Freud's India

Description

The sharp contrast between cultures with a monotheistic paternal deity and those with pluralistic maternal deities is a theme of abiding interest in religious studies. Attempts to understand the implications of these two vast organizing principles for religious life lead to an overwhelmingly diverse set of facts and their meanings. In Freud's India, the companion volume to Freud's Mahābhārata, Alf Hiltebeitel takes up this enormously engaging question, focusing on the thinking of two spokespeople for the inner life of their cultures— Sigmund Freud and Girindrasekhar Bose. Hiltebeitel examines the attempts of these two men to communicate with and understand each other and these issues in the heated context of emotionally divisive allegiances. The book is elegant in its nuanced attention to these two thinkers and its tightly controlled exploration of what their interactions reveal about their contributions and limitations as representatives of the psychology and religion of their respective cultures. Anxieties about mothers, says Hiltebeitel, separate Eastern from Western imaginations. They separate Freud from Bose, and they separate Hindu foundational texts from the foundational texts of Judaism.

About the Author
Alf Hiltebeitel is Professor of Religion at George Washington University. He works mainly on the two Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and Ramayana, and on the south Indian Draupadi cult, which worships the Mahabharata's leading heroine as the Goddess. He is a historian of religions who studies Hinduism with longstanding interests in Sigmund Freud and in the comparative study of Judaism.

Reviews

"Spectacularly impressive. You can dip into these amazing volumes and find all manner of marvelous things—not only the valuable information about Freud, Bose, goddesses, and the Mahābhārata, but Hiltebeitel's highly creative ideas about them." - Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago
"These volumes comprise the magnum opus of a distinguished historian of religions. It lovingly orbits around two cultural oeuvres of roughly the same length: the great Hindu epic of the Mahābhārata and the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. It is as if Hiltebeitel has treated the Mahābhārata as one immense psychoanalytic exploration of the maternal polytheisms of Indian Hindu culture and the Collected Works as an unintended but appropriate mythology of Western civilization and its male monotheisms. Behind this astonishing comparison haunts the question: 'Can psychoanalytic methods work in different ontological structures? Can they work here, for example, in the panpsychic nondualism of the Bengali founder of Indian psychoanalysis Girindrasekhar Bose?' The answer appears to be: 'Yes, they can, uncannily so. And the analysis goes both ways.'" - Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions
"This fascinating study gives nuanced attention to a specific historical focus-the Freud/Bose letters-to open up a profound and comprehensive exploration of the place of the feminine in Hindu myth and thought and the lack of recognition of the feminine in Freud and in most of western thought." - Marshall Alcorn, author of Resistance to Learning

Table of contents

Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Preface
1. Introduction: Beginnings of Tension and Drama in the Freud-Bose Correspondence
2. Restoration of the Bose-Freud Correspondence: Light Shed on its First Two Phases from Freud's 1923-37 Correspondence with Romain Rolland, and a Missed Chance to Compare Views on the Preoedipal
3. Unraveling of the Bose-Freud Correspondence, with More Light Shed from the Freud-Rolland Correspondence and from Freud's 1933-34 Work with H. D.
4. Opposite Wishes
5. Freud, Bose, and the 'Maternal Deity'
6. The Oedipus Mother
7. The Party, the Guests, and Why Visnu Ananta-Deva
8. Thinking Goddesses, Mothers, Brothers, and Snakes with Freud and Bose
9. The Oceanic Goddess in the Gift to Freud
Bibliography