ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts from outside the culture, encountering the strangeness of the cultural mask rather than the similarity of the individual face, may get carried away into exaggerating differences. The start of clinical practice was difficult because a vast majority of the prospective patients had never heard of psychoanalysis even though Sigmund Freud's thought had arrived early in India. The Indian Psychoanalytic Society, formed in 1922, became a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association before such recognition was accorded to organised psychoanalysis in most European countries. Psychological modernity is the individual's recognition that he possesses a mind, with all its complexity. It is the acknowledgement unwilling or conflicted, of the mind's subjectivity that fates one to episodic suffering through some of its ideas and feelings, together with the knowledge that mind can help in containing and processing disturbed thoughts and emotions. A traditional Indian is thus psychologically modern but he or she is often not psychologically minded in the psychoanalytic sense.
