Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose
Alf Hiltebeitel
Abstract
This first three chapters or first third of this book documents the ups and downs in the conflictual correspondence between Sigmund Freud and India’s first psychoanalyst, Girindrasekhar Bose. They trace the relationship through three phases of their 1920–1937 correspondence, and also compare their correspondence with Freud’s contemporary correspondence with Romain Rolland, noting similar disaffections while documenting in both exchanges Freud’s evasions about India. Psychoanalytic topics covered in these chapters include maternal transference as it relates to Bose’s work, to Freud’s therapeuti ... More
This first three chapters or first third of this book documents the ups and downs in the conflictual correspondence between Sigmund Freud and India’s first psychoanalyst, Girindrasekhar Bose. They trace the relationship through three phases of their 1920–1937 correspondence, and also compare their correspondence with Freud’s contemporary correspondence with Romain Rolland, noting similar disaffections while documenting in both exchanges Freud’s evasions about India. Psychoanalytic topics covered in these chapters include maternal transference as it relates to Bose’s work, to Freud’s therapeutic work with the poet H. D., to Bose’s and Freud’s treatments of the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal, and to André Green’s “dead mother complex.” The middle three chapters each treat a concept by which Bose sought to challenge Freud, producing conflicts between tham that had a much richer content than either of them realized or cared to elaborate upon. New answers to two questions are posed: why Bose never wrote an article for Freud on his signature concept of “opposite wishes,” the topic of chapter 4; and why Bose chose an icon of Viṣṇu for Freud’s 75th birthday gift rather than a Bengali goddess, which is asked through the last three chapters.
Keywords:
Sigmund Freud,
Girindrasekhar Bose,
Romain Rolland,
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle),
Oedipus complex,
pre-Oedipal,
dead mother complex,
Viṣṇu,
Jewish monotheism,
Hindu Goddess
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001 |
