Happy birthday, Papa Freud

The father of psycho-analysis certainly has his acolytes in the land of the Kama Sutra

THE 150th birth anniversary of Sigmund Freud is not going entirely unnoticed in this land, where Kama Sutra-Khajurao coexists with the valorisation of brahmacharya. The epitome of brahmacharya fathered no children but got the accolade of 8216;Pitamah8217;. There are other examples. Couples like JP and Prabha as well as Acharya Kripalani and Suchitra, married each other but stayed together as brother and sister. In fact, there seems a strange congruence between Freud8217;s theory of sublimation and the good old Hindu view of sex.

An intrepid band of Freud-wallahs is to be found lurking in Delhi University. Tracking them down is easy. When you hear the first party to the second party saying, 8220;Baby, you are most wonderful person on earth,8221; and the second party to the first party replying, 8220;Hey, don8217;t infantalise me! In fact, you had better get your pre-oedipal to oedipal shift sorted out and choose!8221; 8212; just follow the duo. You will then arrive at the Centre of Psychoanalytic Studies.

The Centre recently rang in the Freud celebrations with talks on 8216;Romantic Love: Normal or Abnormal?8217; 8216;Are Marriages made in Heaven?8217; and 8216;Ram, Rahim and Freud: Hindu Muslim Relations8217;. Celebrated psychoanalyst, Salman Akhtar, author of Freud on the Ganges, managed to bring sex even into the talk on partition in the context of Hindu-Muslim relations. Referring to Mountbatten8217;s sexual anxieties, Nehru8217;s affair with Edwina, Jinnah8217;s entanglement with an 18-year-old and Gandhi8217;s experiments with brahmacharya, Akhtar managed to weave in an interesting side-show in history.

Freud8217;s radical conception of sexuality, the positing of a sexual drive detached from genitalised sex or an instinct for reproduction, the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal psychosexual stages of development, are well-known and still meet with resistance as having taken away the 8216;innocence8217; of children and polluted 8216;pure8217; human relations. However, he stands with Copernicus and Darwin as part of a trio that delivered a severe blow to the anthropocentric view of Man. The postulation of Copernicus that the earth was not the centre of the universe was considered heretical. Galileo under threat of torture and death had to renounce his Copernican beliefs. The shock dealt by Darwin8217;s theory of evolution, taking away man8217;s position as a unique creation, continues to reverberate across the world. The ultimate sabotage by Freud of man as a conscious, willed creature in control of his destiny, engenders hostility even today. The conviction of an individual having free will was not disputed. However, he postulated that acts attributed to free will were in fact attempts to obey unconscious mechanisms.

Tragically, rejection of Freud is nowhere more manifest than in people struggling to make the world a better place. About half a century after Marx, Freud evolved the analytical tools to understand unconscious drives to power and dominance. A synthesis of Marx and Freud would have helped Marx8217;s votaries to have checked tendencies of dominance within their own organisations and helped build a more egalitarian and humane world.