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When psychoanalysis first arrived there in the first decades of the 20th century, India was under British colonial rule. The sway of modern western ideas such as
psychoanalysis was hegemonic among the intellectual elites of the colonized nations in those days. But India also has its own indigenous tradition of psychology in the broad sense, ranging from metaphysical speculation through dense physiological formulations to the empirical study of an array of states of consciousness far wider than that recognized in western scientific thought. That tradition is as venerable, extensive, and profound as any in the world, including that of the West, and it makes India a culture that, from the very beginning, could challenge western formulations from its own unique perspective. Now that we are well into a new postcolonial era, the opportunity is ripe for a genuine two-way dialogue between psychoanalysis and Indian civilization, in which neither is simply ‘applied’ to the other, but in which mutual illumination, critique, and enrichment are possible.
Few authors could be better positioned to organize such a dialogue than Salman Akhtar, whose psychoanalytic credentials are matched by his devotion to and knowledge of his native India. Further, his position not only as an Indian, but also as a member of the Muslim minority, allows him to view India with both love and a dispassionate and even critical eye—a perspective not so different from that of the good clinical analyst. This volume contains 14 mostly quite substantial articles, whose authors are for the most part Indians or individuals of Indian descent (to judge by their names) who combine professional expertise as psychoanalysts and psychiatrists with a rich familiarity with their own Indian traditions. The handful of western authors represented are either well-recognized authorities on aspects of Indian thought, such as Alan Roland or Jeffrey Rubin, or else, as in the case of John Munder Ross or the late Hyman Muslin, t