Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Religion

An internationally renowned psychoanalyst, novelist, and scholar of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, Sudhir Kakar has taught at several universities in India, United States, and Europe. His many honours include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, and Germany's Goethe Medal. Converging multiple disciplines, Kakar's work represents the breakthrough in Indian social thought and indigenous knowledge systems, something anthropologists and historians of religions have been advocating for many years. This collection of essays celebrates three streams of knowledge-psychoanalysis, culture, and religion-and their confluence in Kakar's work as a kind of post-independence renaissances of the Indian mind. Including essays by leading scholars like Wendy Doniger, John Munder Ross, Manasi Kumar, Robert A. LeVine, and others, this book addresses important issues within the context of Indology and South Asian Studies: psychoanalysis; modern psychology and the study of lives across the life cycle; the study of culture and society in all its structural, symbolic, and social formations; and the study of religion with a special emphasis on the history of religious traditions, on the one hand, and praxis or religious practices, on the other. The volume includes a substantial introduction by Dinesh Sharma.