by Sudhir Kakar
Was my analysis destined to fail because we were both embedded in our cultural identities? And now comes the surprise. As an analyst, de Boor was very good—sensitive, insightful, patient. As my analysis progressed, I discovered that my feelings of estrangement that had given rise to questions on cultural differences became fewer and fewer. What was happening? Was the cultural part of my self becoming less salient as the analysis touched ever ‘deeper’ layers of the self, as many psychoanalysts have claimed? I would say yes, but only partially. I believe what I did, and what most patients do, was to enthusiastically, if unconsciously, acculturate to the analyst’s culture—in my case, both to his broader Western, north European culture and to his particular Freudian psychoanalytic culture.
My intense need to be ‘understood’ by the analyst, a need I shared with every patient, gave birth to an unconscious force that made me underplay those cultural parts of my self that I believed would be too foreign to my analyst’s experience. Now, we know that every form of therapy is also an enculturation. As the psychoanalyst R.T. Fancher remarks:4
By the questions we ask, the things we empathize with, the themes we pick for our comment, the ways we conduct ourselves toward the patient, the language we use—by all these and a host of other ways, we communicate to the patient our notions of what is ‘normal’ and normative. Our interpretations of the origins of a patient’s issues reveal in pure form our assumptions of what causes what, what is problematic about life, where the patient did not get what s/he needed, what should have been otherwise.
The oft-repeated adage that patients in therapy with a Freudian analyst have only Freudian dreams, those in a Jungian analysis have only Jungian dreams (and, I imagine, those in behavioural therapy have none or rather forget all their dreams) bears witness to this enculturation.
As a patient in the throes of what psychoanalysis calls ‘transference love’, I was exquisitely attuned to the cues to my analyst’s values, beliefs and vision of the fulfilled life, which even the most non-intrusive of analysts cannot help but scatter during the therapeutic process. I was quick to pick up these cues that unconsciously shaped my reactions and responses accordingly, with their overriding goal to please and be pleasing in the eyes of the beloved analyst. What I sought most was closeness to the analyst, including the sharing of his culturally shaped interests, attitudes and beliefs. This intense need to be close and to be understood, paradoxically by removing parts of the self from the analytic arena of understanding, was epitomized by the fact that I soon started dreaming in German, the language of my analyst, something I have not done before or after my analysis.
One consequence of my heightened awareness of the cultural parts of self and identity was to read the existing literature on childhood in India and then, as a guest lecturer, offer a seminar at the Freud Institute on the subject. As I should have expected, the interest in the subject was low. There were only three people who registered for the seminar, two fellow candidates who came out of friendship and one of our teachers who was probably moved by compassion. Nevertheless, this seminar, along with reflections on my own childhood during the analysis, was invaluable since it formed the starting point of a book, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, on which I worked for the next five years. The book marked the beginnings of what was to become a lifelong search for the wellsprings of Indian identity and how it compared or contrasted with identity development in Western societies.
These are, of course, retrospective reflections. Recently, when my dear friend Pamela, on learning that I was writing my memoirs, sent me a bunch of my old letters to her, I was curious to know how I had felt about the psychoanalytic training at the time I was going through it.
How do I feel otherwise? Quieter, with a tinge of melancholy, not cultivated this time. Also very busy with the analytical institute where the semester is going on and I have to be in seminars till late at night. They accept me more and even as a non-psychiatrist I shall probably get the ‘dispensation’ of being admitted as a full member of the [German Psychoanalytic] Society after I finish. In any case, the learning has been tremendous although at the moment I do not know what it actually means to and for me (except for the greater temptation of slipping into [psychoanalytic] jargon . . .)
In another letter, during an emotionally difficult period on the couch: ‘Becoming the “wise old man” seems to be much more difficult than I thought it would be.’
At another place in the correspondence, I peer into the crystal ball of my future work in the field:
Learning to postpone desires is of course not easy and sometimes I do feel that becoming an analyst is real long range planning for my old age, the only profession where age is equated with wisdom, seen positively. A precocious, ‘pathological’ preoccupation with the last stage [of life]? I have started enjoying the clinical and theoretical seminars and the work with groups, getting acquainted with colleagues and wonder if the analytical identity is the professional identity I have looked for for so long. If so, I somehow feel that even as an analyst I would be on the ‘border’, which seems to be a historical and personal fate. (underlined in original)
Here I was foreseeing my professional writing life being on the overlapping boundaries of the established fields of psychoanalysis, religion and anthropology. It also meant, as Erikson has observed in the context of his own work, of being tempted to avoid the disciplines necessary for any one field, and of being enamoured of the aesthetic order of things while avoiding their methodological implications.5
I had completed the major part of my training that included attending a number of seminars on psychoanalytic theory and practice, and had passed the oral examinations which qualified me to treat patients in psychoanalysis under supervision by a senior analyst when disaster struck. Knut Hebert had decided that one part of futures research would include setting up a data bank from which texts on any particular subject could be retrieved with the help of the computer. The only problem was that the technologies for his ambitious venture, the optical scanning of texts and their retrieval, were in their infancy. This was the 1970s when computers were bulky machines and data was still punched in on cards. IBM had just begun to test the needed technologies and Hebert had signed up Contest as one of their first (if not the very first) customers in Germany. What Hebert wanted to achieve was visionary but not yet economically feasible. The marvels of googling lay decades into the future. Contest began haemorrhaging money at an alarming rate as technological glitches bedevilled the project. My own role changed from providing psychoanalytic inputs to selecting and feeding relevant futuristic texts into the system. I became a reader of all kinds of texts—books, newspaper and magazine articles, essays in serious journals—which could conceivably influence trends in business and society. I would then either prepare summaries or mark selected passages in the documents that were to be fed into the machines. The machines, their programs not yet fine-tuned, behaved erratically, often showing reluctance to either digest the feed or to vomit it out when commanded to do so at the press of a button. Contest teetered on the verge of bankruptcy as its corporate clients refused to fund futures research further. There was panic in the firm. Hebert’s drinking bouts now began with breakfast and were marked by angry outbursts and recriminations rather than the genial charm that had always been a part of our companionable tippling earlier. In order to save the firm, he was deposed as its head in an internal coup and Contest decided to go back to its traditional area of expertise in market research. I was jobless.
Our son Rahul had been born three months earlier, in December1973, and to be unemployed with a wife and a newborn in a foreign country was not a pleasing prospect. After some agonizing (‘Should I try for an academic appointment in the US? Pursue the half offer of a position at a centre for applied psychoanalytic studies in Chicago?’), we decided to return to India where I would set up a psychotherapy practice in Delhi. Since the awareness of psychoanalysis as a mode of therapy was virtually
non-existent in India and I now had family responsibilities, I would need to arrange a basic living wage for at least a year till my practice, I hoped, would get off the ground. I applied to the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) for a fellowship and while I waited for their response, which took a few months, I went off to Vienna as a visiting professor at the University of Economics.
Michael Hofmann, who had been a close friend since my student days in Mannheim, was the one who arranged this appointment. He had paid his academic dues by appearing to subscribe to the absurdities of the Ganzheitslehre of his professor in Mannheim as his assistant for several years while mocking it, and him, in private. He now had a Lehrstuhl, an institute of his own, on organizational leadership at the university. Michael was also returning a favour since I had arranged for his one-year study with Zaleznik at the Harvard Business School, from which he had returned as an enthusiastic proponent of the psychoanalytic approach to leadership studies. Michael’s promising career ended tragically when a few years later, in the late 1970s, in the middle of a talk to a large group of Austrian businessmen, he had a nervous breakdown and started talking incoherently. He went into a serious depression which proved intractable and has institutionalized him as an inpatient in a halfway facility ever since. Manfred and I, his old friends, made many efforts to see him, but he refused to meet us. And although my tendency is to view the human unconscious as a powerful genie who will mostly serve its master well rather than being a dangerous adversary, an even-tempered elephant rather than the wild, bucking horse of Freud’s metaphor, one cannot deny that the unconscious is also home to monsters that may overwhelm the most brilliant of minds and successful of men. Generally, the unconscious is on our side, even when the conscious mind is ignorant or in denial of what our side is. In cases like Michael’s, though, it is hard to sustain the belief in the unconscious as solely a fount of wisdom. In any event, the unconscious demands respect, even awe, not only for its uncanny knowledge but also for its terrible power.
When I reread my letters to Pamela, the contentment of those months in Vienna is evident.
How happy I was to get your letter after a long time! The remoteness in mine was perhaps due to a kind of contentment in the present, without the intrusions of past and future, which has been a new experience for me and which I was handling gingerly, as if it was something fragile. Defensively, of course, it had to do with the ending of the analysis and the repression once again of so many emotions connected with the searches made on the couch.
In part, the ease had to do with the relief from the stress of the last few months: ‘My work load, as befitting academia, is very light. I teach 2 seminars, one once a week and one once a fortnight and the rest of the time is at my disposal—my planned retirement seems to have started . . .’
I was working, at a leisurely pace but with enormous enjoyment, on two books, The Inner World and my first, later jettisoned, novel that richly deserved this fate. But it was the birth of our child that had brought Apeksha and me closer and was responsible for most of my remembered contentment. Our son’s birth had made subterranean streams of love seep through the cracks in the rocky hillsides that our hearts had become to each other. In another letter to Pamela:
We are all well, days passing with a regularity which is not monotonous but a very contented one . . . I think the son, whose picture is enclosed, and with whom I have fallen in deep love, has released some forces that remain obscure to me . . .
I spend most of my time [at] home, playing with Rahul and working whenever he lets me. Two or three times a week I go out late into a jazz cellar which is just next door to where we live and which has become my ‘Stammcafe’. Of course both of us also go to wine cellars of which, it seems, Vienna has an infinite number.
Rahul, that’s the name of the son, is fine, a ‘smiler’ by nature and, yes, I am getting very attached to him. We have our struggles, too, especially the one at 5.30 in the morning when he is awake and wants to ‘talk’ and play and you know how I am in the mornings. The struggle is still undecided—I lose one and win one, but all in all, the three of us at the moment form a mutual admiration society with myself a little at the periphery of things.
At the beginning of 1975, still mildly euphoric from the birth of our son and the lazy summer and autumn months in Vienna, full of plans for writing and clinical work, we packed our meagre belongings, mostly books and records, to begin a new life in Delhi.
A Shrink in Delhi
1975–90
New Delhi
Barely two months after our return from Vienna, while we were still staying with my grandmother and looking to rent a house in Delhi, my mother died. She had not been keeping well after a stroke suffered ten months earlier. What she died of, though, was a cancer of the stomach that was diagnosed and operated upon too late. She was only fifty-five. I was alone with her on the night she passed away in a private room of the Sawai Man Singh Hospital in Jaipur. My father and sister, who had devotedly nursed her all the days before I arrived in the afternoon from Delhi, had gone back home in the evening for a much-needed rest. It must have been around three in the morning when I awoke on hearing an unfamiliar sound coming from my mother’s bed. It was the staccato sound of her breath leaving the body and the body’s final attempt to keep it from doing so. She was gone before I could summon the night nurse.
We had slowly drifted apart ever since I left home to go to college in Ahmedabad. She did not understand what I wanted from life, and why. And after the first year of my marriage, she was also disappointed in my choice of partner. She and my wife were polite when they met but never took to each other. She was also disappointed that I had shifted my filial sentiments so completely towards my father and that I treated her with patronizing affection, much like my father. She would look hurt when I reacted to her devotion to me with impatience, making me feel both guilty and further irritated. My grief at her death, then, was contaminated by guilt. The surface guilt was at not being with her in Jaipur all the time she was in the hospital. Torn between a dying mother and my responsibility towards my wife and infant son in Delhi, in an unfamiliar environment, I had travelled back and forth between Delhi and Jaipur, resenting the 5-hour trip each way on a ramshackle bus baking from inside at the height of Indian summer. The guilt, of course, went much deeper. It tapped into the universal guilt of a son towards the woman who gives him birth and from whom he separates and whom he, in his mind’s eye, abandons. In my youth, I had chosen her sister, Kamla, as a mother, the recipient of my most intimate confessions, and we were both aware of my betrayal. The guilt is stronger in some Asian cultures such as India (as also Japan) where folk tales and movies emphasize the mother’s self-sacrifice and an inexhaustible devotion to the welfare of the son who has also caused her pain. In her letters to me, my mother had unselfconsciously tapped into this cultural trope; deep down, I, too, was not free of its power.
In the next few weeks, guilt-ridden images of the ‘wounded caretaker’ alternated with earlier ones of the happy, chubby child holding on to the hand of a youthful mother and looking up at her with a love untainted by any trace of ambivalence. I welcomed the bittersweet nostalgia of the latter images even as I fought the pain of the former. For there is no greater pain, as Dante observed, than to remember in present grief, past happiness. Psychoanalytic understanding was of limited help. Perhaps what I needed was the catharsis afforded by something like the Japanese Naikan therapy where a patient spends days removed from his day-to-day life, closeted in a room, dredging up memories, not of conflict, but of all the times when he had felt grateful to the parent for her help, nurture and protection.
These are retrospective reflections, their composure crafted by the passage of years. I see from my two letters to a friend that my reactions at the time were more troubled. On 1 May 1975, I wrote: ‘I had gone to Jaipur where my mother was having an operation. It was a stressful time, with a neurotic attack. I repeated her symptoms of extreme restlessness and fever�
�for about two hours, and once again took my hat off to the power of the Unconscious.’ Three months after her death, I was writing to the same friend:
Things are going on—nothing exciting, a kind of hollow calm precariously balanced on a seething restlessness. It’s the price I pay for all the wanderings of the early years. The feeling of banishment from a lost paradise—certainly related to my mother’s death—has never been so strong as also the absurd wish to regain it somewhere, with someone, in that ultimate ‘encounter’. The intensity is sensed by others, scaring off most potential friends and yet it is a phase I have to go through.
The birth of our son Rahul, and two and a half years later of our daughter Shveta, the resulting transition from being a couple to being a family, served to darn the more obvious holes in a fraying marriage. In a letter to Pamela dated 1 January 1977, I wrote: ‘The daughter is now six months old and is such a lovely smiler. I am looking forward to her being two and also have the apprehension that I may be too seductive a father! Somehow I do seem to see her as the last “great” love of my life.’ That prophecy, as we shall see later, proved to be false.