The Doctor and Mrs. A.
ISBN: 9780823286690
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Fordham University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Psychoanalysis and religion; Psychology; Hinduism; Dream interpretation;

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.

Sarah Pinto is Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of two books on the gendering of medical practice in contemporary India, Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (Penn, 2014, winner of the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize) and Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural North India (Berghahn 2008). With Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, and Byron Good, she coedited Postcolonial Disorders (California, 2008).

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