Freud S Mahabharata

Though Freud never overtly refers to the Mahthe companion volume to Freud's India, Alf Hiltebeitel offers what he calls a "pointillist introduction" to a new theory about the Mah

Présentation de l'éditeur : "Though Freud never overtly refers to the Mahābhārata, many of the Sanskrit epic's themes are illuminated by Freud's thought and, conversely, many incidents in the epic can be used to illustrate Freud's theories. In Freud's Mahābhārata, the companion volume to Freud's India, Alf Hiltebeitel offers what he calls a "pointillist introduction" to a new theory about the Mahābhārata based on Freud. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the preoedipal, along with Freud's discussion of burial alive, ghosts and doubles, and castration anxiety, and looks at parallels with Indian theories of karma and reincarnation. In Chapter 2 Hiltebeitel draws on André Green's concept of "the dead mother," alive but dead to her child, to tell the epic's main story through the interactions between the peace-loving King Yudhisthira and his bellicose mother Kunti. Chapter 3 takes up three "dead mother" stories in the Mahābhārata's early books, all of them featuring Kunti, among a plethora of really dead or divine past mothers in the Pandava lineage. Next, Chapter 4 looks at Fernando Wulff Alonso's hypothesis that the Mahābhārata poets worked from Greek sources in modeling their stories. Hiltebeitel explores the epic's divine plan of the unburdening of the Earth, the goddess Earth, and its Greek counterpart in the Iliad's plan of Zeus. Girindrasekhar Bose's concept of the "Oedipus mother" is introduced in Chapter 5 through a discussion of Aravan, a minor figure throughout the Sanskrit epic tradition but one who looms in importance in the Draupadi cult and has a cult of his own, where he is called Kuttantavar. In both cults Aravan is worshiped for his self-mutilating sacrifice as a battle-opening offering to "mother" Kali, and he is worshipped in his own cult by Indian eunuchs or castrati called Aravanis in his honor. The book concludes with a new theory of the epic based on Freud's Moses and Monotheism, in which he argued that religious traditions deserve to be studied not only in what they say consciously about themselves, but in what they have registered unconsciously from past traumas, loss of memory, and the return of the repressed"

The sharp contrast between cultures with a monotheistic paternal deity and those with pluralistic maternal deities is a theme of abiding interest in religious studies. Attempts to understand the implications of these two vast organizing principles for religious life lead to an overwhelmingly diverse set of facts and their meanings. In Freud's India, the companion volume to Freud's Mahs-- Sigmund Freud and Girindrasekhar Bose. Hiltebeitel examines the attempts of these two men to communicate with and understand each other and these issues in the heated context of emotionally divisive allegiances. The book is elegant in its nuanced attention to these two thinkers and its tightly controlled exploration of what their interactions reveal about their contributions and limitations as representatives of the psychology and religion of their respective cultures. Anxieties about mothers, says Hiltebeitel, separate Eastern from Western imaginations. They separate Freud from Bose, and they separate Hindu foundational texts from the foundational texts of Judaism.

How close is spirituality to psychosis? Covering the interrelation of psychosis and spirituality from a number of angles, Insanity and Divinity will generate dialogue and discussion, aid critical reflection and stimulate creative approaches to clinical work for those interested in the connections between religious studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology and hagiography. Bringing together an international range of contributors and covering many different types of religious experience, this book presents its theme in three parts: Psychoanalysis, belief and mysticism Anthropology, history and hagiography Psychology, psychosis and religious experience. Each section includes discussion of the hinterland between madness and religious experience from the perspective of a number of religions, autobiographical accounts of those who have experienced a psychosis in which spirituality played a key part and a comprehensive review of the position of psychology research into the meaning and function of spirituality in relation to the psychoses. Insightful, enlightening and wide-ranging, Insanity and Divinity is ideal for clinicians, academics and chaplains working in clinical settings.

This book traces some of the colonial, postcolonial, and postmodern complexities of psychoanalytical thought as it has been variously applied to Hinduism. From Girindrisekhar Bose's pioneering reflections on the Indian Oedipal wish and the colonial positioning of early psychoanalytic practice in India, to postcolonial cultural criticism and contemporary clinical case studies, the collection spans close to a century of creative, sometimes radical, and always controversial thought about the psychological and theoretical riches of Hinduism.

Nationalist and Revolutionary While a high school student, I actively participated in the Mahatma Gandhis 1942 movement Quit India. I felt disappointed because only a few prominent leaders like Gandhi and Nehru were imprisoned. On Sept. 9, 1945, under the patronage of the Dadu District British Collector, the town dignitaries including my grand father and Mr. Tuljaram Nagrani, the principal of the town High school, along with the matriculate students had assembled at the Hindu temple to celebrate the victory of the Allies at the WW II. Sweets were distributed. I threw the sweets on the floor. The reason I did this was not because I sided with the Axis powers. But because Indian soldiers were fighting for Britain, as India was not a free country. Next morning, the Principal got me in his office and whipped me several times on my palms and ordered me to leave the school and come back with my parent. The principal told my father that Jagat to pay a fine of Rs. 5 and threatened that in case of denial I will be rusticketed (expelled from school as a bad character student) and no school would admit me. I am proud of my father that he said that only Jagat to decide. I said that paying fine means admission of the guilt. In my opinion it was not a guilt. I, with recommendation of my class teacher Mr. Chandnani, got admission in the P. H. High School, Dadu, only about 50 miles away from my home town. In 1947 on the eve of partition, there was an accidently bomb explosion in Karachi, suspected of an RSS activity. Several RSS leaders were arrested. A Khalsa police officer secretly alerted my grand father to hide me to avoid arrest. I, along with a few RSS pracharaks, secretly reached Karachi to take a ship for Okha, Gujarat, then train to Baroda. In 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse. Because Godse was an RSS member, the whole RSS all over India was banned. I participated in the collective protest against the injustice of punishing the whole RSS organization because of the crime by its only one RSS member. Whole family can not be punished because of the crime of its one member. I was imprisoned in Baroda jail for four months. Thousands of RSS members all over India were imprisoned. Dr. Jagat K. Motwani

This volume explores current images of afterlife/afterdeath and the presence of the dead in the imaginations of the living in Indian and European traditions. Specifically, it focuses on the deepest and most fundamental uncertainty of human existence---the awareness of human mortality, on which depends any assignment of meaning to earthly existence as also to notions of worldly and otherworldly salvation. This central idea is addressed in the literature, arts, audiovisual media and other cultural artefacts of the two traditions. The chapters are based on two main assumptions: First, that one cannot report on the direct experience of death; so it is only possible to speak allegorically of it. Second, in contemporary Western societies, marked by structural atheism, people look at literature, the arts and mass media to study their depiction and reading of traditionally religious questions of disease, death and the Beyond. This is in contrast to Asian civilizations whose preoccupation with death and Beyond is persistent and perhaps central to the civilizations’ highest thought. The chapters cover a wide spectrum of disciplinary approaches, from psychoanalysis to religious, anthropological, literary and film studies, from sociology and philosophy to art history, and address issues of unsettling power: comforting illusions of afterlife; the relations between afterlife and fertility; visions of technological immortalization of mankind; the problem of thinking about death after the “death of God”; socialist utopias of bodily immortality; fear of Hell and punishment; different concepts in relating the living and the dead; near-death experiences; and cultural practices of spiritualism, occultism and suicide.

This volume investigates the impact of death consideration on such phenomena as Buddhist cosmology, the poetry of Rilke, cults and apocalyptic dreams, Japanese mythology, creativity, and even psychotherapy. Death is seen as a critical motivation for the genesis of artistic creations and monuments, of belief systems, fantasies, delusions and numerous pathological syndromes. Culture itself may be understood as the innumerable ways that societies defend themselves against helplessness and annihilation, how they mould and recreate the world in accordance with their wishes and anxieties, the social mechanisms employed to deny annihilation and death. Whether one speaks of the construction of massive burial tombs, magical transformations of death into eternal life, afterlives or resurrections, the need to cope with death and deny its terror and effect are the sine qua non of religion, culture, ideology, and belief systems in general.