A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  Not that conflict between father and son is absent in Indian imagination. In Indian myths and many case histories, the son’s rivalry with the father, a central motif in Western case histories and literature, is not so much of Oedipus, where the power of the myth derives from the son’s guilt over an unconscious parricide—Oedipus unknowingly killing his father Laius and marrying his mother Jocasta. The Indian context, on the other hand, stresses the generational envy of the father and is charged with the fear of filicide and with the son’s castration, by self or the father, as a solution to father–son competition for the mother. Shiva’s beheading of Ganesha who on the express wish of his mother stood guard at her private chambers while she bathed, and the replacement of his head by that of an elephant by a contrite father, or the legends of Bhishma and Puru, both of whom renounced sexual functioning in order to keep the affections of their fathers intact, are some of the better known illustrations of the other part of the Ganesha complex, the dominant narrative of the male self in Hindu India.

  A further difficulty to the practice of psychoanalysis in Delhi was the incompatibility of the psychoanalytic view of the person and the Indian view in which many of my patients were steeped. Psychoanalysis, we know, is informed by a vision of human experience that emphasizes man’s individuality and his self-contained psyche. In the psychoanalytic vision, each of us lives in our own subjective world, pursuing pleasures and private fantasies, constructing a life and a fate that will vanish when our time is over. This view emphasizes the desirability of reflective awareness of one’s inner states, an insistence that our psyches harbour deeper secrets than we care to confess, the existence of an objective reality that can be known, and an essential complexity and tragedy of life whereby many wishes are fated to remain unfulfilled. The assumptions underlying psychoanalysis are also the highest values of modern individualism. Traditional Indian values, on the other hand, besides denying the finiteness of life, stress that faith and surrender to a power beyond the individual are better than individual effort and struggle, that the source of human strengths lies in a harmonious integration with one’s group and that belonging to a community is the fundamental need of man. They assert that only if a man truly belongs to such a community, naturally and unselfconsciously, can he lead a full, spontaneous life.

  Yet, in spite of the cultural highlighting of the interpersonal and the trans-personal, I found many of my traditional Indian patients more individual in their unconscious than they initially realized. Similarly, in spite of a Western cultural emphasis on autonomous individuality, my European and American patients were more relational than they realized. Individual and relational are complementary ways of looking at the organization of mental life and how we experience ourselves in the world; although a culture may, over a period of time, stress the importance of one or the other in its vision of the fulfilled human life and thus shape a person’s conscious experience of the self in predominantly either the individual or the relational mode. It is undeniable that Indians are very relational, with the family and community (including the family of divinities) playing a central role in their experience of the self. It is less evident that at least in their fantasy life, at the level of imagination, Indians are capable of conceiving and desiring a self free of all attachments and relationships.

  In practice, a frequent problem arose when I thought the psychotherapy was going well and the client was well on the road to a modicum of psychological autonomy, and then family members would come to me and complain, ‘What are you doing to my son/ daughter? S/he is becoming independent of us. S/he wants to make her/his own choices now, thinks s/he knows what is best for her/him and doesn’t listen to us.’ I vividly remember the patriarch of a large, extended business family, clad in suit and tie, but with the traditional turban as his headgear, walk into my office one day to discuss the progress in the therapy of his 21-year-old granddaughter who had become clinically depressed as the date for her arranged marriage with the scion of another rich family approached. Sitting across my desk with both his palms resting on the silver handle of a walking stick, he could barely hide his disappointment in me, ‘She may be better, doctor, but we are much worse.’ The families were baffled that the psychoanalytic ideal is to increase the individual’s range of choices and not her integration with wishes of the family.

  With so much questioning of the flesh and bones of psychoanalysis, or indeed of Western psychotherapy, a Western colleague may ask, what remains of the Freudian body? Its most important parts, I would answer. I completely subscribe to the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis: the importance of the unconscious part of the mind in our thought and actions, the vital significance of early childhood experiences for later life, the importance of Eros in human motivation, the dynamic interplay, including conflict, between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, and the vital import of transference and counter-transference in the therapist–patient relationship. In fact, developments in the neurosciences and experimental psychology in the last two decades are validating many of the Freudian postulates while, of course, rejecting some others as untenable. These developments go even further in giving the unconscious a much larger role in our life than Freud ever did. The unconscious may be more like an elephant which you can’t really control and which is mostly good-natured. It is not the headstrong horse of Freudian imagery which can be controlled with difficulty by the rider, the conscious part of the mind. The elephant is much stronger than the mahout and goes where it will though the mahout can nudge it in certain directions. There is certainly no point in getting into a fight with the elephant, a fight the mahout is sure to lose. The neurosciences have also shown the vital importance of early childhood experiences in forming the neuronal pathways, the software of the brain. Personally, I agree with Erich Kandel, the 2000 Nobel Laureate for Medicine, that psychoanalysis is still the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind. And this in spite of my increasing interest in Jung (who I find wonderfully wise) and in Yoga psychology, both of which present an intriguing picture of a self that is at the junction of the body and the universe, like a television set that is also receiving signals from the cosmos and not only from the neurons firing in the brain. Both systems, alas, also appear somewhat bloodless to me, without the earthy ‘mud’ that is integral to my attraction for psychoanalysis.

  I have also been asked about the loneliness of being a psychoanalyst in Delhi at a time when there were no other colleagues with whom I could discuss my cases, or my ideas on Indian psychology. In one sense, I was lucky that there was no psychoanalytic institute in Delhi. I could develop my ideas without fear of deviation from the Freudian canon, which would have otherwise attracted censure from the more orthodox members of my guild. The downside of having no colleagues was that I missed the give and take of discussion and that my imagination was bounded only by the discipline I could provide from within myself. My speculations were unchecked at the time they were being formulated. They could be corrected, toned down or expanded only when they were published.

  I guess I was lucky that through referrals from an analyst in Bombay and from colleagues in the US who were contacted by Indians living there for recommending a therapist for relatives in Delhi, I had three patients in psychoanalysis and two in psychotherapy (‘one of them very rich,’ as I wrote to a friend, ‘who pays for the other four!’) within the first six months of my arrival and did not have to depend on occasional consultations with possessed patients that were so bad for my professional morale. At a fee of twenty rupees per session, I needed to supplement the meagre amount I earned from clinical practice by a monthly salary from some kind of academic appointment. This came through the courtesy of the ICSSR in the form of a senior fellowship.

  My fellowship from the ICSSR was for one year and gave me one thousand five hundred rupees a month from which, in my abundant optimism, I rented a house in Vasant Vihar, one of Delhi’s upscale residential areas. The rent was one thousand one hundred rupees a month
, leaving us four hundred rupees for living expenses. The lack of funds was addressed in the very first month when an old colleague from my IIM days invited me to join him in a consultancy assignment for a large organization in Bombay. I had thus bought myself six months more to establish a psychotherapy practice which would, since the rent was taken care of by the fellowship, literally put food on the table, not to speak of the wages for the cook and the ayah for the baby, both of which were considered part of a ‘normal’ household in our social Umwelt. Delhi, of course, had a strong family net to hold us financially if I stumbled: Kamla, who had left Ahmedabad to join the Indian office of the Ford Foundation, my grandmother and, in nearby Jaipur, my parents.

  In Academia and the World

  1975–2000

  New Delhi

  A condition of my fellowship was that I should be affiliated to an academic institution. I chose the Centre for the Study of Social Systems at the nearby Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of India’s most prestigious postgraduate universities, which gave me a cautious welcome. My hope was that I would be able to join its faculty at the end of the fellowship and thus combine an academic career with part-time clinical practice. Given the Indian political situation of the time and its effect on academia, the first goal was unrealistic.

  This was the time when after the split in the ruling Congress Party in 1969, the prime minister Indira Gandhi was consolidating her position on the left side of the political spectrum. Internationally, this involved closer ties with the Soviet Union while nationally the old catchphrase of ‘socialist pattern of society’ was sought to be filled with vigorous new content. Established at the time of the split, JNU’s avowed object was to promote Nehru’s dream of fostering a ‘scientific temper’ in India. In liberal arts and social sciences, ‘scientific’ was translated as Marxist and under the watchful eyes of Nurul Hasan, minister of education in Indira Gandhi’s government, and Moonis Raza, the rector of the fledgling university, both sworn Marxists, JNU became a bastion of leftist thought which it has remained till today.

  In the hard-core Indian Marxism of that era, quite different from the neo- or post-Marxism of the Frankfurt School with which I was familiar, psychology was a ‘bourgeois, pseudo-science’ that did not deserve a centre at the university. JNU had some brilliant scholars; its School of Historical Studies, for instance, boasted of some of the finest historians in India. In general, though, the recruitment to JNU’s faculty seemed to be guided as much by requirements of ideological purity as academic excellence. My having been a lecturer at Harvard was bad enough but a research appointment at Harvard Business School, the intellectual citadel of international capitalism, and a previous faculty position at IIM, Ahmedabad, Harvard Business School’s and thus international capitalism’s Indian outpost, were not credentials with which my future colleagues felt comfortable. The situation had not changed a decade later when the vice-chancellor of JNU asked if I would be interested in joining the faculty of the Centre for the Study of Social Systems. I expressed my interest but a few days later he regretfully informed me that a couple of senior faculty members were opposed to my appointment; I would have polluted the Ganges that issues from Marx’s beard.

  In JNU of the 1970s, liberals, which really means ‘soft’ leftists and among whom I counted myself, were rare and were mostly found among the powerless junior faculty. They did not share the view of their seniors that situated Karl and Sigmund in opposing enemy camps but saw psychoanalysis more as an ally in the ‘liberation of consciousness’ in the Indian context. Generally, though, psychology was seen as an appendage of sociology, not only in JNU, but in most other Indian universities where the only kind of psychology that was considered ‘scientific’ was an a-cultural, anti-introspective behaviourism. I remember that once while talking to an audience of psychology students in a Delhi college I poked gentle fun at behavioural psychology by telling the story of two of its practitioners asking each other anxiously after they had made love, ‘How was it for me?’, the laughter was uneasy. I had to make up for my faux pas by immediately telling the joke about the encounter between two psychoanalysts!

  Yet even at JNU, where I ran a self-experience group in which students talked about their lives and emotions and were exposed to personal reactions by others in the group, the hunger to know more about oneself as a person with a life history and in the context of one’s culture and society was left unsatisfied by the Marxist exegesis of India’s social realities. Among the faculty, it was amusing to see how people who passionately advanced universalistic social theories were quite unaware of their own individual and cultural conditioning. Thus the head of an academic centre who brilliantly analysed the backward and feudal nature of Indian society in the classroom had no qualms about expecting one of his doctoral students to deposit his cheques in the bank, shop for vegetables or do other chores in the guru’s household. The Indian eye’s hierarchical vision had deeper roots than newly planted ideologies of egalitarianism.

  Just before my fellowship ended and before I could become seriously concerned about my financial future, the director of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, then one of the five premier institutions of technical and scientific education in the country, contacted me to ask whether I would be interested in joining the IIT as its head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. The IIT wanted to start a master’s programme in industrial management and the director felt that with my IIM background I would be the right person to get the new programme off the ground. I had no other choice but to accept what to others appeared a coveted appointment although I was dismayed that fate seemed to be pulling me back to my discarded professional identities.

  Humanities at the IIT led a second-class existence where the engineering faculty’s conviction that it was in the forefront of India’s efforts to join the rank of industrialized countries was confirmed by the Nehruvian ethos of the surrounding society. Because of my engineering degree, I personally escaped the condescension, even disdain, with which the concerns of my literature and social science colleagues were addressed by the administration. Their morale was low and their interest in the courses they were required to teach, perfunctory. Except for two professors who were vying for the favours of a woman teacher and thus came punctually to the department, even staying overtime if the object of their desire tarried in going back home to the clamour of her joint-family life, most of the others preferred the convivial atmosphere of the canteen and its cups of tea than irksome classrooms or, worse, the library. The only carrot I could hold out to recalcitrant colleagues was the possibility of participating in the new, prestigious programme of management studies. This could also lead to that hotly coveted ‘foreign trip’, the great motivator for academics in an era where travel abroad to attend conferences was as strictly rationed as the release of precious foreign exchange by the Reserve Bank of India.

  My stint at IIT coincided with one of the most eventful political developments of post-independence India. A few months before I joined, Indira Gandhi had declared a state of emergency in June 1975, suspending civil rights and assuming dictatorial powers. Her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, became the hated face of the new dispensation as censorship was imposed on the media and suspected opponents were jailed. Indira Gandhi might have been a reluctant dictator but her son Sanjay was not. He aroused a visceral dislike among even the gentlest of my friends. The day he died in an air crash a couple of years after the Emergency ended, I was with Ravi Dayal, my editor and publisher of the Indian branch of Oxford University Press. Oxford-educated Ravi, dressed in his trademark khadi kurta and blue jeans and with a bidi between his lips, was a sharp-witted and courteous man. As his assistant brought in the news, we both looked at each other with appropriate countenances of consternation. But, then, instantly realizing that we were not strangers but friends, we broke into smiles. It was a spontaneous welling up of relief shared by many Indians even when it was an unpardonable reaction in face of the death of a fellow human being.
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br />   During the Emergency, rumours of the son’s mysterious hold on the mother were the stuff of many conversations. The New York Times correspondent in Delhi reported that one evening at the dining table Sanjay had slapped his mother, a story, that like many others, later turned out to be false. In the absence of credible information, rumours—which impart an adrenalin-like ‘rush of life’, making people feel more alive than in normal, everyday life—became the normal currency of information, not only in the wider polity but also in all its institutions, including IIT. The faculty was uneasy as less and less information seeped through the administration, leaving me more and more frustrated.

  The dictatorial mindset given birth by the Emergency percolated fast through all institutions of the state as minor functionaries began to throw their weight around in imitation of their superiors. Circulars and memos from various arms of IIT’s bureaucracy asking me to supply details, from the number of steel cupboards in the department’s office to the number of classes a faculty member missed, ‘and the reasons thereof’, inundated me. The Emergency certainly sent India’s bloated bureaucracy into overdrive. The babus came to their offices on time and even worked for a change. I no longer heard such answers as from a clerk in the electricity department who I had accused of not doing his job by leaving a long-standing complaint unattended, ‘It is not my job, I only work here.’ The increase in efficiency was accompanied by a disproportionate increase in haughtiness. The Emergency revealed the lowly government official’s authoritarian face where his guiding dharma of ‘kiss the ass above, kick the one below’ no longer needed to be masked by civility.