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