A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  Other adjustments go to the sinews and bones if not the heart of psychoanalytic theory. The Indian analyst needs to recognize that many psychoanalytic propositions—on what constitutes psychological maturity, gender-appropriate behaviours, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ resolutions of developmental conflicts and complexes, such as the father—son conflict of the Oedipus complex (or rather the way it has been conceptualized in classical psychoanalysis)—that often appear in the garb of universally valid truths, are actually the incorporation of Western middle class experience and values into psychoanalytic theory.2 It was these kind of observations and discrepancies that started me on my life work of mapping the contours of an Indian identity which is not ‘deviant’ just because it does not conform to Western cultural notions about the human psyche that have infiltrated psychoanalysis as well as the discipline of psychology, to masquerade as universal truths.

  There are indeed psychological universals we all share as human beings, but equally there are large parts of our mental life that are cultural, in the sense that they are psychic representations of our society’s culture and social institutions and it is often impossible to separate the universal from the cultural. As the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously quipped on his fieldwork in Java, ‘To be human is to be Javanese.’

  Here, I will take the example of the major male complex of Indian (Hindu) culture which I have called the Ganesha complex, a narrative of ‘maternal enthralment’ that I often encountered among my patients and which also features prominently in the myths of this very popular god. Maternal enthralment refers to the paradoxes in a son’s psychic life: the wish to become independent of the mother together with the dread of separation, incestuous desire (and near-incestuous experiences) coexisting with the terror inspired by assertive female sexuality—abstractions that I’d like to flesh out in fragments from two case histories.

  Let me begin with the first ten minutes of an analytic session with Mohan, a twenty-six-year-old social worker. In this particular session, he began with a fantasy he had while he was travelling in a bus. The fantasy was of a tribe living in a jungle that unclothes its dead and hangs them from trees. Mohan visualized the fresh corpse of a beautiful woman hanging from the branch of a tree. He imagined himself coming at night and having intercourse with the corpse. The fantasy was immediately followed by the recollection of an incident from the previous evening. Mohan was visiting his parents’ home where he had lived till recently when he married and set up his own household. This step was not only personally painful but also unusual for his social milieu where sons normally brought their wives to live in the parental home. His younger sister, with her three-year-old son, was also visiting at the same time. Mohan felt irritated by the anxious attention his mother and grandmother gave the boy. The grandmother kept telling the child not to go and play outside the house, to be careful of venturing too far and so on. On my remarking that perhaps he recognized himself in his nephew, Mohan 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 ten minutes of a session, I would like to unroll Mohan’s conflicts around maternal representations and weave them together with the central maternal configurations of his Hindu-Indian culture.

  Born in a middle class family in a large village near Delhi, Mohan was the eldest of three brothers and two sisters. His memories of growing up, till well into youth, were 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 into it, Mohan, too, often emerges from and retreats into an imagined femininity. In the ‘transference’—the unconscious attitudes from childhood which a patient transfers on to the therapist—the fantasies of being a woman in relation to me are not especially disturbing; neither are the fantasies of being an infant and suckling to my (imagined) exaggeratedly hairy chest.

  Bathed, dressed, combed and caressed by the women, Mohan’s wishes and needs were met by one or other of the women before they were articulated. Food, especially the milk-based sweets, was constantly pressed on him. For a long time during the therapy, whenever a particular session was stressful because of what he considered a lack of maternal empathy in my interventions, Mohan felt compelled to go to a restaurant where he would first gorge himself on sweets before he returned home.

  Besides the omnipresence of women in his inner life, my most striking impression of Mohan’s early memories is their diurnal location in night and their primarily tactile quality. Partly, this has to do with the crowded, public 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 that are an unremarked feature of Western case histories. Sleeping in the heat with little or no clothes next to one of his caretakers, an arm or leg thrown across the maternal body, there was one disturbing memory that stood out. This was of Mohan’s penis erect against the buttocks of his sleeping mother and his reluctance to move away as he struggled against the feelings of shame that she could wake up and notice the forbidden touch. Later, in adolescence, the ‘mothers’ were replaced by visiting female cousins sharing mattresses spread out on the roof, furtive rubbings of bodies and occasional genital contact while other members of the extended family were 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 analysis, Mohan 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 all was well helped Mohan 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 session of the analysis, Mohan talked of an embarrassing sexual compulsion. This 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 had her back to him. If she ever turned to face Mohan, with the knowledge of his desire in her eyes, his erection immediately subsided and he would hurriedly move away. After marriage, too, the edge of his desire was at its sharpest when his wife slept on her side with her back to him. In mounting excitement, Mohan would rub against her buttocks and want to make love when she was not quite awake, his desire reducing precipitately if she became fully awake and wanted to become an enthusiastic partner.

  It is evident from these brief fragments of Mohan’s case history that his desire was closely connected with some of the most inert parts of a woman’s body: hips and buttocks. As in the fantasy of the hanging corpse with which Mohan had intercourse at night, his desire needed the woman to be sexually dead for its fulfilment. The theme of maternal enthralment and its central dilemma for the son on how to maintain an idealized relationship with the mother and the maternal body in the face of male desire and his rock-bottom identity as a man finds various paths in imagination of which Mohan’s solution is only one. Abjuring sexual desire altogether in a celebration of celibacy, a denial of women’s sexuality or the strong wish to be a woman oneself, are some of the other solutions I often encountered in case histories of Indian men. It is important to note that none of these ‘solutions’ are ‘healthy’ or ‘maladaptive’ in themselves but may be judged as one or other only after a careful consideration of the individual’s motivations. That the wish to be a woman has greater access to the consciousness of the Indian man has to be looked at in its cultural context and not evaluated from alien Western standards. The differentiation of human beings into male and female genders is universal, but it is our cultural heritage that further elaborates what it means to b
e, look, think and behave like a woman or a man. This becomes clearer if one thinks of Greek or Roman sculptures which have greatly influenced Western gender representations. Here, male gods are represented by hard, muscled bodies and chests without any fat. One only needs to compare Greek and Roman statuary with sculpted representations of Hindu gods, or the Buddha, where the bodies are softer, suppler and in their hint of breasts, nearer to the female form.

  The visually lesser differentiation between male and female representations in Indian Hindu culture is reinforced by the important, perhaps dominant form of religiosity—Vaishnavism, which not only provides a sanction for man’s feminine strivings but raises these to the level of a religious-spiritual quest. It is a culture where a cultural hero like Mahatma Gandhi can publicly proclaim that he had mentally become a woman, that there is as much reason for a man to wish that he was born a woman as for women to do otherwise, and take for granted that he will strike a responsive chord in his audience. Between a minimum of sexual differentiation that is required to function heterosexually with a modicum of pleasure, and a maximum which cuts off any sense of empathy and emotional contact with the other sex, which is then experienced as a different species altogether, there is a whole range of positions, each occupied by a culture which insists on calling it the only one that is mature and healthy.

  Similarly, celibacy, which has enjoyed high regard at different times in many cultures may not be ‘natural’ but the efforts to sustain it are worthy of respect for they deal with the spiritual, and thus with the pre-eminently human. Freud himself, who is reputed to have become celibate in his mid-thirties, looked at celibacy in relative terms, maintaining that a sublimation of sexuality varies from person to person: ‘An abstinent artist is hardly conceivable; but an abstinent young savant is certainly no rarity. The latter can, by his self-restraint, liberate forces for his studies; while the former probably finds his artistic achievements powerfully stimulated by his sexual experience.’3

  For me, it was important to note that maternal enthralment was not only a feature of my case histories but constituted one of the dominant narratives of Indian-Hindu culture—that of Devi, the great mother goddess. I should add that maternal enthralment is not an issue in the case of Indian women for whom the mother is not a ‘goddess’ but a much more earthy presence. What one finds often in case histories of middle class women is ‘father hunger’, a hankering for an earlier closeness with the father that was absent during her adolescence when she most needed his admiration for the woman she was becoming and his pride in her intellectual activities that would legitimize their pursuit as a profession.

  Clinical work can only generate hypotheses about the contours of Indian identity; their further testing to advance propositions that can be generalized is best done by testing them in the crucible of the culture’s imagination—its myths, art, fiction, cinema, folklore, proverbs and so on. Maternal enthralment, I found, is indeed ubiquitous in Hindu cultural imagination. In India, at least, a primary task of psychoanalysis, the science of unconscious fantasy and imagination, even ‘the science of illusion’ (as an Indian I would call it ‘Mayalogy’), is to grapple with Mahamaya—The Great Illusion, as the goddess is also called. 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 in some of my writings.4 Here, my interest is to connect Mohan’s tale to the larger cultural story of the goddess as a mother, and especially as the mother of Ganesha and Skanda.

  Ganesha, the remover of obstacles and the god of all beginnings, is perhaps the most adored deity in the Hindu pantheon. Iconically represented as a potbellied toddler with an elephant head and one missing tusk, his image, whether carved in stone, wood or drawn in colour, is everywhere: in temples, homes, shops, roadside stalls, dashboards of taxis and autorickshaws. Ganesha’s younger brother Skanda or Kartikeya, 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.

  Ganesha’s myths comment on one part of Mohan’s inner life while those of Skanda reveal yet another. Ganesha, in many myths, is solely his mother Parvati’s creation. Desirous of 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 Mohan’s fantasies of being feminine, Ganesha too is not only his mother’s boy but contains her very essence. Mohan, even while indubitably male like Skanda, is immersed in a world of mothers which an Indian extended family creates for the child. Skanda, like Mohan, 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. Mohan’s 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 however much he is fed. Like the lean Mohan, the fat god’s sweets are a lifeline to the mother’s breast; his hunger for the mother’s body, in spite of temporary appeasement is ultimately doomed to remain unfulfilled.

  In the dramatization of Mohan’s dilemma in relation to the mother, brought to head by developmental changes that push the boy towards an exploration of the outer world while they give him intimations of his identity as a male, Ganesha and Skanda play the leading roles. In a well-known myth: A mango was floating down the river and Parvati said whichever of the two sons rides around the universe first will get to eat the mango. Skanda quickly mounted his peacock and went around the universe. Ganesha, though, circumambulated his mother and said to her, ‘I have gone around my universe.’ Parvati declared Ganesha the winner and gave him the mango. Skanda was furious when he came back and demanded the mango. But before he could act, Ganesha bit into the mango and broke one of his tusks.

  Skanda and Ganesha are the personifications of the two opposing wishes of the boy when he is three to six years old: a powerful push for independent and autonomous functioning and an equally strong pull towards surrender and re-immersion 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 presence, and one kind of reward—the promise of functioning as an adult, virile man. Going back to the mother, I would view Ganesha’s eating of the mango as a return to and feeding at her breast—the analogy between the mango and the breast is a matter of common awareness in Tamil Nadu. It results in a broken tusk, the loss of potential masculinity, as a consequence.

  For Mohan, the Ganesha position was often longed for and sometimes returned to in fantasy. It did not, however, present an enduring solution to the problem of maintaining phallic desire in the face of an overwhelming inner presence of the Great Mother. Enter Skanda. After he killed the demon Taraka who had been terrorizing the gods, the goddess was indulgent towards 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. Upon their complaining to the goddess, she decided she would assume the form of whichever 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.

  Mohan, too, we saw, became ‘passionless’ whenever the motherly woman he fancied in the bus turned to face him. But instead of celibacy, he tried to hold on to sexual desire by killing the sexual part of the mother, deadening the lower portion of her trunk that threatened him with impotence. Furthermore, Mohan did not experience the imagined sexual overpoweringness of the mother—in face of which the child feels hopelessly inadequate, with fears of being engulfed and swallowed by her dark depth—in the form of clear-cut fantasies but
in a recurrent nightmare from which he woke up screaming. Like Mohan’s gentle and somewhat withdrawn father who was the only one who could help in dissipating the impact of the nightmare, the god Shiva often enters the myths of the Devi as a quiet figure who can contain the great mother’s power and energy.

  The early experience of the father as an ally and a protector rather than as a rival was a feature of the memories of many men. Here, I am reminded of Karan, a forty-year-old lecturer in a Delhi college whose analysis brought the boy’s need for what I have called the ‘Oedipal alliance’ into sharp focus. ‘Oedipal alliance’ refers to the deeply buried and unfulfilled need of many male patients for the firm support, guidance and emotional availability of the father who is needed by the little boy at the ‘Oedipal’ stage of life (roughly between three and six years) so that he can separate and free himself from an overwhelming, omnipresent, and especially the sexually threatening, mother in the depths of his psyche. I do not want to describe the details of Karan’s case history, but would only like to mention a period in the analysis when the early memories of an idealized mother–son world, of being someone ‘special’ and a part of the mother’s ‘perfection’, gave way to disturbing recollections of near-incestuous experiences when he was in his teens. The re-emergence of these memories in which the mother was not a passive recipient of the boy’s sexual attention but an active participant was accompanied by intense anxiety and a succession of dreams in which Karan seemed to have embarked on a desperate search for the Oedipal alliance with various father images. In one session, Karan began with a slip of the tongue, ‘I had an erotic mother,’ instead of ‘I had an erotic dream,’ before coming to the dream image: ‘I am lying on my bed when I see my mother approaching. She is almost naked and has a gloating expression on her face. I am very scared but then I see you [the analyst] sitting in one corner of the room with an erect penis next to your chair that rises from the floor and reaches the ceiling. I hold the penis and feel safe.’ In my own associations to the dream as I listened to Karan, I was reminded of a mythological motif, depicted in some temples, in which a boy holds fast to his father’s penis to escape Yama, the god of death and the harbinger of the extinction of self. In Karan’s case, of course, the god of death was a (mother) goddess.