5 ideas
In 1921 Girindrasekhar Bose, a Calcutta physician trained partly on his own, wrote to Freud and sent him his thesis on repression. The next year he founded the Indian Psychoanalytical Society. Freud answered politely but disputed Bose's divergent reading of the Oedipal situation. The exchange is a documented case of a colonized practitioner accepting a Western science while quietly revising its core claims from the periphery.
Bose argued that every wish is paired with an opposite wish, for example to be male and to be female, to dominate and to submit. On this view the boy's wish to be female and his identification with the mother matter as much as castration anxiety. The Oedipal drama then becomes a play of bisexual identifications rather than a rivalry settled by fear of the father.
Bose absorbed psychoanalysis by treating it as continuous with older Indian philosophies of mind and self, rather than as a rupture with them. This let him accept Freud's method while retaining Indian assumptions about the self, the mother and the purpose of knowledge. The price was that psychoanalysis lost some of its role in India as a radical critique of the culture's own norms.
British analysts in India, notably Owen Berkeley-Hill, used psychoanalytic categories to diagnose Hindus as a collectively neurotic or anal-erotic people, which made colonial rule look like therapy. Viewed this way, a theory of the psyche is also a tool for ranking cultures. Bose's Indian version of psychoanalysis matters partly because it declined to turn that gaze back on the colonized in the same way.
Nandy reads the colonized person's hybrid, half-modern self as a store of 'possible and retrievable selves', not as an incomplete copy of the Western model. These discarded ways of being can be recovered to critique modernity from inside. The 'savage' element that the West projected onto its colonies is also a part of Western selfhood that the West repressed.