by Sudhir Kakar
In my own work, 50 years after Bose’s contributions of which till recently I was only vaguely aware, I am struck by the comparable patterns in Indian mental life that we observed independently of each other, and this in spite of our different emotional predilections, analytic styles, theoretical preoccupations, geographical locations, and historical situations. Such a convergence further strengthen my belief, shared by every practicing analyst, that there is no absolute arbitrariness in our representation of the inner world. There is unquestionably something that resists, a something which can only be characterized by the attribute ‘psychical reality,’ which both the analyst and the analysand help discover and give meaning to.
It is the ubiquity and multiformity of the ‘primitive idea of being a woman’ and the embedding of this fantasy in the maternal configurations of the family and the culture in India, which I would like to discuss in my own observations. My main argument is that the ‘hegemonic narrative’ of Hindu culture as far as male development is concerned, is neither that of Freud’s Oedipus nor of Christianity’s Adam. One of the more dominant narratives of this culture is that of Devi, the great goddess, especially in her manifold expressions as mother in the inner world of the Hindu son. In India, at least, a primary task of psychoanalysis, the science of imagination or even (in Wallace Steven’s words) ‘the science of illusion’ (can one call it Mayalogy?)5—‘The great Illusion’—as the goddess is also called. Of course, it is not my intention to deny or underestimate the importance of the powerful mother in Western psychoanalysis. All I seek to suggest is that certain forms of the maternal-feminine may be more central in Indian myths and psyche than in their Western counterpart. I would then like to begin my exposition with the first 15 minutes of an analytic session.
The patient is a 26-year-old social worker who has been in analysis for three years. He comes four times a week, with each lasting 50 minutes and conducted in the classical manner with the patient lying on the couch and the analyst sitting in a chair behind him. He entered analysis not because of any pressing personal problem, but because he thought it would help him professionally. In this particular session, he begins with a fantasy he had while he was in a bus. The fantasy was of a tribe, living in the jungle, which unclothes its dead and hangs them on the trees. M., the patient, visualized a beautiful woman hanging on one of the trees. He imagined himself coming at night and having intercourse with the woman. Other members of the tribe are eating part of the hanging corpses. The fantasy is immediately followed by the recollection of an incident from the previous evening. M. was visiting his parents’ home, where he had lived till recently before he married and set up his own household. This move was not only personally painful but also unusual for his social milieu, where sons normally brought their wives to live in their parental home. An older cousin, with her three-year-old son, was also visiting at the same time. M. felt irritated by the anxious attention his mother and grandmother gave the boy. The grandmother kept on telling the child not to go and play out of the house, to be careful of venturing too far, and so on. On my remarking that perhaps he recognized himself in the nephew, M. exclaimed with rare resentment, ‘Yes, all the women (his mother, grandmother, his father’s brother’s wife, and his father’s unmarried sister who lived with them) were always doing the same with me.’
Beginning with these 15 minutes of a session, I would like to unroll M.’s conflicts around maternal representations and weave them together with the central maternal configurations of Indian culture. Because of this particular objective, my presentation of further material from M.’s analysis is bound to be subject to what Donald Spence has called ‘narrative smoothing.’6 A case history though it purports to be a story that is true is actually always at the intersection of fact and fable. Its tale quality, though, arises less from the commissions in imagination than from omissions in reality.
Born in a lower-middle-class family in a large village near Delhi, M. is the eldest of three brothers and two sisters. His memories of growing up, till well into youth, are pervaded by the maternal phalanx of the four women. Like his mother, who in his earliest memories stands out as a distinct figure from a maternal-feminine continuum, to be then reabsorbed in it, M, too, often emerges from and retreats into femininity. In the transference, the fantasies of being a woman are not especially disturbing, neither are the fantasies of being an infant suckling at a breast which he has grown onto my exaggeratedly hairy chest. One of his earliest recollections is of a woman who used to pull at the penises of the little boys playing out in the street. M. never felt afraid when the woman grabbed at his own penis. In fact, he rather liked it, reassured that he had a penis at all or at least enough of one for the woman to acknowledge its existence.
Bathed, dressed, combed, and caressed by one or the other of the women, M.’s wishes and needs were met before they were even articulated. Food, especially the milk-based Indian sweets, were constantly pressed on him. Even now, on his visits to the family, the first question by one of the women pertains to what, he would like to eat. For a long time during the analysis, whenever a particular session was stressful, because of what he considered a lack of maternal empathy in my interventions, M. felt compelled to go to a restaurant in town where he would first gorge himself on sweets, before he returned home.
Besides the omnipresence of women, my most striking impressions of M.’s early memories is their night setting and their primarily tactile quality. Partly, this has to do with the crowded, public living arrangements of the Indian family. Here, even the notions of privacy are absent, not to speak of such luxuries as separate bedrooms for parents and children. Sleeping in the heat with little or no clothes next to one of his caretakers, an arm or a leg thrown across the maternal body, there is one disturbing memory which stands out clearly. This is of M.’s penis erect against the buttocks of his sleeping mother and his reluctance to move away as he struggled against the feelings of shame and embarrassment that she might wake up and notice the forbidden touch. Later, in adolescence, the mothers are replaced by visiting cousins sharing mattresses spread out in a room or on the roof, furtive rubbings of bodies and occasional genital contact while other members of the extended family are in various stages of sleep.
Embedded in this blissful abundance of maternal flesh and promiscuity of touch, however, is a nightmare. Ever since childhood and persisting well into the initial phase of the analysis, M. would often scream in his sleep while a vague, dark shape threatened to envelop him. At these times, only his father’s awakening him with the reassurance that everything was all right helped M. compose himself for renewed slumber. The father, a gentle, retiring man, who left early in the morning for work and returned home late at night, was otherwise a dim figure hovering at the outskirts of an animated family life.
In the very first sessions of the analysis, M. talked of a sexual compulsion which he found embarrassing to acknowledge. The compulsion consisted of travelling in a crowded bus and seeking to press close to the hips of any plump, middle-aged woman standing in the aisle. It was vital for his ensuing excitement that the woman have her back to him. If she ever turned to face M., with the knowledge of his desire in her eyes, his erection immediately subsided and he would hurriedly move away with intense feelings of shame. After marriage, too, the edge of his desire was often at its sharpest when his wife slept on her side with her back to him. In mounting excitement, M. would rub against her and want to make love when she was still not quite awake. If, however, the wife gave intimation of becoming an enthusiastic partner in the exercise, M. sometimes ejaculated prematurely or found his erection precipitately shrivel.
It is evident from these brief fragments of M.’s case history that his desire is closely connected with some of the most inert parts of a woman’s body, her hips and buttocks. In other words, the desire needs the woman to be sexually dead for its fulfilment. The genesis of the fantasy of the hanging corpse with whom M. has intercourse at night has at its root the fear of the mother’s sexual
ity as well as the anger at their restraint of his explorations of the world. My choice of M.’s case, though, is not dictated by the interest it may hold from a psychoanalytical perspective. The choice, instead, has to do with its central theme, namely the various paths in imagination with M. traverses, in the face of many obstacles, to maintain an idealized relationship with the maternal body. This theme and the fantazied solutions to the disorders in the mother-son relationship are repeated again and again in Indian case and life histories. Bose’s observation on the Indian male patient’s ‘primitive idea of being a woman’ is then only a special proposition of a more general theorem. The wish to be a woman is one particular solution to the discord that threatens the breaking up of the son’s fantasized connection to the mother, a solution whose access to awareness is facilitated by the culture’s views on sexual differentiation and the permeability of gender boundaries. Thus, for instance, when Gandhi publicly proclaims that he has mentally become a woman or, quite unaware of Karen Horney and other deviants from the orthodox analytic position of the time, talks of man’s envy of the woman’s procreative capacities, saying, ‘There is as much reason for a man to wish that he was born a woman as for woman to do otherwise,’ he is sure of a sympathetic and receptive audience.7
In the Indian context, this particular theme can be explored in individual stories as well as in the cultural narratives we call myths, both of which are more closely interwoven in Indian culture than is the case in the modern West. In an apparent reversal of a Western pattern, traditional myths in India are less a source of intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction for the mythologist than of emotional recognition for others, more moving for the patient than for the analyst. Myths in India are not part of a bygone era. They are not ‘retained fragments from the infantile psychic life of the race,’ as Karl Abraham called them,8 nor ‘vestiges of the infantile fantasies of whole nations, secular dreams of youthful humanity’ in Freud’s words.9
Vibrantly alive, their symbolic power intact, Indian myths constitute a cultural idiom that aids the individual in the construction and integration of his inner world. Parallel to patterns of infant care and to the structure and values of family relationships, popular and well-known myths are isomorphic with the central psychological constellations of the culture and are constantly renewed and validated by the nature of subjective experience.10 Given the availability of the mythological idiom, it is almost as easy to mythologize a psychoanalysis, such as that of M., as to analyse a myth, almost as convenient to elaborate on intrapsychic conflict in a mythological mode as in a case historical narrative mode.
Earlier, I advanced the thesis that myths of Devi, the great goddess, constitute a ‘hegemonic narrative’ of Hindu culture. Of the hundreds of myths on her various manifestations, my special interest here is in the goddess as mother, and especially the mother of the sons, Ganesha and Skanda. But before proceeding to connect M.’s tale to the larger cultural story, let me note that I have ignored the various versions of these myths in traditional texts and modern folklore—an undertaking which is rightly the preserve of mythologists and folklorists—and instead picked on their best-known, popular versions.
The popularity of Ganesha and Skanda as gods—psychologically representing two childhood positions of the Indian son—is certainly undeniable. Ganesha, the remover of obstacles and the god of all beginnings, is perhaps the most adored of the reputed 330 million Hindu gods. Iconically represented as a pot-bellied toddler with an elephant head and one missing tusk, he is proportionately represented as a small child when portrayed in the family group with his mother Parvati and father Shiva. His image, whether carved in stone or drawn up in a coloured print, is everywhere: in temples, homes, shops, roadside shrines, calendars. Ganesha’s younger brother, Skanda or Kartikkeya, has his own following, especially in South India where he is extremely popular and worshipped under the name of Murugan or Subramanya. In contrast to Ganesha, Skanda is a handsome child, a youth of slender body and heroic exploits who, in analytic parlance, may be said to occupy the phallic position.
Ganesha’s myths tell us one part of M.’s inner life while those of Skanda reveal yet another. Ganesha, in many myths, is solely his mother Parvati’s creation. Desirous of a child and lacking Shiva’s cooperation in the venture, she created him out of the dirt and sweat of her body mixed with unguents. Like M.’s fantasies of his femininity, Ganesha too is not only his mother’s boy but contains her very essence. Even when indubitably male like Skanda, M. is immersed in the world of mothers which an Indian extended family creates for the child. Skanda, like M., is the son of more than one mother; his father Shiva’s seed, being too powerful, could not be borne by one woman and wandered from womb to womb before Skanda took birth. M.’s ravenous consumption of sweets to restore feelings of well-being has parallels with Ganesha’s appetite for modakas, the sweet wheat or rice balls which devotees offer to the god in large quantities ‘knowing’ that the god is never satisfied, that his belly empties itself as fast as it is filled.11
The lean M., like the fat god, craves sweets as a lifeline to the mother’s breast; his hunger for the mother’s body, in spite of temporary appeasements, is ultimately doomed to remain unfulfilled. M. is further like Ganesha in that he, too, has emerged from infancy with an ample capacity for vital involvement with others.
In the dramatization of M.’s dilemma in relation to the mother, brought to a head by development changes that push the child toward an exploration of the outer world while they also give him increasing intimations of his biological rock-bottom identity as a male, Ganesha and Skanda play the leading roles. In a version common to both South India and Sri Lanka the myth goes as follows:
A mango was floating down the stream and Uma (Parvati) the mother, said that whoever rides around the universe first will get the mango. (In other versions, the promise is of modakas or wives.) Skanda impulsively got on his golden peacock and went around the universe But Ganesha, who rode the rat, had more wisdom. He thought: ‘What could my mother have meant by this?’ He then circumambulated his mother, worshipped her and said, i have gone around my universe.’ Since Ganesha was right his mother gave him the mango. Skanda was furious when he arrived and demanded the mango. But before he could get it Ganesha bit the mango and broke one of his tusks.12
Here Skanda and Ganesha are personifications of the two opposing wishes of the older child at the eve of the Oedipus stage. He is torn between a powerful push for independent and autonomous functioning, and an equally strong pull toward surrender and reimmersion in the enveloping maternal fusion from which he has just emerged. Giving in to the pull of individuation and independence, Skanda becomes liable to one kind of punishment—exile from the mother’s bountiful presence, and one kind of reward—the promise of functioning as an adult, virile man. Going back to the mother—and I would view Ganesha’s eating of the mango as a return to feeding at the breast, especially since we know that in Tamil Nadu, the analogy between a mango and the breast is a matter of common awareness13—has the broken tusk, the loss of potential masculinity, as a consequence. Remaining an infant, Ganesha’s reward, on the other hand, will be never to know the pangs of separation from the mother, never to feel the despair at her absence. That Ganesha’s lot is considered superior to Skanda’s is perhaps an indication of Indian man’s cultural preference in the dilemma of separation-individuation. He is at one with his mother in her wish not to have the son separate from her, individuate out of their shared anima.14
For M., as we have seen, the Ganesha position is often longed for and sometimes returned to in fantasy. It does not, however, represent an enduring solution to the problem of maintaining phallic desire in face of the overwhelming inner presence of the Great Mother. Enter Skanda. After he killed the demon Taraka, who had been terrorizing the gods, the goddess became quite indulgent toward her son and told him to amuse himself as he pleased. Skanda became wayward, his lust rampant, he made love to the wives of the gods and the gods could not stop him
. On their complaining to the goddess, she decided to take the form of whatever woman Skanda was about to seduce. Skanda summoned the wife of one god after another but in each saw his mother and became passionless. Finally, thinking that ‘the universe is filled with my mother,’ he decided to remain celibate forever.15
M., too, we saw, became ‘passionless’ whenever in the bus the motherly woman he fancied turned to face him. But instead of celibacy he tried to hold on to desire by killing the sexual part of the mother, deadening the lower portion of her trunk, which threatened him with impotence. Furthermore, the imagined sexual overpoweringness of the mother, in the face of which the child feels hopelessly inadequate, with fears of being engulfed and swallowed by her dark depths, is not experienced by M. in the form of clear-cut fantasies, but in a recurrent nightmare from which he wakes up screaming.
Elsewhere, I have traced in detail the passage of the powerful, sexual mother through Hindu myths, folk beliefs, proverbs, symptoms, and the ritual worship of the goddess in her terrible and fierce forms.16 Here, I shall only narrate one of the better-known myths of Devi, widely reproduced in her iconic representations in sculpture and painting, in order to convey through the myth’s language of the concrete, of image and symbol, some of the quality of the child’s awe and terror of this particular maternal image.
The demon Mahisasura had conquered all the three worlds. Falling in love with the goddess, he sent a message to make his desire known to her. Devi replied that she would accept as her husband only someone who defeated her in battle. Mahisasura entered the battlefield with a vast army and a huge quantity of equipment. Devi came alone, mounted on her lion. The gods were surprised to see her without even armour, riding naked to the combat. Dismounting, Devi started dancing and cutting off the heads of millions and millions of demons with her sword to the rhythm of her movement. Mahisasura, facing death, tried to run away by becoming an elephant. Devi cut off his trunk. The elephant became a buffalo and against its thick hide Devi’s sword and spear were of no avail. Angered, Devi jumped on the buffalo’s back and rode it to exhaustion. When the buffalo demon’s power of resistance had collapsed, Devi plunged her spear into its ear and Mahisasura fell dead.