[Buddha-l] Sudhir Kakar

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 04 July 2007 10:12, Katherine Masis wrote:

> You're welcome, and thank you and Franz Metcalf for
> recommending Sudhir Kakar. 

If you are collecting writings by Sudhir Kakar, one little gem is his review 
of Jeffrey Masson's book <cite>The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of Religious 
Sentiment in Ancient India</cite> Masson's book, written when he was still 
deeply enamored of Freud (whose character Masson later went on in Oedipal 
fashion to assassinate), was an attempt at (in Kakar's words) "reducing great 
men to the sum of their neuroses." And so we are treated in Masson's books to 
a penetrating analysis of the Buddha as an anorexic with a morbid fear of 
intimacy, of Krishna as a sex addict with a morbid fear of intimacy, of 
Ramakrishna as a schizophrenic with a variety of erotic dysfunctions (and 
probably a morbid fear of intimacy), and...well, you get the idea. Kakar's 
review, entitled "Reflections on psychoanalysis, Indian culture and 
mysticism," takes Masson to task for his analysis of individual cases but 
also shows how reckless and irresponsible it is to try to psychoanalyse a 
human being whom one has never met and with whom one has never interacted in 
any way at all. This, in any case, is how I remember the review, but the 
memory is 25 years old. The review appeared in Journal of Indian Philosophy, 
vol 10 (1982), pp. 289-297. It is followed by a review article by Stella 
Sandahl entitled "To psychoanalyse a civilization" (pp. 299-303).

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico