ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and feminism have had an ambivalent yet shifting relationship. This chapter foregrounds this relationship as it has emerged in postcolonial India, where the intersections of caste and community pose challenges to the understanding of a universal gendered unconscious. The writings of Bose, Kakar and Nandy are seen as attempts at locating an India-specific rendering of the unconscious basis of gender. Despite their critique of feminism, Kakar and Nandy provided the ground upon which later feminist psychoanalysis emerged in India. This chapter draws upon recent writing by feminist psychoanalysts to re-examine the question of feminine subjectivity, particularly as it emerges within the context of mothering daughters in patriarchal India. The chapter focuses on the work of clinicians who retain a critical sensibility towards the misogyny of Indian society. The review provided in this chapter challenges the valorization of motherhood particularly when viewed through the experience of mothering daughters. The limited exploration of homoerotic possibilities between mothers and daughters and hence between women and the tensions posed by the question of caste are also raised. The chapter rests its case by raising the question, can psychoanalytic feminism provide a new Indian ethic that allows for the imagination of a non-racial, non-caste and non-communal symbolic to exist?
