Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Religion

Description

As an 18-year-old, Sudhir Kakar chanced upon one of Freud’s cultural texts, a close reading of which laid the foundation for an interest in psychology, a passion he pursued much later. Today, Kakar is an internationally renowned psychoanalyst, novelist, and a reputed scholar of cultural psychology and psychology of religion. His work, spanning almost three decades, converges multiple disciplines and represents the breakthrough in Indian social thought and indigenous knowledge systems, something anthropologists and historians of religions have been advocating for many years.   In this collection of essays, noted scholars who have worked with Kakar celebrate the three streams of psychoanalysis, culture, and religion, and their confluence in Kakar’s work as a kind of post-Independence renaissance of the Indian mind—an apt tribute to one of the most influential thinkers of the twenty-first century.  

Table of contents

Foreword by Anurag Mishra

Introduction by Dinesh Sharma

Asian Explorers of Psyche and Culture: Sudhir Kakar and His Contemporaries
Robert A. LeVine                    

When a Lingam Is Not Just a Good Cigar
Wendy Doniger

An Island in Mind: Aldous Huxley and the Neurotheologian
Jeffrey J. Kripal

Reinterpreting Sri Aurobindo: An Essay on Psychology and Religion in India
Dinesh Sharma

Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Religious Ecstasy
June McDaniel

Mysticism and the Teacher-student (Guru-shishya) Relationship: The Approaches of Patanjali, Jung, and Kakar
Harold Coward

The Mother-son Symbiotic Dyad and the Positioning of the Oedipus Complex in Asian Culture
Jhuma Basak

The Intergenerational Transmission of Culture in Conflict: The Story of a New York Mongrel
John Munder Ross

Can Leaders Change? Yes, but Only if They Want to
Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

At the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Culture
Manasi Kumar

Let Me Tell You a Story about Hindu Temples and Runaway Trolleys
Richard A. Shweder

Colours of Violence in Meriah Country: Ethno-political Conflict in the Kondhmals
Usha Menon

About the Editor and Contributors