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Dr Sudhir Kakar was India’s most celebrated contemporary psychoanalyst. He was also an acclaimed cultural and post-colonial thinker. Dr Kakar has impacted the global understanding of unconscious processes in individual and collective life. His influence in psychoanalysis, literature and religious and spiritual studies, and his analytical method of studying cultures and civilisations, is worth engaging with. In his later years he moved beyond his life-long preoccupation of studying the culture-and-psyche relationship to that of the psyche-within-civilisational-flows. As a psychoanalytical practitioner his insights were contextually grounded, compassionate and astute. It was the relational aspect of psychoanalysis that involved him the most. This helped him identify with both the position of the analyst and the patient, the victim as well as the victimiser. He appealed for sensitivity in understanding complex actions and situations by retaining a concern for the human condition of perpetrators too.
As a psychoanalytical researcher, he preferred the longitudinal span offered by the life historical and psychobiographical method. Inspired by Erik Erikson, in his prolonged search for an androgynous and non-violent human aesthetic he involved himself in the biographical analysis of major historical figures from India such as M. K. Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa among others. These immersive sojourns into life histories enabled him to think of peace and love without projecting and splitting off currents of aggression and violence in self and others.
Of central interest to him was the promise of enlivenment that Eros and sexual desire offered on the one hand, and on the other hand that of inner stillness and quietude which a spiritual inclination could potentially awaken. I have often considered him as a thinker of the “And” rather than of the “Or” as throughout his life Sudhir Kakar strived to bridge differences and open dialogical spaces between seem