SUDHIR KAKAR

Sudhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst and writer who lives in Goa, India. Kakar took his Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Gujarat University, his Master’s degree (Diplom-Kaufmann) in business economics from Mannheim in Germany and his doctorate in economics from Vienna before beginning his training in psychoanalysis at the Sigmund-Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany in 1971. Between 1966 and 1971, Sudhir Kakar was a Lecturer in General Education at Harvard University, Research Associate at Harvard Business School and Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. After returning to India in 1975 , Dr. Kakar set up a practice as a psychoanalyst in Delhi where he was also the Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology. He has been 40th Anniversary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard (2001-02), a visiting professor at the universities of Chicago (1989-93), McGill (1976-77), Melbourne (1981), Hawaii (1998) and Vienna (1974-75) and a Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton and Berlin. Since 1994, he is Adjunct Professor of Leadership at INSEAD in Fontainbleau, France. A leading figure in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, as well as a novelist, Dr. Kakar’s person and work have been profiled in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Die Zeit and Le Nouvel Observateur, which listed him as one of the world's 25 major thinkers while the German weekly Die Zeit portrayed Sudhir Kakar as one of the 21 important thinkers for the 21st century. Dr. Kakar's many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany ’s Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Residency, McArthur Fellowship and Distinguished Service Award of Indo-American Psychiatric Association. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Board of Sigmund Freud Archives in the Library of Congress, Washington and the Academie Universelle des Culture, France. Sudhir Kakar’s seventeen books of non-fiction and four of fiction, include The Inner World (now in its 16th printing since its first publication in 1978), Shamans, Mystics and Doctors , (with J.M. Ross ) Tales of Love, Sex and Danger,Intimate Relations, The Analyst and the Mystic, The Colors of Violence,Culture and Psyche, (with K.Kakar) The Indians: Portrait of a People, (with Wendy Doniger), a new translation of the Kamasutra for Oxford world Classics and Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. He is also the author of the novels The Ascetic of Desire, Ecstasy, Mira and Mahatma, The Crimson Throne (shortlisted for the 2010 Vodaphone Crossword award for fiction) and the editor of Indian Love Stories. His most recent book is the memoir A Book of Memory, published in February 2011. An edited volume On Dreams and Dreaming will be published in June 2011. His books have been translated into twenty languages around the world. Sudhir Kakar is married to Katharina, a writer and a scholar of comparative religions. He has two children, a son Rahul who is in financial services, and a daughter Shveta, a lawyer, both in New York.

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