Exploring Existentialism and Nature's Role in Spirituality

My conversation with Sudhir Kakar took place five weeks before his untimely death on April 22nd. 

“Freud obviously is very brave and courageous to accept that the world is inadequate and that my desires will never be sufficiently fulfilled. My question - is this in fact the case? I think that everyone has had some kind of spiritual experience, some more than others and in many different contexts, not just religious ones. Spiritual experiences contradict Freud’s notion of common unhappiness and the idea of the world as inadequate. What reason do we have to assume that all such common experiences are simply false, that they are based on some kind of false consciousness? Rather, I believe that the inadequacy lies in our own awareness rather than with the world. The world allows for many experiences that would be highly adequate yet we block them - what we call the mundane world is much more enchanted than we think it is." 

Episode Description: We begin by considering the embodiment of one's cultural imagination - "one's mental representation of culture" - into one's unconscious mind. Sudhir describes different early child-rearing practices and invites the question about their influence on our later inner lives. He shares with us his early idealization of Freudian/Western ways of thinking and his later development, which returned to the enchanting aspects of his Hindu youth. We discuss the similarities and differences between a Judeo-Christian-based psychoanalysis and one founded on a Hindu imagination. We consider the different notions of God, ritual, and illusion. He distinguishes an 'autonomous person' from a 'communitarian person' and describes the pleasures and burdens of each. We close with his sharing his lovely psychoanalytic origin story connected to his meeting Erik Erikson and discovering "I want to be like him."

Our Guest: Sudhir Kakar was a psychoanalyst, scholar, and writer. He had been a Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, and Vienna, Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton, Berlin, and Cologne, and was on the board of Freud Archives. He had received the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Tagore-Merck Award, McArthur Research Fellowship, and Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. `As ‘the psychoanalyst of civilizations’, the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur listed Kakar in 2005 as one of the world’s 25 major thinkers. Sudhir was the author/editor of 20 books of non-fiction and six novels. His books have been translated into 22 languages.

Recommended Readings:

Kakar, Sudhir -

The Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations, Karnac. June 2024

The Capacious Freud, in F. Busch and N. Delgado eds.The Ego and the

Id 100 years Later. London: Routledge 2023

Re-reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion in Hindu India, in O'neill  &  S.Akhtar.eds.On Freud's the Future of an Illusion. London: Routledge, 2018

The  Analyst and the Mystic Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992

Psychoanalysis and Eastern Spiritual Healing Traditions, J. of

Analytical Psychology,48(5).

Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological inquiry into India

and its Healing Traditions. New York: A. Knopf, 1982.

Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. Chicago: U. of

Chicago Press, 2009