The Indian Jungle

For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as Western. Although the terroirs of psychoanalysis in South America, France, Italy, England, the United States, and so on have important differences, they all share a strong family resemblance which distinguishes them clearly from the cultural imaginations of Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other non-Western terroirs. Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, and gender often remain unexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they are universally valid. Thus, ideas that are historically and culturally only true of and limited to modern Western, specifically European and North American middle-class experience, have been incorporated unquestioningly into psychoanalytic thought. In the intellectual climate of our times, with the rise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with the advent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendence of psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted. Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginations of non-Western civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethink some of its theories of the human psyche, extending these to cover a fuller range of human experience. These cultural imaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from a universal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains aware of but is not limited by its origins in the modern West. This book of essays aims to be a step in that journey, of altering the self-perception of psychoanalysis from 'one size fits all' into a more nuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by cultural particularities. The perfect book for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, cultural psychologists, anthropologists, students of South Asian, cultural, and post-colonial studies, and anyone interested in the current and possible future shape of psychoanalytic thought.

Sudhir Kakar is an Indian psychoanalyst and writer. He has been a lecturer and visiting professor at Harvard University, visiting professor at the universities of Chicago, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, and Vienna, fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton, Berlin, and Cologne, and is on the board of the Freud Archives. His many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, the Tagore-Merck Award, the Lotte Köhler Prize for Psychoanalytic Developmental, Cultural and Social Psychology, the Distinguished Service Award of the Indo-American Psychiatric Association, India's Bhabha, Nehru, and ICSSR National Fellowships, Germany's Goethe Medal, McArthur Research Fellowship, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country's highest civilian honor. As 'the psychoanalyst of civilizations,' the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur listed Kakar in 2005 as one of the world's twenty-five major thinkers. Kakar is the author of fourteen books of non-fiction and six novels. His books have been translated into twenty languages around the world. Learn more at his website: www.sudhirkakar.com.