Freud's India Sigmund Freud and India's First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose

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.

Alf Hiltebeitel is Professor of Religion at George Washington University. He works mainly on the two Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and on the south Indian Draupadi cult, which worships the Mahabharata's leading heroine as the Goddess. He is a historian of religions who studies Hinduism with longstanding interests in Sigmund Freud and in the comparative study of Judaism.

Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Preface

1. Introduction: Beginnings of Tension and Drama in the Freud-Bose Correspondence
2. Restoration of the Bose-Freud Correspondence: Light Shed on its First Two Phases from Freud's 1923-37 Correspondence with Romain Rolland, and a Missed Chance to Compare Views on the Preoedipal
3. Unraveling of the Bose-Freud Correspondence, with More Light Shed
from the Freud-Rolland Correspondence and from Freud's 1933-34 Work with H. D.
4. Opposite Wishes
5. Freud, Bose, and the 'Maternal Deity'
6. The Oedipus Mother
7. The Party, the Guests, and Why Visnu Ananta-Deva
8. Thinking Goddesses, Mothers, Brothers, and Snakes with Freud and Bose
9. The Oceanic Goddess in the Gift to Freud

Bibliography