The Indian Jungle:Psychoanalysis and Non-Weste Civilizations

by: Sudhir Kakar (Author)

Publisher: Kaac Books

Publication Date: 2024/9/24

Language: English

Print Length: 180 pages

ISBN-10: 1915565200

ISBN-13: 9781915565204

Book Description

For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as Weste. Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, and gender often remain unexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they are universally valid. In the intellectual climate of our times, with the rise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with the advent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendence of psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted.Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginations of non-Weste civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethink some of its theories of the human psyche, extending these to cover a fuller range of human experience. These cultural imaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from a universal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains aware of but is not limited by its origins in the mode West.This book of essays aims to be a step in that jouey, of altering the self-perception of psychoanalysis from ‘one size fits all’ into a more nuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by cultural particularities.

About the Author

For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as Weste. Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, and gender often remain unexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they are universally valid. In the intellectual climate of our times, with the rise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with the advent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendence of psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted.Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginations of non-Weste civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethink some of its theories of the human psyche, extending these to cover a fuller range of human experience. These cultural imaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from a universal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains aware of but is not limited by its origins in the mode West.This book of essays aims to be a step in that jouey, of altering the self-perception of psychoanalysis from ‘one size fits all’ into a more nuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by cultural particularities.