confessions of a shrink

‘Although written by a shrink, this is not the memoir of a shrink.’ The words, and italics, belong to Sudhir Kakar. The assessment is an honest one. At 73, the writer’s life certainly warrants the kind of scrutiny — his birth weight was ten pounds, he tells us — he brings to it. Also, as a long-time ‘observer of the Indian psyche,’ he is more than qualified to take on the task.

Memoirs are, by definition, accounts of random events that affect a person’s life. It is precisely this randomness that makes some of them more interesting than others. The Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung once mentioned that to read Kakar’s books was always a joy because of the uncommon way he combined ‘literary and psychoanalytic approaches to the world.’ This synthesis surfaces time and again in these pages, only not as often as one would like it to.

Would Kakar, as a Freudian psychoanalyst, agree that to write a memoir is an act of narcissism? Possibly. Then again, he probably subscribes to the view put forth by the psychoanalyst Andrew Morrison, who believes that a reasonable amount of ‘healthy narcissism’ allows an adult’s perception of his needs to be balanced in relation to others.

Writing from Goa where he now lives, Kakar begins with the funeral of his father, returns to his childhood in Nainital, and charts his story from Ahmedabad to Frankfurt, his return to Delhi and the relationships fostered in between these migrations. His writing of his student years is bland, covering meals of rice and keema mattar (sic), his time at the Wirtschaftsuniversitaet in Vienna, and being caught by a policeman at Harvard for urinating against a wall (he blames his ‘Indian instincts’). His first marriage (the brass band played Mere Sapnon ki Rani, apparently) is dealt with summarily, as is life as a ‘minor celebrity.’


At other times though — while focusing on adulterous loves, or describing the late Narasimha Rao as a ‘natural sulker’ — his ability to tease meaning from the innocuous shines. Take for example his assignment from Rajiv Gandhi, who wanted a psychological assessment of the state of Sikh militancy in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star. Interestingly, Kakar refers to the rarely mentioned role of the community’s women in its men taking up arms.

Eventually, one must acknowledge that without psychoanalysis, our stories are largely incomplete. That Kakar manages to bring some sort of completeness to his is commendable.

— A Book of Memory: Confessions and Reflections, Sudhir Kakar, Penguin India