Girindrasekhar Bose (31 January 1887 – 3 June 1953) was an early 20th-century Indianpsychoanalyst, the first president (1922–1953) of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society.[1] Bose carried on a twenty-year dialogue with Sigmund Freud. Known for disputing the specifics of Freud's Oedipus complex theory, he has been pointed to by some as an early example of non-Western contestations of Western methodologies. Apart from this, he also started the first general hospital psychiatry unit (GHPU) in Asia at the R.G. Kar Medical College, Calcutta in 1933.[2]
Bose's doctoral thesis, Concept of Repression (1921) blended Hindu thought with Freudian concepts. He sent the thesis to Freud,[3] which led to a correspondence between the two men and to the formation of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in 1922 in Calcutta. Of the fifteen original members, nine were college teachers of psychology or philosophy and five belonged to the medical corps of the Indian Army, including two British psychiatrists. One of them was Owen A.R. Berkeley Hill,[4] famous for his work at the Ranchi Mental Hospital. In the same year, Bose wrote to Freud in Vienna. Freud was pleased that his ideas had spread to such a far-off land and asked Bose to write to Ernest Jones, then President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, for membership of that body. Bose did so and the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, with Bose as president (a position he held until his death in 1953) became a full-fledged member of the international psychoanalytic community.[1][5] The review of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society is called Samiksha[6] and its first edition appeared in 1947.
Kakar, Sudhir. (1997). "Encounters of the psychological kind: Freud, Jung and India" in Culture and Psyche: Psychoanalysis and India. New York, Psyche Press.
Mehta, P. (1997). "The Import and Export of Psychoanalysis: India". Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. 25 (3): 455–471. doi:10.1521/jaap.1.1997.25.3.455. PMID9513126.
Nandy, Ashis. 'The savage Freud: the first non-Western psychoanalyst and the politics of secret selves in colonial India', in The savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 81–144
T.G. Vaidyanathan & Jeffrey J. Kripal (editors): Vishnu on Freud's Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, Oxford University Press ISBN0-19-565835-3, Paperback (Edition: 2003)
Amit Ranjan Basu,"Girindrasekhar Basu and the coming of psychology in colonial India," Theoretical Perspective, Vol.6, 1999, pp. 26–55.
Amit Ranjan Basu, "Emergence of a Marginal Science in a Colonial City: Reading Psychiatry in Bengali Periodicals." Indian Economic and Social History Review, 41, 2004, pp 103–141.
