by Shalini Masih
Welcome to a dream-travel.
It is a strange invitation and, and yet not at all strange to the regular traveller into the unconscious mind. It is an invitation to enter an experience as Sudhir Kakar ushered his audience into an imaginary psychic field where he, Kakar of 2022, met Sigmund Freud of 1914. This is a dream, it is also a séance of psychoanalytic imagination, a fiction steeped in cultural reflection and it will become more as your mind engages with it in unique ways. For me, personally, this conversation between Freud (of the past) and Kakar (from 3 years ago when this interview was held) had the quality of instantly transporting into state of a child at a threshold: wide-eyed, listening in on what the elders were discussing about what it means to be human. Psychoanalysis, with its reverence for the unconscious, grants us a rare license – to think beyond the bounds of time and space, to dream without borders.
Kakar, ever the consummate fiction writer, often creatively used fictional story-telling to come closer to psychic truth. Honouring his literary instinct, we asked him to imagine a dialogue with Freud on Freud’s birthday. With his signature grace and whimsy, he responded:
“Thank you for giving me a chance to have a conversation which I’ve always wanted to have and now today I can have with Sigmund Freud in imagination. I’ll do it as a real conversation although I don’t think I can speak Freud’s German-infected English, I won’t be able to do that so I’ll start with myself…”
This was an invocation. Here was Kakar emphasising that conversations, of which psychoanalysis is one, is not only an escape from reality but could also become a mode of accessing truths unreachable by linear thought. Fiction ceases to become a distortion, but transforms into a faithful conduit to deeper psychic reality. Here is what Psychoanalysis seeks: the lifting of repression, the surfacing of desire, a connection with what was lost.
In this essay, we follow Kakar into that dream-space as fellow dreamers. I would urge you to take this invitation seriously, even though or, rather, especially because ‘it is just a dream.’ For it is in meeting the dream in all its seriousness that it can be subjectively felt, affectively enriched and become potentially transformative. And so we begin, in the spirit of the dream, with reverence for its fictional premise that opens up a vision of a plural, porous and playful psychoanalysis.
The Dream…
Kakar begins: “Professor, may I call you professor, as the first generation of analysts at your Wednesday meetings on psychoanalysis in Vienna in the first decades of the last century and some of your patients lived?”
Freud replies: “You may, Herr Kakar. If I address you as ‘Herr’ it is because as a European of a certain class and unlike the Americans I was always a formal person in my professional and social interactions and after all, psychoanalytically, you are my great grandson since your own mentor was analysed by my daughter Anna.”
Kakar: “Thank you, professor. I’m happy about that connection though as an Indian I wish you were less irritated with Indian psychoanalysts or even Indians generally. You once said to your patient, the poet Hilda Doolittle, and on another occasion that you Hindus were all muddled with unconscious and with psychoanalysis in general. The writer, Mulkaraj Anand who went to see you for a few sessions in Vienna as a young man told me that you once burst out mid-session – ‘you Indians with your eternal mother complex.’ There are so many things I’d like to ask you about professor, but with the time being short, I will limit myself to what you may have to say on two issues: the first is the universalist aspiration you had for psychoanalysis, your unquestioned assumption of a psychic unity of humankind. The second, on the number of schools that have proliferated in psychoanalysis since you laid the foundations of the discipline.”
Freud: “Herr Kakar, my world was still that of colonial Europe which regarded itself as the center of the world culturally, intellectually, politically. It was untouched by the globalization and decolonization of your times. I discovered only what European thought of my time allowed me to discover. But I was always ready to change my psychoanalytic theories in light of new information and understanding, something not all my followers were or are willing to do.”
We see here how Kakar allows time to bend and reality to breathe through dream logic, where thought and feeling, fact and fiction, get woven in an uncanny embrace creating a unique tapestry. Psychoanalysis becomes both method and myth, therapeutic encounter and cultural reckoning, a shared space where the unconscious of East and West can begin to speak to each other. His reverence for the child-mind, evoked so often in his reflections on baby Krishna and baby Ganesha, also frames his fictive meeting with Freud. He enters the conversation as a grandson, tracing his lineage through Anna Freud, the daughter and heir of Sigmund Freud. The address “Herr Kakar” marks Freud’s Viennese formality, while Kakar’s tone brims with childlike earnestness. This gesture of generational continuity is simultaneously a subtle interrogation of the colonial inheritance: Kakar, the Indian analyst, reclaims Freud not as master but as interlocutor. As one enters into a borderless field governed not by chronology or geography, but by symbol, resonance, and reverie a space opens up where Freud must hear the wounds of his words, and Kakar finds the childlike abandon. East and West speak not in opposition, but in intimacy, through the shared language of the unconscious.
What we witness in this dialogue is what Freud himself once called Nachträglichkeit (deferred action): an event in the past acquires meaning only in the light of later experiences. Freud, now posthumously addressed by Kakar, is being reinterpreted by the very culture he once failed to understand. Here Kakar is chiselling a vision of Psychoanalysis that is no longer European or monolithic but plural, migratory, metamorphic. And so the conversation turns to the proliferation of psychoanalytic schools.
Kakar: “Professor, I’ve always wondered what you think of the many schools of psychoanalysis that have proliferated after your death…British post-Freudian, British Kleinian, French neo-Freudians, French Lacanians, American Ego-Psychologists, American self-psychologists, American inter-subjectivist, American relationists, and so on.”
Freud: “Herr Kakar, I’m sanguine about this proliferation. I was never interested in psychoanalysis becoming a cult with only one set of beliefs…The many schools in psychoanalysis are like the blind man and the elephant in the fable from your country. As long as each school is aware that it has only illuminated one part of the mind…we should welcome even more schools.”
Through his remarkable imaginative framing, Kakar invites us to reflect on the evolving plurality within psychoanalytic thought. Kakar’s catalogue of schools underscores the theoretical fecundity of psychoanalysis – its openness to multiple readings of the mind and to diverging cultural inflections. Rather than viewing this multiplicity as fragmentation, Freud (as imagined by Kakar) offers a magnanimous view: each school grasps a part of the psychic elephant, and none should claim completeness. That Freud uses a fable from Kakar’s own cultural archive – the story of the blind men and the elephant – is more than rhetorical courtesy. It signals a shift in psychoanalysis itself: no longer Eurocentric, but capable of speaking in metaphors that belong to its global interlocutors. In doing so, Kakar’s Freud models a kind of intellectual hospitality and humility.
The deeper insight here is about psychoanalysis as a non-totalizing discourse. If the unconscious is indeed a “system of reverberating representational worlds,” as Kakar elsewhere describes, then it resists capture by any one model. Each school becomes a cartography of a psychic region – partial, contextual, meaningful. What matters, Freud cautions, is not to mistake the map for the territory, or the part for the whole. Moreover, Freud’s metaphor emphasizes the necessity of epistemic modesty. Just as the blind men each proclaim the part as the whole, psychoanalytic schools risk ossifying into dogma when they mistake their insights as exhaustive. But to acknowledge the incompleteness of one’s vision is prerequisite condition for discovery of newer meanings. In Kakar’s rendering, Freud does not yearn for theoretical purity or orthodoxy. Instead, he affirms a polyphonic psychoanalysis, one in which schools offer not competing claims to truth, but different registers of attunement to the unconscious.
Such pluralism, however, also raises questions about coherence, training, and transmission. If each school is partial, how should an analyst be trained? How does one ensure rigor without rigidity? Kakar does not provide direct answers, but his own style – eclectic, interpretive, culturally attuned – suggests that fidelity to the unconscious may matter more than allegiance to any singular doctrine. Ultimately, this moment in the dialogue affirms what perhaps only fiction can show so clearly: psychoanalysis is most alive when it dreams in many tongues, and when it listens not only for universal truths, but for particular voices, rooted in time, place, and imagination.
At this point, after creating space for plurality in psychoanalysis and a need to evolve different registers with which to listen to the unconscious, Kakar ended the fictional conversation. Perhaps he was inviting us to engage with a different register this time. Picking on his cue we asked him to share his reflections on psychoanalytic method and therapeutic style. The dialogue then segued into styles of listening and healing.
Kakar: “Since the primary focus of psychoanalysis is on the unconscious where knowledge, logic and reason are essentially considered as secondary elements of mental life, the therapeutic style of an analyst is dictated by what she believes.
First, what is the nature of the unconscious and second what is the best way of providing the patient an access to the unconscious. The method of listening is common to all schools. The differences lie in how the analyst should act, the technique she should use to facilitate the client’s access to the unconscious. But first the nature of the unconscious… Within the Freudian tradition an analyst usually proceeds to play the Raga as taught by her gharana although there may be some Masters who extend and innovate on the musical training they have received.
For Bose (Girindrashekhar Bose), his view of the unconscious came from his theory of opposite wishes namely that for each repressed wish there is also an opposite wish in the unconscious that needs to be made conscious. His style was as an active didactic one. The patient is first asked to give his free associations to determine the nature of the repressed wish active at that time. He is then ordered to build up wish fulfilments and fantasies with reference to the repressed wish, ultimately taking up the roles of the subject and the object in the wish situation. The patient was further instructed to repeat this at home and to report the resultant fantasies in the next session. Now one can speculate whether Bose’s actively instructing analysts is not also influenced by the active Guru of Indian meditative procedures such as Nyasa of Tantra or Yog Nidra of yogic practice techniques, with which Bose was thoroughly familiar.
Freud’s view of the unconscious as a repository of the repressed is too familiar to all of you as it is this technique of interpreting resistance and defense, free association, transference, dreams and symptom formation to provide access to the unconscious, of translating into conscious awareness the repressed material that created gaps in the patient’s psychic life. One can only add that endearingly he was human enough not to always follow his own instructions on how the analyst should interact with the patient. He was often, as in the famous Dora case, but many analysts have called a paternalistic pedant, who did not listen enough.
I had never reflected my own style until this question prodded me to do so. Of course, I subscribe to the unconscious as a repository of repressions and deprivations but I also believe it is a fount of the healing Eros. Though popularly identified with sexuality, Eros does not merely coincide with it. It is an intense feeling of being alive, of spontaneity, creativity and connectivity to both our human and non-human environment. When Freud writes that the power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life, I think this can go in that direction, and he says this consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs. Then the flow of Eros is an innate need. It is perhaps close to what Winnicott called primitive love antecedent to Kleinian hate. Although Winnicott was of course never comfortable with his erotic dimension. For Winnicott what the analyst needs to do is to provide a holding environment that fosters the natural developmental process of primitive love.
I too visualize the analytic process as removing the blockages and inhibitions to the free flow of Eros in mind, body and soul. Insofar as much of contemporary psychoanalysis focus is on attenuating psychic pain, fear, guilt, anxiety, depression, the engagement with loss and mourning absolutely true, all true, but we often tend to lose sight that the joy of the full flow of Eros (Ananda) is not a way of avoiding or managing psychic pain but the moments of periods of freedom from it. There’s a famous poem by Faiz if I remember correctly, I would adapt it by saying “Aur bhi phool hain chaman mein mourning ke siwa. (There are flowers, other than mourning, that bloom in the psychic field)” For a post-freudian there’s a range of available techniques which go beyond Freud. Such as some of contemporary emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity in accessing the unconscious of the patient by relying on the analyst’s countertransference. This goes even further in the inter-subjectivist school perhaps arising from a strong strain of egalitarianism in American society on analytic transparency and disclosure of the analyst’s own subjectivity to the patient.
My own personal style favours an unearthing of major unconscious repetitive themes in the client’s life history through free associations, transference and countertransference and especially dreams which are the favourite part of my analytic work. I think I may be interpreting more than I should. But since I appreciate one or other insight of different schools, without adhering to any one of them, these are not dogmatic interpretations, which are no more than propaganda. Nevertheless, I need to be constantly aware that I must hold back with my interpretations and not impinge on the client’s exploration of her psychic life, remain open to the emergence of the surprising and the unexpected, that my advanced age is no ground to come to the seduction of the guru fantasy.”
We notice here that Kakar is not only articulating the nuances of different psychoanalytic traditions but also disclosing his own evolving therapeutic sensibility. His is the vision of psychoanalysis as an art of listening and facilitating access to the unconscious – a space where reason and logic are secondary to the symbolic, affective, and often contradictory currents of psychic life. For those who knew him closely know that Kakar was drawn to music and musicality of psychoanalytic process. Here, by invoking the metaphor of the analyst playing the raga of her gharana, Kakar beautifully underscores the blend of tradition and improvisation that shapes each analyst’s clinical voice. Like a trained musician, the analyst brings her lineage, her learned idiom, but must also find her unique note. The unconscious, in this analogy, ceases to be a fixed territory and becomes a melodic terrain.
In his descriptions of Girindrashekhar Bose, Freud, and himself, Kakar offers a triptych of psychoanalytic practice across cultures and generations. Bose, influenced by both Freudian psychoanalysis and Indian meditative traditions, developed a method rooted in “opposite wishes” and active instruction. Kakar speculates compellingly that Bose’s directive style may have been inspired by the role of the active guru in Indian tantric and yogic procedures – a link that underscores how local spiritual epistemes inevitably shape therapeutic practice.
Freud, on the other hand, is positioned within the canonical Western tradition of the analyst as interpreter of resistances and defenses. Yet Kakar is keen to remind us—with gentle irony—that Freud often failed to follow his own injunctions. His handling of the Dora case, for instance, has been widely critiqued for its paternalism and lack of listening. This critique echoes subtly in Kakar’s own awareness, later in the same reflection, of the dangers posed by the “guru fantasy,” especially in old age.
This linking of Freud’s early paternalism with Kakar’s own caution against becoming a guru is poignant. It marks a moment of transgenerational psychoanalytic ethics: Kakar recognizes in Freud the seduction of authority, even as he resists it in himself. Where Freud once failed to listen, Kakar strives to hold back, to adopt a stance of a curious toddler with ease, to allow the unexpected to emerge, to remain open to surprise and thus to protect the analytic space from being colonized by the analyst’s interpretive will. His confession – “I think I may be interpreting more than I should” – is a sign of self-questioning that Freud might have come to, had he lived and listened longer.
Kakar’s view of the unconscious is distinctly expansive. Beyond repression and deprivation, he posits the unconscious as a source of “healing Eros,” aligning it with aliveness, spontaneity, and connectivity to both human and non-human worlds. Here, he moves beyond the pain-focused paradigms of psychoanalysis and introduces the notion of Ananda – joy, erotic vitality, the flowering of the soul. His adapted line from Faiz, “Aur bhi phool hain chaman mein mourning ke siwa,” beautifully captures the essence of this psychoanalytic vision: the psyche is not only a site of mourning, but also where other flowers bloom.
The contemporary analytic movements Kakar references – from the inter-subjectivist emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity to the American push for transparency – serve to widen the scope of what constitutes psychoanalytic work today. As an independent thinker, Kakar stands in this plural space, not dogmatically aligned to any school, but creatively attuned to many. His preferred technique involves dreamwork, free associations, and a delicate balancing act between interpretation and restraint.
What emerges in this reflection is a psychoanalyst who listens to his own shifting position – his age, his cultural inheritance, his capacity for humility – with the same earnest with which he listen to his patients, and I may add his students and supervisees. The reflection loops back to the opening of his fictional dialogue with Freud: he begins not with Freud’s voice, but his own. And yet, like a wise analyst and respectful grandson, he knows when to speak, when to interpret, and when to step aside. In the analytic chamber, and in this imagined conversation, Kakar models a psychoanalysis that resists authority for its own sake and replaces it with reverence – for the unconscious, for the other, for the surprise that awaits when we truly listen.
From adherence to a particular psychoanalytic school of thought, we next invited him to share his reflections on psychoanalytic method and therapeutic style, and its variations with examples of Girindrashekhar Bose, Sigmund Freud and Sudhir Kakar’s own take on it. We asked him how we could read Freud and cultivate the clinician’s mind in the world of 2022.
Reflecting on therapeutic styles and offering a comparison of psychoanalytic approaches to accessing the unconscious Kakar’s draws parallels between psychoanalysis and the Indian tradition of music and meditation. He foregrounds the centrality of the unconscious in psychoanalysis and offers a comprehensive comparison between Freud’s, Bose’s and his own therapeutic styles. However, it is crucial to note that Kakar wants us to remember that Freud himself did not always adhere strictly to his own therapeutic techniques, sometimes displaying a paternalistic or pedantic approach. Kakar draws parallels between Bose’s active instructing style and Indian meditative procedures with which Bose was familiar, suggesting that Bose’s therapeutic approach may have been influenced by Indian spiritual practices, which often involve active participation and guidance from a guru. This is telling that it was always an alive concern in Kakar’s mind to form bridges between psychoanalysis, considered a Western science, and wisdom from Indian enlightenment practices.
Kakar’s own view of the unconscious was a radical one. He saw the unconscious, as not only a repository of repressions but also a source of what he termed a ‘healing Eros’ which goes past the confines of sexuality to encompass intense feelings of aliveness, spontaneity, creativity, and connectivity to both human and non-human environments. This ‘healing eros’ is not akin to Winnicott’s concept of primitive love which was an antecedent to Kleinian hate. While Winnicott emphasized the importance of providing a holding environment in analysis that fosters the natural developmental process of primitive love, allowing for the free flow of Eros, Kakar envisioned the analytic process as removing blockages and inhibitions to the free flow of Eros in mind, body, and soul. He acknowledges the contemporary focus in psychoanalysis on attenuating psychic pain, fear, guilt, and anxiety, but emphasizes the importance of also focusing on the joy and freedom that come from the full flow of Eros. Further, we see Kakar highlighting the importance of the analyst’s subjectivity in accessing the patient’s unconscious, including the use of countertransference. We get glimpse of his own subjectivity when Kakar acknowledges the temptation to interpret more than he should and the need to hold back with interpretations to allow the client to explore their psychic life. His child-like spontaneity comes through in his openness to the emergence of the surprising and unexpected in the analytic process, even as an independent thinker he drew from various psychoanalytic schools. Deeper hues of Kakar’s personhood emerge as he cautions against seduction of the guru fantasy and upholds the value of humility and openness to learning, rather than assuming an authoritative stance in the therapeutic relationship.
Curious to learn more about Kakar’s psychoanalysis, we next asked him – How to read Freud?
SK: If you read Freud as a writer you discover aspects of his thought which have been, I think, insufficiently appreciated by psychoanalysts let me illustrate this with an example in his ‘The Ego and The Id.’ Freud (1923) observes and I quote him –
“For one gets an impression that this simple Oedipus complex is by no means its commonest form, but rather represents a simplification or schematization which, to be sure, is often enough justified for practical purposes. Closer study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally present in children; that is to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude toward his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate, feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother. It is this complicating element introduced by bisexuality that makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts in connection with the earliest object-choices and identifications, and still more difficult to describe them intelligibly. It may even be that the ambivalence displayed in relations to the parents should be attributed entirely to bisexuality, and that it is not, as I have represented above, developed out of identification in consequence of rivalry.”
Now this is Freud talking now. This is an extraordinary statement! Freud admitting to even the slightest doubt in one of the bedrocks of psychoanalytic canon, the fateful developmental consequences of rivalry with a parent. However, in the subsequent paragraphs Freud begins to retreat. The commonly known form of Oedipal complex comes to the fore. Now this is of course at par with the literary style of one of the great stylists of his time, as Freud has often been called. So what distinguishes this style. In ‘The Ego and The Id’, as in most of his essay, Freud is always lucid as he begins to consider an issue, evidently deliberating, apparently scrupulous. Although in the next paragraph he rakes in with the Tiger’s leap all that had just been before possible though by no means is short. I suggest that a reading of the ego and the id and Freud generally pay greater attention to Freud considering and deliberating, rather than following Freud on the path he finally chooses to take. Another example, again from the Ego and the Id because that is what concerning at the moment, which I have been reading is Freud’s statement that and I again quote ‘the identification…the effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting this leads us back to the origin of the ego ideal for behind it their lies hidden and individuals first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory.’ What goes before this statement, because that we often take as the final one is in the footnote where he says “perhaps it would be safer to say the identification with the parents for before a child has arrived at a definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes the lack of a penis it does not distinguish in value between his father and its mother in order to simply my presentation I shall discuss only identification with the father. So what I am suggesting or what I got as a writer reading Freud as a writer is that reading Freud’s consideration, considering and weighing of different arguments gives us a vastly more nuanced view of Freud’s thought than paying attention simply only to the conclusion to which he leaps.
In this pluralistic polyphony, Freud too is revealed to be less monolithic than the Freudians who followed him. Kakar invites us to read Freud in a new way – not only for the canonical conclusions he drew but for the moments when he faltered, revised, or paused to deliberate. These moments, subtle and often overlooked, reveal a Freud who was still searching, still open to complexity.
By drawing our attention to Freud’s paper The Ego and the Id, demonstrates that Freud’s legacy is not merely built on doctrinal authority but on moments of uncertainty that illuminate the unconscious in all its layered contradictions. In those speculative lines, Freud offers us not a closed system, but a glimpse of openness, of multiplicity within the psyche itself. This is where Kakar’s reading becomes especially valuable. He teaches us to read Freud not with reverence for fixed doctrine, but with an attunement to his process of thinking. Freud’s ambivalence, his capacity to entertain conflicting interpretations before settling on one, is not a weakness but a sign of his intellectual vitality. Kakar’s interpretive ethic is not grounded in following established paths, but in listening for hesitations, digressions, reversals, and imaginative leaps. Viewing from this stance, Freud appears less the father of a closed tradition and more a fellow traveller through the labyrinths of the mind.
We next asked him about an interesting an excerpt from Freud’s paper on transience which seemed particularly pertinent to our conversation held at a time where world was still recovering from the pandemic and one nation was raging war against another. It is still is as relevant as it was then.
In his paper, On Transcience, Freud wrote, “My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless…I believe that those who think thus, and seem ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was precious has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state of mourning for what is lost…When one the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing form our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.” (Freud, 1916)
We asked Kakar what he thought has happened to our capacities to hold conversations? Where are we headed as a human race?
SK: What you quoted and showed was a wonderful example of Freud as a writer. I really greatly appreciate it. So what did we mourn during the pandemic as we became isolated in closed spaces, saw daily pictures of people uprooted from their homes and lives trudging along dusty roads and today when the airwaves are full of war and refugees whose habitats have been destroyed and who must seek a new life elsewhere…psychologically I feel the pandemic has made the outside world seem dangerous and untrustworthy. There’s a constant fear of catching the virus, not only from strangers but also from friends and even more unsettling from parents, siblings, spouses and children who normally constitute our unconscious envelope of safe persons, to whom we otherwise entrust our well-being without a doubt. The virus itself is an uncanny object all around us, yet invisible, mounting further assault on our sense of basic trust in the world being a benign place and we know that this basic trust has its origins in the earliest years of life from an infant’s experience of good-enough parenting that makes the outer world, at the time essentially consisting of the family, safe and predictable. With a decrease in basic trust and wilting of the plant that grows out of its soil, hope, our collective economy, does seem to be in doldrums. Hope is further diminished by the images of death all around us not only on television screens but of loved ones and people we knew well. The omnipresence of death, fantasy of our own new immortality, the unconscious conviction that I will live forever. What many felt during the pandemic and what many continue to feel is a long exile from what I call the erotic field – the land of life-giving and life-promoting forces in which we otherwise spend our lives. It is a feeling of drying out of the erotic field, a depletion of loving connectedness, a seepage of the life force which at its extreme is equated with dying and death. The erotic field itself comprises of the person’s myriad connections to the not-self both in the inner and outer worlds. We normally equate the not-self with human others including the mental representation in the psyche of loved ones who are no longer alive indeed stable mental representations of loving connectedness within the family while growing up are some of the more vital parts of the erotic field. Yet there are many other human and non-human connections that we barely register and become aware of them only when the connection is lost as it was for many during the pandemic, connections that are independent of our material circumstances. A patient who had long waited to migrate to the United States had his wish fulfilled when he got a well-paying job in New York. In spite of a great improvement in his material living conditions he soon discovered how unhappy the move had made him. It was not only his family and friends that he missed but the familiar faces he encountered every day on his way to work in Delhi – the sidewalk Barber shaving a customer who would nod to him, the recognition in the eyes of the vegetable vendor he passed by, the smile of a child on its way to school, a child he did not personally know – the recognition connecting them was a part of the erotic field as much as the flowers in the neighbour’s garden or the roadside tree with a roughly huge stone idol of Vishnu leaning against the base of its trunk, marigold petals strewn on and around the idol by passing devotees where he stopped each morning for a quick bow with his raised hand pressed together in genuflection before continuing on his way to work. But there are some, out of this crisis, enhanced rather than impoverished. These are persons whose erotic field is reconfigured and not depleted. Memories of loving connectedness with others especially the earlier ones with all their intensity become more plentiful and come to the fore in the inner world while the non-human connections in the outer world assume a salience that was earlier denied to them. The American poet-philosopher Henry David Thoreau in his solitary forest retreat would write that his daily dip in the pond reminded him of nature’s endless capacity to renew life and stir him to higher aspirations. Whenever Rabindranath Tagore (1913) felt lonely and depressed and I quote him ‘stranded in a desolation where every individual has to struggle through his own problems unaided’ he would withdraw into remote countryside and wall himself from any but the most perfunctory human contact. In a reconfiguring of the erotic field the connection with the surround, the natural environment assumed an unparalleled awareness and a quote – “of year my feelings seem to be those of our ancient earth in the daily ecstasy of his sunkissed life. My own unconscious seems to stream through each blade of grass, each sucking root, to rise with the sap through the trees, to break out with joy’s thrills in the waving fields of corn in the rustling palm leaves. I feel impelled to give expression to my blood tie with the earth, my kinsmen’s love for her but I’m afraid I shall not be understood.” So the drying out of the erotic field in loneliness both ends in obliteration and death. Indeed the fear of death in modern consciousness no longer lies in the dread of punishments in an afterlife but in the erotic field becoming a dust bowl, an unimaginable loneliness where the self is stripped of all connections to our human and non-human world.”
One also wonders if this psychoanalytic séance conjured by Kakar reveals to us a Freud who, through the dreamwork of fiction, finds the voice he could not summon then. The Freud of 1914 speaks in words refracted through the long shadows and quiet wisdom of 2022 – shaped by traumas he never knew and insights he helped seed but could not yet see them bloom. The pandemic, the wars, the depletion of the erotic field – these become the backdrop against which this conversation unfolds. Kakar does leave us in the space he calls, ‘exile from the erotic field,’ but leans on Tagore and Thoreau to reconfigure that field.
But this dialogue is more than an imagined conversation. It is also a manifesto for a psychoanalysis that is decolonized, plural, poetic. Kakar makes it a point to remind us that Freud was a stylist as much as a scientist, a writer, a dreamer. In channelling Freud, Kakar mimics him but also transforms him, situates him anew in a cultural and spiritual cosmos that Freud himself never knew but now, perhaps, through Kakar, can begin to dream. In this glistening fiction, Kakar offers us not a ‘museum’ Freud but an ‘alive’ one – capable of listening, of changing, of bowing before the elephant. Here is a glimpse of psychoanalysis as dream-work, as cultural translation, as love’s labour.
Reference List
- Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 1-66.
- Freud, S. (1916). On Transience. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 303-307.
- Tagore, R. (1913). Gitanjali. London: Macmillan.
Shades of Becoming 