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The Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations

Author(s) : Sudhir Kakar

Reviews and Endorsements

Sudhir Kakar is topmost among those who have put their shoulders to the wheel and helped move the antiquated “psychoanalytic anthropology” to a fresh, modern, and clinically useful “anthropological psychoanalysis.” The essays contained in this most recent book of his are interdisciplinary, dialectical, and meticulously argued. They open up the non-Western world to psychoanalysis and broaden the field’s epistemic terrain and conceptual reach in deep and meaningful ways.
Salman Akhtar, MD, training and supervising analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia; author of Mind, Culture, and Global

How does a culture fantasize, sing, dream itself into existence? What are its myths, stories, values, and aspirations? And how deeply does this cultural ambience reach into our psyches? This brief volume brings great wisdom, distilling deep, personal, and hard-won insights. Years ago, my first encounter with Sudhir Kakar moved and fascinated me, catalyzing a dialogue that revealed new cross-cultural understandings of psychoanalysis and, indeed, of the human condition. Kakar’s astute take on Western psychoanalysis illuminates blind spots and opens unrealized potentials, helping us all to find one another anew, bringing us into conversation within a world of possibilities. What a gift of humane, profound, and surprising psychoanalytic originality! Let his presence light you up.
Alfred Margulies, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Harvard Medical School

Sudhir Kakar offers a vision of psychoanalytic theory and practice as it has been shaped by what he calls the Indian “cultural imagination.” In doing so, he gives us a fascinating glimpse of how psychoanalysis works in a part of the world far removed – geographically, socially, and politically – from where it was born. And, equally valuable, he challenges readers from other cultures to interrogate the unexamined assumptions of their own thinking. The book is essential reading for anybody interested in the intricate ways in which culture and psyche together shape human experience and its ailments.
Jay Greenberg, PhD, training and supervising analyst, William Alanson White Institute; former editor, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

Sudhir Kakar has spent his life as a writer and psychoanalyst personally describing and experiencing the margin, that boundary that marks the possibility of knowing the other by retranslating different myths and traditions through cultural imagination. It is an exceptional transformative work, enlarging psychic and cultural space.
Lorena Preta, psychoanalyst, Italian Psychoanalytic Society; full member, International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA); coordinator, IPA Geographies of Psychoanalysis