The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis

By Sarah Pinto

Just before India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. The published analysis documents a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. “Mrs. A.” (as she is known) turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints.

This book explores the conversation between Mrs. A. and Satya Nand, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a dynamic concept of counter-ethics. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us that the west did not invent feminism, that psychiatry’s history of innovation and creativity is global, and that ethical thinking does not need to center on western myths or paradigms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780823286683

Sarah Pinto

Sarah Pinto is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She teaches courses on medical anthropology, gender, and feminist and social theory, with particular attention to cultures of biomedicine, kinship, and political, cultural, and epistemological concerns related to the human body. Her geographic area of specialization is India.  She is co-editor of Postcolonial Disorders (University of California 2008), and author of numerous articles on medicine and health intervention in South Asia.  She is completing an ethnography of psychiatry's treatment of women patients in urban India, asking how kinship and legal processes related to family life shape clinical practice, and how clinical practice informs subjectivities in and of intimacy. This work is particularly interested in the stakes of mental illness for divorced or divorcing women in India, and asks what these circumstances can tell us about the place of gender in framing culturally relevant ethical frameworks.  Pinto is currently developing a research project on the transnational history of hysteria, focusing on dialogues on hysteria between India and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and their role in shaping contemporary etiologies.

Book preview

THE DOCTOR AND MRS. A.

Thinking from Elsewhere

Series editors:

Clara Han, Johns Hopkins University

Bhrigupati Singh, Brown University

International Advisory Board

Roma Chatterji, University of Delhi

Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University

Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College

Harri Englund, Cambridge University

Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Angela Garcia, Stanford University

Junko Kitanaka, Keio University

Eduardo Kohn, McGill University

Heonik Kwon, Cambridge University

Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

Deepak Mehta, Shiv Nadar University

Amira Mittermaier, University of Toronto

Sameena Mulla, Marquette University

Young-Gyung Paik, Seoul National Open University

Sarah Pinto, Tufts University

Michael Puett, Harvard University

Fiona Ross, University of Cape Town

Lisa Stevenson, McGill University

THE DOCTOR AND MRS. A.

Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis

SARAH PINTO

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK      2020

Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by Tufts University.

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand

1. Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi

2. Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala

3. Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya

Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

If it comes to a breaking point, I shall not be found wanting.

—MRS. A.

Dream-interpretation is the Regenesis of the wish and the Reconceptualization of the thought from the discordant remains of the Manifest Dream.

—DEV SATYA NAND

INTRODUCTION: MRS. A. AND DEV SATYA NAND

How does one remember the future? It might look something like this. Some time during World War II, in the final years of the British Raj, or, put differently, on the verge of India’s independence, a young woman in Punjab, perhaps Lahore, perhaps Amritsar, leaned back on a couch and closed her eyes. Her friend, a young psychoanalyst named Dev Satya Nand, seated just out of her line of sight, guided her into a state of deep concentration, then adjusted his chair so he could see her face. She related a dream. But rather than a dream experienced in sleep, a disjointed eruption of the unconscious, she shared a daydream, a lucid and conscious vision of possibility:

I have joined the Ramakrishna Mission and am working in a village to reconvert men and women to the path of Dharma. I am enjoying the work. They respect me and come to me for all kinds of advice. I have healed quite a number of their sick by prayer.¹

The daydream was a memory that was also a present that had not yet happened. Satya Nand parsed it as he would a dream, cutting its spare sentences into fragments, what he called dream smudges. He then organized these fragments into pairs divided by ellipses, gaps replete with unvoiced connection, which he called dream spaces, and offered each in turn, inviting her to say whatever came to mind, to turn the time-space of the daydream into recollection and possibility. The exercise, a familiar way psychoanalysis has of inviting the past into the future, had nothing to do with treatment. Mrs. A. was not ill; there were no symptoms to alleviate, no twitches to unravel. Instead, Satya Nand had invited her to join him in an experiment, to test his new vision of a better, more objective technique for dream analysis. He was certain that his method was more attuned to the realities of everyday life than were those of Freud and Jung, convinced that its oriental concepts (such as samadhi, the state of concentration he had helped her enter) offered better access to reality.

Mrs. A., though a willing subject, doubted there was anything valuable in her words. She told Satya Nand there was nothing to be made of her mundane fantasy, nothing concealed within it, just a passing fancy with the religious stuff, she said.² In response, quoting an old medical treatise, he said that while happy dreams might be signs of satisfied desires, daydreams were another matter, fretful and complex, the very worrying to which slumbering dreams might be a salve. And so they embarked upon analysis.

The twenty-one-year-old woman is known to us only as Mrs. A., a pseudonym chosen by Satya Nand, who promisingly entitled her case study The Analysis and Resolution of a Day-Dream Namely, The Day-Dream of Hindu Socialism and included it in his book Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State. Self-published in Lahore, the first edition is undated, although his later writings date it to 1947. Its language bristles with raw ideas and the urgency of getting them into the world, and Mrs. A.’s case is one of only two it contains. Her case was undated, and it is unclear whether they met in the final days of the war, when independence was close at hand, or earlier. The other case in the book is dated 1944, and cues suggest hers was undertaken between 1941 and 1944. She spoke of friends who were soldiers fighting the war, and independence seemed to have been a foregone conclusion, but there was no mention of a possible partition.³ An accident prompted her daydream, and it is possible the event was Mrs. A.’s having heard of Nehru’s imprisonment (in all probability the term that began in 1942), although it is also possible that the accident refers to an unspecified event that prompted her to recall first learning about Nehru’s imprisonment. Events and memories compound in this text, making time elusive.

The first dream smudge: I have joined the Rama-Krishna mission. Mrs. A. responded by reflecting on her feelings about villages. Did they repel her? Did they fascinate her? She described, by contrast, the contentments of her urban, upper-class life: a happy marriage to a caring husband, a household bustling with comings and goings, close friendships, and ardent politics. Mrs. A. was the product of fortunate life circumstances: educated, upper-class, urban and urbane. Though she considered herself bookish and introverted, Satya Nand thought her charming, and, hinting at their social connections, said she could be the life of the party. Although she was sometimes times dreamy and prone to be absent minded (he said), when analysis began she was chatty, eloquent, and steeped in hypothetical thoughts. Soon, however, her tone changed. Satya Nand noticed she was worried, that she seemed to be using up her reserves of psychic energy.⁴ As she reflected, a different story emerged. It seemed that not all was well in her home. Her marriage was sliding into unhappiness, there were suspicions of infidelity, she was childless and concerned about what this meant to her in-laws. Moreover, marriage constricted what had once been a world wide open with possibility. She had left college in her final year, setting aside a compendium of aspirations, goals to be a scholar, or a teacher, an actor, a writer, someone who would write a new version of India’s history, relate it in the way it should be told. Now that was all beyond reach.

She told Satya Nand about the pleasures of college life, excitements that barely contained their erotic buzz, friendships, romances, and the general headiness of intellectual discovery. She contrasted that happiness with the stakes and demands of marriage in language that was plain and frank. She spoke about how she learned about sex, how sexual intrigues entered her childhood, and how she encountered the sexual expectations of and on a married woman. She described triangles of desire in her social circle, relationships that included women and men, desire for women, desire for men, desire for men who were not her husband, desire for women who desired her husband and who desired men who were not her husband and who desired her. Possible co-wives, potential affairs, romances thwarted and imagined. There were things she heard from girlfriends, things she heard from boyfriends, things she heard from the servant, and things no one had ever explained but she now wondered aloud about in the safety of the analytic chamber. There was a sense of finally being free to speak, liberated by a shadow cast by science’s objective light, liberated by its pseudonyms to speak for herself.

As they moved further into the dream smudges, Mrs. A. invited mythic figures into her stories, particularly female characters from the Hindu epics. From the Mahabharata came Draupadi, the wronged but righteous wife of five brothers, and Shakuntala, cursed to be forgotten by her beloved. From the Ramayana there was Ahalya, punished for sexual transgressions by being turned to stone. Satya Nand, in awe of his young analysand’s intelligence and interpretive acuity, leaped at the offering. He took up Draupadi and Shakuntala as movable archetypes, binary stars orbiting Mrs. A.’s life, linking them to psychoanalytic concepts such as adaptive and individualist propensities, which he borrowed from existing models, and found interpretive potential in mythic stories and personalities. Where Satya Nand’s contribution to the oriental method was the samadhi state in which analysis occurred, Mrs. A.’s contribution was Draupadi, Shakuntala, and the almost bottomless well of narrative that constitutes the Hindu epics. With this, she also offered up the moral content of those tales, along with an alternative approach to understanding, a creative form of recall, a poetic form of retelling, a way of revising stories that combined the qualities of the actor and dancer, a gait in entering the scene, transforming psychoanalysis into an exercise in imaginative ethics, a way of remembering the future.

Mrs. A. especially identified with Shakuntala. Everything reminded her of Shakuntala and her world. Mrs. A. had been cast as the heroine in a college production of the classical drama when a sudden fall in her family’s fortune rushed her into marriage. The loss of the role in a story with which she so identified was among her bitterest losses, and so as she recollected scenes from her childhood, as repeatedly examined scenes from her current life, and as she imagined what might be in her future, Shakuntala was there. Part of Satya Nand’s objective method was to involve analysands in self-analysis. After the first session, he prepared the case and gave it to Mrs. A. to read. She was not reticent about her views, and when they met again, she told him what he had missed. Satya Nand led her back into a focused, meditative state and returned her to what it was about Shakuntala that oriented her thoughts. He felt that Shakuntala was a yardstick for Mrs. A.’s self-evaluations, that she and Mrs. A. shared personality traits, and that Mrs. A.’s life shared elements with the play, or at least the version of it he recalled. Part of what Mrs. A. needed to achieve, he said, was a balance of impulses. Mrs. A. was unconvinced. She did not think the core issue was a tension in her personality between Absolutism and Hostism versus Nirvanism and Parasitism.

I am not sure about this continuous attempt at compromises. It appears that I am an integrated personality, using the term, the psychologist friend often used, but the way he analysed me, it appears I am not. If I am an integrated personality, then why these attempts to compromise two antagonistic trends? Why should there be these antagonistic trends requiring compromise?⁵

Satya Nand was taken with a political idea in her daydream: Hindu socialism. He saw this as an original and exciting vision, both for its own sake and for the ways in which it might demonstrate that dreams and their analysis are creative pathways to the new, not just pointers to what has already been or lies within. His lines of analysis veered toward HINDU SOCIALISM, which, he pronounced in all capital letters, was the resolution of her case.

Mrs. A. had other ideas about this as well. In one breath she agreed, and Satya Nand pronounced her convinced by his analysis, but in the next she found a different way to Shakuntala, one that imagined a personal and national future not from the ground of a political vision but from the ruins of an intimate arrangement: marriage. Mrs. A. imagined herself as the forgotten heroine, but in an alternate ending, as Shakuntala, she reveled in being forgotten. Upending the play’s moral message, social values centered on marriage and recognition, the value of belonging, certainty, and emplacement, her script saw a livable future in the reversal of those terms. This new, sensical ending gave her purchase on a foreseeable future and, in the process, offered a different vision of a good and just life. Indeed, throughout the case, Mrs. A.’s reflections hinged upon marriage, the things it foreclosed and those it permitted, the way it set the terms for (apparently) wider dilemmas of agency. Mrs. A.’s politics and ethics, a single continuum, derived from conditions of marriage. The social, moral, and structural reality that was marriage for urban, educated Punjabis in late colonial times organized her ideas about freedom and how a person might be connected to others.

With a few exceptions, Satya Nand, caught up in the thrill of the other new things, namely Hindu socialism and the analytic potential of epic heroines, did not appear to notice these counter-ethical moments, or the way they recurred, bubbling out from the two-dimensional maps they drew of the social, political, and cultural mores of their time. However, although unconcerned with the shape of her ethical imagination, Satya Nand noticed, and appears to have delighted in, Mrs. A.’s smart rebuttals to his analysis and her political acumen. He was not an antagonist; sometimes he was right there with her. She, on her part, did not always reject his ideas or their scientific lens. His observations about her weren’t always wrong, and hers weren’t always clear-headed critiques. Sometimes she was blind to what stared her in the face, and at others Satya Nand gently nudged her toward an obvious truth. He made her a collaborator in her own analysis as well as in its presentation to the world. The sense one gets is of co-travelers, experimenters who were at once both subjects and critics. They were partners forging something novel for science and for themselves; these were not always the same things.

When they met, Satya Nand was a major in the Northern Army, a military psychiatrist working at Lahore Mental Hospital and teaching at Amritsar Medical College. During this volatile time and as members of an educated and progressive social circle, they channeled a current of anticolonial and nationalist sentiment into their work. Reading the case now, it is difficult not to feel the Partition of India and Pakistan looming, though there was no mention of it, nor of any communal violence, only our current troubles, which could just as easily have applied to colonialism or war. There was much talk of Nehru, on whom Mrs. A. had quite a crush. The scenery of their lives and of the case was richly Punjabi: a life of parties, outings, and debates, with a cast that included merchants, farmers, businessmen, doctors, professors, educated women, rural landowners, missionaries, nurses, social workers, army subalterns and officers, ardent socialists, dangerous communists, traveling folk theater troupes, and college actors. Theirs was a dense urban world ever in contact with nostalgialaden rural settings: villages, farms, forests, Hindu missions, mountain shrines. The backdrop for their scenery was religion, a scrim of both religious blending and battened down categories, awash in decades of colonial actions and religious reform that had institutionalized religious difference and consolidated it into nationalist politics. Satya Nand, born a Christian, and Mrs. A., a Hindu enamored with Sikhism in a religiously diverse social circle, tended to skirt over such differences, even as they conceived of samadhi and Hindu myth as methods with universal application and potential.

The case is in English, and it is likely that Mrs. A.’s passages are accounts of precisely what she said. For one thing, they are clearly worded, complete thoughts, with readerly buoyancy, whereas Satya Nand’s prose is dense, often incomplete, replete with abstractions and difficult to navigate. For another, in the sections following her review of his analysis, she often quoted herself, linking the latter half of the case to the former through mirrored and commented-upon passages. Notwithstanding her lucidity, the case is tangled and complex, and, befitting a young woman with (almost) a B.A. in English, winds from memories to stories to myth to literature to theater to plays that Mrs. A. saw, read, heard, and (almost) acted in, and the people who surrounded her when she saw, read, heard, or (almost) acted in them. Past and future often merge. This being psychoanalysis, all of it is meaningful, content slipping into form slipping into another level of content, and the like, and there is a frequent concern with truth, sometimes even the sense of the courtroom. Before they began, Satya Nand made her promise to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about whatever came into her mind during our investigations.⁶

It is a curious text. Given the ways we have come to understand the work of reading archives, and reading for women in them, ways that are oriented toward things either on public record or in the more private writings of individuals, this case is an odd amalgam. A certain approach to historical documents attends to what is missing, noting what is obscured in plain sight, particularly in relation to sexuality, but Mrs. A.’s reflections on female sexuality were frank and detailed, and little needs to be read between lines or layered on the page in Technicolor imaginaries.⁷ Similarly, historians working with autobiographies and memoirs might consider encounters between memories and publics, and writing the turning of a face toward an audience, however small.⁸ This is also not entirely appropriate to this case. The notoriety of psychoanalysis for overwriting the real story with analysts’ fantasies about analysands’ fantasies might require us to think of psychoanalysis largely as a project of power. This, too, is not entirely correct. Mrs. A., anonymized, was neither a patient nor a memoirist nor a letter writer. She appears in a published, but narrowly circulated and apparently little read text to which she had no claim of authorship. Yet her thoughts appear to be recounted as she spoke them and their filtering by the book’s author is right there on the page. Here, words are spotted with the emotion of remembered events and put on display the process of turning memories into, well, memories. Her archivist was collaborative about their experiment and forthright about his goals, which did not involve finding, naming, or fixing pathology but seeking a new way to talk about thinking and think about talking. It is a record of a conversation, and Satya Nand’s translations of Mrs. A.’s words into his method are as apparent as the little, intimate performances that occurred in the room where they spoke. While there are vacancies and elisions, there are also extensive and intimate first-person account of female sexuality, with homosexuality a topic of much reflection (and the word itself is used) that appears as a given aspect of sexuality, un-pathologized by the physician. Barring brief references to sexual activity among women as wicked, for Mrs. A. if there is a negative vibe, it is gentle, and it is not the only vibe.

This book is about their story, what happened in their conversations, how Satya Nand presented them to the world, and what burns through in spite of what he and she did and did not say. But it is also about the kind of thing they were up to, the picture they offer us of ethical imagination and reflection in action. The term ethical may seem an odd one, but I think it is the right one, as opposed to culture, or ontology, or any other gloss, though it was not a word they used. Something extraordinary happened when the mythic heroines entered Mrs. A.’s story, something that brought together a young woman’s faltering marriage with a nation’s incipient freedom with a weave of social and cultural ideas about womanhood, class, sexuality, and religion with the pressured possibilities of certain ideas (socialism, freedom, feminism, art) through the labile reimagining of familiar tales. Mrs. A. may have invented a Hindu socialism that captivated her young analysand, who was, himself, working on a new theory of mind and society, but she also demonstrated the imaginative, experimental, reflective work of the contrapuntal, the counter-ethical, a quality of movement and change in relation to ideas about being a person in the world, living a worthy life, finding, as she put it, ultimate happiness, or as Satya Nand would phrase it, later in life, authentic horizons of fantasy and imagination. This book traces that work, their conversation, and Mrs. A.’s life as they came into view over the course of what was, in all likelihood, just a few days, in a decade when whatever they imagined was soon to be overshadowed by other, bigger things, and in a book that left little impact on the world (to its author’s dismay).

As a text on dream analysis, Objective Method is obscure and often confusing, a byzantine scientific vision, but as an account of mid-twentieth-century Indian gender, sexuality, and marriage and the ethics and counter-ethics they generate, it is remarkable. Also remarkable (Satya Nand would remind me) is its social and political vision of a Hindu socialism that was nationalist without being religiously chauvinistic, which derived meaning and inspiration not only from contemporary heroes (Nehru, Gandhi, Naidu, and others) but from myths about cursed and wronged women, stories about marriage as a site of ethical conundrums. These figures stitched Mrs. A.’s intimate life to her politics, and both to ethics, providing clarity to a certain form to ethical imagining, a certain quality of creativity. This may be a heavy burden to place on her. She was, after all, only twenty-one. Perhaps this was a moment in her life when, through an accidental collision of events and actors, things suddenly came into view. It may have been sheer youthful openness, girlish humanity rich with desire and motivated in part by wonder, that allowed her to tell us less about sciences of the psyche than about the nature of musing, and indeed, these are the musings on musing of a muse in a muse-state (as Satya Nand described samadhi). It is a shame that Satya Nand appeared to have not noticed this aspect of what was happening, but then again, in wandering into his own imaginaries, he left her and her world and thoughts in tact for the future.

SATYA NAND’S SCIENCE

Objective Method was Dev Satya Nand’s first book. Trained, like many Indian physicians under colonialism, at the University of Edinburgh, and later a student in psychoanalysis of the famed and controversial colonial psychiatrist Owen Berkeley-Hill, Satya Nand spent his career developing bold, occasionally fanciful, ideas about mind, self, and something akin to an ethical psyche. He drew on Indian and European source materials, taking up literature, mythology, philosophy, and psychology, often in a single crammed paragraph, and formulated oriental methods not because they were more culturally appropriate for oriental patients, but because they were of universal value. In Objective Method, a dense text with rough edges, his wild mind was on display along with his intricate knowledge of his discipline and its canon of concepts and thinkers. Little seems to be known about his personal life, except that he was a Christian by birth, his father having converted from Hinduism and mother from Islam.⁹ He published under different names throughout his life (Dev Satyanand, D. S. Nand, even David S. Nand), which, although not uncommon, has been associated with his lifelong interest in personhood and personality.¹⁰ Satya Nand was a prolific writer, but his corpus is elusive. Aside from his books, most of his articles, essays, and shorter pieces appear to have been lost. His writing is at once brilliant and obfuscating, his syntax often difficult and strange, and his pages full of diagrams and schematic visualizations of abstract ideas. It has been my experience that it is only after numerous readings that his ideas come into view, if at all, concepts dwarfed by the scope of his thought experiments.

The most basic premise of Objective Method is that dreams (in the conventional sense, which Satya Nand referred to as manifest dreams), are not merely expressions of latent desires but are their Regenesis and Reconception. In Satya Nand’s vocabulary, the first level of dream analysis, which few people move beyond, and which he termed Lulla-by (because it helped the dreamer go back to sleep), was just an interruption of the real crisis and the task of resolving it. This was a longer process involving self-understanding as reconceiving, a mode of experience as realization. This was creative work; it could, should give rise to something new. It might be a solution to a life crisis, but it was also more, transforming the desires at the heart of crisis by reconceiving them. In Mrs. A.’s case, the dream was a recurring error (it is not clear to me just what he meant by this), and the Objective Method not only interpreted the dream, but took up the threads of the problem-solution tangle and carried the on to the natural termination, the invention of a thought.¹¹

Satya Nand had something specific in mind. Outlining the land-marks in [her] process of resolution, he wrote,

In the terminal stages she talked of Socialist Hinduism, and . . . finally the new idea of Hindu Socialism was evolved during the process of interpretation. The history of the evolution of a new concept, at least as far as the dreamer is concerned, or the genesis of a new thought, can be studied by the Objective Method, as much in detail as any other process of development of the parts of the body.¹²

In other words, he believed Mrs. A. had created a new political vision in the process of undergoing his scientific method: his psychoanalysis enhanced dreams’ naturally regenerative quality.

Satya Nand’s method entailed a rigid structure of analysis together with the altered state of consciousness required to embark on it. Samadhi, in many uses of the term, is a state of deep and focused concentration (it can refer to death or death rituals). Akin to hypnosis, Satya Nand’s samadhi, which he also called Reminiscence, Contemplation, and muse state, facilitated both recollection and association through a stilled hyperstimulation that dissolved boundaries between layers of the mind such that the conscious and subconscious could function simultaneously.¹³ In such a state, an analysand might confide and accept the analyst as a guide, with sufficient trust to say whatever she wished, and without reserve.¹⁴ Lying in a dark, quiet room, so positioned that she could not see the analyst, the analysand would be prompted to reminiscence through dream smudges alone, without additional questioning or prompting. Although the stories that arose might be self-contradictory, contradictions provided insight