The Danube Meets the Ganges: A review of Freud Along the Ganges: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the People and Culture of India, edited by Salman Akhtar, 2005,  Other Press,  451 pp.

This Lively volume is intended to educate Western psychoanalysts who are largely unfamiliar with the history and influence of psychoanalysis in India. Divided into three sections—Mind, Body, and Spirit—the

chapters analyze myth, literature, spirituality, movies, and politics using psychoanalytic theory to make comparisons and connections between Indian and Western psychologies.

Editor Akhtar, who has cowritten chapter one with Pratyush Tummala-Nara, starts with a history of psychoanalysis in India. We learn of its surprisingly early beginnings in 1921 when Girindrashekhar Bose published The Concept of Repression. Indian scholars have thus been aware of and alive to European ideas about character and the unconscious for quite some time. They have also developed uniquely Indian approaches to psychoanalytic thinking in order to accommodate important cultural differences, such as child development within the complex extended family and the “pervasiveness of religious or spiritual practice” (p. 16). Akhtar and Tummala-Nara acknowledge that these distinctive contributions can also be undercut by “colonial terminology, [which] continues to prevail in the psychoanalytic writings on Indians, by both Indian and non-Indian analysts” (p. 19). The authors give an egregious example in the work of Kurtz, who attributes the ease of Indian children's attachment to nonfamilial female figures to a lack of bonding and implicit rejection by the biological mother. The authors quote Kurtz as saying that “healthy, empathie mirroring seems to be entirely absent here” (p. 15). He describes the impact of multiple mothering as “breaking] the heart of the self, and resulting in narcissistic withdrawal, if not schizoid regression.” Akhtar and his coauthor call this conclusion “racist and incredible” (p. 15). They offer numerous counterarguments and attribute Kurtz's conclusions to Western anthropologists' focus on poverty-ridden households.

Ironically, however, this discussion is followed by a r