Indian Jungle By Sudhir Kakar

For more than a century, the cultural imagination ofpsychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to beassumed as Western. Fundamental ideas about humanrelationships, family, marriage, and gender often remainunexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they areuniversally valid. In the intellectual climate of our times, with therise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with theadvent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendenceof psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted.

Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginationsof non-Western civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethinksome of its theories of the human psyche, extending these tocover a fuller range of human experience. These culturalimaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from auniversal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains awareof but is not limited by its origins in the modern West.

This book ofessays aims to be a step in that journey, of altering the self-perceptionof psychoanalysis from ‘one size fits all’ into a morenuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by culturalparticularities.