by Sudhir Kakar
Erikson himself, when I came to know him more intimately through our conversations when I sometimes accompanied him on the walk back from his office through the Yard and across Cambridge Commons to his house in Robinson Street, was a shy man. He would rather ask me questions than talk about himself. This changed later when he came to India in 1977 to lead a seminar on identity and adulthood that I had organized in New Delhi. At the end of the seminar, I travelled with him and his wife Joan by car from Delhi to Agra to Jaipur and then on to Ahmedabad where we had first met. He talked of his years in Vienna, of Freud and the first generation of analysts. He had sometimes accompanied Freud on his walks and told me—a piece of information that is absent in the vast literature on the Master—that Freud suffered from a mild phobia; when crossing a street, he would clutch young Erik’s arm and release it only after he was safely on the other side.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, I visited Erikson at least two to three times a year at his home in Tiburon in California and later in Cotuit in Cape Cod. As he entered his eighties, it was painful to see the ravages of Alzheimer’s gradually draw a curtain over what had been such a splendid consciousness. In the last few years of his life—he died in 1994 at the age of ninety-two—the eyes no longer sparkled, their dullness broken by an infrequent flash of recognition that never had the energy to sustain itself for more than a few seconds. The mischievous smile had disappeared, to be replaced by a rare, wistful one, mysterious in its origins because it seemed unrelated to anything going on around him. As he entered his nineties, it was heartbreaking to see that the only sign of interest he showed in the outer world was at mealtimes. ‘What is for dessert?’ was the only sentence he spoke during one dinner where his wife Joan and I tried to carry on a desultory conversation. The body had won; it had reclaimed its original sovereignty.
At Harvard, in 1966, I was happy to talk to him about my academic activities and how much I enjoyed being there, my gratefulness for his having made it possible was evident. As part of my thanks offering, my first academic paper was ‘The Human Life Cycle: The Traditional Hindu View and the Psychology of Erik Erikson’, and it was published in the journal Philosophy East and West. Erikson commented extensively in the margins of the draft of the paper and later made use of it in his book on Gandhi. This essay was my first foray into a field which I mapped as my own and became my life work: the formulation of an Indian cultural psychology, or more specifically, the understanding of psyche and society in India using psychoanalytic thought. A questioning of the universality of psychoanalytic theories and understanding their relativity in light of my own clinical experience was an inevitable byproduct of this enterprise.
To prepare myself for my role as an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at IIM, Ahmedabad, I also began to attend a seminar at the Harvard Business School. This was a short walk across the bridge on the river Charles from my apartment above the popular tavern Wursthaus in Harvard Square. The seminar of around ten doctoral and postdoctoral students was a brainchild of Abraham Zaleznik, a pioneer in the application of psychoanalytic ideas to management studies. Since I was now familiar with the full range of Erikson’s work, including his emerging ideas on psychohistory—the introduction of psychological insights into the study of history—I wrote my final essay for the course on Frederick Taylor, the ‘Father of Scientific Management’, using some of these ideas. Erikson’s psychohistorical method proposed that for a full understanding of a historical ‘event’, in my case, the beginnings of scientific management, it needed to be explicated in four different contexts. First, what does the event mean at the individual’s stage of life when it happens? Second, what meaning does the event have in his life history? Third, what does the event mean in context of his group? And fourth, what is its meaning in the history of the group? One gets a fuller and truer account of an event if it is explored in all the four contexts, in their configuration, rather than when the exploration is limited to only one context. The method thus combines psychology, sociology and history in understanding historical events.
Zaleznik was enthusiastic about my paper and asked whether I would like to return to Harvard for another semester, this time to Harvard Business School as a research fellow in social psychology of management. We would then collaborate on writing a book-length psychohistorical study of Taylor and the beginnings of management as a scientific discipline. I accepted his offer with alacrity. I needed to go back to Vienna to take my orals, I said, but would be happy to return in the Fall semester of 1967 and do the needed research at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the Taylor archive was located. I was excited. I would be writing my first book together with an eminent Harvard professor. I would be back in Cambridge where I had learnt so much and made dear friends. Moreover, I would be paid a princely salary of eight hundred dollars a month and could afford to buy books and my very first car. The very next day I enrolled myself in a driving school.
Even while I was working on the Taylor book in Cambridge, Zaleznik, who read the first chapters, graciously said that it could stand on its own and did not need him as co-author. Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation, was published by MIT Press in 1970 when I was already back in India. It was my first book. Since the book was also one of the first that used Erikson’s psychohistorical method that he had pioneered in his Young Man Luther and would later use to its full effect in his Pulitzer-winning book Gandhi’s Truth, it was widely reviewed. To me, steeped in the Indian lore around the guru–disciple relationship, praise from the unknown reviewers of the New York Times, Science and other publications mattered much less than the reactions of my teachers. This was my first solo performance on stage with Erikson and Zaleznik sitting in the front row. Their response was reassuring. Pamela wrote: ‘He [Erikson] kept muttering happily, “It was a good book, don’t you think? You should have seen my whole comment on it.”’ My friend Manfred conveyed Zaleznik’s response to the book’s reception: ‘In Dutch we have a saying “one is as proud as a peacock” and that is exactly what he has been about the reactions . . . He has been showing them to everybody.’
Zaleznik was so pleased that he asked me if I would like to stay on at Harvard Business School. I wanted to become a psychoanalyst, though, and needed to fulfil my commitment to IIM before I could embark on that particular journey. Erikson, who wrote a blurb for the book, was supportive of my plans although he did not know how I could realize them. Psychoanalytic institutes in the US admitted only medical doctors for training at the time although they made exceptions for outstanding social scientists who wanted to be intimately familiar with psychoanalysis and use it in their own fields of specialization. They could get the full theoretical and clinical training, including the all-important personal analysis, but were not permitted to practise as analysts. The sociologist Talcott Parsons, the social psychologist Robert Bales and Zaleznik had gone through this training at the Boston Institute but I, a postdoctoral student without the achievements of this eminent group, could not hope for such an exception. The impossibility of my situation did not weaken my resolve. I remained optimistic that I would eventually be accepted where I did not quite belong. The more I read psychoanalytic texts and came in contact with analysts, the more attractive psychoanalysis seemed to me both as a vocation and an avocation.
I should not underestimate the historical situation of the time in deepening my commitment to psychoanalysis. As a subversive and iconoclastic discipline without peer, psychoanalysis as presented in the writings of folk heroes Herbert Marcuse, Norman Brown and R.D. Laing, seemed especially attuned to the inchoate longings of educated American youth. Many young men and women were in revolt against their parents’ dream of a house in the suburbs, two cars, two children and a dog, eerily reminiscent of the aspirations of middle class India today. They were contemptuous of fathers in their ‘grey flannel suits’ chasing material success and of mothers in their bouffant hairdos glorifying the role of women as homemakers. The rumbling
s against this mainstream consensus had already started in the late 1950s with the writers of the Beat Generation such as Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, as also the beginnings of radical feminism and the environmental movement.
In the 1960s, psychoanalysis appeared to provide the ‘counter-culture’ of youth its intellectual leadership. The esteem enjoyed by psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in the US was at its peak and I wanted a share of it. Moreover, psychoanalysis, as the only profession where the more you aged the wiser you were assumed to become, would ensure that I could look forward to the pleasure of high social regard and admiration into ripe old age. I would escape the fate of being referred to by the young as ‘the old duffer’ or ‘that old fart’ and be respectfully listened to as a sage. The analysts I met were full of a self-assurance I both envied and found fascinating. I remember one visit to the New York home of my friend and Erikson’s tutee, John Ross, whose girlfriend and future wife Jane was in my section. John’s father, Nathaniel Ross, was the co-editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and one of the pillars of the psychoanalytic establishment. A burly, balding man, Dr Ross was an orthodox Freudian who had no doubts about psychoanalysis being the queen of all human and social sciences. He was a Freudian even in his dismissal of people he disapproved of: if a man, he was a ‘limp cock’, if a woman, a ‘dry cunt’. At the dining table, I listened to his psychoanalytic take on social and international issues with rapt attention. I admired the self-confidence with which he delivered his opinions on the problems of India and Indians even when I thought his understanding was superficial and came from a colonial mindset shared by most Western intellectuals. I was too intimidated to show my disagreement openly.
Cambridge was also the place where I made another lifelong friend. This was Manfred Kets de Vries, a Dutchman who had come to Harvard Business School to attend the International Teachers Program and was also attending Zaleznik’s seminar. Manfred, now a professor at INSEAD, the Institut Europeen d’Administration des Affaires, to give it its full name, the leading European business school located in Fontainebleau, near Paris, went on to become one of world’s foremost management gurus and an expert in the psychology of leadership. Our friendship began on a sour note. On the very first evening after the seminar, while walking back to Harvard Square, we decided to stop at Café Pampalona and have a glass of beer. We became absorbed in our conversation and as one glass stretched to three or four I felt a pressing need to urinate. Café Pampalona, like many other small places in the side streets off Harvard Square, did not have a toilet. Leaving Manfred behind, I went in search of one but failed to find any. My need was now urgent and since it had become dark my Indian instincts took over. Unzipping the front of my trousers, I began to relieve myself against a wall at the corner of Mt Auburn Street and Massachusetts Avenue. The bliss of emptying a full bladder was rudely interrupted by a stentorian ‘Hey, you!’
Looking over my shoulder, I saw a Harvard police car parked behind me on the street, the light on its roof flashing. A burly policeman stood outside the passenger door.
‘Come here,’ he ordered in an unfriendly tone bordering on the menacing.
Zipping up, I walked over.
‘Let’s see some ID,’ he said.
I took out my freshly issued ‘officer’ card that identified me as a member of the Harvard faculty.
The policeman looked at it carefully and then gave me an odd look.
‘You are not supposed to do that here,’ he said, adding an ironic ‘sir’ at the end. I nodded in acute embarrassment.
‘You can go there,’ he said more kindly, pointing to the lighted students’ dorms in the Harvard Yard across the street.
I walked into the first dorm and knocking at the door of a room on the ground floor asked the surprised student who opened the door whether I could use the facilities. After I had finished, I could not just impolitely leave and sat down with the two students who shared the room. We got talking. They offered me more beer and by the time I returned to Pampalona two hours had passed and Manfred had left. In the sixteen years we have been teaching together in his leadership seminar for top management at INSEAD, he never forgets to narrate this incident to the participants, a protracted revenge for leaving him stranded in a Cambridge café more than forty years ago.
Harvard was not all study and work. In fact, the ‘life of the mind’, though important, was but a minor part of my existence. I remember the two years at Harvard as a time of hedonic entrancement. This was the mid-1960s, the time of ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’. I didn’t do drugs. My friend John Ross often invited me to the opening and closing night parties of students’ plays staged at Harvard’s Loeb Theatre. John was an aspiring and talented actor who became, to his recurring regret, a psychoanalyst in New York, his professional and material success and the high regard in which he is held being but small compensations for a missed vocation. Harvard’s student theatre company produced some fine actors: Tommy Lee Jones had graduated a year earlier, John Lithgow, who was in my section in Erikson’s course, was another who went on to have a distinguished career in Hollywood movies and Broadway plays. John would have liked to be one of them.
At these parties, I always hid my affiliation to the Harvard Business School and highlighted the one to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences instead. The Business and Law Schools were looked down upon as the domain of the ‘squares’ and no self-respecting female student who aspired to be a part of the counter-culture would have dated its denizens. The ‘squares’ dressed in coats, button-down shirts and ties, while those identifying themselves as belonging to the counter-culture wore blue jeans. These were not the designer jeans of today but faded, sometimes dirty, patched bell-bottoms. Hair worn long, brightly coloured shirts, fringed vests and handmade sandals were some of the other counter-culture accoutrements. At the parties, we listened to the songs of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, danced to the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the beat of rock ’n roll. My memory of myself is of someone who never completely identified with the counter-culture of my friends. I liked the Beatles but was more enthusiastic about the jazz of Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan. I did own one orange-coloured corduroy jacket with wide lapels but otherwise wore clothes that were neither square nor outrageously ‘hip’. I wore long hair but shunned facial fleece. It was the time of the ‘sexual revolution’ but I never went overboard. My sexual reserve was more out of shyness in approaching women than it was an outcome of moral conviction.
The mid-1960s were also a time of political ferment on American university campuses. Nuclear uncertainties and opposition to the Vietnam War had burgeoned into a radical peace movement. Ripples of the Vietnam War were felt in as unlikely a place as Erikson’s course. Every young male in America had to register for the draft. Once registered, he became eligible to serve in Vietnam. Students received a deferment but if a student’s grade point average dropped below 2.0, that is, a C, he could lose his deferment status. The grade of a student in our course largely depended on the essay he wrote at its end. The respective section men graded the essays and Erikson then forwarded the grades to Harvard’s examinations office. In one of our last luncheon meetings, one of the section men, Richard Sennett, who later became a well-known sociologist, insisted that he would not give any of his students a grade less than a B. A graduating student became eligible for the draft if he did not go on to enrol in a graduate school which required a minimum grade point average for its admission purposes. ‘I will not be responsible for someone dying in Vietnam just because my grade made a difference to whether he was drafted in the army or not,’ Dick said somewhat grandly.
Erikson was reluctant to let extra-academic considerations dictate the evaluation of academic performance but all of us enthusiastically supported Dick and Erikson agreed to go along with the consensus of his assistants. As a protest against the Vietnam War, this was ludicrous. As was my feeling of self-satisfaction that I had struck a blow against US imperialism in Southeast Asia which was
more than listening and contributing to anti-war rhetoric over cold mugs of beer in the comfort of Cambridge’s taverns. A couple of years later, when I was back in India, the gathering unrest led to massive student protests across the US which then spread over to Europe.
The second focus of student unrest, American race relations, had more of a personal impact than the Vietnam War. This was the time of Martin Luther King, Jr and the civil rights movement. The culmination of King’s non-violent protest, though, was marked by the March on Washington in 1963. By 1965, the emphasis of the civil rights movement was shifting to the theme of self-respect and Black Pride, represented by Huey Newton and the Black Panthers who did not believe in non-violence. As a bastion of liberal thought, Harvard’s students and faculty were in the forefront of the battle against racial discrimination. Some went down to the South, to Mississippi and Georgia, to take part in the marches and demonstrations organized by civil rights groups. In Cambridge, among my friends, going to a jazz club in the Roxbury area of Boston where most blacks lived (they were called negroes then) was an event one boasted of the next morning, not only because it was a declaration of solidarity with the blacks but also of courage in venturing into dangerous territory where whites risked verbal and, occasionally, physical assault. The few black students on the campus, unimpressed by this racial tourism, generally kept to themselves. They were fawned over by liberal white students who paid flattering attention to their views on American society and took care not to contradict them. A claim of friendship with a black was a highly prized credential of one’s liberal convictions. At the same time, though, the whites were convinced that the few black students and faculty members were intellectually inferior to their white peers and were at Harvard solely because of the university’s affirmative action policies. Aware of the liberal ambivalence, the American black students defiantly closed ranks and it was only the African students who easily crossed the racial divide. I was a brown Indian, neither white nor black, and although I strongly leaned towards an identification with the latter, I felt more comfortable with the former where the talk was not always of race relations, of white oppressors and black victims.