Freudian psychoanalysis, commonly critiqued for being rooted in a male-centric, Central European ethos, has surprisingly been an extremely fertile ground for the study of the Indian psyche. This volume brings together a rich variety of classical and contemporary writings on aspects of Hindu culture, and places these within the frames of understanding of psychoanalysis. The contributors include Girindrasekhar Bose, Sarah Caldwell, G.M. Carstairs, Alfred Collins, Paul B. Courtright, Prakash Desai, Wendy Doniger, Robert P. Goldman, Christiane Hartnack, Sudhir Kakar, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Stanley N. Kurtz, J.M. Masson, Ashis Nandy, Gananath Obeyesekere, William B. Parsons, A.K. Ramanujan, B.K. Ramanujam, and Alan Roland. To lay readers interested in psychoanalysis, and to academics interested in the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies and Hindu thought, this is an invaluable collection of essays.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR T.G. Vaidyanathan
T.G. Vaidyanathan was the author of Hours in the Dark, a collection of film essays. He co-edited An Indian Cricket Omnibus with Ramachandra Guha and Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Hinduism and Psychoanalysis with Jeffrey Kripal. He also guest-edited the Sunil Gavaskar biography by Dom Moraes. TGV was born on 21 October 1929 in a village in Tanjore district. When his family moved to Madras, he was sent to Madras Christian College High School and then to college at Loyola. He took a law degree but did not use it, choosing instead to take an MA in English literature, privately. He did short teaching stints in Assam, Hyderabad (Osmania University, where he edited the prestigious Shakespeare number of the Osmania Journal of English Studies) before settling in at Bangalore University in June 1967, from where he retired in 1991. He wrote on cinema, literature, cricket and culture for the Deccan Herald, Gentleman and the Hindu. He died on 26 March 2002.
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