Thank you very much, Russell. I should start by saying that my talk or my comments are slightly at a tangent from some of the ongoing discussions,
as well as perhaps even with with this panel. But let me say that I'm here because actually, more than a decade ago,
I wrote a Ph.D. on the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in India, which I never published and by the more.
But I but in the last four, five, four years, I've been training as a psychoanalyst in London, in the Freudian leukaemia in style.
And also my book in press, which is on the question of political violence in India.
Looking at figures starting from pillock and ending with 1947.
And Patel uses some psychoanalytic concepts, but it's not loaded with that jargon.
So I thought I should place myself in this, in this conversation and where I'm coming from.
So in a way and the way I want to take this forward is really like two things because I'm going to extract a few things from my training,
a few things from my book and a few things from my doctoral work.
So in a way, if it's a collage, do do forgive me of different bits, but it will all it will all come together.
Which is to say that and the more kind of collaborative interest with a lot of people in this room is to really open
the discussion which cannot be done here today is really what is the present and future of the clinic in India.
Because if you look at the history of psychiatry or psychoanalysis, it is coterminous.
Its history is coterminous in India with the rise of the discipline.
So there is no time lag. It's not like psychiatry comes in in in England and then 40, 50 years later, it goes to India.
It actually it is coterminous much like liberalism in the 19th century.
It's coterminous with it. And as we know in psychiatry, in the 18th century confinement was the condition of therapeutics.
You needed to put people in asylums and so on and so forth.
And you but you you have psychiatry in India, but you do not have a great confinement in India,
which is the experience of, say, France of Britain and so on in a similar analogical way.
And I would say a lot more about psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis comes a very, very early to India.
It is a it is. It's it's international body.
It's body is recognised even before the French body is recognised by the International Psychoanalytic Society.
And yet it is the same story in that its uptake is very wide in humanities, in humans,
in discussions around the novel, in discussions, even in some therapeutic practise.
But you never really get the effect the the takeoff of, as it were the clinic again, the talking shop, the talking cure in India.
The way perhaps now a little bit because because of India's opposing a lot of stressors for every individual being,
you are seeing a new new form demand in it and all sorts of therapeutic talking cures are available.
Apart from my style, which is leukaemia and because there might be a reason from it,
I'm sorry the demand is not here, but but I won't minds a talk yesterday and even so should judge.
I wanted to actually posit my talk quite diametrically opposed to it to kind of see what psychoanalysis can do and doesn't do,
as opposed to, say, psychiatry and the interface between, say, society and culture.
The book that we've been hearing how medicine might interact with society or culture or and it may not.
So in a way, this is the opposite in a way to psychoanalysis, because what a psychoanalysis attends to is not is not this kind of spread.
Can we put animals in? Can we put all of this in, but really is interested in the question of containment and specificity?
Because if you will take the the dictum, take the most abject condition of, say,
schizophrenia, I was telling Bustle this, you know, people who people who hear voices,
there's an invasion of the outside in in that kind of suffering and the work of psychoanalysis is then therefore not to kind of,
as it were related to what many dynamics that of course it takes it for.
Read that people are subjects of capitalism. Freud is very, very clearly stating that psychoanalysis stands against capitalism.
So it's not. That's all taken for read, but it's it's it's it's practise is not the way cross-cultural psychiatry or medical.
Ology, or the kind of discussion we have been hearing,
so this is a kind of important caveat in my people, so suffering is individual, especially in Freud.
And as you know that Freud was a neurologist and he developed psychoanalysis through as it were the true description which was observed,
which is also why you can see anthropologists take onto to do psychoanalysis.
But unlike psychiatry, psychoanalysis is limited to and by talking.
It's not really. It doesn't extend beyond this. It's very it's it's very clearly about talking and what can be done in and with language.
It can, you know, that's really it's it's self-limiting.
Horizon and lacking in psychoanalysis is driven less by identification of a diagnosis, whether you're schizophrenic, hysteric or what have you.
But really, it's focussed on prognosis and the future of the person.
And in that sense, say, for instance, again, the story we heard yesterday of of Rommel for,
say, someone like knocking on, you know, psychosis was is a question of adaptation to society.
It very openly poses that question. And and therefore, so I was just coming to it.
I wanted to have that discussion, which is why I'm saying all this because, you know, it's also different.
And moreover, I'm now at the slightly controversial was a difficult bit, as its as such, psychoanalysis takes a very strong claim to universality.
It is a very it believes in certain universal precepts and and and therefore, as my teachers in London would say, we are of course all mad,
but not in the same way this would in a way, you know, you could say that this is really what the psychoanalytic tradition is.
It's not like, OK, am I a Hindu and my, you know, all that comes in, but you know,
those those kinds of cultural kind of deconstruction or social deconstruction that we
see in a lot of cross-cultural psychiatry is not on the table for psychoanalysis,
actually. And it is therefore less drawn, a driven or rather, it is not interested in the question of normality as a diagnostic category.
So there is and finally, there is no necessary link between behaviour and diagnosis, so you can be speaking so-called nonsense.
It's not necessary, therefore, that you are hysterical or schizophrenic, so the structure of a diagnostic category.
So there's a big gap between surface and death, if I can put it like that.
So in a way, it is the opposite of the psychiatrists practise, which, as we saw in the case, note in in this regard of stock yesterday,
and it's a case note I was struck because I work with these notes in India and from the colonial period, it's the same form.
The form has not changed and even the entries were very similar to to a to the kind of practises, say English.
Psychiatrists who had no access to Indian languages or informants were deploying something here to be discussed.
So in a way, the methodological issue is not universal versus cultural or social.
But it is really the universal question which which which concerns everybody.
And therefore, it is a universal list, the singular or the particular. It is not therefore about culture or society in that way.
So Indians in this trajectory to psychiatry and psychoanalysis is therefore quite
different because most of its concern has been in as as were really devising,
really devising diagnosis and and so on and so forth.
So to give a very do to come to Oedipus complex, which I will, I want to take a two examples here,
one on how in the theoretical debates itself in Freud's time, how this was theorised and debated from an Indian perspective.
And then I want to end with why Gandhi might be the father of India and what what in a
way his his assassination tells us in a way on the question of father figure relations.
But before that, let me just draw out a little bit of the context.
I'm sorry if my mother, I needed to make my logical claims, and it's too bad that a man is not here, but I'll tell him later when we meet.
So when psychiatry comes to India and early as I think the early 19th century, it's really interested in confinement.
But its main concern is really to rationalise law.
It's not really looking out for people, whether they are bad homeless, ill, able bodied, ill, ill bodied.
But the concern is really how to make criminal law more coherent in its own, in its in its own precepts because there is an issue with.
With criminal lunacy, let's put it like that, so that's really how it's a.
In the first instance appears,
it secondly appears with the question of also white women who have arrived very recently in India because colonisation is,
as you know, women were not part of the 18th century story British story in India.
It's really in the early 19th century when women are allowed to enter. And there is a huge number of breakdowns of of of of women in India.
And so there are two kinds of concerns and one that concern with with English women, British women in India and the second with actually the rational.
So in a way, it's actually quite detached from Indian society. But having said that, you have about 30 asylums by 1920 in India or from big,
big to small and there and all the major cities they are part of as the integral architecture of cities.
Whether it is most prominently Bombay, which then it moves.
But then, you know, if you all. And and the key, the key big asylums are remain in one in Lahore.
And then in the early 20th century, it still is a very big hospital.
I gather is the other one in Ranchi, which is in Bihar, which is where you see a lot of a lot of the work.
But the interesting thing about Indian psychiatry is, which is a contrast to psychoanalysis, is that very few Indians take it up.
So the you know, so when you have professionalisation and so-called Indian ization of the medical
services around the nineteen hundreds tends to use when actually Indians have,
you know, storming the gates of sort of higher offices in in the in the professional services.
Psychiatry remains something of a kind of an very unattractive option for the medical service people,
and you really don't get widespread Indian ization of the, you know, the way you get it for, say, surgery or or so on.
So the interesting thing is the flipside for psychoanalysis. So in a way, psychiatry finds it very hard to find Indian intellectual life.
It might find a practise, but it doesn't really, you know, there is some kind of a gap which I can discuss later.
But psychoanalysis, on the other hand, become take is taken up very is grabbed very enthusiastically and early on in the nineteen hundreds.
And here the look again. The two Lucas's, oh, Calcutta and Lahore and of course, Banaras and various other places.
Also it come up and the two figures here, one on academic entrepreneur Anand Sengupta,
who had studied at Harvard and he was interested in in actually instituting the discipline in India.
And it's remarkable that, you know, in about 15 years.
So from about ninety five onwards to about 1920,
all the major Indian universities have a psychology department in India, plus they teach psychoanalysis.
It's not, so it's a hermeneutic exercise.
And of course, the key figure as a practitioner is getting through shake her, whom everyone has heard of in the room.
I imagine who is in correspondence with Freud for good 20 years and 50 years,
and Aki has seen some of the correspondence or something, and I've seen some of it.
But so what is the wood? Who is boss and what does he have to do with the Oedipus complex?
And and let's come to that to the story. So as we so Freud's understanding, of course,
of human suffering and and the human subject is driven is is formulated around two or three very basic concepts.
Very it's very minimal. It's a very minimal theory. Of course, the unconscious is one which is the introduction of the unconscious as a specific site.
But the second is the Oedipus complex, which is what really ties it up into debates with kinship, with science, biology, with history and so on.
And and it's this debate. So Get in.
The Checkerboards is not trained as a novelist himself analyses himself and gets into
and writes a Ph.D. on the theory of repression in You will tell me the date 1920,
you know, 1920, 1920, and is critical of Freud for two reasons.
And you're in correspondence. It's not happening. It's not a one sided thing.
So he says, Well, Freud is OK, but he Freud had made the other argument that every human subject is driven by opposing sets of wishes,
and this is a problem for humanity itself and causes hatred and love.
You know, all of all of all of our emotions, all of our drives are basically basically binary and opposite opposing in nature.
This is one of the things that Freud had had said, and he had identified a few few of those things which were important.
Both says, Well, OK, you're right. And remarkably, for this time, he says, the most important thing, which is the desire to be both male and female.
So this is something you know, really.
Radical, because, of course, Freud has not entered the debates around sexuality in this, in this, in this period.
Relatedly, what happens is, of course, the debate opens up, but not quite really open in a very big way because Freud and Bush kind of part company.
And as we know that Freud himself in the 20s would turn to big social and religious questions because of the war question,
because of the Jewish question, because of many of the catastrophes.
And so he is interested in how religion comes to be, how wars come to be.
And this is also whether Oedipus complex then is beefed up and bush then batiks critiques of Freud,
who say, Well, you know, Freud has it wrong in in in, in in kind of as it were installing the father.
What is really important is, in the Indian case, the mother figure, right?
It's really the. So he wants to relatives the paternal and the maternal across cultures.
So it's a cultural relativism problem. And you know, when I first published this, I was like, OK, good man, boobs, you are right.
Correct. And you know that there are different ways of thinking about it.
I no longer think that. So this is what I'm trying to open up here, you know, speculatively here.
Secondly, a both also goes to the. Much like Freud goes to really important Judaic texts and even Egyptian texts,
otago's to the guitar to kind of mount a different theory of the self, which I can't I don't go to.
But the biggest fillip to psychoanalysis in India is given by none other than Nehru and Nehru deployment of Freud in in his autobiography.
And, you know, but you also have the uptake of it in particularly the Hindi novel,
which wants to kind of break away from its social shackles of Pynchon and all of that,
you know, how Indian society is oppressive and we must write novels about it.
And you know, and that was the kind of opening moment for the Hindi novel.
But then there's a tone in the 30s for Hindi novelists to do a psychoanalytic way.
But anyway, so. And so why do I want to sort of critique my own work where I kind of initially agreed with with with boss and say yes,
that there is a relative relationship across cultures and on the figure of the father and the mother?
No, I was driven to it actually by my book on Indian politics and and anyone who opens at the newspaper in India,
you will see that the figure of the father was everywhere, you know,
even even, you know, the most recently, when Trump called Modi the father of India,
there was a huge kerfuffle, you know, and and of course, the story, of course, belongs to do too.
To me, this is actually a really important question, and in a way, Freud addressed it.
So Freud's point was that it's really what is at the heart, at the heart of any organisation,
whether it is family, whether you skin it, family, religion, nation, community,
what have you that there is there is a kind of a parasite which which which inaugurates a that that that that unity,
whether it is that of the father or whether it is that of the family. And.
And he also writes about a theme which is supposed to pass heart, not the question of sacrifice.
So there are two things which really allow for humans to come into a form of more than one being.
And that is that is the question of of of a parasite.
And the killing of the father is necessary almost for as it were it can be, can be its metaphorical.
It doesn't have to be a real killing. And what the killing allows is a process of both inclusion and exclusion.
So you kind of you throw the father out, but you also create a taboo around around it.
And therefore you have new norms through which society or fraternity will appear, and it must be about violence.
And in that sense, I think I want to conclude by saying that I could read out maybe five seven two.
I mean, I probably will say something that is really fascinating to turn to, not the debate.
If you see, Oh my God, but this really is the father and the real father. It's not about the musical chairs that people want to have in India.
My argument is that actually in killing and killing Gandhi, goods sit in stores.
Gandhi as the father of India, it's not because he existed because Ramala said that he was the father of father of India.
He was himself called Babu as a paternal name.
But it's actually the fact of the patricide itself, which institutes Gandhi's Gandhi's Gandhi's figure as as of.
And here I turn in my book Please. I mean, to actually to to actually gods.
His confession, which is now. Easily available. And and the good goods,
his confession is absolutely brilliant for a psychoanalyst because it's replete with that language for first articles because Gandhi,
the father of Pakistan and and and and and be what he says is which I like.
I find it fascinating when he says he's asked why he's killed, and he says Gandhi has failed in his paternal duty.
So I'm actually restoring the duty of the father by killing him because he has failed as as a father.
And so in a way, the confession really becomes a note psychoanalytic note on the relationship of them.
And here, I think the key question here is that in a very Oedipal sense, a good sissy's Gandhi as the obstacle to the figure of the mother,
which is, of course, mother India and and the correct relationship of enjoyment that can be established between as it were good c.
And so in a way of a good set,
it's really the betrayal and neglect that has caused by the father is a betrayal and neglect by the father that has caused the patricide.
And he concluded, yes, that he has proven to be the father of Pakistan.
It is for this reason alone that as a dutiful son of mother India, it is my duty to put an end to the life of the so-called father of the nation,
who had played a very important role in the vivisection of the country of our mother, our motherland.
So this is, of course, you can see that, you know, you could say is this is, of course, a parasite.
And Gandhi, as a father, is fixed as the obstacle in the first instance for the son to establish a relationship with the nation or the
mother to kill the father for good say it was necessary to establish a proper and enjoyable good relationship.
And his confession was the admission of this biocidal guilt.
The overcoming of the father, as Freud elaborated in his writings on the psychic structures of political life,
precedes the production of future generations in establishing horizontal bonds of fraternity.
So it's really the killing of the father, which allows for fraternity to come in.
So in his classic elaboration on the consolations of whether fraternity or religion or or even paradigmatic ideas,
Freud singled out the primacy of the mythic powers up parasite as a primary passage into life and language.
The figure, a figure of the father, incites reverence and envy,
love and fear and his extinction or banishment in of outside conditioned actually matrilineal descent and fraternal bonds.
So the father's exclusion is death or exile. Killing, nevertheless, is also incorporated into the symbolic system of the clan,
religion or nation, providing meaning inasmuch as ordering the nature of that bond.
So in a way, it allows for a symbolic structure. If I can put it like that, though, the murder is marked by the by prohibition.
The murdered father nevertheless becomes emblematic of the new order.
Gandhi's assassination replaces the mythic structure of Parasite, but crucially, as a historical event Gandhi.
That's a statistic of not only the Indian nation, but also its new fraternal and independent horizons.
While his assassination is marked by guilt for his transgression for God's Guzzi, the assassination indeed represented him in the play's primacy.
It also has something to do with it with within the public, the secret the secret life of it, which only becomes overt once Gandhi Gandhi is killed.
It is death, however, that guarantees the perpetual return of the father as the brilliantly insightful I'm concluding
if controversial analyst Jack Black clarifies that once dead fathers become even more potent.
The dead father, as he elaborates, is perpetuated through his name,
and it is his name that reproduces the order of things where the familial of symbolic.
The patriarchal weight of such an order is, of course, reinforced as in the case of a nation that is often imagined in terms of a mother.
But it might be easy to dismiss this as pure psychobabble.
But it is instructive that precisely because Gandhi is deemed to hold a symbolic order of the Indian nation that
his name and its commemoration has become synonymous with the Indian nation that not merely signifies a spark,
but has guaranteed his status as the father or the super ego of the nation.
The power of betrayal and the afterlife is redirected towards a symbolic order of the nation.
The international assassination therefore had two independent effects.
The betrayal that goods imputed to Gandhi returned to haunt and inform him that it's a life that has neither been owned nor fully exercised.
God said it would, however, be associated with this crime. But but it surely establishes Gandhi as the father.
The act of Parasite to his return as the father of the nation, marked the transformation also of the brute force into the symbolic structure as his
assassination became one of the founding events and the mythic structures of independent.
India, so in a way, I just want to say that it would be it easy, therefore you can say something about something about Hindutva here,
which I don't have the time to do, but in the book it is there. But it's really it's really this killing which does these two things.
It establishes Gandhi as a figure, which is why he's constantly complained against even by Dalits and women.
Everyone, I mean, you know, he's always a bad father betraying father. I mean, that constantly installs him as the father is my point.
And that installation would not be possible without as it were this this patricide.
And finally, the more important thing here is that actually,
it's really with his assassination that you can see that that Hindutva choirs for the first time, a public debate, a public name.
It was a it was a secret society up until that. Pretty much so.
I just want to end here to actually say that, Mayakoba.
I do think fathers are important to India and they are actually of all over the Indian political landscape.
And and this is just do I could do something more clinical, but I just thought, given that it's gone D850, it's he's everywhere.
He's been denigrated. What can psychoanalysis bring to it?
Thank you.