The Mind in the World Selected Writings by Sudhir Kakar

The four volumes cover Sudhir Kakar's selected writings on psychoanalysis, culture and society, and religion and biography over the last four decades. As the 'psychoanalyst of civilizations', Kakar uniquely captures wide swathes of Indian cultural imagination through his essays. The first volume unfolds his psychoanalytic journey comprising both his theoretical innovations and clinical speculations. It recounts his personal travelogue in psychoanalysis that gave birth to the later macro spectrum of his analytic explorations into the concept of maternal enthralment, Oedipal alliance, and spiritual healing traditions. Kakar's thinking from his earliest works to the most recent is traced in the four sections of the second volume: Hinduism and psychoanalysis; psychoanalytic and spiritual healing in India; violence, self, and the sacred; and spirit and psyche. The third focusses on Kakar's original contributions on culture and society and maps the landscape of Indian cultural imagination from multiple vantage points, thus demonstrating Kakar's dynamism as a prominent, deep, and fierce Indian thinker who has combined Western philosophical thinking with critical Indian cultural thinking. The fourth volume presents psychological biographies to advance the claim that the study of life narratives across cultures needs to be pursued, especially in the era of globalization and increased cross-cultural exchange and connectivity.

A psychoanalyst, scholar, and writer, Sudhir Kakar (1938-2024) was a Lecturer at Harvard University; Research Fellow at Harvard Business School; Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; and Adjunct Professor of Leadership at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France (1994- 2013). He was also a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago (1989-1992), Harvard, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, and Vienna, and a Fellow at the Institutes for Advanced Study, Princeton and Berlin and the Centre for Advanced Study, University of Cologne.