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Books Reviewed: Sudhir Kakar- The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978; Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982; Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; and The Analyst and the Mystic, New Delhi: Viking by Penguin Books India, 1991. Takeo Doi- The Anatomy of Dependence, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha International Ltd., 1973; The Anatomy of Self: The Individual Versus Society, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha International Ltd., 1985.
To review the work of the two most prolific and internationally recognized psychoanalysts in India and Japan today, Sudhir Kakar and Takeo Doi, is to become involved in a study of contrasts. Both men embarked on a journey of formulating Indian and Japanese psychological makeup, respectively, from their own prolonged sojourns in the West. Their work is forged in the crucible of personally encountering a totally different life style and psychology from their own, which set them upon a profound self-exploration of their indigenous psychology. But here the similarity ends.
Sudhir Kakar, a truly gifted writer and story-teller whose original ambition was to write fiction, received his doctorate in social psychology from the University of Vienna before returning to India to write and teach about management psychology at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. There, he met Erik Erik-son who was researching his book on Gandhi, and soon became Erikson's teaching assistant and disciple for two years at Harvard