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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $73.95

Format:
Hardback
348 pp.
156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198076988

Publication date:
January 2014

Imprint: OUP India


Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Religion

Essays in Honour of Sudhir Kakar

Edited by Dinesh Sharma

An internationally renowned psychoanalyst, novelist, and scholar of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, Sudhir Kakar has taught at several universities in India, United States, and Europe. His many honours include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, and Germany's Goethe Medal.

Converging multiple disciplines, Kakar's work represents the breakthrough in Indian social thought and indigenous knowledge systems, something anthropologists and historians of religions have been advocating for many years. This collection of essays celebrates three streams of knowledge - psychoanalysis, culture, and religion - and their confluence in Kakar's work as a kind of post-independence renaissances of the Indian mind.

Including essays by leading scholars like Wendy Doniger, John Munder Ross, Manasi Kumar, Robert A. LeVine, and others, this book addresses important issues within the context of Indology and South Asian Studies: psychoanalysis; modern psychology and the study of lives across the life cycle; the study of culture and society in all its structural, symbolic, and social formations; and the study of religion with a special emphasis on the history of religious traditions, on the one hand, and praxis or religious practices, on the other. The volume includes a substantial introduction by Dinesh Sharma.

Readership : Suitable for students and scholars of social psychology, cultural studies, sociology, religion, and general readers.

Robert A. LeVine: Foreword - Asian Explorers of Psyche and Culture: Sudhir Kakar and His Contemporaries
Dinesh Sharma: Introduction
1. Wendy Doniger: When a Lingam Is Not Just a Good Cigar
2. Jeffrey J. Kripal: An Island in Mind: Aldous Huxley and the Neurotheologian
3. Dinesh Sharma: Sri Aurobindo Demystified: An Essay on Psychology and Religion in India
4. June McDaniel: Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Religious Ecstasy
5. Harold Coward: Mysticism and the Teacher-Student (Guru-Shishya) Relationship: The Approaches of Patanjali, Jung, and Kakar
6. Jhuma Basak: The Mother-Son Symbiotic Dyad and the Positioning of the Oedipus Complex in the Asian Culture
7. John Munder Ross: The Intergenerational Transmission of Culture in Conflict: The Story of a New York Mongrel
8. Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries: Can Leaders Change? Yes, But Only If They Want To
9. Manasi Kumar: Kakar's Contribution
10. Richard A. Shweder: Let Me Tell You a Story about Hindu Temples and Runaway Trolleys
11. Usha menon: Murder in Meriah Country: Ethno-political Conflict in the Kondhmals
About the Editor and Contributors

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Dinesh Sharma is Senior Fellow at the Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research, St Francis College in New York.

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Special Features

  • Celebrates the work of Sudhir Kakar.
  • Essays by prominent psychoanalysts, sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural theorists.
  • Comprehensive Introduction by Dinesh Sharma.