Students of psychoanalysis and Hinduism alike recoil from any monolithic characterization of their subject area. Those familiar with the psychoanalytic tradition know it to embody multiple and often contradictory perspectives and techniques; those who study “Hinduism” know that its great and diverse histories leave scholars puzzling over its unity — the very name of “Hinduism” was imposed by outsiders upon India's vast array of people and religious traditions. Indeed the encounter of Hinduism and psychoanalysis, not even 100 years old, has itself many incarnations — too many to address in a single overview, so at the outset of this historical essay I must limit my focus to certain realms of the encounter and trust that to explore any one will afford some sense of the whole.1
I will consider a handful of theories that have defined the historical course of the psychoanalytic study of Hindus and Hinduism. These theories reflect the major emergent perspectives within psychoanalysis — classical and Kleinian models, object relations theories and the psychologies of the self — and certain corresponding and salient issues — Oedipal dynamics and Hindu sons, the nature of self and ego in cultural context, and the place of genuine mystical experience within psychic processes. As a way of characterizing and evaluating the plurality of approaches in the psychoanalytic study of Hindus, I suggest that it is useful to be mindful of three hermeneutics that are engaged, in varying measure and context, within all psychoanalytic thinking. I refer to them in this paper as “dimensions” because they signify distinct forms of analysis or interpretation that are found within any single psychoanalytic study of Hinduism, and because each one privileges a different dimension of human nature; one stressing the universal machinations of psyche, another the interpretive and imaginative processes of meaning-making, and another the influence of ultimate and irreducible realities to which I refer here as the “mystical” or “religious.”2 Allow me to name and define each dimension briefly.
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Meckel, D.J. (2009). Hinduism and Psychoanalysis. In: Belzen, J.A. (eds) Changing the Scientific Study of Religion: Beyond Freud?. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2540-1_9
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