transfer of tacit skills through development of capabilities.
The guru-chela (teacher and disciple) tradition in India can be viewed as an
enabling proactive paradigm and also as a reactive constraining one when dif-
ferences in roles are seen through the prism of hierarchy. The word guru con-
sists of two syllables: gu meaning darkness, ignorance; and ru, annihilation
of darkness by insight or illumination. This is reminiscent of Grotstein (2007)
and his attention to negative capability waiting for something to emerge. The
word guru, although loosely used worldwide to connote “teachers with great
knowledge or glamour power,” is a sui generis concept, with emphasis on
learning through practice of reflection, introspection, meditation, question-
ing, dialogue, and enactment, rather than through instruction. The guru is not
a coach or trainer. For this reason, unless a guru has attained self-awareness
and resolved inner conflicts within himself to extinguish or limit desires, he
can only be an adhyapak (teacher), pundit (scholar), or acharya (professor).
Recovery and reparation involve a journey toward the depressive position
without being consumed by the sadness. The psychogenesis of the intersub-
jective relationships is an essential feature of civilizational evolution in both
yoga and psychoanalysis.
Neki (1973) examined guru-chela relationships and developed a typology
by connecting the sentient experience to role models in Indian mythology.
156 Chapter Nine

He identified seven forms of guru-chela relationships. Neki concluded that

the guru-chela relationship enables succession only when unequals end up as
co-equals. None of the relationships he examined could achieve co-equality
except one—that between enemies—such as Rama and Ravana and that too
only after Ravana had been mortally wounded. This is why successions in
India are seldom accomplished smoothly.
Scholars have noted that Indian experiential learning traditions of know-
ing were almost extinguished in the nineteenth century by getting the na-
tives to identify with the invader by embracing a different system of educa-
tion (Mishra 1999). It is never easy for a suppressed tradition to resurface
and thrive without an abiding commitment to institutional or organizational
forms from motivations supported by power bases. When yoga re-surfaced
in India in the twentieth century as a byproduct of nationalism, and decades
after political independence, by the time it was recognized as a holistic
system for health and well-being in 2005 under AYUSH, the sentiments
surrounding its values had been layered over in diverse traditions. These
included naturopathy, “Hindutva” revivalists, shaivite monk-sanyasins,
vaishnavite sadhus, spiritual ashrams, religious sects such as natha sampra-
daya, yoga schools of Ashtanga yoga, Hatha yoga, Kriya yoga, Satyananda
yoga, Bikram yoga, Iyengar yoga, Art of Living, Sahaj Marg, Ayurveda,
Unani, Siddha, homeopathy, reflexology, acupressure and the esoteric
practices of tantriks, eclectic pranahuti traditions of whirling dervishes and
Nakshbandi sufis, mindfulness and vipassana traditions among Buddhists,
shatkarmas of Jains, and meditations and spiritual exercises of Franciscan
Catholics and Jesuits. This potpourri of conduits and carriers renders it very
difficult to separate the core of yoga from the paraphernalia and trappings
surrounding it in its various lineages. Some of the traditions themselves
have ossified into arrogant fortresses that have closed all doors and win-
dows to thinking from anywhere outside of themselves. But it is important
to attempt that to be able to grasp at their essential nature and the scope
of offering that partially overlaps in notable ways the benefits available
through psychoanalysis.
In contrast, psychoanalysis spread far and wide from its origins in Europe,
taking root in many countries. Exchanging neurotic suffering for ordinary
unhappiness (as Freud put it) acquired appeal. Elder (1994) notes that the
real significance of Freudian psychoanalysis was the articulation of an en-
tirely new form of psychological discourse of introspective consciousness.
Its early professionalization in 1910 as an international system in a mutually
recognized fraternity, organized by a peer group, carrying on conversations in
a journal, enabled a certain homogeneity, and convergence of norms and stan-
dards (Loewenberg and Thompson 2010). This did not inhibit the application
 Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 157

of psychoanalytic insights to other arenas such as psychoanalytic psycho-

therapy, the study of organizations, group relations, mass observation, and for
understanding whole societies. And it kept psychoanalysis shorn of religious
discourses and conflicts because there was no requirement in its methods to
advance any particular religious persuasion, political agenda, ethnic prefer-
ence, or linguistic exclusions. But it mainly catered to a particular affluent
elite class of society, and faith in the efficacy of the method spread through
word of mouth. Besides the competitive comparisons of the variants (Freud-
ian, Jungian, Laingian, Kleinian, etc.) subscribed to by its practitioners, in
certain circles, it has become almost a fashion statement to have an analyst
to go to. It also provides a non-medical alternative devoid of the side-effects
of medication for some, whereas for others it offers a “cure” concurrent with,
but beyond, mere psychiatric treatment with drugs.
The Indian Psychoanalytic Society was founded in 1921, almost a de-
cade after Girindrashekhar Bose began using psychoanalytic concepts and
methods in his clinical practice in 1910. Nandy (1995) describes how Girin-
drashekhar Bose blended his initial fascination for yoga with emerging ideas
in psychoanalysis.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AT THE MARGINS OF SOCIETY

Curiously, just as yoga was all but marginalized in India until its resurgence
in the twentieth century, psychoanalysis now faces a similar specter of mar-
ginalization despite growth in the number of psychoanalysts worldwide.
Eisold (2010) describes the collapse of the profession of psychoanalysis in
the United States, pointing out that the interest in studying forces beyond our
awareness has not diminished and that many new professions are embracing
the unconscious. Meanwhile, psychoanalysis has been reduced to a service
that has to compete like a commodity in the marketplace alongside other ther-
apeutic alternatives. Eisold argues that collapse of trust in traditional author-
ity, time pressures and budgets are just three of many reasons underlying the
collapse of psychoanalysis in the United States. There are others. Researchers
have been able to work with many layers of the unconscious, beginning with
the autonomic nervous system and going on to the cognitive unconscious
(which works by perceptual categorization including transference schemata).
In contrast, psychoanalysts have become dogmatic, arrogant, and complacent
about short therapies and psychopharmacological approaches. Lack of atten-
tion to unconscious self-esteem, emotional responses involving the cerebral
cortex and the amygdala, role of metaphor grounded in embodied experience
are also mentioned by Eisold. Eisold argues that the individual unconscious
158 Chapter Nine

is best understood in the context of the social unconscious and organizational

and societal forces that have caused fractures in communal structures.
There is also an interplay of four forces that I consider worth mentioning.
Firstly, there is a large number of people who are more aware of the impor-
tance of personal psychological and emotional well-being than ever before.
There is no corresponding supply of trained psychoanalysts available, and
not even the entire pool of psychoanalysts taken together could attend to
even a miniscule fraction of the people even if they worked day and night, if
everyone were to want psychoanalysis as the preferred means for enhanced
self-awareness and well-being. For this reason alone, psychoanalysis cannot
be mainstreamed and remains marginal in its scope and impact.
Secondly, the availability of alternatives to psychoanalysis, such as other
therapies or yoga, are less costly and less demanding from the perspective
of time duration. Yoga can be learnt in one week (basic) to three weeks
(advanced) from an instructor and a person can continue its practice for
life. In India, it is available free in many institutions and at an affordable
cost by other providers all over the country. Scientific studies have been
conducted worldwide to demonstrate what benefits different practices of
asanas, pranayams, mudras, and bandhs can bring. Its popularity and appeal
has spread across the world. The World Yoga Convention 2013 witnessed
the participation of more than 24,000 participants from 57 countries—a
far greater number than any conference on psychoanalysis. France has
introduced yoga into the school curriculum for schools supported by the
Ministry of Education. The UN General Assembly has adopted June 21 as
World Yoga Day since 2014.
Psychoanalysis is mainly sought out by those persons who wish to enter
the therapeutic professions as analysts, therapists, counselors, etc., and need
to understand themselves as analysands with an analyst, acquire basic skills
in working with transference, and who would need the stamp of recognition
to professionally establish their clinical therapeutic practices. But only if they
have time and money to go to an analyst four times a week for about four
years! And then do another training analysis under supervision.
Thirdly, healthcare systems and healthcare insurance practices have in-
centivized short therapies, and psychoanalysis is being increasingly regarded
as a luxury, privately affordable only by a few affluent people among elite
classes. The requirement that an ICD-10 or DSM-V diagnosis must precede
treatment subsidy, and that subventions would be made available only for ap-
provable standardized short therapeutic interventions justifiable on essential
criteria, has loaded the dice against psychoanalysis. In contrast, therapies
such as Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) have gained
prominence and are spreading at a rapid pace.
 Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 159

Fourthly, Chakraborty (2010) has argued that “there is not much to repress
in permissive societies” and that the “superego lost its sting” quite some
time ago. This calls into question the very viability of the method in certain
contexts. This can be contested by arguing that the nature of taboos may
undergo change but to expect repression to be eradicated may be overstating
the case. Yet, Eisold (2010) seems to agree with Chakrobarty by pointing to
cataclysmic changes that have caused ruptures in the social and communal
fabric and sparked irreversible traverse. That the boundaries of the internal
and external worlds of individuals may be shifting is another explanation
(Hämäläinen 2009).
To quote Rumi:

I’ve heard it said, there’s a window

That opens from one mind to another
But if there’s no wall, there’s no need
For fitting the window or the latch.

BLENDING YOGA AND

PSYCHOANALYTIC INSIGHTS IN EDUCATION SYSTEMS

Yoga, in its limited appeal as an alternative to physical training, has been

traditionally regarded as a means to good health and personal well-being.
In this form, it has remained an extra-curricular activity on the periphery of
education in schools in post-independent India. As the full scope of yoga gets
known to more people, it faces the same challenges that psychoanalysis faced
in trying to find roots in academia, that is, universities designed for knowl-
edge creation. The significance of mindful dialogue processes as internal
conversations and as potential external interactions extending open system
boundaries by postulating a new boundary of “understanding” arose from a
doctoral dissertation spanning empirical work in India and Finland (Mattila
2008). Mattila has introduced mindfulness dialogues blending yogic methods
and traditions with psychoanalytic insights in Turku, Finland, and for stu-
dents at Nirma University, Ahmedabad, IIM Ahmedabad, and IIM Bangalore
to prospect wisdom and knowing in organizations.
Both yoga and psychoanalysis are at the cusp of change and continuity.
Let me mention five ways yoga has been brought into the educational cur-
riculum at IIM Ahmedabad alongside psychoanalytic insights for the study
of organizations:

• The introduction of yoga through asanas, pranayams, and mudras in the

Working Conference on “Authority, Organisation, Strategies and Politics
160 Chapter Nine

of Relatedness” preparatory to dream work in a “harmony sensing matrix”

alongside experiential learning through transference work in small and
large groups.
• The exercise of Yoga Nidra in Corporate Retreats for Strategy and Or-
ganisation Development alongside dream work for visioning, discovering
and interpreting strategies using psychoanalytic frames for the study of
organization behavior.
• The adoption of yoga and pranayams for de-stressing after exercises such
as mass observation and action research praxis using listening posts in the
analytic tradition.
• The development of a new Course “Mysteries in Management” in the flag-
ship MBA (PGP) program emphasizing consciousness and mindfulness to
nurture curiosity for cultivating wonder.
• Yoga capsules (including pranayams and yoga nidra) as part of work with
dyads, couples, and families, at the Centre for Gender Equity, Diversity,
Inclusivity.

The shift in focus from looking at outward phenomena, without a location in-
side of oneself, toward mindful self-awareness of the whole body with atten-
tion to one’s breath creates fields of harmony inside and outside. The range
of participants involved with experiential learning through the mainstreaming
of yoga in educational and developmental initiatives is already vast. Besides
corporations across every sector of activity, there have been requests for
programs from such diverse institutions as Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghathan,
Antarnad Foundation, and Border Security Force Academy. Yet, only the
surface has been scratched so far.
This is not something alien to psychoanalytic traditions. The International
Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations provides space for
blending psychoanalytic insights with yoga in its explorations for understand-
ing toxicity in organizations. It is noteworthy that Bion’s concept of reverie
also finds parallels in Buddhist meditation. Reverie is comparable to the state
of mind of equanimity. Bion acknowledged that thought can be subordinate
to the senses and the pleasure principle. While Freud considered emotions as
close to their instinctual source, Bion recognized emotions as an integral part
of mental life and its development. The alpha function is a mental digestive
system for learning from experience. The capacity to think is then a pain-
modifying apparatus and the absent goodness is initially experienced as a
present evil. Mindfulness (a synonym for attention) in both yoga and psycho-
analysis involves awakening and letting go “by observing of this penetrating
through that” without interfering with the occurrence. (Pelled 2007).
 Two Cultures? Frontiers of Faith in Yoga and Psychoanalysis 161

CONCLUSION

These are early days in the mainstreaming of yoga, around questions of what
knowledge is of most worth (Mathur 2000, 2003) and for bringing closer the
underlying essence in the traditions of yoga and psychoanalysis. Attention
to spirituality can help the analyst exercise more empathy and compassion
whereas attention to the unconscious through psychoanalytic insights can ex-
pand the horizons of yoga to understand and use the psychic force of “prana”
in many new ways. There are plenty of parallels between psychoanalysis and
yoga for correspondences in emotional, psychological, and aesthetic tradi-
tions (Mathur 2009, Mathur 2013). But there are also significant differences.
The high dependency in Indian culture, the lifelong obligations to family
members, the preponderence of passive aggression over open defiance, at-
tribution of stigma to identities, and the tolerance for high proliferation of
boundary leakages, call for an enormous leap of faith for psychoanalysis to
succeed in the Indian context. The frontiers of faith in yoga make no such
demand. Yet, the frontiers of faith in yoga are not without their own set of de-
mands. The practice of dharma, as what Kakar and Kakar regard as a “pivotal
ethical concept” modulated by a “thou canst but try” ethos, coexists alongside
the concept of karma that draws upon the notion of innate dispositions, with a
relational orientation and with non-attachment regarded as a virtue.
It has been claimed by Brar (1970), and commented upon by Chakraborty
(1970), that yoga transcends the limitations of psychoanalysis by recogniz-
ing a spiritual plane of existence. However, this is so only to the extent that
spirituality really begins where the pull of religion ends and it is only by
transcending spirituality that reality may be grasped. The syntax and gram-
mar of the unconscious that has been discovered provided the foundations
of psychoanalysis (Elder 1994). This is similar to the quest for identifying
with the subtle body (sookshma shareer) rather than the gross body (sthool
shareer). This further needs distinguishing between aiming to self-actualize
versus theological or cosmological liberation. Yoga does not claim that a
self-realized person has become liberated in the sense that liberation theolo-
gians would claim. A good night’s sleep is regarded as an important restor-
ative in both yoga and psychoanalysis because it puts us in touch with the
unconscious (Vivekananda 2013). Dreams have their place in both yoga and
psychoanalysis. The stage of samadhi postulated in yoga and demonstrated
by yogis is further evidence that although frontiers of faith in yoga may have
been pushed more than in psychoanalysis, the essential nature of both seeks
to experience unplumbed depths of human consciousness. The foundations of
the earliest traditions of thinking that have been inter-generationally passed
162 Chapter Nine

on and revalidated in every generation cannot be considered primitive (Hall-

pike 1980). Ancient is not the same as primitive or obsolete. If a hundred
years makes something ancient, western psychoanalysis is also now ancient,
having been around for more than a century (Loewenberg and Thompson
2010). In this sense, the frontiers of yoga and psychoanalysis converge and
raise hopes for possibilities of bringing the two cultures closer together as
part of the same kind of human endeavor involving physical, intellectual,
emotional, mental, and spiritual processes.

NOTES

1. This is a revised version of the paper presented at the First Annual Psycho-
analytic conference: “Psychoanalysis, Culture and Religion” at Fortis Memorial Re-
search Institute, Gurgaon, December 19–20, 2013. The author thanks Sudhir Kakar,
Sari Mattila, Niloufer Kaul, Manasi Kumar, and an anonymous reviewer for sugges-
tions and comments on a previous version of the paper. © 2015
2. For this insight, I am grateful to T.V. Raghu Anantnarayanan, the Master-
Choreographer of the Sumedhas Learning Theatre.

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 Chapter Ten

Psychoanalysis, Culture,
and the Cultural Unconscious
Sudhir Kakar

Most of our knowledge on how human beings feel, think, act, is derived from
a small subset of the human population which the psychologists Joseph Hen-
rich and his colleagues (2010, p.61) call what the psychologist Jonathan Haidt
(2012, p.) calls WEIRD, the acronym standing for western, educated, indus-
trialized, rich, and democratic. Psychologists, sociologists, psychotherapists,
philosophers are as WEIRD as the subjects of their studies, ministrations, or
speculations. It is this small group of statistical outliers that provides us with
both the producers and subjects of our contemporary psychoanalytic knowl-
edge we have then blithely proceeded to generalize to the rest of humankind.1
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2012) demonstrates the chasm between
the WEIRD and others in a study of morality where he interviewed twelve
groups of different social classes in different countries. He tells each inter-
viewee different stories and then asks if there is something wrong in how
someone acts in the story and, if so, why is it wrong. One of the stories goes:

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before
cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and
eats it.

One of his groups was from students of the University of Pennsylvania, a lib-
eral, Ivy League college in the United States and certainly the most WEIRD
among the selected groups. This was the only group out of the twelve where
a majority (73 percent) tolerated the chicken story, finding it OK. “It’s his
chicken, it’s dead, nobody is getting hurt and it’s being done in private.’
(p.96)
Or to take Anurag Mishra’s (2012) analogy of psychoanalysis and wine,
the terroir of a wine is a specific place with its particular soil and climate

165
166 Chapter Ten

where the wine is made and thus different terroirs, although made with the
same sort of grape, have different wines. The terroir of human beings—
historical, geographic, cultural, social, political, religious—too, varies and
will produce different psychoanalytic wines. The terroir of psychoanalysis,
for more than a century, has been and continues to be Western. It contains
many Western cultural ideas and ideals that permeate psychotherapeutic
theories and practice. Shared by analyst and patient alike, pervading the
analytic space in which the two are functioning, fundamental ideas about
human relationships, family, marriage, male and female, and so on, which
are essentially cultural in origin, often remain unexamined, and are regarded
as universally valid. As has been said, if a fish were a scientist, the last
discovery it would make would be of water. Let me illustrate this by taking
examples from India.

My own interest in the role of culture in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and

becoming an Indian vigneron of psychoanalytic wine did not begin as an ab-
stract intellectual exercise but as a matter of vital personal import. Without my
quite realizing it at the time, it began with my beginnings as an analyst, more
than forty years ago, when I entered a five-day-a-week training analysis with a
German analyst at the Sigmund-Freud Institut in Frankfurt. At first, I registered
the role of culture in my analysis as a series of niggling feelings of discomfort
whose source remained incomprehensible for many months. Indeed, many years
were to pass before I began to comprehend the cultural landscape of the mind in
more than a rudimentary fashion and make some sense of my experiences, both
as an analysand and as an analyst, in cross-cultural therapeutic dyads (Kakar
1982, 1987, 1989, 1994, 1997).

I earned very little at the time and, in spite of my frequent complaints about
my poverty from the couch, I was disappointed when my analyst was prompt
in presenting his bill at the end of the month and did not offer to reduce his
fees. Without ever asking him directly, I let fall enough hints that he could be
helpful in getting me a better-paying job—for instance, as his assistant in the
Institute where he held an important administrative position.
I did not have any problems in coming to my sessions on time but was re-
sentful that my analyst was equally punctual in ending a session after exactly
fifty minutes, sometimes when I had just got going and felt his involvement
in my story had been equal to my own. After some months, I realized that my
recurrent feelings of estrangement were not due to our cultural differences in
forms of politeness, manners of speech, attitudes toward time, or even differ-
ences in our aesthetic sensibilities (to me, at that time, Beethoven was just so
much noise while I doubt if he even knew of the existence of Hindustani clas-
sical music which so moved me). The estrangement involved much deeper
cultural layers of the self, which were an irreducible part of my subjectivity
 Psychoanalysis, Culture, and the Cultural Unconscious 167

as, I suppose, they were a part of his. In other words, if during a session we
sometimes suddenly became strangers to each other, it was because each of
us found himself locked into a specific cultural unconscious, consisting of
a more or less closed system of cultural representations that were not easily
accessible to conscious awareness. Glimmers of these deeper cultural layers
became visible, although I did not fully recognize them till many years after
the analysis ended.
To begin with the specific relationship: in the universe of teacher-healers,
I had slotted my analyst into a place normally reserved for a personal guru.
From the beginning of the training analysis, it seems, I had pre-consciously
envisioned our relationship in terms of a guru-disciple bond, a much more
intimate affair than the contractual doctor-patient relationship governing my
analyst’s professional orientation. In my cultural model, he was the personifi-
cation of the wise old sage, benevolently directing a sincere and hardworking
disciple who had abdicated the responsibility for his own welfare to the guru.
My guru model also demanded that my analyst demonstrate his compassion,
interest, warmth, and responsiveness much more openly than is usual or even
possible in the psychoanalytic model guiding his therapeutic interventions.
A handshake with a “Guten Morgen, Herr Kakar” at the beginning of the
session and a handshake with an “Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Kakar” at the end
of the session, even if accompanied by the beginnings of a smile, were not
even starvation rations for someone who had adopted the analyst as his guru.
Not that I was uncomfortable with long silences during a session, only that
the silence needed to be embedded in other forms of communication. In an
earlier paper, I have mentioned that the emphasis on speech and words in
analytic communication is counter to the dominant Indian idiom in which
words are only a small part of a vast store of signs and semiotics (Kakar
1985). In psychoanalytic therapy, speech reigns supreme. As Freud (1916,
p.17) remarked, “Words were originally magic and to this day, words have
retained much of their ancient magical power. By words one person can
make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair, by words the teacher
conveys his knowledge to his pupils, by words the orator carries his audience
with him and determines their judgements and decisions. Words provoke af-
fects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men. Words
have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest
despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable
the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of
arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.” Of course,
Freud’s privileging of words is embedded in a profounder cultural difference
on the relationship between speech and truth. Language in the Hindu, and
especially in the Buddhist, world is inherently unfit to express what is real. It
168 Chapter Ten

signifies distance between things and ourselves and thus misleads. Moreover,
it inevitably generates illusions and ignorance. To speak is to be drawn into a
network of mirages. Truth is unspoken, only silence is true.
In this vision of the relationship between speech and silence, the cultural
expectation of the healer-teacher (in words of the sixteenth-century Indian
saint Dabu) is that:

The guru speaks first with the mind

Then with the glance of the eye
If the disciple fails to understand
He instructs him at last by word of mouth
He that understands the spoken word is a common man
He that interprets the gesture is an initiate
He that reads the thought of the mind
Unsearchable, unfathomable, is a god. (Steinmann 1986, p.235)

I wonder how many of us realize that the rhythms of our spoken interpreta-
tions and silences are not only governed by the course of analysis, by what is
happening in the analytic interaction, but are also culturally constituted? That
the interpretations of silence, the analyst’s of the patient and the patient’s of
the analyst, also contain cultural signifiers of which both may be unaware?
Our cultural orientations also attached varying importance to different fam-
ily relationships. For instance, in my childhood, I had spent long periods of
my young life in the extended families of my parents. Various uncles, aunts,
and cousins had constituted a vital part of my growing-up experience. To pay
them desultory attention or to reduce them to parental figures in the analytic
interpretations felt like a serious impoverishment of my inner world.
This almost exclusive emphasis on the parental couple in psychoanalysis,
I realized, has also to do with the modern Western conception of the family,
which has the husband-wife couple as its fulcrum. In the traditional Indian
view, which still exerts a powerful influence on how even most modern In-
dians view marriage, parent-sons and filial bonds among the sons override
the importance of the couple as the foundation of the family. Cultural ideals
demand that the universal dream of love, that constitutes and seeks to find its
culmination in the couple, be muted. They enjoin the family to remain vigi-
lant lest the couple becomes a fortress that shuts out all other relationships
within the extended family.
On a general level, I realized later, our diverging conceptions of the “true”
nature of human relationships were a consequence of a more fundamental
divide in our cultural view of the person. In contrast to the modern West,
the Indian experience of the self is not that of a bounded, unique individual-
ity. The Indian person is not a self-contained center of awareness interacting
 Psychoanalysis, Culture, and the Cultural Unconscious 169

with other, similar such individuals. Instead, the traditional Indian, in the
dominant image of his culture, and in much of his personal experience of the
self, is constituted of relationships. He is not a monad but derives his personal
nature interpersonally. All affects, needs, and motives are relational and his
distresses are disorders of relationships—not only with his human but also
with his natural and cosmic orders.
This emphasis on the “dividual” (rather than the individual), transpersonal
nature of man is not limited to traditional, rural India. Even with the urban-
ized and highly literate persons who form the bulk of patients for psycho-
therapy, the “relational” orientation is still the “natural” way of viewing the
self and the world.
In practice, a frequent problem arose when I thought the psychotherapy
was going well and the client was well on the road to a modicum of psycho-
logical autonomy, and then family members would come to me and complain,
“What are you doing to my son/daughter? S/he is becoming independent of
us. S/he wants to make her/his own choices now, thinks s/he knows what is
best for her/him and doesn’t listen to us.” I vividly remember the patriarch of
a large, extended business family, clad in suit and tie, but with the traditional
turban as his headgear, walking into my office one day to discuss the progress
in the therapy of his 21-year-old granddaughter who had become clinically
depressed as the date for her arranged marriage with the scion of another rich
family approached. Sitting across my desk with both his palms resting on the
silver handle of a walking stick, he could barely hide his disappointment in
me, “She may be better, doctor, but we are much worse.” The families were
baffled that the psychoanalytic ideal is to increase the individual’s range of
choices and not her integration with the family. Transference reactions in a
patient may suppress this cultural view during and, for a while, but it returns
as a nagging separation guilt, of having abandoned the family.
The yearning for relationships, for the confirming presence of loved per-
sons and the distress aroused by their unavailability or unresponsiveness in
time of need is thus a dominant cultural motif in Indian social relations. The
motif is expressed variously but consistently. It is expressed in a person’s
feelings of helplessness when family members are absent, or in his or her dif-
ficulty in making decisions alone. In short, Indians tend to characteristically
rely on the support of others to go through life and to deal with the exigencies
imposed by the outside world (Kakar 1978).
Could it be that my analyst was like some other Western psychoanalysts,
who I was reading at the time, who would choose to interpret this as a
“weakness” in the Indian personality? An evaluation that invariably carries
with it the general value implication that independence and initiative are
“better” than mutual dependence and community? But it depends, of course,
170 Chapter Ten

on a culture’s vision of a “good society” and “individual merit” whether a

person’s behavior in relationships is nearer the isolation pole of the fusion-
isolation continuum, as postulated by the dominant cultural tradition in the
contemporary West, or the fusion pole advocated by traditional Indian cul-
ture. To borrow from Schoepenhauer’s imagery, the basic problem of human
relationships resembles that of hedgehogs on a cold night. They creep closer
to each other for warmth, are pricked by quills and move away, but then get
cold again and try to come nearer. This movement to and fro is repeated
until an optimum position is reached in which the body temperature is above
the freezing point and yet the pain inflicted by the quills (the nearness of
the other) is still bearable. Independent of the positions our individual life
histories had moved us to select on this continuum, in my Indian culture, in
contrast to my analyst’s German Kultur, the optimum position entailed the
acceptance of more pain in order to get greater warmth.
Let me add that I am not advancing any simplified dichotomy between
my analyst’s Western cultural image of an individual, autonomous self and a
relational, transpersonal self of my own Hindu culture. Both visions of human
experience are present in all the major cultures, though a particular culture
may, over a length of time, highlight and emphasize one at the expense of
the other. What the advent of Enlightenment in the West has pushed to the
background for the last couple of hundred years is still the dominant value
of Indian identity; namely that the greatest source of human strength lies in
a harmonious integration with the family and the group. This widespread
consensus about what I have called the ideology of “familism” asserts that
belonging to a community is the fundamental need of people. Only if a person
truly belongs to such a community, naturally and unselfconsciously, can he or
she enter the river of life and lead a full, creative and spontaneous life.
In practice, of course—and this is what makes psychoanalytic psychother-
apy in non-Western societies possible—the cultural orientations of patients
coming for psychoanalytic therapy are not diametrically opposite to those of
the analyst. Most non-Western patients seen by analysts in North America
and Europe are “assimilated” to the dominant culture of their host country to
varying degrees, the contest between their original and new cultures not yet
decisively tilted in the favor of one or the other. Similarly, in non-Western
countries, the clients for psychoanalytic therapy—like their analysts—are
westernized to varying degrees. In India, for instance, Indian analysts practice
in the enclaves of Western modernity in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Ban-
galore. Here, among the upper and middle classes, there are enough patients,
Westernized to various degrees, who are attracted by a Freudian model of a
person and the causes of his or her suffering, and look toward an analyst as
their best ally in the realization of their full individuality.
 Psychoanalysis, Culture, and the Cultural Unconscious 171

What could my analyst have done? Did he need to acquire knowledge of

my culture and, if so, what kind of knowledge? Would an anthropological,
historical, or philosophical grounding in Hindu culture have made him under-
stand me better? Or was it a psychoanalytical knowledge of my culture that
would have been more helpful? Psychoanalytical knowledge of a culture is
not equivalent to its anthropological knowledge, although there may be some
overlap between the two. Psychoanalytic knowledge is primarily the knowl-
edge of the culture’s imagination, of its fantasy as encoded in its symbolic
products—its myths and folktales, its popular art, literature, and cinema.
Besides asking about the kind of knowledge, we also need to ask the ques-
tion “Which culture?” Would a psychoanalytic knowledge of Hindu culture
have been sufficient in my case? Yes, I am a Hindu but I am also a Punjabi
Khatri by birth. That is, my overarching Hindu culture has been mediated by
my strong regional culture as a Punjabi and further by my Khatri caste. This
Hindu Punjabi Khatri culture has been further modified by an agnostic father
and a more traditional, believing mother, both of whom were also western-
ized to varying degrees. Is it not too much to expect any analyst to acquire
this kind of prior cultural knowledge about his patients? On the other hand,
is it OK for the analyst not to have any knowledge of his patient’s cultural
background? Or does the truth, as it often does, lie somewhere in the middle?
But, now comes the surprise. My analyst was very good—sensitive, in-
sightful, patient. And, I discovered, as my analysis progressed, that my feel-
ings of estrangement, which had given rise to all these questions, became
fewer and fewer. What was happening? Was the cultural part of my self
becoming less salient as the analysis touched ever-deeper layers of the self,
as many psychoanalysts have claimed?
Most analysts have followed George Devereux’s (1953) lead in main-
taining that all those who seek help from a psychoanalyst have in common
many fundamental and universal components in their personality structure.
Together with the universality of the psychoanalytic method, these common
factors sufficiently equip the analyst to understand and help his or her patient,
irrespective of the patient’s cultural background, a view reiterated by a panel
of the American Psychoanalytic on the role of culture in psychoanalysis more
than forty-five years ago (Jackson 1968). There are certainly difficulties, such
as the ones enumerated by Ticho (1971), in treating patients of a different
culture: a temporary impairment of the analyst’s technical skills, empathy
for the patient, diagnostic acumen, the stability of self and object representa-
tions, and the stirring up of counter-transference manifestations, which may
not be easily distinguishable from stereotypical reactions to the foreign cul-
ture. Generally, though, given the analyst’s empathetic stance and the rules
of analytic procedure, these difficulties are temporary and do not require a
172 Chapter Ten

change in analytic technique. It is useful but not essential for the analyst to
understand the patient’s cultural heritage.
I believe that these conclusions on the role of culture in psychoanalytic
therapy, which would seem to apply to my own experience, are superficially
true but deeply mistaken. For what I did, and what I believe most patients do,
was to enthusiastically, if unconsciously, acculturate to the analyst’s culture,
in my case, both to his broader Western, north-European culture and to his
particular Freudian psychoanalytic culture. The latter, we know, is informed
by a vision of human experience that emphasizes man’s individuality and his
self-contained psyche. In the psychoanalytic vision, in Kenneth Kenniston’s
words (Adams 1979), each of us lives in our own subjective world, pursuing
pleasures and private fantasies, constructing a life and a fate which will vanish
when our time is over. It emphasizes the desirability of reflective awareness
of one’s inner states, insistence that our psyches harbor deeper secrets than
we care to confess, the existence of an objective reality that can be known,
and an essential complexity and tragedy of life where many wishes are fated
to remain unfulfilled. I was, then, moving away from my own Hindu cultural
heritage that sees life not as tragic but as a romantic quest that can extend over
many births, with the goal and possibility of apprehending another, “higher”
level of reality beyond the shared, verifiable, empirical reality of our world,
our bodies and our emotions.
Now, we know that every form of therapy is also an enculturation. As
Fancher (1993) remarks: “By the questions we ask, the things we empathize
with, the themes we pick for our comment, the ways we conduct ourselves
toward the patient, the language we use—by all these and a host of other
ways, we communicate to the patient our notions{Freudian, Jungian, Klei-
nian, Lacanian, etc.} of what is ‘normal’ and normative. Our interpretations
{Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, etc.} of the origins of a patient’s
issues reveal in pure form our assumptions of what causes what, what is
problematic about life, where the patient did not get what s/he needed, what
should have been otherwise” (pp. 89–90).
As a patient in the throes of transference love, I was exquisitely attuned
to the cues, to my analyst’s values, beliefs, and vision of the fulfilled life,
which even the most non-intrusive of analysts cannot help but scatter during
the therapeutic process. I was quick to pick up the cues that unconsciously
shaped my reactions and responses accordingly, with their overriding goal to
please and be pleasing in the eyes of the beloved analyst. My intense need to
be “understood” by the analyst, a need I shared with every patient, gave birth
to an unconscious force that made me underplay those cultural parts of my
self which I believed would be too foreign to the analyst’s experience. In the
transference-love, what I sought was closeness to the analyst, including the
 Psychoanalysis, Culture, and the Cultural Unconscious 173

sharing of his culturally shaped interests, attitudes, and beliefs. This intense
need to be close and to be understood, paradoxically by removing parts of the
self from the analytic arena of understanding, was epitomized by the fact that
I soon started dreaming in German, the language of my analyst, something I
have not done before or after my analysis.
This tendency to excise a cultural part of the self is accelerated when the
analysis is conducted in a language other than the mother tongue, wherein
much of one’s native culture is encoded. One’s mother tongue, the language
of one’s childhood, is intimately linked with emotionally colored sensory-
motor experiences. Psychoanalysis in a language that is not the patient’s
own is often in danger of leading to “operational thinking,” that is, verbal
expressions lacking associational links with feelings, symbols, and memories
(Basch-Kahre 1984). However grammatically correct and rich in its vocabu-
lary, the alien language suffers from emotional poverty, certainly as far as
early memories are concerned.
The emotional poverty of language that is acquired much later has been
dramatically demonstrated by an experiment in which subjects are asked the
following question: A train is approaching at high speed. If you can push one
individual on the track, stopping the train, it will save the lives of six others
standing a little distance down the track. Will you push that individual in front
of the train? Asked and answered in the mother tongue, most people show
signs of an emotional dilemma and would not push the person to his death. The
same question in the acquired language evokes much greater calculated ratio-
nality and the readiness to push one person in order to save the lives of six.

How should a psychoanalyst, then, approach the issue of cultural difference of a

client in his or her practice? The ideal situation would be that this difference ex-
ists only minimally, in the sense that the analyst has obtained a psychoanalytic
knowledge of the patient’s culture through a long immersion in its daily life and
its myths, its folklore and literature, its language and its music—an absorption
not through the bones, as in case of the patient, but through the head, and the
heart. Anything less than this maximalist position has the danger of the analyst
succumbing to the lure of cultural stereotyping in dealing with the particularities
of the patient’s experience. In cross-cultural therapeutic dyads, a little knowl-
edge is indeed a dangerous thing, collapsing important differences, assuming
sameness when only similarities exist. What the analyst needs is not a detailed
knowledge of the patient’s culture but a serious questioning and awareness of
the assumptions underlying his own, i.e., the culture he was born into and the
culture in which he has been professionally socialized as a psychoanalyst. In
other words, what I am suggesting is that in the absence of the possibility of
obtaining a deep psychoanalytic knowledge of the patient’s culture, the analyst
needs to strive for a state of affairs where the patient’s feelings of estrange-
ment, because of cultural differences from the analyst, are minimized and the
174 Chapter Ten

patient does not cut off, or only minimally cuts off, the cultural part of the self
from the therapeutic situation. This is possible only if the analyst can convey
a cultural openness which comes from becoming aware of one’s own culture’s
fundamental propositions about human nature, human experience, the fulfilled
human life, and then to acknowledge their relativity by seeing them as cultural
products, embedded in a particular place and time. The analyst needs to become
sensitive to the hidden existence of what Kohut (1979, p.12) called “health and
maturity moralities” of his or her particular analytical school. He needs to root
out cultural judgments about what constitutes psychological maturity, gender-
appropriate behaviors, “positive” or “negative” resolutions of developmental
conflicts and complexes, that often appear in the garb of universally valid truths.

Given that ethnocentrism, the tendency to view alien cultures in terms of

our own, and unresolved cultural chauvinism, are the patrimony of all human
beings, including that of psychoanalysts, the acquisition of cultural openness
is not an easy task. Cultural biases can lurk in the most unlikely places. For
instance, to judge from the number of articles in psychoanalytic journals
and books, psychoanalysis has traditionally accorded a high place to artistic
creativity. To paint, sculpt, engage in literary and musical pursuits have not
always and everywhere enjoyed the high prestige they do in modern Western
societies. In other historical periods, many civilizations, including mine to
this day, placed religious creativity at the top of their scale of desirable hu-
man endeavors. Psychoanalysts need to imagine that in such cultural settings,
the following conclusion to a case report could be an example of a successful
therapeutic outcome: “The patient’s visions increased markedly in quantity
and quality and the devotional mood took hold of her for longer and longer
periods of time.”
I would suggest that for optimal psychotherapy with patients from different
cultures, what a psychoanalytical therapist needs is not an exhaustive knowl-
edge of the patient’s culture, but a reflective openness to and interrogation of
his or her own cultural origins. A therapist can evaluate progress toward this
openness by the increase in the feelings of curiosity and wonder in counter-
transference when the cultural parts of the patient’s self find their voice in
therapy, when the temptation to pathologize the cultural part of the patient’s
behavior decreases, when the analyst’s own values no longer appear as nor-
mal and virtuous and when the analyst’s wish to instruct the patient in these
values diminishes markedly.
In the end, I hope I have not only provoked you to rethink your views about
how the unconscious reveals itself but even how the unconscious is struc-
tured. That is, to challenge the traditional analytic notion that culture is built
on top of an unconscious structure. Culture, as a fundamental way of viewing
ourselves and the world we live in is not a later substrate in the formation of
 Psychoanalysis, Culture, and the Cultural Unconscious 175

the psyche but is present from the beginning of life. Alfred Margulies (2014),
in an earlier discussion of this chapter, pointed out that on deep levels cul-
ture and unconscious co-create each other; that their relationship is not like
that of archeological layers but yin-yang, each shaping the other. Another
way to think about the interaction between the individual and the cultural
unconscious could be the well-known topological object: the Möebius strip.
It`s a surface with only one side and one boundary and “If an ant were to
crawl along the length of this strip, it would return to its starting point having
traversed the entire length of the strip (on both sides of the original paper)
without ever crossing an edge” (Horenstein 2015).
We know that this kind of relationship between the dynamic and cultural
unconscious is even true neurobiologically.
Take the example of the Muller-Lyer illusion, where lines of equal length
give impressions of different length, an illusion, created by the orientation
of the arrow caps placed at their ends. This illusion is a consequence of our
depth perspective shaped by the rectangular cues of buildings we live in.
Children who grow up in round huts rarely experience the Muller-Lyer ar-
rows as an illusion.
In other words, Marguiles goes on to say, “our cultural environment in its
everyday structures, practices and aesthetics shapes the way our brains pro-
cess visual information. And, if this is true for neurobiological non-conscious
visual processing, it seems almost certain it would be true for psychoanalyti-
cally relevant unconscious processes and the impact of culture.” (p.5)
For me, it has then become important to constantly remain aware of the
Indian cultural context in clinical work and in my writings, but without
sinking into traditionalism and becoming an apologist of tradition. On the
other hand, because of the presence of many western cultural assumptions
in psychoanalysis, as indeed they are in most social sciences, I also needed
to critically look at psychoanalytic concepts without junking a discipline
which has considerable explanatory power, not to speak of its individual and
social emancipatory potential. Even as I question much of psychoanalytic
superstructure, I continue to stand on its foundations and subscribe to its
basic assumptions: the importance of the unconscious part of the mind in our
thought and actions, the vital significance of early childhood experiences for
later life, the importance of Eros in human motivation, the dynamic interplay,
including conflict, between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind,
and the vital import of transference and counter-transference in the therapist
and patient relationship. All the rest is up for grabs and just as we have be-
gun to talk of modernity in the plural, of different modernities, perhaps we
will soon be talking of Japanese, French, Chinese, Argentinian, and Indian
psychoanalyses.
176 Chapter Ten

My own project of “translation” in the last forty years of work with Indian
and Western patients has thus been guided by a view of the psyche wherein
the individual, dynamic unconscious and the cultural unconscious are inextri-
cably intertwined, each enriching, constraining, and shaping the other as they
jointly evolve through life. The unconscious exists only when it is expressed
through culture. In other words, to keep constantly in mind that the translation
of psychoanalysis in a non-Western culture must give equal value to both the
languages, of psychoanalysis and of the culture in which psychoanalysis is
being received.

NOTE

1. Revised version of a talk sponsored by Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the

American Psychological Association, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute,
Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, New England Foundation for Psycho-
analysis, and PINE Psychoanalytic Center, Boston, April, 19, 2014.

REFERENCES

Adams, V. “Freud’s Work Thrives as Theory, Not Therapy.” The New York Times,
14. August. (1979).
Basch-Kahre, E. “On difficulties arising in transference and countertransference
when analyst and analysand have different socio-cultural backgrounds.” Int.R.
Psychoanal. 11(1984):61–67.
Devereux, G. “Cultural factors in psychoanalytic therapy.” J. Amer.Psychoanal. Assn
1(1953): 629–655.
Fancher, R.T. “Psychoanalysis as culture.” Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology,
15(1993): 81–93.
Freud, S. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. S. E., 1916:16.
Haidt, J. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Reli-
gion. New York: Pantheon, 2012.
Henrich, J. , S.J. Heine and Norenzayan, A. “The weirdest people in the world?”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33(2010): 61–83.
Horenstein, M. Personal communication. 2015.
Jackson, S. “Panel on aspects of culture in psychoanalytic theory and practice.” J.
Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 16(1968):651–670.
Kakar, S. “Clinical work and cultural imagination.” Psychoanal. Q. 64(994): 265–
281.
Kakar, S. “Psychoanalysis and non-western cultures.” Int. R Psychoanal.
12(1987):441–448.
Kakar, S. “Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Cultures.” Int. R. Psycho-Anal.,
12(1985):441–448.
 Psychoanalysis, Culture, and the Cultural Unconscious 177

Kakar, S. “The maternal-feminine in Indian psychoanalysis.” Int. R. Psychoanal.

16(1989): 355–362.
Kakar, S. Culture and Psyche. Delhi: Oxford Uuniversity Press, 1997.
Kakar, S. Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. New York: Knopf, 1982.
Kakar, S. The Inner World: Childhood and Society in India. Delhi and New York:
Oxford Universiy Press, 1978.
Kohut, H. “The two analyses of Mr. Z.” Int. J. Psychoanal. 60(1979):3–27.
Margulies, A. “Imagining the real: Discussion of Sudhir Kakar’s ‘Culture and Psy-
choanalysis,’ Boston, April 19, 2014.
Mishra, A. “Sudhir Kakar—Psychoanalytic Wine from Indian Terroir: Towards a
Compassionate Psychoanalysis.” Unpublished Talk, Int. Psychol. Congress, Cape-
town, July, 2012.
Steinman, R.M. Guru-Sisya-Sambandha: Das Meister-SchülerVerhältnisimtraditio-
nellen und modernen Hinduismus. Stuttgart: Steiner.1986.
Ticho, G. “Cultural aspects of transference and countertransference.” Bull. Meninger
Clinic, 35 (1971): 313–326.
 Chapter Eleven

Imagining the Real

An Essay on Sudhir Kakar’s
“Culture and Psyche: A Personal Journey”
Alfred Margulies

Our colleague Sudhir Kakar (2014) began his presentation “Culture and Psy-
choanalysis” with the weird—and weirdness, I submit, is a perfect place for
me to begin, too. Because the rest of this essay depends heavily on Kakar’s to
make sense, I now quote the beginning of his talk at some length:1

Most of our knowledge on how human beings feel, think, act, is derived from
a small subset of the human population which the psychologist Jonathan Haidt
(2012) calls WEIRD, the acronym standing for western, educated, industri-
alized, rich and democratic. Psychologists, sociologists, psychotherapists,
philosophers, are as WEIRD as the subjects of their studies, ministrations or
speculations. It is this small group of statistical outliers that provides us with
both the producers and subjects of our contemporary psychoanalytic knowledge
we have then blithely proceeded to generalize to the rest of humankind.
Haidt demonstrates the chasm between the WEIRD and others in his study
of morality where he interviewed twelve groups of different social classes in
different countries. He tells each interviewee different stories and then asks if
there is something wrong in how someone acts in the story and, if so, why is it
wrong. One of the stories goes:
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before
cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats
it (p.3–4).
One of his groups was from students of the University of Pennsylvania, a
liberal, Ivy League college in the United States and certainly the most WEIRD
among the selected groups. This was the only group out of the twelve where
a majority (73 percent) tolerated the chicken story, finding it OK. “It’s his
chicken, it’s dead, nobody is getting hurt and it’s being done in private’ . . . (p.
96).
Or to take Anurag Mishra’s . . . analogy of psychoanalysis and wine, the
terroir of a wine is a specific place with its particular soil and climate where

179
180 Chapter Eleven

the wine is made and thus different terroirs, although made with the same sort
of grape, have different wines. The terroir of human beings—historical, geo-
graphic, cultural, social, political, religious—too, varies and will produce differ-
ent psychoanalytic wines. The terroir of psychoanalysis for more than a century
has been and continues to be Western. Modern psychotherapy thus contains
many Western cultural ideas and ideals that permeate psychotherapeutic theo-
ries and practice. Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, mar-
riage, male and female and so on which are essentially cultural in origin often
remain unexamined and are regarded as universal by many Western therapists
treating patients from different cultures.

With his opening story Kakar deftly—that is both gently and sharply—turns
the tables on Western liberals. For me, Kakar’s surprising paper evoked two
reveries about cultural weirdness and unconscious structure that took me in
surprisingly different directions: The first to Freud and Heidegger’s concep-
tion of the uncanny. And my second association took me to my colleague
Edward Hundert’s (1995) book Lessons from an Optical Illusion and the im-
plications for the intertwining of culture and neurobiology. These two paths
(the weird and lessons from an optical illusion) come back together again and
offer a third path that follows Kakar’s vision of cultural imagination. So let’s
now go down each of these paths in turn.

AUTHENTIC WEIRDNESS

Astute students of the strangeness within, both Freud and Heidegger ex-
plored the weirdness of Unheimlichkeit, literally “not-at-home-ness,” which
translates as the uncanny. Freud (1919) of course aimed toward the dynamic
unconscious: the uncanny signaled the return of the repressed. Heidegger
(1962), taking a different path, thought the uncanny heralded those poten-
tially authentic existential moments when being apprehends its own being;
that is, moments when being-as-being jumps out at us, pulling us from our
everyday absorption in the world and into a heightened state of awareness.
And here we fall into a place of strangeness: we feel anxiety or dread.
At the margins of what (after Heidegger) I call “worlding,” this existential
strangeness sometimes offers the “authentic” clarity of surprising perspec-
tives (Margulies 2000, 2015). And here we might find ourselves, as the poet
Wallace Stevens (1972) put it, “more truly and more strange” (p. 55). The ex-
istential uncanny then emerges at the margins of being-in-the-world, at those
liminal places on the edges of birth and death where we fall into and out of the
world. And so witness our Western cultural struggles to define who is already
alive (for example, when does inception begin?) and who is already dead (for
 Imagining the Real 181

example, when do we pull the plug?)—at these profoundly unsettling places

we find what mortality means to us, places that evoke our deepest spiritual
longings and conflicts about the meaning and sanctity of life.

CULTURAL ILLUSIONS

Kakar challenges not only our usual notions of how the unconscious reveals
itself, but indeed our conceptions of how the unconscious gets structured. A
more traditional notion of the unconscious posits that culture is built on top of a
foundational unconscious structure, not unlike how we used to think of genes:
a gene might express itself as varied phenotypes emerging differently within
different environments. That is, genetic material achieves its varied expression
within its environmental matrix. Individual people are actually secondary to
the genotype, sort of like flowers sprouting from an extensive root system: the
root system is primary and underground, the flowers a manifestation.
Another image might be of grapes expressing themselves in wine, which
reflects their terroir. The environment works on the basic genetic structure of
the grape to produce a distinctive wine specific to its soil, climate, sunlight,
water, etc. But the grape—like the noble grapes Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cab-
ernet—are primordial, the overlay is the essential environment. Hence, Bor-
deaux or Napa. And so, by analogy, we have universal unconscious structuring
potentials, not unlike Jung’s notions of archetypes, or from a more classical
Freudian perspective: the Oedipal structures, libidinal stages, and so on.
Kakar, though, is suggesting a different path, one profound and hard to
visualize: On deep levels culture and the unconscious co-create one another;
that is, they are co-primordial. It is not that the unconscious is anterior, and
it is not quite that culture is anterior; it is more like a yin-yang, each shaping,
each bootstrapping, the other. The socio-cultural environment gets under our
skin into the unconscious, and then the unconscious gets under the skin of our
environment. Kakar is proposing a very strange, spiraling meta-conception—
and one that we know to be true neurobiologically! Let me explain.
One might think that neurobiology is a straightforward primordial sub-
strate from which visual experience is constructed. That is, neurobiology, the
physical structure of our central nervous system, is fundamentally anterior
to environmental experience. In this vein, neurobiology seems the necessary
first step in a series in lock-step order: neurobiology (or brain), to individual,
to culture. Indeed, this is the sequence of Western medical school curricula,
with culture either not considered or added as a humanistic after-thought. But
is neurobiology the primordial first mover in the creation of behavior? Well,
yes and no.
182 Chapter Eleven

Consider cross-cultural studies of optical illusions, I am here indebted to

my colleague Edward Hundert’s book (1995), Lessons from an Optical Il-
lusion. For example, the famous images known as the Muller-Lyer Illusion,
where lines of equal length give impressions of different length, an illusion,
created by the orientation of the arrow caps placed on their ends (see Hundert
1995, p. 209). Richard Gregory (1966), a pioneer of artificial intelligence,
proposed that these illusions were a consequence of how our visual system
processes and makes sense of lines as information about depth perspective
and size constancy scaling within the world that we actually live with its
ubiquitous rectilinear shapes of buildings and box edges and so on.
But, a seeming paradox emerges. To quote Hundert (1995):

It is tempting to call this phenomenon [the Muller-Lyer arrows illusion] of the

accommodation of our plastic visual input analyzers to the realities of depth
perspective and size constancy in our world a “natural phenomenon”—except
for the simple fact that such rectilinear lines do not exist in nature! One may
therefore ask what becomes of the visual input system in the brains of children
who are raised in caves, or in round huts with no rectangular cues for depth
perspective? . . . These people rarely experience the Muller-Lyer arrows as an
illusion . . . (p. 211)

That is, our cultural environment in its everyday structures, practices, and
aesthetics shapes the ways our brains process visual information. Just think
of it: Culture shapes neurobiology! Where now is the first cause in our causal
chain of perception? And, if this circular complexity of experience and struc-
ture is true for neurobiological non-conscious visual processing, it seems
almost certain it would be true for psychoanalytically relevant unconscious
processes and the impact of culture.
How heartening this circularity is for those of us who talk to and care
deeply about actual individuals rather than aggregated statistical norms! That
is, if this non-linear, recursive complexity is mind-boggling, it is also deeply
reassuring: experience does indeed shape biology on a deep, deep level,
which then shapes experience on a deep, deep level, in a spiral of uniqueness
that flowers not only into wines, but into each individual. And this nonlinear,
recursive complexity is precisely where clinical psychoanalysts live, from
culture, to neurobiology, to individuals, circling back to culture, all shap-
ing one another in this extraordinary richness of spiraling interaction. This
evokes for me Freud’s conception of Nachtraglichkeit (Freud 1918; and see
Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, for a fuller history), translated as “deferred ac-
tion,” for the recursive spiraling of memory and significance, only here this
iterative process stretches across cultures and evolution within the uncon-
scious worlding of a people.
 Imagining the Real 183

Which brings us back to the W.E.I.R.D. psychological studies Kakar cites

at the beginning of his paper, that is, western “science” assumes universal
significance—and this, too, is a cultural illusion as robust as the Muller-Lyer
example. In short, the W.E.I.R.D. studies of western research are themselves
exceedingly weird. And so we now conclude that understanding the essences
of a culture’s unconscious is of special importance to understand the essences
of an individual’s unconscious processes, that is, her complex worlding. But
what, we now ask, are the implications for clinicians? And, most importantly,
what is the path into understanding another’s culture psychoanalytically?

“FACTIONS”: OR, KAKAR’S IMAGINING THE REAL

Here Kakar (2014) asks a brilliant psychoanalytic question that points to a

third path: Just how does a culture imagine itself? Reversing the vectors of
causality, and psychoanalytic to its core, this question goes to fantasy, desire,
history, and to the stories we tell ourselves from one generation to another.
And these stories often come with shared multi-generational rituals, com-
munal gatherings of all ages: the great array of religious stories, of historical
origins, the world-wide oral traditions back before Homer’s The Iliad and The
Odyssey, the songs that sang us into being . . .
Kakar’s novel approach offers a different Olympian view outside of our-
selves: How does our culture imagine its origins and its dreams of the right
way to live? How does it dream of lives in and out of balance? How does a
culture sing of meaning and of one’s place in the universe and tell the story
of individual and collective purpose and the hazards along the way? How
does a culture go to the liminal edge of meaning that unsettles, perplexes,
and demands answers to that which will always be beyond us? What are our
primal signifiers, our collective store of symbols, expressed in mythic struc-
turing stories?

IN THIS VEIN I NOW ASK MYSELF:

HOW DO WE DREAM OURSELVES?

An Example: Cultural Symbols, Up Close and Personal;

A Message in a Dream
Over 40 years ago I awoke from this dream:
My mother and I are walking. I trip and stumble. She catches me, picks
me up, and then she holds me in her lap. But this is so odd in so many ways:
184 Chapter Eleven

I am a grown man, that is, a young man in my early 20s, and yet cradled by
my mother.
So strange and moving to me: I am a layering of selves from different ages
coming together in a powerful image. On waking, I immediately got both
the image and the unconscious message. The image: Straight from Michel-
angelo’s sculpture, “The Pieta,” Mary holding the broken body of Jesus. The
message: Though I am far away in Boston, I knew then with clarity that my
mother was about to die of her cancer. She and everyone around her, though,
had denied this imminent event—and in my dream it broke through with cer-
tainty. A message from my unconscious awareness of what was being denied:
I knew that she was on the threshold.
And, surprising to me, though dreaming of the Pieta, I was a Southern Jew,
raised kosher. Now Kakar (2014) speaks of the highly specific subcultures
within his Indian culture, as in:

Yes, I am a Hindu but also a Punjabi Khatri by birth. That is, my overarching
Hindu culture has been mediated by my strong regional culture as a Punjabi and
further by my Khatri caste. This Hindu Punjabi Khatri culture has been further
modified by an agnostic father and a more traditional, believing mother, both
. . . also westernized to varying degrees.

Like nested Russian dolls, all of these cultures are contained within cul-
tures within more cultures. And so when I say I was a Southern Jew, raised
kosher, that only hints at my cultural specificity and nuance. This to say, I
was Southern, Virginian, Jewish, raised kosher, but not orthodox, with a more
traditional believing mother, a father who ate “chow mein” with pork, but
who told me the red thingies were “water-chestnuts,” both parents strongly
assimilated to the Southern culture within the American melting pot. And
my American, patchwork unconscious lifted an iconic cultural image straight
from Michelangelo’s sculpture “The Pieta” in the Vatican! I had only seen
photographs, but here is a powerful, archetypal Christian image. Surely gran-
diose for me to be so identified, but more, I think, universal and primal, that
is, the image crystallized death, life, the earliest human connections and sor-
row throughout all time, human suffering precisely because we are only hu-
man and long for something bigger. Mortal, we lose those we love; we know
that we live on a horizon of time. That is, Madonna is the universal mother
and Christ is a universal son, connected throughout all time. A mother’s death
became my stumble, my death—a part of my world dies.
My unconscious appropriated the Pieta from the great art of my culture to
bring me the message I didn’t want to see, but needed to experience. The art-
ist, a seer, summons the imagination of the culture; artists dream the culture
to its depths. Let us not forget that Freud’s initial approach to dreams was as
 Imagining the Real 185

a model for neurotic symptom formation. And, yes, in this sense, I submit the
artist imagines and instantiates the over-determined symptom and sign, both
the dis-ease and flowering, of a culture itself.
Many years later I finally saw the actual Pieta in the Vatican, and uncan-
nily, I felt as if the sculpture had been commissioned for me, personally. Face
to face, I observed it closely: Michelangelo carved the marble so thin that the
Madonna’s cloak glowed in translucence, like lace, like life itself, tough and
fragile. And here I noted: This perfect image was surreal, not real at all.
The proportions of the Madonna were unearthly, not of our experience in
the real world—which, ironically, makes them so perfect! Like the Parthe-
non, an image of perfection, though each column is actually slightly askew,
off by fractions of degrees to give the illusion of perfect Platonic linearity.
That is, perfection is something we live abstractly, something we experience
that never was, like Pythagorean perfect lines and points in space. Perfection,
then, is created, co-created, through artistry. The artist imagines the reality
she is trying to capture.
Or, more to the point, these creative illusions are like the taken-for-granted
optical illusions of our Western world I described earlier. The sense of per-
spective is embedded in a culture’s collective imagination, which gets wired
into its neurobiology. And so my socio-cultural perception and imagination
will be quite specific to my time, place, historical moment, that is my being-
in-the-world which is nested within my culture’s being-in-the-world, our
“worlding.”
Perspective then does not mean Cartesian truth, a gift to us Westerners
from the Renaissance, but rather, it is relative to, an angle of vision. Or, as
Kakar puts it in his wonderful paper, “Seduction and the Saint” (2003, p.
206): some primal fantasies are “a play, a dramatic enactment of a compel-
ling fact-fiction (“faction”) which might have been but was never real.” A
“Faction”: how wonderful! A compelling fact-fiction emerges like Martin
Buber’s (1957) “imagining the real of the other,” the bold empathic swing
into another’s life, into another’s fantasies and imagination (see Margulies
1989; 2014).

FULL CIRCLE: SET ONESELF FREE

I think Heisenberg (though there is uncertainty here) once said the world is not
only stranger than we think—it is stranger than we can think! And so let me
paraphrase and bring these threads together: the world, that is, we ourselves
in our-being-in-the-world, are always-already interconnected, top to bottom,
conscious to unconscious, bottom to top. That is, we are not only weirder
186 Chapter Eleven

than we think, but we are weirder than we can think. To this impossible
challenge, along with Sudhir Kakar, we must dream into the other’s culture,
we must imagine. . . .

NOTE

1. This chapter began as a discussion of Sudhir Kakar’s talk “Culture and Psyche:
A Personal Journey,” presented in Cambridge, MA, on April 19, 2014, at Lesley
College for a conference on “Culture and Psychoanalysis.” For intelligibility, I have
adapted my discussion to fit into this volume, primarily by more extensive quotations
from Kakar’s presented chapter.

REFERENCES

Buber, M. “Elements of the interhuman.” Psychiatry 20(1957): 105–113.

Freud, S. “From the history of an infantile neurosis.” Standard Edition, (New York:
Norton) 1955, 17(1918): 3–122.
Freud, S. “The “Uncanny,”’ Standard Edition. (New York: Norton), 1955, 17(1919):
217–252.
Gregory, R. Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1966.
Haidt, J. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Reli-
gion. New York: Pantheon, 2012.
Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. New York:
Harper Collins, 1962.
Hundert, E. Lessons from an Optical Illusion: On Nature and Nurture, Knowledge
and Values. Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press, 1995.
Kakar, S. “Culture and Psyche: A Personal Journey.” unpublished manuscript. Talk
presented in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Committee on International Relations for
Psychoanalytic Psychology, Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psy-
chological Association; Co-Sponsors: Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute;
Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis; Psychology and the Other Institute at
Lesley University; The Paul G. Ecker, M.D. Center for Interdisciplinary Studies,
New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis, and PINE Psychoanalytic Center.
Apr. 19, 2014.
Kakar, S. “Seduction and the Saint: Desire and the Spiritual Quest.” Ann. Psychoanal
31(2003):197–209.
Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.B. The Language of Psycho–Analysis (D. Nicholson–
Smith, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1973.
Margulies, A. “Falling Out of the World: Shock, Strangeness—and Afterwards.”
Unpublished manuscript, for the conference, “The Therapeutic Action of Psycho-
dynamic Psychotherapy: Current Concepts of Cure,” Boston. March 22, 2015.
 Imagining the Real 187

Margulies, A. “After the Storm: Living and Dying in Psychoanalysis. With Discus-
sants Shelly Orgel and Warren Poland.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association 62(2014): 863–905.
Margulies, A. “The Place of Strangeness, a review of Warren Poland’s ‘The Analyst’s
Witnessing and Otherness.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
48(2000): 72–79.
Margulies, A. The Empathic Imagination. (New York, Norton, 1989.
Stevens, W. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems, edited by H. Stevens.
NY: Vintage Books, 1972.
 Chapter Twelve

As Psychoanalysis Travels
Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, and Anurag
Mishra in Conversation with Sudhir Kakar
Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, Anurag Mishra
and Sudhir Kakar

Even people who are well-inclined toward psychoanalysis are often skeptical
whether psychoanalysis is at all possible in a non-Western society such as
India, with its different family system, religious beliefs, and cultural values
from those of bourgeois Europe in which psychoanalysis had its origins.
Freud himself had hinted at some of the cultural difficulties a Western
import like psychoanalysis may have in the Indian setting. In response to a
letter from Romain Rolland who had sought Freud’s views on the mystical
experience, “the oceanic feeling,” Freud (1930) stated his attitude toward In-
dia and things Indian when he wrote: “I shall now try with your guidance to
penetrate into the Indian jungle from which until now an uncertain blending
of Hellenic love of proportion, Jewish sobriety, and Philistine timidity have
kept me away.” (p. 392)
I do not give the easy answer to my skeptical friends that Indian analysts
practice in the enclaves of Western modernity in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata
,and Bangalore. Here, among the upper and upper-middle classes, there are
enough patients, Westernized to various degree, who are attracted by the
Freudian model of the human and the causes of his or her suffering and look
toward an analyst as their best ally in the realization of their full individual-
ity. I know that the questioners—Manasi, Anup, and Anurag—are seeking
an answer to the relevance of psychoanalysis for the majority of Indians who
are still firmly rooted in their civilization. My answer is that, yes, traditional
India is indeed very different. There is an emphasis on extended rather than
a nuclear family, mother goddesses are vastly more important than a father-
god, the nature of a person is not viewed as individual and instinctual but as
inter- and transpersonal. Further, there are fundamental differences on the
nature of human experience and the fulfilled human life. Psychoanalysis, we
know, is informed by a vision of human experience that emphasizes man’s
189
190 Chapter Twelve

individuality and his self-contained psyche. In the psychoanalytic vision,

each of us lives in our own subjective world, pursuing pleasures and private
fantasies, constructing a life and a fate that will vanish when our time is over.
This view emphasizes the essential complexity and tragedy of life whereby
many wishes are fated to remain unfulfilled. The psychoanalytic vision is in
contrast to the Indian, specifically Hindu cultural heritage, which sees life
not as tragic but as a romantic quest that can extend over many births, with
the goal and possibility of apprehending another, “higher” level of reality
beyond the shared, verifiable, empirical reality of our world, our bodies, and
our emotions. The Indian view further asserts that belonging to a community
is the fundamental need of the human. Only if the human truly belongs to
such a community, naturally and unselfconsciously, can he or she enter the
river of life and lead a full, creative, and spontaneous life. And, of course,
Hindu-Indian myths are very different from Greek myths or the Christian and
Jewish legends that have irrigated the terroir of psychoanalysis for the last
one hundred years.
At the beginning of my practice in India, I was acutely aware of the strug-
gle within myself between my inherited Hindu-Indian culture and the Freud-
ian psychoanalytic culture that I had recently acquired and in which I was
professionally socialized. My romantic Indian vision of reality could not be
easily reconciled with the ironic psychoanalytic vision, nor could the Indian
view of the person and the sources of human strengths be reconciled with
the Freudian view—now also mine—on the nature of the individual and his
or her world. With Goethe’s Faust, I could only say to a Western colleague:

Your spirit only seeks a single quest

so never learns to know its brother
Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast
And one would gladly sunder from the other.

Some Indian colleagues try to sunder the two souls by unreservedly identify-
ing with their professional socialization, radically rejecting their Indian cul-
tural heritage. Many of them have migrated to Western countries to work as
therapists, to all apparent purposes indistinguishable from their Western col-
leagues. Some who stay back in India struggle to hold onto their professional
identity by clinging to each psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Loath to be critical of
received wisdom and exiled from Rome, they become more conservative than
the Pope. Others enthusiastically embrace the latest fashions and analytic
gurus from the metropolises of psychoanalysis. A few, like myself, live with
the oppositions, taking comfort from the Hindu view that every contradiction
does not need a resolution, that contradictions can co-exist in the mind like
 As Psychoanalysis Travels 191

substances in water that are in suspension without necessarily becoming a

solution.
And yet my experience with traditional Indian patients teaches me that
psychoanalysis is still possible, if (as the Indian astrologer said on being
asked how he cast horoscopes when new planets have been discovered which
are absent in his ancient system) “one makes the required adjustments.” In
other words, if the translation of psychoanalysis gives equal value to both the
languages, of psychoanalysis and of the culture in which psychoanalysis is
being received.
Some of the adjustments are theoretical. The Indian analyst needs to recog-
nize that many psychoanalytic propositions on what constitutes psychological
maturity, gender-appropriate behaviors, “positive” or “negative” resolutions
of developmental conflicts and complexes, that often appear in the garb
of universal truths, are actually the incorporation of Western middle-class
experience and values into psychoanalytic theory. But the most important
adjustment one needs to make is to recognize that culture, as a fundamental
way of viewing ourselves and the world we live in, is not a later substrate in
the formation of the psyche but is present from the beginning of life. Alfred
Margulies (2014), in a discussion of an earlier version of this chapter pointed
out, at deep levels of the psyche culture and unconscious co-create each other,
that their relationship is not like that of archeological layers but yin-yang,
each shaping the other and that we know this to be true neurobiologically.
He illustrates this by taking the example of the Muller-Lyer illusion where
lines of equal length give impressions of different length, an illusion, cre-
ated by the orientation of the arrow caps placed on their ends. This illusion
is a consequence of our depth perspective shaped by the rectangular cues of
buildings we live in. Children who grow up in round huts rarely experience
the Muller-Lyer arrows as an illusion.
In other words, Marguiles goes on to say, “our cultural environment in its
everyday structures, practices and aesthetics shapes the way our brains pro-
cess visual information. And, if this is true for neurobiological non-conscious
visual processing, it seems almost certain it would be true for psychoanalyti-
cally relevant unconscious processes and the impact of culture.” (p.5)
To adapt the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s quip about the Javanese,
“To be human is to be Argentinian”; “To be human is to be Indian.”
Why does the cultural unconscious which, too, is decisive in the formation
of individual psyche, which flows into the same river that also receives the
stream of the dynamic unconscious, receive such little attention in clinical
case histories reported in the analytic literature across the world?
It is easy to see why narratives of cultural unconscious would be absent in
cases when both the analyst and the patient share the same culture. As has
192 Chapter Twelve

been said, if a fish was a scientist, the last discovery it would make would be
of water. In the analytic dyads from the same culture, both the analyst and the
patient are two fish in the same water. Mostly, of course, it is the professional
identity of the analyst—Freudian, Kleinian, Kohutian, Lacanian, or whatever,
which almost completely overlays or trumps the analyst’s cultural identity.
As Fancher (1993) remarked some years ago: “By the questions we ask, the
things we empathize with, the themes we pick for our comment, the ways we
conduct ourselves toward the patient, the language we use—by all these and
a host of other ways, we communicate to the patient our notions {Freudian,
Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, etc.} of what is ‘normal’ and normative. Our
interpretations {Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, etc.} of the origins of
a patient’s issues reveal in pure form our assumptions of what causes what,
what is problematic about life, where the patient did not get what s/he needed,
what should have been otherwise” (pp.89-90).
The patient, of course, contributes her share to this tacit pact with the ana-
lyst. In the throes of transference love and quick to pick up cues that uncon-
sciously shape his reactions and responses accordingly, the patient’s intense
need to be “understood” by the analyst gives birth to an unconscious force
that makes her underplay those cultural parts of her self which she believes
would be foreign to the analyst’s experience.
My own project of “translation” in the last forty years of work with Indian
and Western patients has been guided by a view of the psyche wherein the
individual, dynamic unconscious and the cultural unconscious are inextrica-
bly intertwined, each enriching, constraining, and shaping the other as they
jointly evolve through life.

REFERENCES

Fancher, R.T. “Psychoanalysis as culture.” Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology

15(1993): 81–93.
Freud, S. “Letter to Romain Rolland, 19 January 1930.” In The Letters of Sigmund
Freud, edited by E. Freud. New York: Basic Books, 1980 [1930].
Margulies, A. “Imagining the real: Discussion of Sudhir Kakar’s ‘Culture and Psy-
choanalysis,’” Boston, April 19, 2014.
 Chapter Thirteen

Genealogies of Aboriginalization
Psychoanalysis and
Sexuation in Cultural Crucible
Anup Dhar

This reflection sees psychoanalysis not just as a “philosophy of the uncon-

scious,” but also as a “philosophy of sexuation”; and it is on the question
of “sexuation”—“the [il]logical development of the cause of gender”—that
psychoanalysis is most creative; and it is also where it slips most. Jacques
Lacan in Seminar XI (1998 [1977]) foregrounds four fundamental concepts
of psychoanalysis: “the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the
drive.” This reflection argues for a fifth fundamental concept: sexuation.
What however is sexuation? How has the concept of sexuation taken shape in
Freud and Lacan? How has it been reshaped by feminist psychoanalytic and
psychoanalytic feminist work? What form did it take in the works of the first
non-western psychoanalyst—Girindrasekhar Bose (1886–1953)? Ragland
(2004) shows how

Lacan discovered the link Freud sought—but never found—between the

pleasure principle and the reality principles. Having desexualized the reality
principle, Freud could never place libido in it any more than he could locate the
signifier in Es or Id. . . .

Lacan’s theory of sexuation argues that men and women are sexuated psychi-
cally, and not biologically. That is, there is a psychic asymmetric logic1 at
work in differentiating biological woman from biological man [hence “there
is no such thing as a sexual relationship”]. . . . Lacan’s rethinking of sexuation
concerns the conditions of jouissance that rotate between pleasure and pain.
He argues that the masculine and feminine are psychic identifications. The
masculine identifies predominantly with the symbolic order of language and
social conventions, while the feminine identifies with the real of affect, loss,
and trauma. Whether one identifies as masculine or feminine does not concern

193
194 Chapter Thirteen

one’s biological sex, but the position one occupies in reference to the masculine
all of knowledge, or the feminine not all of knowledge. (Ragland 2004: 29, 179)

What however is sexuation? Is sexuation— as in Freud’s work—about hav-

ing and not having, a culturally privileged part object, the penis? Is sexua-
tion—as in Lacan’s work—about having or being an Imaginary object, the
“phallus”? Is it about the “position one occupies in reference to the masculine
all of knowledge, or the feminine not all of knowledge” (Ragland 2004:
179)? Is sexuation—as in Luce Irigaray’s (1985b) work—about an ethics of
“sexual difference”? Or is sexuation—as in Bose’s (1949) work—about the
Moebius of “sexual ambivalence”? This reflection is premised on a dialogue
between perspectives to sexuation; perspectives born in both the west and in
the colonized east; perspectives that are at times in dialogue; perspectives that
are at other times alien to each other; including questions of translation as
Kakar suggests in this volume (in the chapter “As Psychoanalysis Travels”).
It is also about how one can make sense of oneself as a sexuated subject in
cultural context.
The reflection is also about feminism and woman. Not who is woman or
who the woman is. But what is “woman.” Not what is woman, in general, but
in psychoanalysis; in both its original (i.e., Freudian), ab-original (i.e., Lacanian
and feminist) and aboriginal (i.e., Bose-ian) forms; and what is its relation to
the question of what is woman in feminism, in especially the Indian context?
The reflection thus takes feminist enquiries beyond the standard sex-gender
system to questions of sexuation, sexual difference, and sexual ambivalence.
Taking off from (i) Freud’s own work on eros, pleasure principle, sexed
subjectivity, and female/feminine sexuality, to (ii) “internal corrections”
initiated by Jacques Lacan’s “return to Freud,” to (iii) “internal critiques” by
French feminist philosopher Irigaray (in the feminist turn to psychoanalysis
as also the psychoanalytic turn in feminism), this reflection would suggest
how Bose (Ashis Nandy calls him “Savage Freud” [1995]); I don’t; he is
Girindrasekhar Bose; he is not a version of Freud, sage or savage) and his
“aboriginal theory of mental life” (Bose called it “A New Theory of Mental
Life”; why new? What is new about his theory? One will have to explore.)
offers a different and distinctive understanding of mental life, sexuation, and
sexual difference. What does such a “new” theory of mental life, sexuation,
and sexual difference do to erstwhile understandings in psychoanalysis?
What happens when Freudian psychoanalysis and sexed subject constitution
with Oedipality, phallicism, and castration as central tenets are put in a cul-
tural crucible?2 What happens when a culture (here India) is put in the psy-
choanalytic crucible marked by its own and distinctive focus on and history
of sexuation and sexual difference (Kakar [1982, 1989, 2011] has explored
this “cultural crucible” and this “history” in tales of love, sex and danger, in
re-readings of the Kamasutra, in the story of the ascetic of desire: Vatsayana,
 Genealogies of Aboriginalization 195

and in the relationship between Mira and Mahatma Gandhi . . . ; Foucault

has explored it in History of Sexuality [1978]; also see Davidson, 2001 and
Laqueur, 1990)?
In that sense, this reflection works its way through (i) Freudian psychoanal-
ysis (which marks its own difference with medicine, psychiatry, and psychol-
ogy), and (ii) Lacan’s notion of sexuation and feminist philosophies of sexual
difference (initiated by Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Bracha Ettinger, Helene Cix-
ous, Monique Wittig, and Sarah Kofman which marks its own difference with
“feminisms of equality” and generates its own kind of apposite positionality
with respect to psychoanalysis) to arrive at (iii) Bose’s “new” theory of sexual
life (marked by Bose’s aboriginalization of Freudian psychoanalysis through
the invocation of gendered “ambivalence,” “double-wish,” “psychic see-saw,”
“identification,” and “Oedipus Point” [as against Oedipus Complex] as fun-
damental concepts). Bose is seen as rendering redundant the importance of
the phallus (as part object or as signifier) that has been paradigmatic of much
of psychoanalysis. In other words, Bose moves from having or not-having an
(part) object to being or not-being (like) a subject; he is moving from posses-
sion (and hence the consequent pride, [penis] envy, and [castration] anxiety)
to identification with a momentous Other; he is moving from the notion of a
cannibalistic or devouring self to an image of self where the self extends itself
outwards toward Others through identification, where Others are mirrors and
not objects; Bose calls it “irradiation of identification.” It is not just an argu-
ment for cultural relativism. It is not that Indian and European patients are
different in psychic disposition. It is that, in the “Indian” outline of psycho-
analysis, the phallus is not considered the fundamental object or signifier of
sexed subjectivity. Here “India” is not an analysand who offers different case
experiences to phallocentric psychoanalysis. Instead, India is an analyst of
the European obsession with the phallus (and the Oedipal) as the structuring
principle of psychic constitution.

GENEALOGIES OF ABORIGINALIZATION

This reflection is also about three possible, perhaps related, genealogies of

aboriginalization. The first is about the now-known history of the “aborigi-
nalization of non-western cultures” during the colonial era. The first is about
the characterization of non-western cultures as aboriginal and the conse-
quent degradation, devaluing. The first is about Orientalism (both white and
brown). It is about representing the Other as the “lacking/lagging other.”
The second is to “render the origin genealogical” (as in Michel Foucault)
or to “put under erasure the origin-al” (as in Jacques Derrida).3 The second—
designated as ab-originalization in this reflection—is to render the “western
originals” ab-original.
196 Chapter Thirteen

The third is about a possible post-Orientalist episteme. While the first was
about how knowledge of cultures was made and unmade, the third is about
what cultures of knowledge (as against the Orientalist knowledge of cultures)
can be produced. The third is about creating cultures of aboriginalization as
against an extant aboriginalization of cultures. The third is not just about
making micro-changes in western theories, keeping its architechtonics intact;
but about aboriginalizing its very archi-texture (see Dhar and Siddiqui, 2013).
Through a close reading of the long correspondence (1921–1933) between
Freud and Bose one could argue for a possible culture of the aboriginaliza-
tion of western knowledge systems put in place by Bose through conceptual
resources drawn from the Bhagvad Gita, the Puranas, and the Yoga Sutra; as
also through the invocation of a theory of mental life not circumscribed or
limited by what Foucault in History of Sexuality calls “The Repressive Hy-
pothesis” (see Dhar, 2017).
Was Bose-ian psychoanalysis, then, stemming from the realization that India
cannot perform conventions laid down according to Hebraic-Hellenic-Christian
stories? Is the parricide story the beginning of human history? Does not Freud
foreclose possibilities of looking at a different (rather than deviant) language
game by relegating matrilineal polytheisms and pagan polymorphisms to the
pre-history of humankind or by making Islam an “abbreviated repetition of the
Jewish religion” (see Spivak, 1994; also see Siddiqui and Davar’s chapter in
this volume)? This chapter therefore asks: what happens when psychoanalysis
and India come close? Does India become the analysand? Does India provide
to western psychoanalysis case material about the aboriginal world? Or can
India emerge as the analyst in this exchange? Can India give back to the west
interpretation about the west? What was the nature of aboriginal psychoanaly-
sis? Was it Indian psychology? In which sense was it Indian? Was it the Indian
logic of the psyche? Or was it the logic of the “Indian psyche”? In that sense,
this reflection problematizes the space that has now come to be known as “In-
dian Psychology”; all the more because India is not an undivided perspective; it
is a perspective that is deeply marked, or perhaps, scarred by relations of caste,
gender, and class as also experiences of aboriginality.

AT THE EDGE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

The urge and inspiration for this reflection flows from our (“our” includes
Ranjita Biswas, Asha Achuthan, and the author of this chapter) experiences
in and around science, experiences that have to it the history of the last 30
years. 1987 was when it began. Medicine was interesting. But I had no time
for it. First three years I was more interested in (left) theater—writing scripts,
 Genealogies of Aboriginalization 197

acting, directing plays; it was a kind of group work: working in groups, un-
der groups, as groups; forging contingent collectives around a script where
each acted, and acted out; much later I understood why it is important to
understand groups and not just individuals, as also why it is important to
understand groups psychoanalytically and not just politically, through the
works of Bion (see Experiences in Groups, 1961) and Guattari (see Trans-
versality 2015). The next three years I had joined radical left student politics;
our student organization, Medical College Democratic Students’ Association
(MCDSA) had terminated its affiliation to Maoist Communist Parties; it had
begun to call itself an independent student organization; I felt student orga-
nizations should not be part of or under Communist Parties; students formed
a heterogeneous mass and were not marked by only the class question. Once
again the attention was elsewhere. Medicine was now to be put to the ser-
vice of the “third world nation” if not exclusively to the working class or the
poor peasant. We were doctors sensitized to “human society, or socialized
humanity” (see Marx, 2016); the writing on the wall was, doctors have only
diagnosed, in various ways; the point, however, is to take treatment, cure,
relief, and healing to the malnourished and suffering masses. For two years in
a distant village in Murshidabad district we tried to take health to the villag-
ers. We tried to build a model of public health through people’s participation;
a model not sponsored by the state or by international funding agencies; a
model put in place by individuals who had come together (a kind of nascent
being-in-common [see Luc-Nancy, 1991]) to economically and intellectually
contribute to people’s health. We ran free clinics in working-class colonies
of jute factories along the river Ganges. We also read dialectical materialism
with working-class youth. However, free clinics were not enough. “The Con-
dition of the Working Class in Bengal” could be understood only through a
close reading of Marx (as also questions of sexual and cultural difference). It
could not be a question of setting up a human relation with the worker only.
It had to be a question of knowledge: one had to understand “work,” “working
class,” and the question of “class.”
On the one hand was a clinical experience tuned to public health concerns;
this experience took me later to community mental health and to some work
with Anjali and Iswar Sankalpa in Kolkatta and Banyan in Chennai; and has
now taken me to a deep doubt: How does one practice psychoanalysis in In-
dia, in adivasi contexts, in say the Kalahandi district of South Odisha? Does
psychoanalysis become critical developmental or transformative social praxis
by the time it reaches Kalahand? The MPhil program in Development Prac-
tice at AUD is an attempt to think psychoanalysis in Kalahandi-like contexts.
In that sense, Development Practice is psychoanalysis. It is psychoanalysis
is poor contexts. It is psychoanalysis amongst adivasi forms of life, forms of
198 Chapter Thirteen

life not attuned to the kind of psychological interiority and the confessional
attitude classical Freudian psychoanalysis requires or demands. It is psycho-
analysis of groups; it is informed and driven by the psychoanalytic work with
groups (a la Bion and Guattari). It is psychoanalysis with community and
not with individuals. It is perhaps, as Sudhir Kakar suggests, psychoanalysis
under a tree. Most people think Development Practice is only about develop-
ment. It is not. That word “development” sometimes serves as a distraction.
Development Practice is about a relationship between the MPhil student and
the community/group; a relationship that cannot be described as just transfer-
ential (which is dyadic); but is understood in terms of also transversality (a la
Guattari, which is within groups); a relationship that leads to both an arrival
at the truth of the community and transformation: both self and social. It is,
like psychoanalysis, an exercise where new knowledge is generated from and
through practice. Does Bion and Guattari’s work on groups become more
important than Freud’s case histories, in Kalahandi? Or do we need to rethink
the standard practice, idioms, language, ethos, and logic of psychoanalysis
when we work in India; all the more when we work in Kalahandi? Do we
need to arrive and create a new theory of mental life, or a new theory of the
psyche? Do we then need to move to how we do psychoanalysis from India,
rather than just doing (Freudian or post-Freudian) psychoanalysis in India?
Kakar had asked this question a little differently in Pondichery some years
back: how does one do psychoanalysis under a tree? Was he asserting in the
process the need to do psychoanalysis under a tree and not on a couch or in
what could be called a strict psychoanalytic setting, which is also and usually
an urban setting, which is also and usually a square and rectangular room
with four brick and mortar walls? It is important to remind ourselves in this
context what the shape of the rooms does to us (see Kakar’s paper in this vol-
ume for how the difference of the habitat of square/rectangular cottages and
round cottages has an effect on how we experience the world thereafter; it is,
as if, our being-in-a-square/round-world determines our being).
On the other, was critical-political experience tuned to Marx; and later
feminism and the postcolonial?
How to connect the two, if at all (this question of the connection between
the clinical marked by psychoanalysis and the political marked by sexual-
cultural difference haunts this reflection).
More particularly, this reflection flows from my discomfort with the work-
ings of medicine in general and psychiatry in particular. It takes off from
the question of the patient/client/survivor/user in the psychiatric clinic; what
the patient feels; what is her position in the clinic? Does she at all secure a
position for herself in the clinic? How does the institution of mental health
 Genealogies of Aboriginalization 199

treat her? How does the mental health professional treat her? How does the
professional relate to her? What are the relations between the professional
and the patient/client/survivor/user? How does one set up a relation with
someone who is purportedly “mad”/abnormal? Further, how do we do mental
health today? What are the new questions? Neurobiology is one new ques-
tion; community mental health is another; rights of the mentally dis-eased is
yet another. Are we beginning to see and sense our bodies differently? What
is it doing to our subjectivities? What is our consciousness of such emergent
conditions of corporeality? While in the world of the economic there are
corporate realities in their boom and their depressions/recessions, there are in
Other worlds, corpo-realities. How does one relate to these corpo-realities?
How does one relate to the contemporary? Does the past (the distant pre-
colonial past, and the not so distant, colonial past) offer us a few interesting
insights? Does the fashionable present (Lacan and the Lacanese) offer us
some other insights?
Further, where do we place mental health today? On the one end of the
spectrum we have neurobiology; on the other, we have socio-political pro-
cesses; both are in turn immersed in culture. While we would not like to col-
lapse the space of mental health or of the psyche into either the neurobiologi-
cal or the discursive—into either the materialist (which at times lapses into
mechanical materialism) or the culturalist (which at times becomes ruthlessly
constructivist), we would still like to ask what is it that is psychic and how
does one attend to the psychic in India, from India? For cure (we have in mind
the hegemony of the cure model, though medicine hardly cures!)? For heal-
ing? For care of the Other? For the arrival at (self) truth? Davar (2002: 20) is
right when she says that in epistemological, methodological, and ontological
terms, somatic experiences are different from psychic experiences.
This reflection is thus about the connection between clinical and critical
perspectives, between depth psychology and critical psychology, between
Freud and Foucault (see Butler, 1997). It is also about a theory of the outside.
Critical psychology relies on a notion of the outside. Can this be revisited,
in the context of two outsides: sexual difference, which has remained the
outside of Indian psychology and cultural difference, which has remained
the outside of critical psychology. Critical psychology, born out of the womb
of the west, is an internal critique of the west’s intimate principles. Critical
psychology, drawing upon a critical version of psychoanalysis and an equally
critical version of discourse analysis and setting to dialogue in the process the
dissenting children of the west, has tried to carve out a space for a re-formed
(not merely reformed) psychology in the west. What can India offer to this
field? India can offer “Savage Freud” Girindrasekhar Bose’s re-reading of
200 Chapter Thirteen

one of the resources of critical psychology: psychoanalysis. Will this add

value to the “critique” that critical psychology embodies? Perhaps; but we
will also have to demonstrate how and where it adds value. In this chapter, I
would like to suggest that the tradition of critical psychology in India cannot
just rely on a critique of psychiatry or mainstream psychology. It has to be,
simultaneously, a critique of Orientalism. Critical psychology in India is thus
premised on a dual critique. It is critique of both the hegemonic Occident and
the Occident’s hegemonic description of the Orient. It is critique of both the
West’s hegemonic principles and principles (emanating from either the West
or from the East) that hegemonize the East (see Dhar and Siddiqui, 2013).
Premised on such a dual critique, this reflection becomes a search for a “new
theory of mental life” and a new epistemo-ontology and an ethico-politics of
engaging with “madness” in historico-cultural context.

SEXUATION

This reflection engages with the question of sexual difference and cultural
difference within the space of psychoanalysis. This engagement with the two-
ness of sexual and cultural difference is indeed a task because phallocentrism
does skew the narrative of gendering; one needs to be appreciative of the text
of sexuation beyond a phallocentric cloud; just like one needs to be apprecia-
tive of culturing beyond a Eurocentric blur.
It asks: would the question of woman (as also of sexuation) remain central
in this rethinking of psychoanalysis? Why would woman figure as central?
While in psychiatry the pervert and the (masturbating) child has figured as the
trope around which psychiatry was organized, in psychoanalysis it was perhaps
woman (and the hysteric). Is the woman-question also built into the crisis of
Indian modernity; the woman, the machine, the ethnic Other, nature as Other,
are all edges of this reconstitution/reconfiguration (of Otherness in modernity)
within which we are still moving and trying to find our way. It is not as if
woman is alone; one is not over-emphasizing sexual difference to the detriment
of other differences, especially caste in the Indian context. But in any case, the
centrality of the feminine Other and the organization of our entire modern way
of thinking around the feminine Other is not altogether negligible.
Taking off from my own experiences as a medical doctor and from my
unease with(in) the psychiatry clinic, this reflection turns instead to an “ab-
original” form of psychoanalysis—a psychoanalysis marked also by a postco-
lonial feminist mindset. To think a postcolonial feminist form of psychoanal-
ysis as also a psychoanalytic form of postcolonial feminism this reflection
looks at three figures who are all at the edge of psychoanalysis: Bose. Lacan,
 Genealogies of Aboriginalization 201

Irigaray. This reflection builds on a turn first to western psychoanalysis (i.e.,

the works of Freud and Lacan) and then to native psychoanalysis (i.e., the
works of Girindrasekhar Bose); a turn, marked albeit by questions of sexual
difference (i.e., the works of French feminists).
Lacan takes us to the “incommensurate two of sexual difference.” This
understanding of the incommensurate two of sexual difference is important
for both psychoanalysis and feminism. Both psychoanalysis and feminism
have in their own ways inaugurated the question of sexual difference; both
have tried to think the incommensurate two of sexual difference; both in their
own ways have tried to think “woman”; both have tried to think through
unreason and affect; both in their own ways have tried to set up a dialogue
with unreason and affect. Yet there is a fundamental difference between the
ways psychoanalysis approaches the question of “unreason-affect-sexual
difference-woman” and feminism approaches the question of “woman-sexual
difference-affect-unreason.” While both could possibly think of crucial con-
vergences over the question of unreason, affect, and sexual difference, both
for their respective perspectives-standpoints produce radically different ren-
ditions of the question of woman. Respective renditions of woman produce
a fundamental torsion in their relationship; the relationship remains forever
skewed. A possible relationship could be forged through a more commen-
surate rendition of the question of woman, a rendition that could possibly
make possible a feminist (form of) psychoanalysis as also a psychoanalytic
(form of) feminism. To think, to arrive at a more commensurate rendition of
woman, we first have to move through a number of moments in the concep-
tual history of psychoanalysis—moments that mark a rupture, a discontinuity
with the existing paradigm. Our voyage through uncertain seas passes first
through the notion of sexuation; through the invocation of the question of
sexuation, through a moving away, through a turning away of psychoanalysis
from the logic of the One, and an arrival, albeit tentative, at a logic of the
two, at the incommensurate two of sexual difference. From One, from the
possible absence of a relationship, from the absence of a possible relation-
ship to two – to an impossible “relationship between “them-two” (la relation
d’eux) . . . them-two sexes” (Lacan 1998: 6). In its strange flirtations with
the two psychoanalysis comes face to face with man-woman and masculine-
feminine; in its strange flirtations with man-masculine and woman-feminine
psychoanalysis comes face to face with the phallic jouissance and the Other
jouissance. Irigaray however remains critical of the Freudian-Lacanian en-
gagement. Irigaray returns once again to the question of sexual difference
(1985a, 1985b) within Western Philosophy, or for that matter, to the question
of woman within Freud’s return to unreason as also Freud’s inauguration of
the question of sexual difference (see Dhar, 2009).
202 Chapter Thirteen

CULTURES OF AB-ORIGINALIZATION

Jean and John Comaroff (2012) has argued that “Western enlightenment
thought has, from the first, posited itself as the wellspring of universal
learning” as also of science and philosophy. It has, in turn, “regarded the
non-West—variously known as the Ancient World, the Orient, the Primi-
tive World, the Third World, the Underdeveloped World, the Developing
World, and now the Global South—primarily as a place of parochial wisdom,
of antiquarian traditions, of exotic ways and means.” It has also regarded
the non-West as largely a repository of “unprocessed data.” The non-West
was as if offering unprocessed data to Western thories or to theories from
the West, including psychoanalytic/Freudian theories. The non-West is
thus “treated less as sources of refined knowledge than as reservoirs of raw
fact: of the minutiae from which Euromodernity might fashion its testable
theories and transcendent truths”; which would then get transported to the
non-West (through colonialism) as Universals. Freud wanted to capitalize on
non-Western patient/analysand data or case/raw material Bose was offering
by “ostensibly adding value and refinement to them” (“this continues to be
the case,” even today!). It looked like Bose was to offer an archive of Indian
experiences to Freud and Freud would in turn analyze, and generate theories
out of the data. Bose was however not offering Freud Indian case material.
He was offering Freud “a new theory of mental life.” Bose was thus invert-
ing the Order of Things. It was as if the so-called Global South or India was
offering “privileged insight” or “refined knowledge” into the workings of the
psyche—Western and non-Western.
This section of the chapter is premised on the layered life-history4 of
the first “savage” psychoanalyst, Girindrasekhar Bose, who also practiced
psychiatry in a mental hospital, taught psychology and psychoanalysis in
the University, and wrote (psychoanalytically singed) commentaries on
the Bhagvad Gita (1931), the Yoga Sutras (1966), the Puranas (1934), and
proposed in lieu of Freudian psychoanalysis, A New Theory of Mental Life.5
This section of the chapter however remains menaced by a somewhat pri-
mal doubt, doubt marked by the question: is the history of psychoanalysis
in India indeed the history of psychoanalysis? Is it psychoanalysis turned
upside down? Or is it the Other side of psychoanalysis? Is it the history of a
new theory of mental life and of sexuation, different from the one offered by
Freudian psychoanalysis? It is possible that taking off from an extant logic
of the Indian psyche (exemplified by epic manuscripts like the Mahabharata
as against Greek Tragedy6) it offers to the west the Indian logic of the psyche
(and not just the logic of the Indian psyche). We are thus left with two pos-
sibilities. It is possible that Bose was re-conceptualizing the given contours
 Genealogies of Aboriginalization 203

of (western) psychoanalysis and of sexuation in the Indian context. In the

process, he was giving birth to an ab-Original form of psychoanalysis, a form
different from the western Original. It is also possible that Bose was giving
birth to an aboriginal form of psychology, where aboriginal psychology was
not about an isolated insight or data but about questioning the basic paradigm,
architectonics, and culture of western psychology; this could possibly grant
alternative/aboriginal psychologies the right to integrate within what they see
as the best of modern psychology and to reject the bad; and inaugurate in the
process a new theory of mental life and of sexuation marked, in this case,
by the interminable see-saw of the eroticized double wish (Bose 1948, p.
108–205; 1949, p. 54–75; 1951, p. 203–214; 1952a, p.1–11; 1952b, p. 53–69;
1952c, p. 191–200).
Let us examine both possibilities. One would be to read Bose from the
perspective of Freud; that would be akin to (Freudian) Psychoanalysis in
Indian Terroir. The other would be to read Freud from the perspective of
Bose; and that would be akin to Psychoanalysis from Indian Terroir; which in
other words, is psychoanalysis from Bose’s vantage point; where Bose is not
a savage version of Freud; there are two psychoanalytic thinkers: Bose and
Freud, standing face to face in their exchange of letters and their respective
understandings of the psyche.
This is, of course, not to clinch the exchange between Bose and Freud in
favor of the one or the other; this is not to declare a winner, but to see what
possibilities emerge out of the table-turning. One would be to see Bose’s
psycho-logic as a version of (western) psychoanalysis; one then uses Freud-
ian psychoanalysis as the paradigm or at least, benchmark, for understanding
Bose’s psycho-logic. Here one wishes to see whether Bose was concurring
with the principles of Freudian psychoanalysis. Or whether in his engage-
ment—in his immersion/submersion in psychoanalysis—he was moving far
from being psychoanalytic in his psycho-logic. He was in the process inau-
gurating a different psychoanalysis—an ab-Original psychoanalysis. Was
then Bose a savage Freud, or a savage Klein, or a savage Lacan or at best/
worst a savage Jung? Or was he in the process inaugurating an altogether dif-
ferent or a radically different psycho-logic—different from psychoanalysis,
so different that his version is not a version of psychoanalysis; his version is
not a version at all; it is original; it is aboriginal. In the process, he was giv-
ing back Freud another psycho-logic—or an Other psycho-logic (which was
also not merely about the psycho-logic of the cultural or colonial Other)—a
psycho-logic that could be the ground for rethinking mental health (and such
rethinking is the inspiration and mandate of this reflection) not just in India
but even in the West. Bose’s psycho-logic is then not a displaced Oriental/In-
dian version of the western Universal. It is not what could then be represented
204 Chapter Thirteen

as an Indian version of the Universal—or an Indian version of the Western

Modern—it is not what our modernity was all about. We were actually giv-
ing back to the west an aboriginal insight—an insight that would need to be
adopted by the West as well; and this insight was not about who we were;
it was not just about the Indian psyche; it was not about the possibility that
Indian males don’t have the castration complex; it was about questioning
the very deployment of the castration complex as a constitutive node/anchor
of psychic life. It was not about saying that we are or were different. It was
to build on this difference and give to the west and to ourselves a different
psychology. It was psychoanalysis from India. Not just in India; and not just
about or on India(s).
It was about asking: what kind of a psychoanalysis is born from a psycho-
logical culture not determined/dominated, by what Thomas Laqueur calls the
“two-sex model” (1990), where men and women are not seen as the opposite
sex, but as a dynamic appositeness—an unconscious “see-saw” between
gender(ed) identifications? Kakar develops this line of thought through
Boss’s case histories—

reading early Indian case histories, one is struck by the fluidity of the patients’
cross-sexual and generational identifications. In the Indian patient, the fantasy
of taking on the sexual attributes of both the parents seems to have a relatively
easier access to awareness. Bose . . . tells us of a middle-aged lawyer who ‘took
up an active male sexual role treating both of them as females in his unconscious
and sometimes a female attitude, especially towards the father, craving for a
child from him. In the male role sometimes he identified himself with his father,
and felt a sexual craving for the mother, on the other occasions his unconscious
mind built up a composite of both parents towards which male sexual needs
were directed; it is in this attitude that he made his father give birth to a child
like a woman in his dream . . . Another young Bengali, whenever he thought of
a particular man, felt with a hallucinatory intensity that his penis and testes van-
ished altogether and were replaced by female genitalia. While defecating he felt
he heard the peremptory voice of his guru asking, “Have you given me a child
yet?” In many of his dreams, he was a man whereas his father and brothers had
become women. During intercourse with his wife he tied a handkerchief over
his eyes as it gave him the feeling of being a veiled bride while he fantasized
his own penis as that of his father and his wife’s vagina as that of his mother
(Kakar 2007, 111).

The reflection thus argues for a pentagonal critique. It argues for the need
to begin with a critique of science—psychiatry and behavioral or quantitative
psychology. What however is a critique of science? Critique of scientism?
Critique of objectivity? Critique of instrumental rationality? Or critique of
the hidden metaphysics or the hidden theology in modern science? Critique
of science—either for its avowed anti-metaphysics or its hidden metaphysics
 Genealogies of Aboriginalization 205

– made us arrive at psychoanalysis. But arrival at psychoanalysis meant both

a turn to metaphysics and a critique of metaphysics/theology. Both critiques
of science and psychoanalysis meant in turn a critique of Christianization.
Critique of colonization or maybe, a more ambitious decolonization, meant
a critique of Christianization, Theology, Metaphysics, and Science. While
feminism of the post-metaphysical kind and feminist critiques of science do
create conditions for decolonization, while deconstruction does create condi-
tions for a critique of onto-theology and metaphysics, Bose’s work remains
a good example of and window to critiques of Christianization and a more
thorough-going decolonization. One perhaps needs to work at the cusp of
“ab-Originalization” (for example, deconstructive feminism or psychoana-
lytic feminism [Mitchell, 2000]) and aboriginalization (for example, Bose’s
“New Theory of Mental Life” [1948]).

FROM/IN

Psychoanalysis in India is premised on the idea of an implant. Why implant?

It is, as if, a plant—called psychoanalysis—was born in western Europe from
Judaic-Christian-Hellenic terroir. Later the plant was implanted in Indian ter-
roir. The plant took a certain form as it grew in Indian terroir.
Psychoanalysis from India is premised on the idea of multiple plants, or
an originary multiplicity. It is somewhat like psychoanalysis from Germany,
from Britain, from India, from Japan; each a different plant; growing in a
different terroir; having a different terroir-plant relation. Kakar’s work, ac-
cording to my understanding, has tried to discover-invent a psychoanalytic
form from India delving deep into the inner world of the Indian child and of
Indians and the graph/archaeology of eros-thanatos in India.

NOTES

1. While Lacan speaks of a logic of asymmetry, Irigaray speaks of a logic of dif-

ference, thus inaugurating the two of sexual difference (“this sex which is not one”)
in psychoanalysis in particular, and philosophy in general.
2. I owe the idea of “cultural crucible” to the psychoanalysis group in the School
of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi, and especially to my colleagues
Ashok Nagpal and Honey Oberoi. How do we understand cultural crucible? How is
culture a crucible? Is it one? Is it a “container”? Container of what: psychoanalysis?
Is it containing it, keeping it contained? What is it made of? Resilient stuff that can
withstand high temperatures/adversities? What is its use, ancient and modern? Cru-
cibles historically were usually made from clay. They however can be made from
206 Chapter Thirteen

any material that withstands temperatures high enough to melt or otherwise alter its
contents. Is the crucible then a form-altering apparatus? Or can the contents corrode,
reform, deform, and alter the crucible itself?
3. Deconstruction is the ground or pre-text on which aboriginalization as an ob-
stinate impulse works; in that sense, deconstruction is for aboriginalization the neces-
sary foreplay that renders vulnerable the structure of the text or the text of structure.
Thereafter aboriginalization sets up a particular relation with the Original text (here
psychoanalysis). It is however not to look into the origin of psychoanalysis; it is not
to see whether it originates from one of the two western approaches to the self: (i)
the Greek pagan marked by the “know thyself”—“care of the self ” continuum or (ii)
the Roman Christian marked by the flesh-sin-guilt-confession continuum. I however
take psychoanalysis as a determinant original to our colonial modernity. We want to
see what our relation with this original was. Was it aboriginalization? However, how
does aboriginalization qua cultural critique work? Does it work through the marking
of (cultural) difference?
4. When graduate training in psychology was introduced at the University of
Calcutta, Girindrasekhar Bose, already a medical professional, obtained a Master’s
degree in psychology (1917). He was awarded the first doctorate in psychology at an
Indian university in 1921. His dissertation was titled “The Concept of Repression.”
5. See Bose (1921; 1931; 1948; 1949; 1951; 1952a; 1952b; 1952c; 1966; 1980;
1999; 2001).
6. When one takes Oedipus Rex as the “text of the psychic” one ends up with a
narrative of “acts committed in the context of non-knowledge/ignorance” (Oedipus
did not know who his parents were), remorse/guilt at what one has done, self-chas-
tisement or sacrifice to atone for one’s deeds (Oedipus blinds himself). This guilt-
ridden traumata sets off the “psychic teleology.” Freud tries to make a case for such
a psychic teleology in Moses and Monotheism. However, if one takes the Bhagvad
Gita as the text of the psychic, as Bose does, one gets a different psychic teleology, a
teleology sparked off by an affront to a menstruating woman in the blind king’s court
of justice now being avenged by the collective of husbands she has; however there is
a deferral; one of the five husbands is haunted by a near-primal doubt that could be
so characteristic of the conception of dharma (what should I do?) and why not the
human (who am I?) as well; the doubt is premised on the question: can I kill? Not or-
dinary killing. Can I kill my relatives, my brothers, my teacher, my grandfather even
if I am here to avenge the trauma inflicted on “my” woman? The answer was “yes,
you have to” to forestall further harm and auxiliary destruction by a group of maraud-
ing men. While the premise is guilt (what have I done? The “should” and “should
not” being known beforehand) in the Oedipal narrative, the premise is dharma (what
should I do? Should I kill? The should and should not needs reflection) in the nar-
rative of the Bhagvad Gita; even the call of dharma (the a-dharma woman has been
subjected to) requires further reflections on dharma (avenge an originary a-dharma
over woman); it is, as if, dharma sparking off further reflections on dharma. While in
the Oedipal narrative the psychic teleology is sparked off by guilt a posteriori (guilt
after the event), in the Bhagvad Gita the psychic teleology is sparked off by reflection
on self and dharma a priori. The choice is thus not between Oedipus (a la Freud) and
 Genealogies of Aboriginalization 207

anti-Oedipus (a la Deleuze-Foucault). The task is to look for perhaps non-Oedipal

psychic economies (a la Bose). Does this then offer interesting insights for another or
even a new theory of mental life; a theory relevant to both east and the west?

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 Index

Page references for figures are italicized

abjection, 86 Bhagvad Gita, 196, 202, 206–7n6

aboriginalization, 195, 196, 205, 206n3 bhava, 147–48, 152, 153
adab, 107 bhaya, 147; spirituality, 33, 87, 89, 95,
Adbhut Ramayana, 78n3 146, 153, 161, 212
adivasi, 26, 197–98 borderline states, 37, 38, 39, 40
affects, 48, 49, 53, 122, 167, 169 breakdown, 44, 45, 48, 49, 109, 122
aggressor, 122 Buddhist, 30–31, 35n10, 147, 153, 156,
Allah, 107, 108, 131 160, 167
alpha function, 86, 160
ambivalence, 194, 195; erotic mother, Capabilities approach, 136; reverie, 14
13–14 cathartic, 121
anthropology, 125, 126–27, 132 Chandi Patha, 97
anti-Oedipus, 206–7n6 Christianity, 30, 154
anxiety: acute, 50; madness, 52; Christianization, 205
separation, 124, 147; thanatos, 146; communal violence, 108, 110, 112,127,
understanding of, 122; unthinkable, 130, 133, 134
39 confession, 8, 206n3
Aradhis, 20, 23, 26, 28–29, 32, 34 consciousness: distinction between, 148;
ascetic, 30, 32 introspective, 156; narcissistic states
askesis, 29–34, 35n10 of, 13; planes of, 145; post-colonial,
asuras, 97 25
atripta, 96 critical psychology, 199, 200
attachment, 123, 124, 136, 153 cultural crucible, 194,
cultural difference, 166, 167, 173,
Balaji, 89–99 197–200
bhagat, 26, 93, 94, 95, 99, 101n12 cultural illusions, 181

209
210 Index

cultural narratives, 4, 13, 14 fantasy, 5–8, 12, 38, 40, 41, 42, 51, 57,
cultural unconscious, 18, 3, 4, 58, 165, 64, 74, 75, 79n17, 111, 122, 171,
167–76 183, 204
culture: of aboriginlization, 202; feminism, 73, 194, 195, 198, 200, 201,
disputations over, 135; facilitated by, 205
87; folk, 52; imaginations of, 184; fillicide, 5, 7
Indian, 7, 161, 170, 184; narratives, forgotten mother, 13
13; religion, 20; role of, 166; Freudian psychoanalysis, 30, 156, 194,
split aspect of, 53; syncretic, 103; 195, 198, 202, 203
unconscious posits that, 181 functionings, 136
Culture-Bound Syndromes, 25
Ganesha, 5–7, 14
deconstruction, 205 genealogies, 193–95
defenses, 122, 125 genotype, 181
demons, 25, 28, 97 gnothi sauton, 29, 30
desexualization, 124 guilt, 42, 52,71, 91, 129, 135, 137, 169,
Devi-possession, 20, 28, 32 206n3, 206–7n6
dharma, 161, 206–7n6 Guru, 24, 26, 27, 88, 152, 154, 155,
disability, 121, 135, 137, 212 167, 168, 190, 204
dissociative states, 122 Guru-Aai, 22, 26–27
dividual, 169 guru-chela relationship, 147, 155–56
doctor-patient, 167 gurukulas, 152
domesticated, 60, 63
double-wish, 195 hallucinatory, 98, 99, 204
dreaming, 45, 92, 94, 99, 148, 173, 184 Hanuman, 93–96, 99, 100n10, 101n14
dreams: Hanuman Chalisa, 94–96
fantasies, 14; origin, 183; series of, 91; harmony sensing matrix, 160
sleep, 145; whispers from many, healing, 20, 25, 28, 80n19, 92–95, 122,
63 125, 148, 197, 199, 212
drive, 49, 90, 91, 122, 124, 148, 193 hijra, 24
Durga Saptashati, 95–97 hilflosigkeit, 123
duta, 93, 95, 100, 101n13 Historical Other, 108–10, 112–13
hypnotic, 121
ego-alien, 86 hypnotic states, 147
emotional poverty, 173 hysteria, 24
empathy, 80n19, 95, 136, 146, 153, 161
empiricism, 122 idealization, 6, 41, 52, 77, 104, 107,
enculturation, 172 108, 111, 112
Epimelesthai sautou, 29 identification, 5, 7, 52, 68, 75, 76, 86,
eros, 10, 12, 93, 175, 194 93
erotic renunciation, 6 implantation, viii
Eurocentric, 200 Indian mythology, 3, 52, 155
Indian psyche, 67, 69, 78, 85, 196, 202,
faith, 19, 20, 25, 28, 88, 92, 93, 96, 107, 204
145 Indian psychology, 196
 Index 211

Indian traditions, 147 Oedipus Point, 195; of transference

Indian unconscious, 7, 13 love, 172, 192
infant observation, 37, 38, 46, 47, 50, omnipotence, 7, 42, 63, 86, 90
instincts, 39, 65, 74, 75, 76, 122, 123, omnipotent mother, 6
154 optical illusion, 180, 182, 185
in-thrall, 6, 11, 13 Orientalism, 195, 200
irrelevant mother, 5 otherness, 124, 200

Jogati, 21, 24, 35n4 paranoia, 86, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111
jouissance, 148, 193, 201 paranoid, 41, 65, 105, 107
parricide, 196
kafir, 107 Partition, 103–4, 107–8, 110, 112, 131
Kali, 90, 91, 95 Parvathi, 5–7
Kansa, 55, 58, 62–63 patriarchal, 27, 61, 62, 68
karma, 32, 147, 161 personal narrative, 4
Krishna, 55, 56, 57–63, 153, 154 personalities, 103
personhood, 3, 4, 6
loss, 4, 12, 13, 24, 40, 42, 50 perversion, 45
peshi, 91, 96, 100n9
manic, 5, 75, 128 phallocentrism, 200
maternal enthrallment, 5–7 phallus, 194, 195
maternal subjectivity, 7 phantasy, 88, 111
maternal tableau, 10,11 pleasure principle, 74, 160, 193, 194
matricide, 58–60, 62–63 polis, 3, 4, 6–7, 14
meditation, 147, 148, 155, 156, 160, possession, 20–29, 31–33, 75, 85, 89,
memory, 48, 49, 70, 86, 90, 103, 121, 90, 92, 96, 97, 99, 110, 137, 195
122 prakriti, 149
metabolization, 121 prana, 149, 154, 161
metaphysics, 204–5 primitive, 4, 45, 47, 59, 60, 62, 71, 88,
misogyny, 62, 65 100, 110, 162, 202
modernity, 71, 170, 175, 189, 200, 204 projection, 25, 46, 50, 58–60, 110, 112,
mourning, 5, 13, 14, 77, 122 147
Muller-Lyer Illusion, 175, 182, 191 psychic see-saw, 195
myth, 3–8, 14, 30, 55, 57–61, 63, 67, 69 psychic work , 87, 88, 96, 99
psychoanalytic feminism, 205
Nachtraglichkeit, 121, 182 psychoanalytic psychotherapy, 3, 104,
narcissism, 9, 11, 13, 70, 73, 74, 76, 105 157, 166, 170
narrativization, 121 psychosis, 104 108, 113
negative thoughts, 104–6 psychosomatic, 45, 53
neurobiology, 180, 181–82, 185, 199 psychotic, 37–41, 48, 51, 92, 104
neurosis, 25, 123, 124, 153 purusha, 149
Putana, 55, 56, 57–59, 62, 63
object-relationship, 75, 98, 124
obsessive, 12, 104–5 Rama, 68–69, 93, 156
oedipal rivalry, 9, 10 Ramzaan, 107
212 Index

rasa, 147, 152 terroir, 145, 146, 165, 166, 179, 203
Relational Deprivation, 129 thanatos, 146, 154, 205; Moebius strip,
repetition, 48, 49, 57, 76, 122, 124, 193, 175; Oceanic feeling, 189; Odyssey,
196 183
repression, 58–60, 122, 123, 125, 159 theology, 204, 205
return to Freud, 194 transitional space, 49
reverie, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 146, 160, trauma: associated feeling of, 43;
180 beneficial effects of, 26; child, 126,
riot, 110, 119, 120, 121, 126–34, 37 135; narrativisation of, 121; pain
and, 103; riots, 129; still born sense
samadhi, 89, 161 of, 96
Samkat, 87, 89–91, 93–96, 99, 100n3
Sardarni, 90, 91, 100n7 uncanny, 41, 61, 72, 180
savashana, 27 Unheimlichkeit, 180
schizophrenic, 42 unreason, 201
separation, 28, 39, 40, 44, 50, 70, 86, Upanishads, 152
88, 124, 128
separation individuation, 6 violence: collective, 134; communal,
sexual ambivalence, 194 108, 130; of emotion, 60; escalated
sexual difference,194, 195, 199–201 into, 120; of male child, 133;
sexuation, 193–95, 200, 203 sexuality, 104, 111; social, 127;
Shiva, 5, 7, 55, 62, 63 testimony of, 123
shok, 147 visionary experience, 31
Sita ideal, 67–69, 73, 76 void, 77, 86, 88, 154
Skanda, 6
social vulnerabilities, 135 Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich
spirit, 28, 29, 32, 33 and Democratic (WEIRD), 165, 179,
spiritual, 26, 28, 32, 75, 145, 146, 156, 183
212 wish: analyst’s, 174; childlike, 6;
spirituality, 33, 146, 153, 161, 212 double, 203; embrace her death,
splitting, 57, 59, 60, 62, 87, 97, 110 69; to expunge, 72; puts it as, 42;
Stoicism, 30 samkat’s, 93; stab at the, 8
Subaltern Askesis, 31–34 women’s subjectivity, 4
worlding, 180, 182–83, 185
tameez, 107
Tantra, 149, 155 Yoga, 145–61
tehzeeb, 107 Yoga Sutra, 196, 202
 About the Editors

Anup Dhar (PhD in Philosophy) is professor, School of Human Studies, and

director, Centre for Development Practice, at Ambedkar University, Delhi,
India. His co-authored books include Dislocation and Resettlement in De-
velopment: From Third World to World of the Third (2009), and The Indian
Economy in Transition: Globalization, Capitalism and Development (2015).
His co-edited books include Breaking the Silo: Integrated Science Educa-
tion in India (2017), and Clinic, Culture, Critique: Psychoanalysis and the
Beyond (forthcoming: 2018).

Anurag Mishra is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytical psychotherapist

heading the Psychoanalytical Unit of the Department of Mental Health and
Behavioral Sciences at Fortis Healthcare (India), Adjunct Faculty at the
School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University–Delhi, and Visiting Faculty
at Institute of Psychotherapy, Antarnad–Ahmedabad. He is the founder of
Psychoanalysis India and Livonics Infotech, a psychobionics start-up. He has
been the founder and organizer of the Annual International Psychoanalytical
Conferences in Delhi.

Manasi Kumar is a senior lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry, Uni-

versity of Nairobi, Kenya and holds a dual appointment as a research fellow
at University College London, UK and University of Cape Town, SA. She
works on issues around psychological ramifications of poverty, trauma, and
social adversities in different geopolitical “terroirs,” and the seamless inter-
rogation of the cultural and clinical in the Indian terrain provokes her work.
This interrogation has paved way for more critical as well as implementation
driven systems thinking in her mental health work. She holds a PhD in psy-
chology from University of London.
213
 About the Contributors

Amrita Narayanan is a psychologist in private practice in Goa, India. Am-

rita earned her doctorate in psychology at the Pacific-Stanford University
Psy.D. consortium in 2007. She completed her pre-doctoral training at the
National Center for Asian-American Psychology, a psychoanalytic internship
site in San Francisco, California, and her post-doctoral training and license
hours at the California State Mental Hospital in Napa Valley. Amrita moved
back to India in 2010 and has had a private practice since then. Outside of
her private practice she has provided psychotherapy services at the Indian
Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, and taught at the Antarnad Founda-
tion, Ahmedabad. She has written and published essays in peer-reviewed
journals such as Psychodynamic Practice and Psychoanalytic Review and in
magazines such as India Today.

Sabah Siddiqui is currently completing her PhD at the University of Man-

chester on Faith Healing practices in India that situate the subject between
discourses of Science, Religion, and the State. She has received training
in cultural studies and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She has worked on
research projects connected to gendered violence as well as the philosophy
of science and higher education. Her book Religion and Psychoanalysis in
India: Critical Clinical Practice was published in April 2016 (Routledge,
London).

Bhargavi Davar works as a “human rights activist” and a “survivor” in the

mental health sector, due to her childhood experiences of trauma which car-
ried forward intensely, and well into adult years. She started Bapu Trust in
1999, to place her experiences within social services, informed by research
and advocacy. Bhargavi finished her Ph.D. in philosophy and psychology,
215
216 About the Contributors

from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai; and also post-doctoral

studies at the University of Hyderabad. Her orientation has been in existen-
tial, person-centered practice. She has published in areas linking gender, cul-
ture, disability, human rights, and mental health. Her books include, Psycho-
analysis as a human science: Beyond Foundationalism (with PR Bhat, Sage,
1995); Mental Health of Indian Women (Sage, 1999); Gender and mental
health (Sage, 2001); and more recently, Gendering mental health: Knowl-
edges, identities, institutions (OUP, 2015). Having always been interested in
the connection between madness, creativity, and spirituality, and following
intense engagement in the field with spiritual places of healing, she trained
as an Arts-Based Therapist, and started supporting the use of ABT in Bapu
Trust Services from 2006.

Urvashi Agarwal is a trained psychoanalytic psychotherapist from Ambed-

kar University Delhi. Together with her four friends, she has set up a clinic in
New Delhi where they offer psychotherapy services to individuals, couples,
adolescents, and children. Her practice includes work with borderline and
psychotic states and she has been interested in understanding the “negative”
as a way to understand clinical states where self-destruction becomes the
predominant way of relating and living, where losses are unrecognizable, and
particularly the psycho-somatic state. Of special interest to her is exploring
the mother-daughter relationship in India and maternal depression, engaging
with the woman in the mother and what happens to a woman’s identity when
all that she can be is a mother.

Nilofer Kaul, Ph.D., is a Delhi-based training analyst. She is also an associ-

ate professor of English at Hansraj College in Delhi University. Her doctor-
ate was on “Masks and Mirrors: Configurations of Narcissism in Women’s
Short Stories” (2012). She has since then written on bisexuality (presented
at Istanbul 2013), child sexuality “Afterwords” in Dark Room (ed. Pankaj
Butalia), on “Three degrees of Separation” (at the Second International Psy-
choanalytic Conference in Fortis, Delhi),” on homosexuality (“Morphology
of the Closet” in the Psychoanalytic Review 2015, ed. Salman Akhtar), and
on “The Rehearsed Language of Psychonanalysis” (a paper presented at the
International Conference in Mumbai 2016), and has written “On Stranger-
ness” (forthcoming in Div/Review. She is also a part of a supervision group
of the Delhi Chapter of psychoanalysis.

Shifa Haq, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at School of Human Studies,

Ambedkar University Delhi. She is also associated with Centre of Psycho-
therapy and Clinical Research, Ambedkar University Delhi. Trained as a
 About the Contributors 217

psychoanalytic psychotherapist, she is interested in studying mourning, social

suffering, and psychoanalysis. Her doctoral research is a study on mourning
in the lives of survivors of the “missing” persons in Kashmir. She practices in
Ehsaas, a low-fee clinic, housed in Ambedkar University Delhi.

Shalini Masih was trained in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy from Centre

for Psychoanalytic Studies, Delhi, and at present she is Convenor and Psy-
choanalytic Psychotherapist at Ehsaas Psychotherapy and Counseling Clinic,
Centre of Psychotherapy and Clinical Research, Ambedkar University Delhi.
She has been working in the field of counseling and psychotherapy for ap-
proximately a decade and has experience working psychoanalytically with
traumatized children, adolescents, and with borderline and psychotic young
adults. She is also involved in supervision of Psychoanalytic Psychothera-
pists training in MPhil Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy program of School of
Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi. Her doctoral thesis was a Psy-
choanalytic Study on Beauty in Ugliness in Spirit Possession and Exorcism.
She has a particular interest in states that do not render themselves easily to
representability, body in psychoanalysis, cultural processes, and the kind of
psychoanalysis feasible to a given cultural soil. She is also a member of Divi-
sion of Psychoanalysis (Division 39).

Zehra Mehdi is a graduate student at the Department of Religion at Colum-

bia University pursuing her doctoral research on religious-political violence
in India and the question of Muslim Identity in relation to Unconscious. She
was named the Dean's Scholar for the academic year 2016–2017. She has an
M.Phil in Psychotherapy and Clinical Thinking from Ambedkar University,
Delhi, and has worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist since 2010. She
has written on the trans-generational trauma of Partition, religious and politi-
cal identity within the clinic, psychotherapy as a means for social justice as
well as on cultural reading of India cinema around themes of stammering,
memory as history, political violence, and popular representations. In her pa-
pers as well as her clinical work her impetus remains to explore the relation-
ship between psyche and religion in its political and social constructions. She
has published papers in Karanc and Palgrave McMillian and has forthcoming
essays in Routledge and Harvard University Press.

Atreyee Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the

University of Copenhagen. She is a political anthropologist of urban South
Asia. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of
Oriental and African Studies (2003), University of London. Between 2004–
2015, she held academic positions at the University of Sussex and the Uni-
218 About the Contributors

versity of Manchester. Her research and publications trajectory focuses on

militant political movements in the city that create micro-cultures of violence
in confined urban spaces. She has carried out multidisciplinary projects on
right-wing activism, communal conflict, resistance and guerrilla movements
(Mumbai, Hyderabad, Calcutta, and Dharamsala), and explored the impact of
these movements on slums, refugee colonies, and prisons. She is author of
Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (2007) and
co-editor (with Dr David Pratten) of Global Vigilantes: New Perspectives on
Justice and Violence (2008).

Ajeet N. Mathur (Ph.D., IISc. Bangalore) is a Professor at IIM Ahmedabad,

Affiliate Life Member of the Indian Psycho-analytic Society, “Yoga Shik-
shak” of the Bihar School of Yoga, and member of the International Society
for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations.. He was elected to the Fel-
lowship of Sumedhas Academy of Human Context, is a Founding Member
of Harmoninen Laulu Yhdistys Ry, (Harmonic Music Foundation) and an
Invitee to the Finnish Chapter of the Club of Rome. His publications include
27 books and over 150 papers in scientific journals and anthologies. He is the
recipient of the Prestige Award as “Professor of the Year 2014.” He has held
visiting academic appointments at K.U. Leuven, Belgium, Cornell Univer-
sity, University of California at Berkeley, University of Bielefeld, Germany,
Helsinki School of Economics, Aalto University, Turku School of Econom-
ics, Royal University of Bhutan, and Fresenius University, Cologne. He has
been a Fulbright Scholar and a Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Scholar. He has been
a member of the Board of Directors with Corporates in India and Europe and
is consulted by businesses, governments, international organizations, and
the policy research community. He served a term as the Director and CEO,
Institute of Applied Manpower Research with the rank of Secretary to the
Government of India. He is Chairperson, Centre for Gender Equity, Diversity
and Inclusivity, IIM Ahmedabad. He has directed IIM Ahmedabad’s Group
Relations Conferences since 2009.

Sudhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst, novelist, and a scholar in the fields of

cultural psychology and the psychology of religion. He has been Lecturer at
Harvard University, Senior Fellow at the Center for Study of World Religions
at Harvard (2001–02), and Visiting Professor at the universities of Chicago,
(1989–92), McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, and Vienna.
Kakar has been a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton,
Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, and the Centre for Advanced Study of Humani-
ties, Cologne. His many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia
University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American
 About the Contributors 219

Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Resi-

dency, McArthur Research Fellowship, and the Order of Merit of the Federal
Republic of Germany. He is also on the board of Freud Archives, Library of
Congress, Washington.
Kakar is the author of eighteen books of non-fiction and five of fiction. His
latest books are Young Tagore: The Makings of a Genius (Penguin-Viking,
2013), and the novel The Devil Take Love (2015). His books have been trans-
lated into twenty-two languages around the world.

Alfred Margulies, M.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst, The Boston

Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry,
Harvard Medical School, at The Cambridge Health Alliance. Dr. Margulies
co-founded the Program for Psychotherapy, directed Out Patient Services in
Psychiatry, and for many years served as Director of Medical Student Educa-
tion in Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance. He is the recipient of the
Harvard Medical School Faculty of Medicine Prize for Excellence in Teach-
ing; the Cynthia Kettyle Award for Excellence in Teaching of the Depart-
ment of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; the Havens Faculty Award for
Excellence in Teaching at Cambridge; 2013 Outstanding Psychiatrist Award
for Clinical Psychiatry, Massachusetts Psychiatric Society; Plenary Speaker,
American Psychoanalytic Association, June 2014. He is the author of The
Empathic Imagination, a study of the complex nature of attempting to feel
into another’s experience, and his scholarly interests have continued at the
nexus of psychoanalysis, existential studies, and postmodern critique, with a
particular interest in the nature of the construction of time, self, and memory.

Erica Burman is Professor of Education, and a United Kingdom Council of

Psychotherapists-registered Group Analyst. She trained as a developmental
psychologist, and well known as a critical developmental psychologist and
methodologist specializing in innovative and activist qualitative research.
She is author of Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (Routledge,
3rd edition, 2017), Developments: Child, Image, Nation (Routledge, 2008),
and is co-editor (with Dan Cook) of the SAGE Encyclopaedia of Childhood
and Childhood Studies (forthcoming). Erica co-founded the Discourse Unit
(www.discourseunit.com) a transinstitutional, transdisciplinary network re-
searching the reproduction and transformation of language and subjectivity.
Erica’s research has focused on critical developmental and educational psy-
chology, feminist and postcolonial theory, childhood studies, and on critical
mental health practice (particularly around gender and cultural issues). She
has co-led funded research projects on conceptualizing and challenging state
and interpersonal violence in relation to minoritized women and children,
220 About the Contributors

and on educational and mental health impacts of poverty and “austerity.” She
currently leads the Knowledge, Power, and Identity research strand of SEAN
at MIE (see http://www.seed.manchester.ac.uk/education/research/research-
themes-and-projects/sean/projects/knowledge-power-identity/. For further
information see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/Erica.burman/ and
www.ericaburman.com). She is a past Chair of the Psychology of Women
Section of the British Psychological Society, and in 2016 she was awarded
an Honorary Lifetime Fellowship of the British Psychological Society in
recognition of her contribution to psychology.