Abstract
In her article, ‘Freud in the Tropics’, Jacqueline Rose writes of the ‘missed encounter’ of Australia and its place and significance for the destabilization of the Freud-Jung partnership. The ‘phantom’ of Australia for both Freud and Jung becomes an entrée for Rose to chart and question how it produced differences between them. She asks, ‘What can this…encounter…tell psychoanalysis, and the forms of Western thinking which it both embodies and queries, about itself?’2
The term ‘godless’ is borrowed from Peter Gay in A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: 1987).
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Notes
J. Rose, ‘Freud in the “Tropics” ’, History Workshop Journal, 47 (Spring: 1999) 51.
C. Hartnack, ‘Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: Psychoanalysis in Colonial India’, in T. G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffrey J. Kirpal (eds), Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism (Delhi: 1999), p. 97.
Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography first published from London in 1936. Twelfth edition (New Delhi: 1998) used here.
Mahendra Lal Sircar, On the Physiological Basis of Psychology (Calcutta: 1870).
Shruti Kapila, ‘The Making of Colonial Psychiatry, Bombay Presidency, 1849–1940’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2002), pp. 215–19.
For Sircar’s life history, see, Sarat Chandra Ghosh, Life ofDr. Mahendra Lal Sircar (Calcutta, 2nd edition, 1935).
Also David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge: 2000), pp. 58–9, 163, 176. It would seem that Sircar held a continuing interest in psychology, as he readdressed these issues two decades later in Moral Influence of Physical Science (Calcutta: 1892).
Durganand Sinha, Psychology in a Third World Country: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: 1986), p. 14.
Amit Ranjan Basu, ‘The Coming of Psychoanalysis in Colonial India: The Bengali Writings of Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose’, Enreca Occasional Papers Series, 5, Tapati Guha Thakurta (ed.), Culture and the Disciplines: Papers from the Cultural Studies Workshops (Calcutta: 1999), p. 37.
Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal’, Partha Chatterjee (ed.), Texts of Power (Calcutta: 1996), pp. 11–20.
Girindrasekhar Bose, The Concept of Repression (London: 1921).
Freud to Andreas-Salome, E. Pfeiffer (ed.), Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salome (London: 1972), p. 114.
Ernest Jones, ‘Minutes of Business Meeting, Seventh International Psychoanalytical Congress, Berlin 1922’, IJP, 4, 1 (1923) 236.
Sailendra Krishna law, ‘Girindrasekhar Bose’, Special Issue on Bose, Samiksha (1955), p. 9 cited in C. Hartnack, Vishnu, pp. 83–4. I have taken Dipesh Chakrabarty’s translation of the term adda from his Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: 2000), p. 180.
The literal translation of the term Utkendra is given as of circles, not having the axis to the centre. See, M. Ali, M. Moniruzzaman, and J. Tarique (eds), Bengali to English Dictionary (Bangla Academy, Dhaka: 1996), p. 75.
For an analogous discussion of the everyday but significant cultural changes in Bombay see, Frank Conlon, ‘Dining Out in Bombay’ in Carol Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: 1995), pp. 90–127.
On the role of formal and informal bodies for the dissemination of scientific ideas see Irfan S. Habib, ‘Institutional Efforts: Popularization of Science in the Mid 19th Century’, Fundamenta Scientiae, 6, 4 (1985) 299–312.
G. Bose, ‘Psychology and Psychiatry’ paper read at the Symposium held by the Indian Science Congress at Calcutta, 1928, IJP, 4, 4 (1931) 143.
N. N. Sengupta, ‘Psychology, its Present Development and Outlook’, IJP, 1,1 (1926) 19.
Freud first used the word psychoanalysis in 1896 in ‘Heredity and Aetiology of the Neuroses’ (in French) and expanded its meaning and use in The Interpretation of Dreams first published in early 1900. For an exhaustive account of Freud and his work see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life of Our Time (London: 1988).
Suhrit Chandra Mitra, ‘Suggestions for a New Theory of Emotions’, IJP, 8, 1, 2&3 (1933) 19. Mitra was a member of both the Indian Psychology Association and Psychoanalytic Society. He wrote extensively on psychoanalytic theory. Some of his works include ‘The Concept of Instinct’, IJP, 3, 1 (1928) 45–87, ‘Psychology and Life’, IJP, 10, 1&2 (1935) 108–24.
Girindrasekhar Bose, ‘A New Theory of Mental Life’, IJP, 8, 1, 2&3 (1933) 86–157. The seesaw mechanism entailed each opposing set of desire to be made part of the conscious and in the process of it being made conscious, the client would be rid of the attenuated anxiety. See ‘Illustrative Cases’ in the same article.
Girindrasekhar Bose, ‘The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish’ (1928), reprinted in Vishnu, pp. 21–38.
For an appraisal of the problematic of Freud’s relationship with his female clients see Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (London: 1993).
See, for instance, A. K. Ramanujan, ‘The Indian Oedipus’, Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes (eds), Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook (New York: 1983), pp. 235–61,
and Paul B. Courtright, Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (Oxford: 1985).
‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1907), Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader (London: 1995), pp. 429–35.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927) in Civilization, Society and Religion The Pelican Freud Library (PFL), 12 (London: 1985).
On the issue of a scientific interpretation of religion in Freud’s work see D. Black, ‘What Sort of a Thing is a Religion? A View from Object-Relations Theory’ IJP, 74 (1993) 613–25.
In relation to colonial psychiatry, Kapila, ‘Making’, pp. 178–220. For a more general historical discussion of the term, see George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: 1987).
He reiterated these ideas 3 years later in Civilization and its Discontents (1927), translated by Joan Riviere (New York: 1994). This work is often seen as the most representative and most quoted of the later Freud. Freud wrote this work in the shadow of the advancing power of the Nazi regime, and a pessimism about human nature underwrites what many commentators have described as a Hobbesian piece.
C. G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, Bollingen Series, XX, Translated by R. F. C. Hull (London: 1964). See especially, ‘The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man’ (1931), pp. 74–98.
Frank McLynn, Carl Gustav Jung (London: 1996), pp. 398–415.
Gerhard Adler (ed.), C. G. Jung, Letters, 1906–1950, Vol. 1 (London: 1973).
Simultaneously, it is instructive to note that Jung became paradigmatic of mid-twentieth-century Indology. See Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: 1990), pp. 85–130.
Panchan Mitra, ‘Psychology of Cultural Change’, IJP, 7, 3&4 (1932) 105–6.
Girindrasekhar Bose, ‘The Psychological Outlook in Hindu Philosophy’, IJP, 5, 3&4 (1930) 120.
Javed Majeed, ‘Putting God in His Place: Bradley, McTaggart and Iqbal’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 4 (1993) 208–36.
Through the decade, the difference between the Indian psychoanalytic rendition of religion with that with Freud was discussed though not always with the same range of insight as that of Bose. See, B. Sen, ‘The Standpoint of Religious Psychology’, IJP, 10, 1, 2&3 (1935) 119–26;
N. R. Amenchelra, ‘Another View of Religion’, IJP, 11, 3&4 (1936) 237–45;
S. C. Chatterjee, ‘Freud on the Future of Religion’, IJP, 15, 4 (1940) 135–45, or Bose’s own restatement, ‘An Aspect of Freudian Thought’, IJP, 15, 4 (1940) 97–108.
Bhargavi V. Davar, ‘Colonialism, Caste and Gender in Indian Psychiatry: A Preliminary Investigation’, Paper presented at the 16th European Meeting of South Asian Studies, Edinburgh (September 2000), p. 2.
Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (1936), 12th edition (New Delhi: 1998). This is not to assert that this was the only form that popular Freudianism acquired in the first half of twentieth-century India. Literature, was a particularly fertile ground for it, Tagore’s Gora being an obvious example. Though a key aspect and an unexplored arena in Indian history, Popular Freudianism can only be dealt with in a highly selective manner here.
It is interesting that there has been no psycho-history attempted on the life of Nehru in the way it has been done in Gandhi’s case by Erik Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-Violence (London: 1969).
B. R. Nanda, Jawaharlal Nehru: Rebel and Statesman (Delhi: 1995).
Sunil Khilnani, ‘Nehru’s Nehru: The Uses of Autobiography’, Paper presented at SOAS South Asian Life-Histories Conference, London, May 2000.
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: 1994). On the debate over the applicability of the concept of the public sphere in colonial India see, South Asia (1993), Special Issue.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things An Archaeology of Human Sciences (London: 1997), p. 374.
Uday Singh Mehta, Empire and Liberalism: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought (Chicago: 1999) argues that Gandhi’s emphasis was on the forming of an ‘ethical community’ rather than nationalism, pp. 106–14.
John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and its Passions (Cambridge, Mass.: 1997), p. 207.
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Kapila, S. (2007). The ‘Godless’ Freud and his Indian Friends: An Indian Agenda for Psychoanalysis. In: Mahone, S., Vaughan, M. (eds) Psychiatry and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593244_6
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