Sudhir Kakar, passed away on April 22, leaving behind a great legacy of psychoanalytical tradition in India. His unique approach to observing Indian society with a psychoanalytical lens significantly contributed to the field of psychology in India. Thus, his passing has left the community grieving a great loss for times to come.
Kakar was born in Nainital, India, on 25 July 1938. Following a brief
stint studying engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology
Kharagpur, he made his way into the field of psychology. As his curiosity
for human behaviour grew, he attended Harvard University and studied under
the renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Kakar pursued a PhD in Economics
and trained as an analyst at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt. His
intellectual path was significantly shaped by this guidance, especially
his emphasis on the interaction between culture and psychology.
His early years, which were turbulent due to the Partition and radical
movement, as well as his upbringing in a multicultural India, had a
significant impact on his development of thought. Kakar primarily inquired
about the intersectionality between identity, psychoanalysis, mythology,
mysticism, and religion. A significant portion of his work included
reframing the Indian psyche in the context of Western psychoanalysis,
particularly about the conflict between individualism and collectivism.
Rather than departing from Freud's vision, Kakar worked to
expand it during his career. Famously, Freud refused to be called the
"discoverer of the unconscious," praising philosophers and poets instead
for that distinction Embracing this notion, Kakar integrated stories from
Hindu mythologies and Urdu folk tales with ideas from Indian philosophers
such as Gandhi, Tagore, and Vatsayana into his psychoanalytic framework.
Through this method, a regional unconscious within psychoanalysis was
defined and recognised globally.
One of Kakar’s significant contributions is his exploration of the Indian
concept of the self. In contrast to the Western enclosed self, he
conceptualised the Hindu-Indian self as "much more open and strongly
influenced by and intimately connected to its surround." The Hindu Indian
perspective goes on to say that one's basic need is to belong to a
community. Consequently, the two notions of “inclusiveness” and “universal
consciousness” are prevalent throughout Sudhir’s work. It was the first of
its kind for Kakar to look at Indian sexuality. In treading an uncommon
subject, he explores the historical and cultural perspectives of intimacy
and sexual expression in Indian society, as well as the influence of
religion, social mores, and the colonial past on close relationships that
oscillate between eroticism and asceticism. Aside from his psychoanalytic
practice in Delhi and his global, multidisciplinary teaching activity, he
has written twenty nonfiction books and six novels.
Often
spotted with a cigar, Sudhir Kakar was a romantic committed to uniting
Eastern and Western thought. His contributions as a trailblazing
psychotherapist, accomplished author, and cultural critic have a lasting
impact on how we perceive the human experience. We pay tribute to a
visionary who enhanced the intellectual and cultural landscapes as we
remember him. His legacy continues with the Kakar Centre of Psychoanalysis
and Culture, which is striving towards the formation of global
psychoanalysis rather than local psychoanalysis, drawing resources from
diverse civilizational foundations and varied conceptions of the human
psyche thus revising the existing psychoanalytic perspective of basic
concerns of human life, the human mind and the hunt for the psychic truth.
Kakar’s passing marks the end of an era, but his influence will continue
to be felt for generations.
