Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Religion: Essays in Honour of Sudhir Kakar

As an 18-year-old, Sudhir Kakar chanced upon one of Freuds cultural texts, a close reading of which laid the foundation for an interest in psychology, a passion he pursued much later. Today, Kakar is an internationally renowned psychoanalyst, novelist, and a reputed scholar of cultural psychology and psychology of religion. His work, spanning almost three decades, converges multiple disciplines and represents the breakthrough in Indian social thought and indigenous knowledge systems, something anthropologists and historians of religions have been advocating for many years.

 

In this collection of essays, noted scholars who have worked with Kakar celebrate the three streams of psychoanalysis, culture, and religion, and their confluence in Kakars work as a kind of post-Independence renaissance of the Indian mind—an apt tribute to one of the most influentialthinkers of the twenty-first century.