An Analyst's Hindu-Indian Imagination with Sudhir Kakar (Goa, India)

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May 5, 2024

Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar discusses the influence of Hindu-Indian culture on psychoanalysis, challenging Freudian principles. He explores spiritual experiences, the enchantment of the world, and the inadequacy of awareness. The conversation delves into the impact of cultural factors on psyche development and the contrast between Western and Indian perspectives. Kakar's personal journey from idealizing Western thinking to embracing his Hindu roots is highlighted, emphasizing the significance of cultural diversity in understanding human psyche.

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INSIGHT

Cultural Imagination's Impact

Cultural imagination, including child-rearing practices, shapes the psyche.
Psychoanalysis often overlooks this cultural influence, focusing more on race and class.

ANECDOTE

Kakar's Journey

As a young man, Sudhir Kakar was drawn to Freud's iconoclastic views, rejecting his native Hindu traditions.
Decades later, he reevaluated Freud, questioning the West's focus on individual unhappiness and rediscovering the enchantment of his Hindu upbringing.

INSIGHT

Freud's Limited God Concept

Freud's concept of God, rooted in the father figure, doesn't resonate with Hindu traditions.
Hindus emphasize mother goddesses, parental protectors, and diverse relationships with the divine, lacking the fear associated with some Western religions.

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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.