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Coming from a background of left political activism in India, I would not have imagined going in for psychoanalysis. In the 1980s I had a flat mate in Mumbai, India who was writing down his dreams and going to an analyst, a colleague at the documentation center training to be a psychoanalyst and so it was not a case of lack of exposure. It was the passion for social change and the slotting of psychoanalysis as primarily serving to maintain the status quo. Rather than battling social oppressions in the outer world, “adjusting” the inner world of the individual to accept the myriad injustices of the world we inhabit. As a lawyer too my orientation was to use my skills to help movements for social change and victims of atrocities of all kinds.
The lack of awareness and acknowledgment of our own drives of power, domination, aggression and hierarchy and their impact on our efforts at social change was striking. The famous “Power Corrupts” slogan seemed to be with a proviso ubiquitous in law - “power corrupts everyone but us”. French author and Nobel laureate Andre Gide who was once an official guest of the Soviet Union, came away convinced of the early stages of totalizing despotism in the communist officials in 1930s and put it as “Power does not corrupt people, people corrupt power”. The extreme left in India working among indigenous peoples replaced the traditional leadership of tribal elders looking upon them as co-opted by the youth with nary a thought about the impact on the psyche of the young men wielding the power of the gun in the communities. The consequent misuse at times reminiscent of the behavior of state functionaries is so pervasive that it appears that the party refuses to engage with the phenomenon.
In a similar vein, time and again, I was struck by the fact that a number of individuals in the “progressive” set subscribing to the ideals of equality and democracy seem to be pretty autocratic personalities with little tolerance of differences. Sheila Rowbo