Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Chapter 6

  1. For psychoanalytic perspectives on autobiography, see Robert Steele, ‘Deconstructing Histories; Toward a Systematic Criticism of Psychological Narratives,’ in Narrative Psychology, ed. T.R. Sarbin (New York: Praeger, 1986). See also Erik H. Erikson, ‘In Search of Gandhi: on the Nature of Psychohistorical Evidence,’ Daedalus (Summer 1968).

  2. For a discussion of Nobokov’s Speak, Memory, see Sudhir Kakar and John Ross, Tales of Love, Sex, and Danger (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), chap. 8.

  3. M.K. Gandhi, Satya no frayoga atma Atma-Katha (translated by Mahadev Desai as The Story of My Experiments with Truth) (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Prakashan Mandir, 1927), 10; henceforth referred to as Autobiography.

  4. Ibid., 31.

  5. V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1976), 102-6.

  6. Gandhi, Autobiography, 75.

  7. Ibid., 69.

  8. A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Hanchi: A Kannada Cinderella,’ in Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook, ed. A. Dundes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), 272.

  9. M.K. Gandhi, Bibi Amtussalam ke nam patra [Letters to Bibi Amtussalam], Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1960), 70.

  10. Gandhi, Autobiography, 91.

  11. Ibid., 205.

  12. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi; The First Phase, (Bombay: Sevak Prakashan). 213.

  13. Ibid., 207.

  14. M.K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Delhi: Publication Division, Government of India, 1958), vol. 3, letters of 30 June 1906 to Chaganlal Gandhi and H.V. Vohra, 352-54; henceforth referred to as Collected Works.

  15. Ibid., 208-9.

  16. Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. 5, 56.

  17. M.K. Gandhi, To the Women (Karachi: Hingorani, 1943), 49-50, 52.

  18. Gandhi, To the Women, 194.

  19. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Yervada Mandir,’ in Selected Works, Vol. 4 (Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1968), 220.

  20. Ibid.

  21. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Hind Swaraj,’ in Collected Works.

  22. Millie G. Polak, Mr. Gandhi: The Man (Bombay: Vora & Co., 1949), 63-64.

  23. Gandhi, ‘Yervada Mandir,’ 223.

  24. St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. E.R. Pusey (New York: Modem Library, 1949), 227.

  25. Ibid., 228.

  26. Gandhi, Autobiography, 324.

  27. Ibid., 210.

  28. Ibdi., 501.

  29. Ibid., 24.

  30. St. Augustine, Confessions, 162.

  31. Gandhi, Collected Works, vol. 37(1928), ‘Speech on the Birth Centenary of Tolstoy’ (10 September 1928), 258.

  32. Ibid., 265.

  33. Gandhi, Autobiography, 209.

  34. Gandhi, Collected Works, vol. 37 (1928), 258.

  35. Gandhi, Collected Works, vol. 36 (1927-28), letter to Harjivan Kotak, 378.

  36. Gandhi, ‘Ek Tyag,’ in Harijanbandhu, 22.9.35.

  37. M.K. Gandhi, Kumari Premaben Kantak ke nam patra [Letters to Premaben Kantak], (Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1960), 260-62 (my translation).

  38. The best eyewitness account of Gandhi’s Bengal period is by N.K. Bose, Gandhi’s temporary secretary, who was both a respectful follower and a dispassionate observer: see his My Days with Gandhi (Calcutta: Nishana, 1953).

  39. Ibid., 52.

  40. Ibid., 189.

  41. In his Key to Health, rewritten in 1942 in the middle of another depressive phase following the widespread violence of the ‘Quit India’ movement and the death of his wife in prison, Gandhi had hinted at this kind of self-testing: ‘Some of my experiments have not reached a stage when they might be placed before the public with advantage. I hope to do so some day if they succeed to my satisfaction. Success might make the attainment of brahmacharya comparatively easier.’ See Selected Works, vol. 4, 432. For a compassionate and insightful discussion of these experiments, see also Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth (New York: Norton, 1969), 404.

  42. Gandhi, Kumari Premaben Kantak ke nam patra, 16.

  43. Ibid., 19.

  44. Ibid., 188.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Ibid., 39.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Ibid., 190.

  51. Ibid., 151.

  52. Ibid., 173.

  53. Ibid., 369.

  54. See Mira Behn, ed., Bapu’s Letters to Mira (1924-48) (Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1949) and The Spirit’s Pilgrimage (London: Longman, 1960).

  55. Behn, ed., Bapu’s Letters to Mira, 27-28.

  56. R. Greenson, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis (New York: International University Press, 1967), 338-41.

  57. See Martin S. Bergman, ‘Transference Love and Love in Real Life,’ in J. M. Ross, ed., International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 11 (1985-86): 27-45.

  58. Behn, ed., Bapu’s Letters to Mira, 42.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Ibid., 43.

  61. Ibid., 71.

  62. Ibid., 88.

  63. Ibid., 166.

  64. For an elaborate description of some of these popular psychological ideas in English, see Swami Sivananda, Mind: Its Mysteries and Control (Sivanandanagar: Divine Life Society, 1974), chap. 28, and Swami Narayanananda, The Mysteries of Man, Mind, and Mind-Functions (Rishikesh: Universal Yoga Trust, 1965), chap. 19.

  65. Gandhi, To the Women, 71.

  66. G. Bose, ‘All or None Attitude in Sex,’ Samiksa 1 (1947): 14.

  67. Wendy O’Flaherty, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 45.

  68. See Wendy O’Flaherty, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 55.

  69. Brahmavaivarta Purana, 4.31, 4.32, 1.20, 4.33, 1.76; English translation abridged from O’Flaherty, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, 51.

  70. Cited in Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 154.

  71. Ibid., 54.

  72. Ibid., 156.

  73. See Ramchandra Gandhi, Brahmacharya (Department of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad, 1981, unpublished), 26.

  74. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1959), 719.

  75. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modem Nervousness’ (1908), Standard Edition, vol. 9, 197.

  76. St. Augustine, Confessions, 165.

  77. Gandhi, To the Women, 81.

  78. Ibid., 60.

  79. Ibid., 57.

  80. Polak, Mr. Gandhi, 34.

  81. Gandhi, To the Women, 28-29.

  82. Behn, ed., Bapu’s Letters to Mira, 141.

  83. Gandhi, To the Women, 102.

  84. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth.

  85. Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (New Delhi: Indian Book Co., 1977), 13.

  86. D.W. Winnicott, ‘Appetite and Emotional Disorder,’ in Collected Papers (London: Tavistock Publications, 1958), 34.

  Chapter 7

  1. T.C. Sinha, ‘Psychoanalysis in India,’ Lumbini Park Silver Jubilee Souvenir (Calcutta: 1966), 66.

  2. G. Bose, ‘The Genesis of Homosexuality,’ (1926) Samiksa 4, no. 2 (1950): 74.

  3. G. Bose, ‘A New Theory of Mental Life,’ Samiksa 2 (1948). 158.

  4. G. Bose, ‘The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish,’ Samiksa 3, no. 1 (1949): 222-40.

  5. The coinage is by Clifford Geertz, who used it in the Symposium on Culture and Human Development sponsored by Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago, 5-7 November 1987.

  6. Donald P. Spence, ‘Narrative Smoothing and Clinical Wisdom,’ in Narrative Psychology, ed. T. Sarbin (New York: Praeger, 1986).

  7. M.K. Gandhi, To the Women (Karachi: Hingorani, 1943), 194 and 28-29. Karen Homey, ‘The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity Complex in Women as Viewed by Men and Women,’ in Feminine Psychology (New York: Norton, 1967).

  8. Karl Abraham, Dreams and Myths: A Study in Race Psychology (New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Health Publishing Company, 1913), 72.r />
  9. Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming,’ in Standard Edition, Vol. 9, 152.

  10. Gananath Obeysekere, Medusa’s Hair: A Study in Personal and Cultural Symbols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  11. Paul B. Courtright, Ganesha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 114.

  12. G. Obeysekere, The Cult of Pattini (Chicago: University of Chicaro Press, 1984), 471.

  13. Margaret T. Egnor, The Ideology of Love in a Tamil Family (Hobart and Smith College, 1984, unpublished).

  14. Sudhir Kakar, ‘Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: A Renewed Alliance,’ Contributions to Indian Sociology 21, no. 1 (1987), 88.

  15. The Sanskrit source of the myth is the Brahma Purana, 81. 1—5. For an English translation see Wendy O’Flaherty, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 203.

  16. Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).

  17. Chasseguet-Smirgel, ‘Feminine Guilt and the Oedipus Complex,’ in Female Sexuality, ed. J. Chasseguet-Smirgel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 94—134. For traditional views, see Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism,’ Standard Edition, vol. 21 (1924) and ‘Splitting the Ego in the Process of Defence,’ Standard Edition, vol. 23 (1940). See also R.C. Bak, ‘The Phallic Woman: The Ubiquitous Fantasy in Perversions,’ The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 23, 15-16.

  18. Sudhir Kakar and John Ross, Tales of Love Sex, and Danger (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987).

  19. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950).

  20. Sigmund Freud, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,’ Standard Edition, vol. 22 (1922).

  21. Janis Long, ‘Culture, Selfobject, and the Cohesive Self,’ paper presented at the American Psychological Association Meetings, August 1986.

  22. Heinz Kohut, Self Psychology and Humanities, ed. D. Strozier (New York: Norton, 1985), 224-31.

  23. Janis Long, ‘Culture, Selfobject, and the Cohesive Self,’ 8.

  Chapter 8

  1. For an exhaustive discussion of these conceptual models see A. Brittan and M. Maynard, Sexism, Racism and Oppression, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

  2. Sudhir Kakar and John Ross, Tales of Love, Sex and Danger (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987).

  3. Plato, ‘Symposium’ in B. Jowett, trans., The Portable Plato, (New York: Viking Press, 1950), p. 145.

  4. See, for instance, L.H. Tessman, ‘A Note on the Father’s Contribution to the Daughter’s Ways of Loving and Working,’ in S.H. Cath et al., eds., Father and Child: Developmental and Clinical Perspectives, (Boston: Little Brown, 1982), 219-38.

  THE ANALYST AND THE MYSTIC

  Chapter 1

  1. N. Soderblom, Till mystikens belysning (Lund, 1985), cited in H. Akerberg, ‘The Unio Mystica of Teresa of Avila,’ in N.G. Holm, ed., Religious Ecstasy (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1981), 275-792.

  2. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902)

  3. Andrew M. Greeley, The Sociology of the Paranormal: A Reconnaissance (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1975), 62.

  4. For a psychological description of the structure of mystical experience see Committee on Psychiatry and Religion, Mysticism: Spiritual Quest or Psychic Disorder (New York: Group for Advancement of Psychiatry, 1976). See also H. Hof, ‘Ecstasy and Mysticism,’ in Holm, Religious Ecstasy, 243-49.

  5. R.C. Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (London: Athalone Press, 1960). The authoritative work on Hindu mysticism remains S.N. Dasgupta (1927), Hindu Mysticism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1987).

  6. See Committee on Psychiatry and Religion, Mysticism, especially 782-86. For specific psychoanalytic contributions stressing the ego-adaptive aspects of the mystic experience see Paul C. Horton, ‘The Mystical Experience: Substance of an Illusion,’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 22 (1974): 364-80; David Aberbach, ‘Grief and Mysticism,’ International Review of Psychoanalysis 14(1987): 509-26.

  7. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).

  8. Romain Rolland, The Life of Ramakrishna (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1986), 38.

  9. For the arguments against a psychoanalytic, ‘scientific’ study of mysticism, ste Roger N. Walsh et al., ‘Paradigms in Collision,’ in Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology, ed. R.N. Walsh and F. Vaughan (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1980), 36-52.

  10. See Peter Buckley and Marc Galanter, ‘Mystical Experience, Spiritual Knowledge, and a Contemporary Ecstatic Experience,’ British Journal of Medical Pyschology 52 (1979): 281-89.

  11. For the case histories see P.C. Horton, ‘Mystical Experience,’ and Committee on Psychiatry and Religion, Mysticism, 799-807.

  12. For a comprehensive comparison of the three see Manfred Eigen, ‘The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 62 (1981): 413-34.

  13. Cited in Irving B. Harrison, ‘On Freud’s View of the Infant-Mother Relationship and of the Oceanic Feeling—Some Subjective Influences,’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 27 (1979): 409.

  14. Ibid.

  15. J.M. Masson suggests a different passage from the writings of Ramakrishna as the source for the term ‘oceanic feeling’; see his The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 36.

  16. Dushan Pajin, ‘The Oceanic Feeling: A Reevaluation’ (Belgrade, 1989, manuscript).

  17. Letter to R. Rolland, 19 January 1930, in E. Freud, ed., The Letters of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 392.

  18. Mahendranath Gupta, Sri Ramakrishna Vachanamrita, trans. into Hindi by Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala,’ 3 vols. (Nagpur: Ramakrishna Math, 1988).

  19. Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna, The Great Master, 2 vols. (Mylapore: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1983), vol. 1, 276-77.

  20. Rolland, Life of Ramakrishna, 22-23.

  21. Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna, vol. 1, 276-77.

  22. Ibid., 156.

  23. Ibid., 162-63.

  24. Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna, vol. 1, 424.

  25. Gupta, Vachanamrita, vol. 1, 71.

  26. Ibid., 301.

  27. Ibid., 320.

  28. Ibid, 135-36.

  29. Ibid., 41.

  30. Ibid., vol. 2, 241.

  31. Bhavabhuti, Uttara Rama Charita, in Six Sanskrit Plays (Bombay: Asia, 1964), 368.

  32. Gupta, Vachanamrita, vol. 1, 90.

  33. S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures (1933), Standard Edition, vol. 22, 79-80.

  34. Nathaniel Ross, ‘Affect as Cognition: With Observation on the Meaning of Mystical States,’ International Review of Psychoanalysis 2(1975): 79-93.

  35. Gupta, Vachanamrita, vol. 3, 238-89.

  36. Ernst Hartmann, The Nightmare: The Psychology and Biology of Terrifying Dreams (New York: Basic, 1984).

  37. Gupta Vachanamrita, vol. 3, 289.

  38. J.M.R. Damas Mora et al., ‘On Heutroscopy or the Phenomenon of the Double,’ British Journal of Medical Psychology 53 (1980): 75-83.

  39. Gupta, Vachanamrita, vol. 1, 388

  40. Ibid., vol. 3, 109.

  41. Ibid., vol. 1, 431.

  42. Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna, vol. 1, 417.

  43. Octavio Paz, The Money Grammarian, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Seaver Books, 1981), 133.

  44. For representative statements of the classical Freudian view see L. Salzman, ‘The Psychology of Religious and Ideological Conversion,’ Psychiatry 16(1953): 177-87. For the Kleinian view see Irving B. Harrison, ‘On the Maternal Origins of Awe,’ The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 30 (1975): 181-95.

  45. P.C. Horton, ‘Mystical Experience.’

  46. For a detailed discussion of the link and parallels between the process of mourning and mysticism see Aberbach, ‘Grief and Mysticism,’ 509-26.

  47. S. Kakar, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors (
New York: Knopf, 1982), chap. 5. See also Buckley and Galanter, ‘Mystical Experience,’ 285; P.C. Harton, ‘The Mystical Experience as a Suicide Preventive,’ American Journal of Psychiatry 130 (1973): 294-96.

  48. Cited in Aberbach, ‘Grief and Mysticism,” 509.

  49. I. Barande and R. Barande, ‘Antinomies du concept de perversion et epigenese del’ appetit de excitation’, cited in S.A. Leavy, ‘Male Homosexuality Reconsidered,’ International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 11 (1985-86), 163.

  50. Gupta, Vachanamrita, vol. 1, 388.

  51. Eigen, ‘Area of Faith’; ‘Ideal Images, Creativity and the Freudian Drama,’ Psychocultural Review 3 (1979): 278-98; ‘Creativity, Instinctual Fantasy and Ideal Images,’ Psychoanalytic Review 68 (1981).

  52. Eigen, ‘Area of Faith,’ 431.

  53. E. Underhill, Mysticism (1911) (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961); J.H. Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925).

  54. A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954), 75.

  55. Herbert Moller, ‘Affective Mysticism in Western Civilization,’ Psychoanalytic Review 52 (1965): 259-67. See also E.W. McDonnel, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 320-32.

  56. Gupta, Vachanamrita, 3: 535-36.

  57. Ibid., 107.

  58. Robert Stoller, ‘The Gender Disorders,’ in I. Rosen, ed., Sexual Deviation (Oxford University Press, 1979), 109-38.

  59. J.O. Wisdom, ‘Male and Female,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 64(1983): 159-68.

  60. D.W. Winnicott, ‘Creativity and its Origins,’ in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 72-85.

  61. Ibid., 85.

  Chapter 2

  1. Pupul Jayakar, J. Krishnamurti: A Biography (Delhi: Penguin, 1987), 9. Here I must add the caution contained in Brent’s observation that ‘In a country where there where perhaps ten million holy men, many with their own devotees, acolytes and disciples, some of them gurus with hundreds of thousands of followers, all of them inheritors of a tradition thousands of years old, nothing tht one can say about them in general will not somewhere be contradicated in particular.’ See P. Brent, Godmen of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 22.