Sudhir Kakar’s Contributions

Review of Dinesh Sharma’s Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Religion: Essays in Honour of Sudhir Kakar (NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0198076988, 348 pages, hardcover, $12.00.

To an extraordinary extent, Sudhir Kakar embodies the two sides of Indian men’s reactions to British colonial denigration. On the one hand, he joins a long line of Indian intellectuals and reformers reaffirming the value and uniqueness of Indian identity and cul-

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ture vis-à-vis the pervasive British denigration. He brings two strengths to this endeavor. The first is a psychoanalytic model that takes into account sociocultural, sociohistorical, and religious factors through his discipleship with and use of Erik Erikson’s broad theory. He applies this to Indian culture in a meticulous, scholarly way in a variety of areas that has resulted in important contributions. The second strength is being a truly gifted writer, one of the very best if not the best of contemporary psychoanalysts, as evidenced by his being awarded the Goethe Prize for Literature, the only psychoanalyst since Freud to receive it.

On the other hand, in his application of psychoanalytic theory to Indian psychological makeup and spiritual practices and experiences, Indians emerge as either inferior or psychopathological. He asserts they have an underdeveloped ego with poor secondary process thinking, a superego that is not internalized, and vague ego boundaries. Taking Western psychoanalytic norms as superior and universal, he also manifests an identification with colonial ideology, not that unusual in Indian men of his generation.

Nowhere do these two sides of Kakar manifest so strongly as in his work on mysticism, to which nearly half of this book is devoted. Kakar is one of the very first after Erich Fromm and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s book Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism in 1960 to challenge the pervasive Freudian denigration of spiritual practices and experiences. However, when he applies psychoanalysis to Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, their experiences emerge as psychopathological. Moreover, he wholeheartedly agrees with the psychoanalytic reductive dictum that mysticism is regressive even though he gives a positive spin to it.

Needless to say, in a Festschrift honoring Kakar, the first side is overwhelmingly supported, while the second, with but one exception, is totally ignored. Or are there other reasons that this is so? Kakar is very popular in the West for his contributions, while major Indian psychoanalytic therapists and psychologists are highly critical of his work. Perhaps many Western scholars and his Indian disciples are not aware of this other side of Kakar, his partial identification with British colonial denigration.

The chapters all relate to Kakar’s multifaceted writings. The six chapters on mysticism are well written by accomplished specialists in their field, such as Wendy Doniger, Jeffrey Kripal,

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June McDaniel, Harold Coward, Manasi Kumar, and the editor, Dinesh Sharma. Other important chapters reflect Kakar’s writings on the psychocultural and the psychohistorical, his work on organizational psychology, and his book on social violence in India.

Of particular note in the first category is Robert LeVine’s opening chapter that compares Kakar’s oeuvre with those of Takeo Doi and Takie Lebra from Japan, and Gananath Obeyesekere from Sri Lanka, each of whom, with the exception of Lebra, uses psychoanalysis to explore the psychocultural. LeVine’s point is that the indigenous psychoanalyst or anthropologist is much more able to come up with telling analyses of the psychocultural in their own culture than the Western investigator. From a totally different perspective, John Munder Ross writes as a psychoanalyst in a literary style a striking chapter on the effects of the psychocultural and psychohistorical on his own life from the hugely diverse cultural backgrounds of his parents and grandparents.

There are also other excellent chapters, more stemming from the author’s own work but still related to Kakar’s. Manfred F.R. Kers de Vries, a psychoanalyst involved in organizational relationships, relates a telling story of his psychological work with corporate leaders who are having major emotional problems that interfere with their organizational leadership. Another is by Usha Menon, an anthropologist, in an excellent analysis of an incident of social violence in Orissa, enhanced by Kakar’s work on social violence.

Despite the above-mentioned caveats, the book is well worth reading, as most of the chapters profit from longstanding work of a variety of scholars and psychoanalysts.

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