Psychoanalytic perspectives from South Asia: introduction to special issue

The contributors to this issue interrogate South Asia by reflecting on its historical, cultural, literary, and political life, offering unique psychoanalytic perspectives on subjects such as citizenship and nationalisms, nonviolence and otherness, claims and contests of sovereign homelands and sovereign selves in the background of diversity and multiculturalism, but also inequality and unfreedom. The authors turn to psychoanalysis as a subversive tool to interrogate and recognize the psychic life of individuals and their collectives, whose dreads and dreams follow a non-European structure. They shed light on uneasy legacies of caste, ethnicity, colonialism, and nationalism as they make and unmake contemporary lives in the region. Collectively, the special issue demonstrates immense richness and versatility of psychoanalytic perspectives ranging from the Freudian, Winnicottian, Lacanian, and Kleinian to the spiritual and relational turn, listening deeply and openly to concerns for a postcolonial subjectivity.