Lecture image placeholder

Premium content

Access to this content requires a subscription. You must be a premium user to view this content.

Monthly subscription - $9.99Pay per view - $4.99Access through your institutionLogin with Underline account
Need help?
Contact us
Lecture placeholder background
VIDEO DOI: https://doi.org/10.48448/rhcy-kt30

panel

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

November 18, 2021

Baltimore, United States

Counter-Ethical Scenes and Other Arrangements in an Indian Dream Analysis A Roundtable on "The Doctor and Mrs. A," by Sarah Pinto

keywords:

myth

south asia

psychiatry

In the middle of World War II and at the end of colonial rule, a young woman in Punjab, Mrs. A, met with family friend Dev Satya Nand as a willing participant in his new method of dream analysis. The case of Mrs. A appeared early in the career of Satya Nand, a prolific but little remembered figure in 20th century Indian psychiatry, who theorized complex connections between the mind and the social world, casting the psyche as an organic vehicle for ethical imagination. Mrs. A’s sessions with Dev Satya Nand included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She 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. "The Doctor and Mrs. A" is a meditation on these worlds, dwelling in composite time frames drawn from archival and historical research, classics, and myth, as interacting forms or "moving structures." As Pinto analyzes the dynamic between Satya Nand and Mrs. A, she weaves temporalities of past experience with present reverie and future projection, frames not only for women's personal horizons, but for the broader possibilities of Indian psychoanalysis, mythology, and political concepts for a nation soon to be born. Rather than uncovering latent meanings as in Western psychoanalylsis, the dynamic between Satya Nand and Mrs. A is a profoundly regenerative one, gesturing to its own method. Playing with ideas not as content but as transformations in the arrangements of forms - such as place, idea and genre, drawn from disparate sources - enables us to imagine new and evocative scenes of inquiry. Mobilizing the voices of both analyst and analysand, Pinto reveals to us the possibility of thinking with a concept of "counter-ethics." In this roundtable, we discuss how "The Doctor and Mrs. A" compels us to reconsider several anthropological themes: questions of gender, power, and possibility; ethics from the standpoint of movement and change; imaginings of epistemic and moral canons; and finally, the place of art, mythology, and sidelined histories of science and method in conceiving truth and responsibility. What does it mean to consider ethical imaginations from another time and place - of immense social struggle, intimate voices and confused desires? What does such narrative demand of us today?

Downloads

Transcript English (automatic)

Next from AAA Annual Meeting 2021

The Everyday Politics and Praxis of Truth, Responsibility and Honesty in Anthropology
panel

The Everyday Politics and Praxis of Truth, Responsibility and Honesty in Anthropology

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

18 November 2021

Similar lecture

A Roundtable Discussion on an Edited Volume "Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization: South Asia in the World Perspective" (Routledge Press, 2020)
panel

A Roundtable Discussion on an Edited Volume "Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization: South Asia in the World Perspective" (Routledge Press, 2020)

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

18 November 2021