This is a blog post from
Amrita, you're a writer and a clinical psychologist. Could you talk about how these areas come together or work at odds in your life?
I think writing and the practice of psychoanalysis have in common the purpose of using language to render the inner world more visible on the outside. So, it calls for a certain sensitivity to one's own psyche, to the psyche of others and to language. When they come together then the result is so pleasurable: an attuned psychoanalytic hour, a moment of intimacy with a child or a lover, or a piece of writing that feels like a truthful and beautiful representation.
But they can also, as you rightly point out via your question, come against each other, for example if I'm engaged in a piece of writing, I'm very much absorbed in an inner state and it can be quite difficult to come out of that and attune to another person which can be quite a problem in a social setting, in the therapy hour or even in the setting of the family in which I live. So I think it goes both ways, my attunements allow me to have moments of extraordinary resonance but also terrible dissonance as in situations where one of these three becomes overbearing. And they can all three become overbearing — oneself, another person, language.
I do agree with this idea that I associate with Baudelaire but that probably has multiple origins, of the writer being at once gifted and cursed. It's true also of psychoanalysis, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for example said that people who enter psychoanalysis had only two professional choices, doctor or patient! Both Baudelaire and Bion seemed to be onto something, understanding the inevitability and the vulnerability that these professions — writing and psychotherapy — have in common.
And could you place the body within that context? I remember you telling me when you first began practising that you wanted to integrate a physicality to psychology (yoga etc.) because it was impossible to separate body/mind.
Well the body is invaluable as our most available storehouse of feelings and inner experiences (dreams are the other one). And I think a body practice of some kind is very helpful in containing the overbearing nature of the self. If I can feel the contours of myself via my body it immediately helps me also know where I stop and another begins, it helps me respect others’ boundaries, it helps me feel contained and intimate with my own feelings which in turn helps me attune to others.
Aside from your many academic papers, you've also written two books — a collection of erotic short stories, A Pleasant Kind of Heavy , and more recently an anthology of 3,000 years of Indian erotica. In your beautiful introduction to Parrots of Desire , you address the modern reader, who makes place for the romantic/erotic/body in life, and I wonder if you could talk more about why you are drawn to the subject of erotica?
I'm drawn to lost things, and in the India that we (you and I at least, and maybe also others) grew up, erotica was a lost thing. There was almost no literary erotica, the whole concept was submerged, barring a few white male writers in the popular (not literary) press. For both genders but especially women the prevailing ethos around things erotic was one of secrecy, silence and often shame. With the books, in retrospect, I can definitely say with A Pleasant Kind of Heavy I was doing what psychoanalyst feminists like Luce Irigaray call "refurbishing the unconscious", which is to say adding back material into an area of silence or darkness. The Parrots of Desire had a similar purpose, but to go beyond my own imagination to collect together Indian writers who had spoken or written on the erotic.
And what do you feel are the greatest threats to the erotic in India today?
Well, the archaic pulls of the “old” shame culture are always present and shall continue to be a factor that threatens the erotic. But there is also the environmental damage and the rise of consumer culture that are exerting their particular pulls upon our erotic lives. Consumer culture seems to order us to be erotic even as we lose the real markers of some of what I think are our most Indian erotic metaphors: the oceans, the forest, the rivers.
Absolutely, this is such an interesting dichotomy. I was listening to a comedian talk about how when he was a teeanger it was so difficult to find a picture of a naked woman, and how teenagers today don’t have to do much except access the Internet, and rather than make us more alert, this technology and access actually has the opposite effect of dulling our senses, so it’s more like yawn, oh, there’s another naked person. Can you talk about what this onslaught of pornography does to the erotic imagination, and also in a more basic sense, what it does to desire, which I see somehow as central to all creativity?
I think the onslaught of pornography combined with the pressure that consumer culture places upon us to dress, live and be “sexy” can make us conservative, by which I mean imaginatively lazy. Being continuously told (as it were) who and what is arousing, having supposedly arousing bodies in our faces, makes it easy to miss the inner journey that allows us to discover what we individually find arousing. There is a bit too much of an injunction about desire, which makes it more difficult, of course, to have it. I think there is the risk of being bullied by sound-bytes and visual clips, such that we sell ourselves short (and soon) when it comes to desire. And, of course, as you rightly say, when you have sold yourself short on desire, you have also sold yourself short on creativity, you've short-circuited the journey, been satisfied too quickly...
If desire indeed is shrinking, if we are becoming more robotic as we get increasingly distanced from nature, the environment and more and more glued to our screens, are the intensity of our emotions also in a kind of decline? I mean to say, will we no longer need to read Kalidasa because tweets from KimKierkegaardashian will do?
Because we are bombarded, I think we withdraw into ourselves and yes become more robotic as a self-protection. And perhaps, as a result, there is maybe a narrowing of the amplitude, the bandwidth of what is possible in terms of experience both erotic, emotional and otherwise. I think there is a shying away from intense emotions, the hope of somehow, studiously, avoiding loss. So there is now the notion that perhaps we could hack our way through life without loss, but as you know there is no desire without that prospect of loss. So I don't think it makes sense to say that we no longer need to read Kalidasa because tweets from KimK will do, rather I think its a question of who amongst us can now bear a Kalidasa because his intensity requires the reader to go out of a limited emotional comfort zone, meeting ourselves in a different way. The tweets on the other hand might provide a bearable frisson without challenging the whole inner landscape as would a more dramatic and intense emotional experience.
One of the words that get bandied about in the art world is authenticity. Without this ‘it’ quality apparently, the art cannot be good, but the deciding of this authenticity is obviously a nebulous zone, particularly when one is working in contemporary/modern forms as opposed to classical/traditional. So, can you talk a little about why this quest for authenticity is so important?
Well, what are we saying when we say something in the art world is not authentic? I think we are saying there is some disconnect between the artist and her/his work, and a felt sense that the work is appropriated from the outer world rather than being a reflection of the artist's inner world (which is how many of us define art — as an expressive product of the artist's inner world). The use of the word ‘authentic’ suggests our implicit belief that art itself ought to be an extension of one's search for self, and when it’s not, the art feels somehow not genuine. Of course, all these assessments are very subjective, but I think there is something about our preoccupation with the notion of genuine or authentic that reflects some of our contemporary anxiety. I think you're onto something when you speak about the departure from classical forms which means we can no longer easily use the word “authenticity” in the sense of "undisputed origin and not a copy". So in a post-modern world where both individuals and their art are of muddied origins, where technology also has us second-guessing what is genuine, I think we have a quest, wish, or drive towards art or writing or relationships that restore our own ever-fragile feeling of being genuine.
So authenticity is really an extension of one’s search for self… could you talk then about how the quest for authenticity fits into the solipsistic social media world many of us navigate?
Social media presents a problem to the search for self in multiple ways. Most of all it tempts us to foreclose the depth of the search, going for a sort of breadth instead. I think the risk for both artists and beholders of art is that we will skim the surface of many things and the risk is that such a skim tempts us to appropriate things, to re-present as art and as ourselves. We might get more focussed on how we are presenting ourselves which does distract from the search for the self. I'm not disputing that social media is a powerful source of connection, nor am I advocating being a luddite. But there is a way in which the quick likes and fast food of social media can get us satisfied too quickly, before we even start to consider what it is we are looking for. And so as much as we have a drive to the genuine, when the experience of the genuine becomes elusive and our distance from it greater, it becomes harder to drop into that search for the genuine, we might even feel a slight terror of it.
