India(ns) on the Psychoanalytic Couch:
An Introduction to the Work of Sudhir Kakar
The School of Liberal Studies along with Antarnaad Foundation recently
organised a guest talk on 'India(ns) on the Psychoanalytic Couch: An Introduction
to the Work of Sudhir Kakar', by Dr. Apurva Shah.
Dr. Apurva Shah is responsible for reviving the psychoanalytic movement in
Gujarat. After medical training in Ahmedabad, he completed the residency
training in General Adult Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine,
followed by fellowship training in Consult-Liaison Psychiatry at the Monteore
Medical Center and in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the Bronx Children's
Psychiatric Center, New York. He was a candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute for two years, and trained in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and
practiced for ve years, also completed a two-year programme in Systemic Family
Therapy from the Urban Family Institute, New York. He has presented several
papers at local, national and international conferences on psychotherapy across
cultures and on addressing violence against women in family therapy, and
authored a chapter on Psychoanalysis and Long-term Dynamic Therapy in the
Textbook of Psychiatry for South Asia. Back in India in 1996, his advocacy of
psychoanalysis nally led to the creation of Antarnad Foundation. After seeing it
through the early years, he returned to Palmdale, USA, where he currently
practices and runs a Freud Study Group, and is associated with the New Center for
Psychoanalysis, Santa Monica. He began the lecture by giving a brief history of
psychoanalysis, and said that the theory of psychoanalysis has largely been
formulated in the West and, since it is largely inuenced by culture, there have to
be certain kinds of modications before it has been implemented in India. The
Indian identity is largely fragmented, and is actually cohesive. But in spite of all
the differences and diversities there is a certain fundamental similarity.
He also talks about the phrase, “Unum de
Multis” which Kakad has used to describe the
Indian identity, which roughly translates to
“Out of one, many”. His main purpose of
using this phrase was to emphasize that a
psychological unity lies beneath all these
diversities of the culture. And thus, the main
basic concepts of the theory remain the
same.
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