Coming from a background of left political activism in India, I would not have imagined going in for psychoanalysis. In the 1980s I had a flat mate in Mumbai, India who was writing down his dreams and going to an analyst, a colleague at the documentation centre training to be a psychoanalyst and so it was not a case of lack of exposure. It was the passion for social change and the slotting of psychoanalysis as primarily serving to maintain the status quo. Rather than battling social oppressions in the outer world, “adjusting” the inner world of the individual to accept the myriad injustices of the world we inhabit. As a lawyer too my orientation was to use my skills to help movements for social change and victims of atrocities of all kinds.
The lack of awareness and acknowledgment of our own drives of power, domination, aggression and hierarchy and their impact on our efforts at social change was striking. The famous “Power Corrupts” slogan seemed to be with a proviso ubiquitous in law – “power corrupts everyone but us”. Time and again, I was struck by the fact that a number of individuals in the “progressive” set subscribing to the ideals of equality and democracy seem to be pretty autocratic personalities with little tolerance of differences. Sheila Rowbotham in ‘Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism’ aptly puts it – “we can be opposed to hierarchy elitism and yet feel superior”. Pointing out the domineering behaviours to a person who consciously thinks that their sole motivation is altruism and working for a better society is a recipe for anger and embittered battles in an organisation.
Coming to the temples of justice, lawyers, perforce and any person engaging with law courts can see the huge role played by the biases, prejudices and stereotypes of the judge in the adjudicating of cases. Gender, class, caste, sexual orientations are some of the usual areas of play. Generally, by an invisible osmosis like process we imbibe the prejudices and stereotypes of the family, class, gender, caste, religion and community where we have grown up. There are few individuals who consciously think “I am against homosexuals” or “I am against muslims/hindus/christians”. Far from devising ways to minimize the impact, legal systems do not take on board the impact of the unconscious biases and prejudices at play perpetuating discrimination and injustice in total derogation of the rule of law. Along with the twin pincers of law and social change, the general failure of rationality and logic in inter-personal relations was the third prong which nudged me to psychoanalysis. In 2006 the newly minted Centre for Psychoanalytical Studies in Delhi University started a three-year pilot course on “psychoanalytic psychotherapy” which I promptly joined and today have been working as a psychotherapist for half-a-dozen years. An integral part of the course was a minimum of six months of ‘personal work’ with preferably an analyst. This set me on the journey into personal analysis and the search for an analyst.
“Love is sweet poison” is a popular slogan written at the back of “autos” -three-wheeler contraptions for public hire– popular across the length and breadth of India. The trials and tribulations of love made me particularly anxious about the phenomenon of “transference love” integral to psychoanalysis. Observations by Freud (1915) on the subject, “We have no right to dispute that the state of being in love which makes its appearance in the course of analytical treatment has the character of a ‘genuine’ love. If it seems so lacking in normality, this is sufficiently explained by the fact that being in love in ordinary life, outside analysis, is also similar to abnormal rather than to normal mental phenomena ” (p. 168), further fuelled anxiety-levels. I consulted internationally with a psychoanalyst friend about whether to go in for analysis with a humorous, terribly attractive, single younger woman Training Analyst. The reply lost in the mists of cyber space was along the lines – “Well in Paris psychotherapists haven’t started taking sessions in thongs as yet!” In short to go for it and that should be an interesting enterprise!
The first meeting with the Analyst did not allay my fears and I sent a text message: “Will I be pulling out petals from flowers – She loves me; She loves me not!” I started with her and after three months she re-located to another town terminating the analysis. Abandonment by Analyst to add to feelings of abandonment by mothers-partners and what have you! I started off with a second analyst. One day, I am taking off my shoes to lie down on the couch and he says “Rakesh, I want to talk to you”. Intrigued, I put shoes back on and sit across on the chair and the Analyst tells me about his own feelings of being scattered and fragmented and wanting a six month break, after which may be we could resume. Most people have one analyst with whom they continue.
I discover getting an analyst in India is no easy proposition. In sharp contrast to Berlin which has nine hundred psychoanalysts, there are three analysts in the National Capital Region of Delhi where I reside and thirty-one analysts altogether in a country of sub continental proportions. I begin with once a week as no slots are available with the third analyst. After two months, I progress to twice a week. Less than thrice a week is not even counted as psychoanalysis and falls in the category of “psychotherapy”. My fondness for detective fiction makes me think up of murder plots with fellow analysands as victims, where no one would be able to ascertain the motive making the crime perfect: ‘Getting a slot vacant for analyses’. It takes about a year to move on to thrice a week with no assurance of continuance.
It is six years down the line. The analysis is helping me in many ways as well as contributed to my skills as a psychotherapist. Along with there is a meshing in of my interests and I increasingly see ways to apply psychoanalytic concepts like the “narcissism of minor differences” or the “splitting” of the bad and “projecting” on to the “other” in the area of matrimonial law disputes, inter-community relations and judicial training . In the crucial area of social change and psychoanalysis I find my current understandings are articulated succinctly by Samuels (2006) who writes “This is because I do not agree that therapy and analysis siphon off rage that might constructively be deployed in relation to social injustices. In fact, I think it is the reverse that often happens: experiences in therapy act to fine down generalized rage into a more constructive form, hence rendering emotion more accessible for social action”.
As far as my own analysis is concerned, quite in tune with the title of the Freud paper (1937) “Analysis, terminable and interminable”, things remain indefinite and inchoate. A graduate degree in law or medicine qualifying a person to enter the legal or medical profession takes five and a half years after completing school. And I think trust my vacillating and vague self to choose something like psychoanalysis.
References:
Freud S. 1915. Observations on Transference-Love. Standard Edition XII.
Rowbotham S. Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (The Women’s Movement and Organising for Socialism, Part Two: IV). Retrieved March 3, 2015 https://forworkerspower.wordpress.com/tag/sheila-rowbotham/
Samuels A. 2006. Working directly with political, social and cultural material in the therapy session. In L. Layton, N.C. Hollander and S. Gutwill (Ed.), Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics – Encounters in the Clinical Setting (p. 12). Routledge.
