Sudhir Kakar
Indian psychologist and writer (1938–2024)
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Through British Raj, Partition of India and Ahmedabad
Biography
Kakar was born on 25 July 1938 in Nainital, a town in present-day Uttarakhand, India. He spent his early childhood near Sargodha, now in Pakistan and also in Rohtak, where his father was an additional district magistrate during the British Raj and during the partition of India, and the family moved quite a bit from city to city. At age eight he was enrolled as a boarder in Modern School, New Delhi; he would later write about homosexual encounters in the school dormitories.
He next attended St. Edward's School, Shimla. He began his Intermediate Studies at Maharaja's College, Jaipur, in 1953 after which his family sent him to Ahmedabad, where Kakar lived with his aunt Kamla Chowdhry, and attended engineering college. After his B.E. degree in mechanical engineering from Gujarat University 1958, Kakar obtained a master's equivalent in business administration (Dipl.-Kfm.) at the University of Mannheim (1960–64), and a doctor's degree in economics at the University of Vienna. He began his training in psychoanalysis at the University of Frankfurt's Sigmund Freud Institute in 1971.
In 1975, Sudhir Kakar moved to Delhi with his aunt, Kamla. Kakar resided in Goa and was married to Katharina (born 1967), a German writer and a scholar of comparative religions. Kakar has two children, Rahul and Shveta, from his Indian ex-wife.
Kakar died on 22 April 2024, at the age of 85.
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Career
After returning to India in 1975, Sudhir Kakar set up a practice as a psychoanalyst in Delhi. There, for a short period of time, he was the Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology (1976–77). He was the 40th Anniversary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard (2001–02) and a visiting professor at the universities of Chicago (1989–93), McGill (1976–77), Melbourne (1981), Hawaii (1998) and Vienna (1974–75), and at INSEAD, France (1994–2013). He had been a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute of Advanced Study), Berlin, Centre for Advanced Study of Humanities, University of Cologne.
Kakar was in private psychoanalytic practice in New Delhi for 25 years before moving in 2003 to his place of residence in Goa, India. Since then he had his practice in Benaulim, a village in Goa. He was a visiting professor at Goa University. He created controversy in a symposium regarding the Death Penalty for Child Rape in 2018 by advocating leniency towards perpetrators of child rape, emphasising protection of the family reputation and the family bond over the child's safety.
Psychoanalysis and mysticism
A portion of Sudhir Kakar's work involves the relationship between psychoanalysis and mysticism. His analyses of personages include that of Swami Vivekananda in The Inner World (1978), Mohandas Gandhi in Intimate Relations (1989), and Ramakrishna in The Analyst and the Mystic (1991).
Kakar’s novel Ecstasy (2003) was "written exclusively for the senses of the skeptic and the mind of the mystic" and "is the beginning of a journey through the soulscape of spiritual India". The story is set in Rajasthan of 1940s or 1960s.
Psychoanalyst Alan Roland (2009) writes that when Kakar applies his psychoanalytic understanding to these "three spiritual figures [Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi, Ramakrishna]", his analyses are as "fully reductionistic as those of Jeffrey Masson". Roland also disputes the Kakar's theoretical understanding of mysticism from a psychoanalytic standpoint, and writes that it is "highly questionable whether spiritual aspirations, practices, and experiences essentially involve regression."
At a personal level, Kakar felt that spirituality for him consists of moments of profound connection with a person, nature, art, music, and for those who believe in God, with the Divine. His spiritual beliefs have been influenced by a combination of a rationalistic, agonistic father and a religious, ritualistic mother.
His some general observations on Indian psychology and attitudes are mentioned in V. S. Naipaul's India - A Wounded Civilization.