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This slim volume consists of three essays originally delivered as the Haskell Lectures at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The unifying theme of these otherwise unconnected essays is the author's project of juxtaposing a psychoanalytic viewpoint with the mysticism of his native India, not, as he says, 'to "shrink" the mystic, but rather to expand our understanding of his mystery and, ultimately, of the working of our own selves' (p. ix). The distinctive flavour of the book as a whole arises from the conflict between the author's dual loyalties as analyst and as spokesman for the validity of the mystical experience and tradition.
The first essay is also the most substantive and intriguing, presenting rich material, conveyed with grace and lucidity, from the biography of the great nineteenth-century Indian mystic Ramakrishna. Kakar solves his dilemma of wanting to be psychological about his subject without reducing, 'shrinking', or pathologising him, by proposing that relational rather than classical theoretical models are the appropriate ones in the study of someone for whom, as Kakar asserts, 'there is no evidence … which is remotely suggestive of any strong hostility toward the Oedipal Father' (p. 25). To his credit, Kakar provides enough data about his subject, even in the short compass of this 30-page essay, for the analytic reader who might be sceptical about this claim to reach his or her own conclusions about Ramakrishna's psychodynamics.
Of central importance in Kakar's view of Ramakrishna is the latter's purportedly unconflictual identification as a female; diagnosable, as Kakar says, in Stoller's terms as secondary transsexuality. But this is also to be understood in the context of a society in which such phenomena are viewed in a quite different light than is the case among ourselves. In the end, Kakar relies on Winnicott's ideas about femininity as aligned with being, while masculinity is concerned with doing; in this sense, mysticism