Sigmund Freud and India: Theoretical and Cultural Transformations of Psychoanalysis

The question analyzed in this paper is: "Is psychoanalysis at all possible in a traditional non-Western society with its different family system, religious beliefs and cultural values?". The current sharp increase in scepticism about the transcultural validity of psychoanalysis correlates with the rise of relativism in human sciences. S. Freud was not ready for an intercultural dialogue. He insisted on a one-sided monologue. Through Freud took little interest in India, India took an early interest in Freud. I show that psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method and as a cultural theory was not easily received in Indian culture with its rich philosophical and scientific traditions and religious beliefs. To this day, the focus of analysis on individual patients has deflected the attention of analysts from the cultural assumptions built into psychoanalytic theory as well as from the shared cultural characteristics of psychoanalytic patients. I conclude that traditional psychoanalytic theory has been too bound up with Western individalism to take seriously the centrality of the group in the construction of Hindu forms of consciousness and self. Psychoanalysts must stop judging Indian culture by their own Western developmental assumptions and admit that India possess its own culturally distinctive psychological structures with their own pattern of normality and their own line of soul development and traditional forms of healing. If early psychoanalysts tended to use psychoanalysis as a colonial instrument for retooling Indians into the ninetheenth-centry Europeans, nowadays a new tendency becomes evident - a desire to refashion or reshape psychoanalysis itself in the light of Indian culture. Evidently, awareness of the cultural contexts of the new, comparative psychoanalysis will contribute to increasing the ken and tolerance of this discipline for the range of human variations.