Sudhir Kakar

Sudhir Kakar (born Monday, 25 July 1938[1]) is India's most celebrated psychoanalyst and author in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion.

Education and personal life

Kakar spent his early childhood near Sargodha, now in Pakistan.[2] and also in Rohtak, Haryana state; his father was an additional district magistrate during the British Raj and during the partition of India, and the family moved quite a bit from city to city.[2][3] At age eight he was enrolled as a boarder in Modern School, New Delhi;[2] he would later write about homosexual encounters in the school dormitories.[2] He next attended St Edward's School, Simla; he would later write about the sadistic beatings at that school handed out by the Irish Christian Brothers.[2] He began his Intermediate Studies at Maharaja's College, Jaipur in 1953 after which his family sent him to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, where Kakar lived with his aunt, Kamla Chowdhury, and attended engineering college.[2] After college, he attended Mannheim, Frankfurt am Main and Vienna. Kakar received a Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering, a Master's degree (Diplom-Kaufmann) in business economics and became Doctor of Economics.[4] He began his training in psychoanalysis at the Sigmund-Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany in 1971.

His aunt, Kamla, moved to Delhi, and Kakar moved there as well.[2] Earlier, he had married.[2] He and his wife, a Gujarati woman, had two children.[2] He started practising as a psychoanalyst and writing books.[2]

Career

Kakar was in private psychoanalytic practice in New Delhi for 25 years before moving to his current place of residence in Goa, India.

Before he began his practice, he was a Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a Professor of Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Kakar has also held several visiting appointments at international universities, Chicago(1989–92), McGill, Melbourne, and INSEAD, Fontainbleau.

Psychoanalysis and mysticism

A portion of Sudhir Kakar's work involves the relationship between psychoanalysis and mysticism. His analyses of personages include that of Swami Vivekananda in The Inner World (1978), Mohandas Gandhi in Intimate Relations (1989), and Ramakrishna in The Analyst and the Mystic (1991).[5][6]

Kakar’s fiction novel, Ecstasy (2003) deals with the "making of a mystic" and with "two characters who are very different. One is steeped in traditional religiosity. The other is a modern, rational sceptic but who is not closed to tradition. It deals with their encounters. And how one is influenced by the other" and the characters were based on Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. The story is set in Rajasthan of 1940s or 1960s[7]

Psychoanalyst Alan Roland (2009) writes that when Kakar applies his psychoanalytic understanding to these "three spiritual figures [Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi, Ramakrishna]", his analyses are as "fully reductionistic as those of Jeffrey Masson". Roland also disputes the Kakar's theoretical understanding of mysticism from a psychoanalytic standpoint, and writes that it is "highly questionable whether spiritual aspirations, practices, and experiences essentially involve regression."[5]

Awards And honors

Sudhir Kakar's honours include the Kardiner Lecturership at the Institute of Psychoanalytic Medicine, Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany's Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Residency, a McArthur Foundation Grant. As 'the psychoanalyst of civilisations', the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur listed Kakar as one of the world's 25 major thinkers, while the leading German weekly Die Zeit has profiled him as one of the 21 thinkers for the 21st century. His most recent award is the Order of Merit (Grade: Merit Cross (Verdienstkreuz)), of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country's highest civilian honour.http://www.sudhirkakar.com/sudhir.htm[]. "The Sudhir Kakar Prize" for the best psychoanalytic paper by an author less than 40 years of age was instituted in honour of Prof. Sudhir Kakar in 2013. The prize is given at the Annual Psychoanalytical Conference held in Delhi.

Works

Non-fiction

Fiction

Bibliography

Further reading

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "A book of Memory: Confessions and Reflections" Sudhir Kakar, Viking Press
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 Singh 2011.
  3. ↑ Kakar, Sudhir. "Colors of Violence." Chapter 2, p25.
  4. ↑ Renée Zucker (7 October 2006). "Das System der Klaglosigkeit". die tageszeitung. Retrieved 1 January 2008.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Roland, Alan (2009). "Mysticism and Psychoanalysis". Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. US: Springer. pp. 594–596. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-71802-6_449.
  6. ↑ In The Indian Psyche, 125–188. 1996 New Delhi: Viking by Penguin. Reprint of 1991 book.
  7. ↑ The Rediff Interview/Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar Date accessed: 1 April 2008

References

External links