Thanks. That was a good read.
Below is the article by Dr Salman Akhtar(Brother of Javed Akhtar), an eminent psychiatrist about the psychoanalytical perspective of fundamentalism.
A psychoanalytical perspective
BY SALMAN AKHTAR
A man urinates on himself and in the process he also breaks some expensive crockery as when the fit occurred he was sitting at the dining table. On another occasion the man who has epilepsy is driving a car when suddenly he has a seizure and as the car goes out of control many innocent people are killed. Obviously in such circumstances we have to take into consideration the kind of epilepsy he has, the manifestations of the seizure and which part of his body goes out of control, how unconscious he becomes et cetera and therefore how dangerous this situation can be. We must of course examine the consequences of the seizures on him and on things and people around him but to my mind those concerns pale in comparison to our wondering why this man has epilepsy and what causes this epilepsy.
As physicians, I am a doctor myself, we certainly treat symptoms although that is not our preference. We treat symptoms if symptoms become very annoying but as good doctors we are most interested in pathology: What is causing the symptom? That is what we need to treat. The same thing applies to prejudice; the same thing applies to the topic at hand: fundamentalism. Certainly we should define it, certainly we should describe it, certainly we should think about its consequences but I think it is more important to worry about its causes. Why? What is the attraction? What pull, what hypnotic attraction does fundamentalism have that people succumb to it? And if we know why then we can devise remedial strategies that would go deeper and are not related merely to phenomena.
What is fundamentalism? Please understand that when we talk of fundamentalism we are not talking of any particular religious group. We are not talking of Jews, we are not talking of Muslims, we are not talking of Hindus, we are not talking of Christians. We are not talking of any particular group because this is a human phenomenon and fundamentally or perhaps I shouldn’t use the word fundamentally, basically all human beings are more or less alike and all of us have struggled with basically similar kinds of problems. There are two problems that we all struggle with. In fact, all human problems can be boiled down to two fundamental problems. One, that some things are impossible and two, that a few others are prohibited. If you can swallow this bitter pill, I think you are fine (you’ll never need to see Dr. Sudhir Kakar, me or any other psychoanalyst!).
When we say fundamentalism, we mean a complex set of five things that go together. First, there is a literal interpretation of some religious tract so what is written is no longer deciphered or deconstructed. It is not to be thought about, it is not to be given meaning, it is what it is. There is literalness to the interpretation – one. Second, there is an ethnocentric attitude. The fundamentalist says my belief, my religion, my book is the best one there is. So there is literalness and there is ethnocentricity. With that there is megalomania – We know and we have the solution and we can solve the problem; we know exactly what the problem is and we know exactly what the solution is. Megalomania, and then interestingly, a little spice, just as we add a little hing when we are cooking aloo gobi, a little spice of a sense of victimhood, a sense that we are endangered. Real or imaginary, it is a cultivated sense of delightful and delicious masochism, a masochism that will come very handy, as you will see. The imagined cultivated threat is what creates cohesion of the group and would then permit the enactment of violence towards others as a justified protective device. But this is merely a description. Why does fundamentalism have such a powerful appeal? If Marx called religion the opium of the people I believe fundamentalism is intravenous morphine.
In my way of thinking, to be mentally healthy and to be sane is not an easy thing. Sanity comes with its own burdens. It is not easy to be mentally healthy. As psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, we write volumes about mental illness and its struggles, about what is ill, what is not ill, what is normative and what is not normative, and what do normative and pathological have to do with each other and so on, but we pay inadequate attention to what is healthy and the problems of mental health. When Freud said that the purpose of psychoanalysis, clinical psychoanalysis, was to reduce neurotic suffering into day-to-day misery, what did he mean by day-to-day misery? That is what I think we need to understand. I think that sanity has its own burdens; mental health comes with many problems.
There are six problems that mental health poses and it is these problems that fundamentalism solves. This is the key issue here because mental health comes with some baggage, some problems and some burdens, and fundamentalism is the treatment of those burdens. (You could say that fundamentalism is the cure for mental health!) The burdens of sanity are the following six things.
1) Factual uncertainty. A mentally healthy person has to accept the fact that things are uncertain. We don’t really know what is about to happen and what can happen. Who knew that the tsunami would happen and that so many people would get killed? Who knew that 9/11 would happen? Some people knew, of course, but in general who knew that 9/11 was going to happen? And we don’t know, car accidents happen, you’re taking a flight to Bombay and the flight is cancelled or delayed, we don’t know. We don’t know what will happen, what happens, what is happening right now. You have no idea what is happening right now, not only in Calcutta but even in Karol Bagh. Things happen. A mentally healthy person has to understand that things are uncertain.
2) Conceptual complexity. Matters are not simple, all matters are complex. How to get from Place A to Place B does not have only one path – it can have many paths. What does a phenomenon mean? Four people will leave this particular meeting and may describe it in entirely different ways. Our reaction to the vice chancellor’s leaving can be a complex reaction. Some people might respect him for the fact that he spared some time to come here and feel grateful for that. Some people might be annoyed at him for leaving. Some people might think that it was all a pretence, that he comes, just says a few words and leaves. Some people will say how humble and decent of him it was to take time out of his busy schedule, to walk over, give his blessings and shake people’s hands, and so on. The same phenomena can be interpreted in many ways. Conceptual complexity – things are not simple.
3) The third burden of sanity is moral ambiguity. Freud said that there are two great human crimes: incest and parricide. Here Freud was right about incest, certainly. Why is incest such a horrible thing to do? Because it destroys the family structure and family is the unit of civilisation. So incest is an attack against civilisation. But parricide I’m not too sure about because the implication is that killing the mother is alright or killing a child is alright, infanticide is alright and matricide is alright. That is undeniably ridiculous but that was Freud’s own personal phallocentric bias. The correct word he should have used is homicide. Two fundamental human crimes are homicide and incest. Between these instances most things are actually ambiguous.
Take the example of stealing. Is stealing bad? Of course stealing is bad, but let us suppose that your daughter is terribly, terribly ill, near death, and you have no money. Should you steal money, or medicines from a doctor’s cabinet? Of course! In fact, if you stand on ceremony, moral rights and righteousness at such a time that would be silly and that would be wrong. Murder? Certainly murder is wrong but sometimes murder in self-defence is the correct thing to do. And that’s what Krishna says to Arjuna in the Mahabharata, "Jo avashyak hai wahi uchit hai (What is necessary is therefore appropriate)". So there is ambiguity about morality. What seems right in one place becomes wrong in another place. What seems right today becomes wrong tomorrow, what was right in one era is not right in another era, what is right in a certain context is wrong in another context – moral ambiguity.
4) Cultural impurity. A mentally healthy person realises that there is no such thing as purity. Purity, the search for purity, is the enemy of truth and the enemy and destroyer of reality. Reality is always hybrid whether we acknowledge it or not. I am an Indian who is an American psychoanalyst because I’ve been trained in certain modes of analysis that are prevalent in America. There is a psychoanalyst called Christopher Bollas whom you should read, he’s very good. He is an American but he is a British analyst because he is trained in the British tradition. Bhimsen Joshi is a South Indian, I think from Bangalore originally, but trained in the Patiala tradition. The sitar is born out of the hybrid mixtures of Afghani drone instruments and the southern rudra veena. All things are mixed up, all things are mixed up. I am speaking in a language that is predominantly British in origin, predominantly, not exclusively, but British in origin, with profound Latin, Greek, German ancestry. I am speaking it in an Indian accent (all I haven’t done is nod my head but I can do that too – "What yaar?"!) and here I am, having travelled on a German airline, Lufthansa.
....cont.
