Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

needed to establish a distinctive Indian identity. ‘The Indian concern for the “self”, its
psycho-philosophical schools of “self-realization”, often appearing under the label of Indian
metaphysics or “spirituality”, has become one of the primary ways of salvaging self-respect’
(Kakar 2005). Psychoanalysis was seen as offering a divergent path that offered a
psychological form of colonization that did not fit the emerging and independent Indian
psyche.
Fourthly, as psychiatry has evolved in India, it has adopted biologically driven models that
exclude psychoanalysis, and ‘many leading contemporary Indian psychiatrists who most
vehemently reject psychoanalysis are involved in Indian spiritual practices’ (Akhtar and
Tummala-Narra 2005: 16). Given the limited scale of psychiatry (there are no more than
3,500 psychiatrists) as a single factor this would not be significant. However allied to: the
rejection of colonialism; the analytic rejection of religion and mythology that permeates
Indian culture; Eurocentric and patriarchal foci failing to engage with the collective
dimensions of belonging; the result is the isolation of psychoanalysis as a social, cultural or
clinical force.
Fifthly, there has been some development in psychoanalysis with the evolution of Kleinian
ideas, ‘perhaps the most universalistic of the many relational theories’ (Kakar 2006: 234),
using concepts of good/bad and breasts/penis which has helped psychoanalysis engage more
fully with Indian culture. This is allied to the increasing number of psychologists and
psychiatrists trained in Western countries (where they have also acquired contemporary
psychoanalytic theory). Consequently they were are able to ‘understand the Indian psyche
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