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The people, who impacted his life — parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and innumerable friends and co-workers that meander in the narrative and contribute to the making of the first Indian psychoanalyst who tread the path that he carved out like a trailblazer. What helps the narrative to become riveting is that the story recounted is not a linear account but one that meanders just as consciousness does. Even chronology is in terms not of time alone but of psychic time and inner growth. It’s almost as if Kakar is confessing before the readers and watching his own processes. For instance, if the shadow of Partition violence falls on his childhood years, the Ahmedabad riots lead to his book Colours of Violence, an analysis of the triggers of communal tension. The Inner World: A psychoanalytic study of childhood and society in India, Intimate Relations and even his fiction: Ascetic of Desire, The Crimson Throne, are all milestones that he discusses. It is in his fiction that Kakar finds expression of creativity because he was diffident about submitting himself "to the tyrrany of the footnote," so restless was he to just give expression to his cretive urge. Reading the autobiography of India’s first psychoanalyst is a ‘revealing’ experience not only in the graphic manner in which the author peels off layers of his life but also the tremendous pioneering work he did to put culture-specific vriants as a vital part of the psychoanalytical process as opposed to a primarily individualstic Western world view. And this journey into the inner and outer worlds is mapped in a prose that is lucid and easy to comprehend. Despite the string of academic accomplishments, there are no attempts to browbeat the reader into submissson or awe with a showcasing of knowledge. Kakar takes us through his childhood in mofussil towns, growing up in Sargodha, Rohtak and Simla. Mechanical engineering in Germany, teaching organisational behaviour in IIM-Ahmedabad, training at the Freud Institute in Frankfurt, setting up practice in New Delhi as a practising psychoanalyst — all told with a rare candour. He might be frank and engaging but he is also sensitive and guarded when he talks of the break up of his marriage. The falling in love many times as well as his second marriage to Katrina are all laid bare. It is as if he is trying to understand his own life and lay it bare. "For though my head was filled with the intellectual excitement of the West, India was still an overpowering emotional presence," he says while in Germany, and this is what permeates the book. The neat classification into chapters: Origins 1943, Of Fathers and Men, A Welcome to the World, `A0Kamla (1953-58), Rebel in a Known Cause, (Germany), Identity Crisis, Becoming a Psychoanalyst, A Shrink in Delhi (1975-90), In Academia and the World, Two Loves, Retreat to the Forest—all chapters deal with distinctive phases in Kakar’s life. He maps the ebbs and flows in consonance with an inner ordering. The towering influence in his life were the psychologist Erik Erikson,who he met when the latter came to Ahmedabad to work on the biography of Ambalal Sarabhai. Erikson was his mentor. His aunt Kamala, who was his confidante and in whose house he stayed as a student in Ahmedabad, was another towering influence. With the brush of a miniaturist, Kakar brings out the passion of the relationship between Kamla and eminment scientist Vikram Sarabhai. The letters, the two exchanged, too have been subjected to an analyst’s scrutiny, in the same manner as Kakar’s own own life is. For ardent Kakar fans and those initiated into the world of psychology as well as for the lay reader an unputdownable book.
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