Shades of Becoming is proud to present this conversation with Professor Sudhir Kakar.
We are so very grateful that he joined us for this conversation. Kakar begins with indulgently allowing us to witness a fictional dialogue between Freud and himself. What a breathtaking revelation! We go on to discover ‘erotic fields’ and images of psychic nurseries teeming with human experiences to the point of becoming wild jungles with wilder promises of adventure! Kakar’s insights and propositions for renewing our ways of reading Freud- or perhaps reading with him- to think about the nuances of intimacy and solitude, empathy and loneliness, and about cultural and transcultural dialogues in psychoanalysis have never been more enervating and electrifying! Even as he facilitates an opening for ananda, he also helps us to reflect on how the pandemic has brought us to encounter a shrinking of our spaces- hitherto peppered with recognition- into dust bowls where the memory of living as we’ve known it struggles to be generative of life that remains to be lived anew.
We have been profoundly stirred by his suggestion to reconfigure the erotic field as we reconnect with our own ‘blood tie with the earth’; to find an erotic connection with our world through the mind and its gifts of imagination, empathy, thought and creativity, when the body must contend with an uncanny virus (which may also become, at some point, an enemy whose inflictions we can learn to work with). We shall carry his ideas like seeds that hold much more than what meets the eye.
Shades of Becoming 