This extraordinary collection highlights the emergence of a new strand of critical psychoanalytic theory and practice that is debating how culture and psychoanalysis mix and make each other. Each term in this cryptic title, Psychoanalysis from the Indian Terroir, poses rather than answers questions. It sets in play a terrain of inquiry that it refrains from fixing or stabilizing. Terroir, a suitably technical name for the combination of climate, soil and texture that allows for cultivation (of wine or other specialist food crop), topicalizes the question of setting and outcome without presuming what its constitutive elements are, or what it is they produce. Such technical obscurity of terminology perhaps befits a practice that is typically seen as being as elitist or inaccessible as psychoanalysis. This is notwithstanding the commitment to free psychoanalytic provision that characterized the early institutionalization of psychoanalysis in inter-war Germany from the 1920s until the Nazis closed down (and repressed) the public psychoanalytic clinics, as well as driving the psychoanalysts into—at best—exile. Further, the French allure of terroir—that, to a British reader like me, conveys sophistication as well as the requirement for delicate appreciation—speaks to the necessary specificity of readings of psychoanalysis that are ever at play. But even if we encounter British or German psychoanalytic authors in this text, as well as Green, Deleuze, and Lacan, their reading or “application” does not presume a mere transposition from one geopolitical space to another, in the course of which such spaces acquire a spurious reification. Rather, we are invited to explore the how, the making and re-making of “psychoanalysis” in a particular, rich, biopolitical environment, where psychoanalysis is as much what is grown as what is imported.
Indeed the botanical metaphor is extended: the editors discuss the question of planting as well as what is planted, and play with whether this process is an implanting or something that becomes “home-grown.” Discussion of hybrids could incite a previous or prior authenticity. But this would essentialize that which might be understood to be contingent, if not arbitrary. How significant is it that psychoanalysis was developed in Judeo-Christian societies as, perhaps, an effect of the alienation produced by industrialization in the late nineteenth century? Can, or should, we disaggregate capitalism and modernity from what is sometimes called “westernization,” albeit that this was resourced by as well as warranting colonial exploitation? How are we to understand the forms of experience, including the distress and social suffering wrought by dispossession and social exclusion that were the underside of the story of European “development”? How should we address shifts in family dynamics, the (re)invention of the bourgeois nuclear family, the forms of forced or elective migrations to cities, the intensifications and reformulations of class/caste and gender divisions and relations enabled, produced, allowed by such seismic shifts?
Clearly, the sun-lit hillsides of proliferating vines envisaged through the trope of terroir are neither stable, nor are their limits enclosed. Indeed the focus on (im)plantation seems also to evoke—albeit implicitly—questions of violence, cultural appropriation, and perhaps even sexual/reproductive manipulation; of surrogacy rather than conception, commerce or exploitation rather than (only) intimacy. In his History of Sexuality: an introduction, Michel Foucault writes of the implantation into bodies of forms of power/knowledge relations around sexuality that owe their current forms to a secularization and scientization of the practice of religious confession. Indeed it is this incitement to self-knowledge and giving an account of one’s true, innermost thoughts and feelings that form the conditions of possibility for psychoanalysis. The “perversion” of this “implantation,” Foucault writes, is not that aberrant impulses or fantasies should be silenced or erased, but rather that the demand to speak of them in fact constitutes, stabilizes, and naturalizes them. Thus the cultural-political terrain of and for the development of psychoanalysis as a “talking cure” or at least a talking method, comes to be situated in specific socio-historical and material conditions such that its emergence or incursion into India calls for reflection and interrogation. Questions of power are foregrounded, not only through topicalizing cultural imperialism and class/caste privilege in what counts as “culture,” but also in pursuing a psychoanalytic inquiry to explore why and how these power relations come to structure embodied histories that are inhabited, lived, and lived out in particular geopolitical conditions.
Such themes anticipate much of the content of the chapters that follow, with the focus on gender and women much discussed—whether in the social imaginary, in dreams, in the cultural-religious appeal of female deities or even the quasi-religious figure of the mother. All these structure gendered patterns of relationships, including as they appear in the consulting room. They are also embodied in the wandering, homeless women who sleep in the New Delhi train station or the women pilgrims seeking healing and solace at a Sufi shrine. Indeed women and children do not merely haunt this text, they inhabit it. The only place where the question of masculinity forms the overt, primary topic is in the (only jointly written) chapter exploring juxtapositions between gender, trauma, and political violence across two different catastrophic contexts.
This volume is, then, a response to as well as development of, the monumental initiation of this field of debate of Indian Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalysis in India (a half century after Girindrasekhar Bose tried to engage Freud) via Sudhir Kakar’s 1970s study of the psychic development and life of the Hindu boy child. Kakar’s field of inquiry has continued to expand, as his contribution here indicates, moving from that earlier quasi-developmental and gender and caste-specific account to a wide-ranging analysis of the ways cultural-political nuances enter and configure individual psychic lives. His presence in this book reflects a continuing project that has now been taken up widely and in manifold directions, as these diverse chapters indicate. Perhaps the most visible twenty-first century reconsideration of the earlier formulations is evident not only in the primary focus on women’s gendered experiences but also in the chapter on how Hindu-Muslim relations come into the consulting room, as forms of transferentially invested, relationally produced but socio-politically overdetermined forms of otherness, attention to which not only inflects analyst/analysand dynamics but also forms a vital arena for re-working these.
Here we see a different politics of psychoanalysis emerge—one that destabilises psychiatric and psychological “truths” or notions of “mental illness,” to show how the symptoms so displayed are not only individual. Rather, they indicate not only the individual struggle with obstacles and constraints in particular lives but, via the psychoanalytic dialogue which slows down and focuses on processes of relational engagement (including defenses against, or repudiations of engagement), a recovery of the “other” as always produced by and as a disavowed part of the “self” is made possible that addresses political, as well as personal, transformation.
As the editors note, a key ambiguity or debate traverses the book’s thirteen chapters: is its object an exploration of Indian psychoanalysis or a document of Indian engagement with, and reflection on, psychoanalysis? Does psychoanalysis require indigenization (to render it “Indian”?) or rather is “Indian-ness” itself, what it is to be Indian and the relationship with the contemporary nation state named as India that is rather under psychoanalytic scrutiny here. Such questions are, of course, not only those addressed by this book, or in relation to the status of psychoanalytic theory and practice in India, but also those which exemplify the wider challenges posed by attending to the ways culture, history, and biopolitical conditions write themselves onto bodies, into minds, and are lived out as both singular and collective biographies.
The trope of terroir names land (terre) or turf without presuming its ownership or territorialization. This mobilizes an attention to placed-ness or specificity without falling foul of the kind of methodological nationalism that characterizes so many transnational research encounters. What “India” or “Indian-ness” is posed here as a question, a topic, rather than a foundational assumption. As such, the book as much diagnoses the contemporary (clinical) state of the national entity called India as its citizen-subjects. This relationship between one’s own mental state and the cultural-political entity end territory within which chronological, biographical lives are lived out is, as the editors note, a troubled and troubling interface, articulating “cultural questions in clinical contexts” with “clinical questions in cultural contexts.” Its treatment here is beautifully composed, and illustrated.