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Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001

Title Pages

Alf Hiltebeitel

(p.i) Freud’s India (p.ii) (p.iii) Freud’s India (p.iv)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hiltebeitel, Alf, author.

Title: Freud’s India : Sigmund Freud and India’s first psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose / Alf Hiltebeitel.

Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018001328 | ISBN 9780190878375 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190878382 (updf) | ISBN 9780190878399 (epub) | ISBN 9780190878405 (online resource)

LC record available athttps://lccn.loc.gov/2018001328

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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America (p.xxiii) Freud’s India (p.xxiv)

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Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001

(p.vii) Figures

Alf Hiltebeitel

7.1“Viṣṇu Ananta Deva.” Front and side views of the Viṣṇu on Freud’s desk196

7.2Iconography of Paravāsudeva203

7.3Paravāsudeva at Badami, Cave 3205

7.4Śrī Śeṣanārāyaṇa207

7.5Viṣṇu AnantaŚayana208

7.6Viṣṇu, seated, with two wives on a coiled Ananta.211

7.7Bāla Kṛṣṇa215

7.8Narasiṃha216

8.1“Long” Madhusūdana on south-facing wall of second-floor circumambulatory, Vaikuṇṭha Perumāḷ temple240

9.1Reclining icon in middle-floor sanctum, with goddeses Śrī and Bhūmi 255

9.2West-facing Vāsudeva vyūha, ground-floor sanctum, Vaikuṇṭha Perumāḷ temple, Kanchipuram256

9.3Saṃkarṣaṇa vyūha, facing out from northern wall of ground-floor sanctum, Vaikuṇṭha Perumāḷ temple258

9.4Ananta positioned like Saṃkarṣaṇa on north-facing wall of outer circumambulatory on ground floor, Vaikuṇṭha Perumāḷ temple260

9.5Viṣṇu off his serpent couch but still on the ocean killing Madhu and Kaiṭabha on his lap270 (p.viii)

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Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001

(p.ix) Preface

Alf Hiltebeitel

THE TITLE OF this book, coupling Freud with India, was decided upon after considering other titles. The subtitle has been a constant. The title is not meant to be coy; Freud did not make as much of India as he could have. It is meant to catch the eye of two chief groups of prospective readers: those interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, and those interested in India. That is a good-sized readership and hardly a new combination.

I have taken some risks in presenting such breadth of material. The foremost risk involves readers who begin with an interest in Freud and psychoanalysis, but have little knowledge of India. These readers will be carried along through the book’s first three chapters that treat Freud’s correspondence with Bose and the next three that discuss Bose’s main challenges to Freud. Only the concluding three chapters cover the complex Indian material necessary to the book’s argument, but by then I hope to have made it accessible and intriguing. Resistant readers could read only the first six chapters, by which they would be replicating Freud’s own detours around Indian materials—but they can discard that option.

The companion book, titled Freud’s Mahābhārata presents more Indian material as part of this same project. The latter makes the Indian and primarily GrecoMediterranean Goddess one of its three principal characters as a figure who links the two pioneer psychoanalysts. Freud’s Mahābhārata makes points about how both Freud and the Hindu epic treat mythologies that complement the discussions of Freud and Bose made in this book, and the book ends by proposing a new Freudian theory of the Mahābhārata.

I am less worried about readers interested in India, whom this book addresses throughout. Indian readers are known for their longstanding comfort with an adversarial Freud and with Freudian analysis as providing an inevitable angle on the study of Indian life and thought that (p.x) has more interest for them than the Indophilic Carl Jung.1 Readers about India cannot be surprised that the same angle has been exploited since the 1950s by many serious scholars both from South Asia and the West. The risks I take are more personal here—about Freud and Bose, and about myself.

About Freud and Bose, I resist the hagiographic impulses that have shaped most writing about them, and I argue that their correspondence allows one to trace the ups and downs that put each of them, occasionally, in an unflattering light. About myself, I speak of risk because a book on Freud, India, and psychoanalysis these days invites a choice as to whether one talks personally about one’s life. If I join those who have done so,2 which I do with a few sidelights about religion, it is because I do not see the point in trying to hide the fact that thinking about my life and upbringing has been an engaging and ongoing part of this project. I take this risk, but only in the preface, so that readers can sometimes think between the lines of the main text about my personal input.

Beginning and ending with the near present, I highlight thirteen vignettes in telegraphic form, some of which have an affinity with Freud’s life, as one will meet it in this book:

1.My mother Lucille Barnett Hiltebeitel passed away at age 101 on June 13, 2014. Freud’s mother died at 95.

2.I was my mother’s firstborn, as was Freud. Unlike Freud, I was also my father’s firstborn. I was born in a Catholic hospital in New York City early during World War II. During an air-raid alert, my mother was “given the baby” and told “you take care of it!” She “threw” me “under the bed.”

3.I had a Catholic nanny named Fanny, who was Irish, from ages two to four, before my family made its big move. Freud also had a Catholic nanny, who was Czech, up to his third year, but in reverse circumstances. Fanny was my nanny in New York City before we moved to Weston, Connecticut, in the country, whereas Freud at three moved from rural Freiberg to Leipzig and then a year later to Vienna. My earliest memory is of crossing a New York City street (I imagine (p.xi) it to have been 89th Street near Broadway) holding Fanny’s hand. Neither nanny made the big move.

4.My sister Jane, my only sibling, was born eleven days before my fourth birthday, for which my mother just made it home from the hospital. Freud had two brothers and five sisters, and thus many more sibling rivalries.

By my reconstruction from family stories reinforced by some childhood memories, my rivalry with my sister derives from her hospital visit for a tonsillectomy when she was about two. From that time, she suffered fears

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of being left alone, which left my mother feeling guilty that she had not stayed with Jane in the hospital. My mother quit her job in New York City to be able to be in Weston with Jane. My experience of this change, from long range and over many incidents, including when my second marriage began to unravel in the mid-eighties, is that my mother’s unending concerns for my sister had as their counterpart a determination that all must be alright with me. This loss of closeness with her is my distant analogue to whatever Freud experienced when and after his immediately younger brother Julius died at the age of eight months, before Freud was two.

5.When I was about ten or twelve, my Jewish mother took me twice on the holidays to the Catholic churches of my home towns—first to Westport’s on Easter and then, along with my sister, to Weston’s new church on Christmas Eve while it was being finished (there was hanging plastic sheeting for walls in the back where we sat). These are two of the few mysterious things she did with me. Freud reports that by age three, his nanny had carried him to all five Catholic churches in Freiberg.3

6.My Lutheran-by-birth father’s hypersensitive ears developed since childhood a hatred of Lutheran choral exuberance, which had to do with his preference for the visual arts and his life as a painter. He made stained-glass windows for the Rockefeller Chapel in Princeton, New Jersey, when he was in art school. I have panels of a Virgin Mary and a Joseph that he made.

7.He told me at the lunch table once when I was about fifteen, uncontradicted by my mother, “Son, I am not your father; I am your mother.” I had just gone to the kitchen for a second glass of milk, which he accused me of “swilling.” My mother replied, “Oh, leave him (p.xii) alone.” My father’s remark made a contradictory impression on me. I felt I had lucked out in having a nurturing, though somewhat nutty, father to compensate for my mother’s haughtiness. I took his remark to be about who wore the pants in the family, or about the bisexuality of both members of my parental unit.

8.In 1970, my uncle Alfred, after whom my mother had named me, died at eighty-two. According to my mother his last words, after a life of identifying as a Viennese expatriate Jew who escaped the holocaust, were “Save me, Jesus.” His mother was Catholic.

9.My father died in 1984 when I was forty-two, just as Freud was fortyone. Having dealt with Parkinson’s disease since about 1969, he was courageous about his loss of painting skills with his loss of hand coordination, and also about growing housebound and being unable to take walks in the woods. But exchanges with him grew more scarce and difficult. I was in Washington and came up to Weston to see his body and attend the cremation. Some months later, the family reunited to place his ashes in the outlet of a brook on a trail named after him in the Weston

Conservancy, at which I read a passage from his library by Henry David Thoreau about thrashing through underbrush. When I published my first book on the Draupadī cult in 1988, about the cult’s mythologies, I dedicated it “in memory of my father who taught us to see.”

10.My sister was killed in early 1996 when her car was hit from behind by a truck at a red light that rammed her into another truck ahead of her. She was returning home after seeing her Jungian therapist. I received the news that evening from her husband, who called me from Russia. My two sons, Adam and Simon, and I decided to drive the next day from Washington to Norwalk, Connecticut, to break the news to my mother. She was playing cards with friends when we arrived in the late afternoon. She said that when she saw us through the window, she knew we were bringing bad news.

11.Not long after Jane’s funeral, my mother decided to move to Washington, D.C., to live near me. For several years, she saw a therapist about my sister, but fired her when she fell asleep while my mother was talking. Thinking that my father would have wished it, I tried being a dutiful son, seeing her at least once a week, usually to take her out to dinner, and introducing her to friends, including girlfriends and my eventual third wife. Women usually liked her. But two events made me rethink my accommodation. In 2007, she was rushed to a hospital where two (p.xiii) weeks of tests with no exercise (despite my urgings to her doctor) found nothing wrong with her. Upon release, she had lost motor skills, could no longer use a walker, and was obliged to relocate from her chosen residence at a Hyatt. Physical therapy was a nonstarter and she became wheelchair-bound. Meanwhile, in 2006, I was told I had an essential tremor, which I knew would probably soon mean a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, which it did by 2008. Because my mother had suffered through my father’s Parkinson’s, and because I had learned to expect no sympathy from her, I decided not to tell her. Then after her hundredth birthday in January 2013, I began to see much less of her. I arranged her birthday party at my wife’s country place in Middleburg, Virginia, calling my mother’s few surviving relatives, and threw a catered party for twenty-eight guests. Just a week later, my daughter-in-law told me that my mother had told her and Simon that she was “surprised that Alf had done nothing for my hundredth birthday.” 12.My mother’s death in June 2014 was to me a surprise, since I had decided she would live to 104, and that we would have more time to grow alike in our senility, like Molloy and his mother in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy.4 I was in Colombia when I received the news that she was losing consciousness, and I decided not to go back. She was with Simon, who was overseeing her last shift from assisted living to hospice care. I urged him to follow up on his plans to come with his wife and two girls to Colombia to join me and my wife the next day, and leave her with Adam.

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She died holding Adam’s hand soon after Simon and his family had gotten to Colombia. Through all this, I was prepared by Freud’s biography to recall that he did not mourn his mother’s death, felt no grief over it, and did not attend her funeral. Freud, too, had the fear that his mother, who died at ninety-five, would outlive him. More than this, I believe that my mother’s grip on things was not unlike that of Amalia Freud as Freud and her grandchildren knew her. Freud’s son Martin called her a “tornado,”5 and a granddaughter described her as “full of charm with strangers (p.xiv) but overweening, demanding, and tyrannical with her family” and “a most selfish old lady.”6 At her son’s seventieth birthday celebration to which Freud had discouraged her from coming, but at which she was nevertheless the first guest, she announced to the assembled party, ‘I am the mother.’ ”7 My father and sister had terms for my mother’s huffiness long before I did. My father called her an “injustice collector” to explain her skill in showing everyone else at fault whenever there was a family argument. In the late 1960s, my sister coined the name “war hostess” for her trait of commandeering our friends and other guests for after-dinner games and arguments, long before there was a component of senility to her behavior, such as Simon writes of:

I recall how often (and I mean incessantly) she would tell me with great pride those last few years of her life about the time you’d been called off to Spain to deliver a series of lectures that would prepare Spain for war. It’s such a wonderfully strange idea. I picture you at a lectern, tens of thousands of Spanish soldiers standing at attention in neat cohorts that stretch to the horizon before you, the king and queen with all the generals with all their medals arrayed on chairs to your sides on the golden dais, nodding gravely as you explain, as Kṛṣṇa did to Arjuna, that they need to stop hesitating and fulfill their Kṣatriya duty.

I was in Spain for a month in 2009 to lecture on the heroines of the Indian epics.8 Year after year, my mother would await the announcement of the MacArthur “genius awards,” sure that I must be a contestant. Worst of all for me, she felt entitled to be mean to whomever she felt like telling off, even after being told I had made peace with them, or with myself about them.

13.I have always had a predilection for goddesses that I don’t claim to understand, but which probably has something to do with the fact that I converted to Roman Catholicism during the writing of this book.

(p.xv) The first chapter written for the whole study, about three dead mother stories in the Mahābhārata, is now chapter3of Freud’s Mahābhārata. But both books have been impacted by André Green’s article “The Dead Mother,” which is about an imago that “has been constituted in the child’s mind, following maternal depression, brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of

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vitality for the child, into a different figure,” one who may eventually give the patient “the feeling that a malediction weighs upon him that there is no end to his dead mother’s dying.”9 Green sees Amalia Freud’s dealing with the death of Julius behind Freud’s variation on “the dead mother complex”10

But why go into all this? Old age is no picnic for anyone, and my mother’s foibles made me cringe only in her last years. I tell such stories after much thought and vacillation because I lived with them, and recalled many more like them, as this book took shape, and I feel that it is a fuller and more honest book thereby. I feel some survivor guilt,11 and I acknowledge that Freud only spoke positively about his mother. To paraphrase one of his well-known epigrams: biography is destiny.

I started work on the project in the fall of 2012, and I soon began to announce the book in publications as “forthcoming,” with “Uncanny Domesticities” as part of the title, giving name to a trope that ran through early chapters as applied to Freud, Bose, and the Goddess. I kept thattitle until late 2015, when I scrapped it. I decided then to overhaul the whole book and retitle it, for a time settling on either “Viṣṇu on Freud’s Couch” or “Freud on Viṣṇu’s Couch”: titles that I eventually rejected because they were limited by their play on the older title, Vishnu on Freud’s Desk, 12 and because they applied only to the third part of this volume. In the meantime, I had found Henri and Madeleine Vermorel’s 606-page Sigmund Freud et Romain Rolland: Correspondence 1923-36: de la sensation océanique au trouble du souvenir sur l’Acropole. The Vermorels’ book first caught my eye in August 2014, on a shelf for returned books at the Freud Museum library in London. I was immediately intrigued that the dates of the Freud–Rolland correspondence overlapped the time span of the Freud–Bose letters, and since I knew that the Freud–Rolland correspondence (p.xvi) touched on India, I thought there could be the potential to read the two exchanges for light they might shed on each other. I read the book over the 2014–15 winter holiday. I then took time out from Freud and company to write Nonviolence in the Mahābhārata: Śiva’s Summa on Ṛṣidharma and the Gleaners of Kurukṣetra.13

Having put the Freud–Bose book in the twilight for a while, once I returned to it, owing to what I had discovered in the Vermorels’ book, I decided in December 2015 to thoroughly rewrite the three chapters-which now intercalate the two correspondences—and to highlight some of the Vermorels’ fruitful findings elsewhere. Since readers will be making the Vermorels’ acquaintance in these early pages—most, I suspect, for the first time—I will say some words about them, and about what it means that a chance find looms so large in this book. (It was also at the Freud Archives, in its bookshop, that I found JanineBurke’s The Gods of Freud, 14 which led me to the poet H. D., whose 1933–34 work with Freud is also introduced in chapter3.)

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It seems, as a rule, that writers on Freud in English know they should read about him in German, but very few read about him in French. The result is that, aside from Jacques Lacan and his followers, French scholarship on Freud and psychoanalysis tends to exist in the English-speaking world as an unvisited island.15 Yet the body of non-Lacanian collaborative work in French is distinctive and considerable, and from the 1950s through their 2013 publication, De la psychiatrie à la psychoanalyse, 16 the Vermorels have been on its pulse as writers, readers, and respondents. As a recent interview of Henri Vermorel by Marie Roumanens says,17 the Vermorels began their careers as interns and then as doctors together in the 1950s, participating in the movement for a humane opening of psychiatric institutions in France after the Second World War. Members of the Psychoanalytic Societies of Paris and Lyon, each has a private psychoanalytic practice at (p.xvii) Chambéry, the capital of the Savoy Prefecture, and both have taught clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Savoy for over thirty years. Roumanens lists three reasons for carrying out her dialogue with Henri: that he began his work (with Madeleine, as he quickly points out) at a time when psychiatric hospitals included a farm where patients worked; that his (and their) work took part in a transformative movement that saw psychoanalysis begin to think about relations to the environment; and that he (with Madeleine) renewed the study of the origins of psychoanalysis by showing the influence of German Romanticism on Freud’s thought. It is the latter that they work into their book on Freud and Romain Rolland, as well as their 1995 book, Freud, Judéité, Lumières et Romantisme. 18

The Vermorels offer a new interpretation of Freud’s lifelong yet, as they argue, deepening interests in religion, and they interpret the correspondence with Rolland about the “oceanic feeling” as impactful on Freud’s late-in-life interests in pre-Oedipal themes involving the mother. I will argue that this coincides with what Bose was challenging Freud to consider, which allows me to explore what Bose might have been able to contribute from an Indian perspective to Freud’s rethinking, had Freud been as encouraging of a give-and-take exchange with him about things Indian as he was with Rolland. Both the correspondence with Bose and that with Rolland ended as Freud was shifting his ground to turn, for his last sustained effort, to Moses and Monotheism 19 On the one hand, this last turn coincides with what Richard A. Bernstein (in Freud and the Heritage of Moses) and Jacques Derrida (in Archive Fever) have hit on in Freud’s softening on religious traditions (not on religion itself), whereby he relates them to a people’s collective traumas. On the other hand, it finally made both Rolland’s and Bose’s openings onto Hinduism seem antithetical to Freud’s driving interests.

To my surprise, this book and its companion volume thus have a chance to say something new about Freud himself, not to mention about Freud and Bose, Judaism and Hinduism, images and their rejection, God and the Goddess, and

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Moses and the Mahābhārata in the light of Freud’s analysis of religious traditions in terms of peoples’ collective traumas. (p.xviii)

Notes:

(1.) SeeKapila 2007, 127–34.

(2.) I think of Sarah Caldwell1999a,1999b; Jeffrey Kripal2000,2001; David GordonWhite 2003; and among those working on Buddhism, Gananath Obeyeekere 2012.

(3.)Bernfeld 1951, 115, 128.

(4.) Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

(5.) The comment follows MartinFreud’s (1958, 11)depiction of Amalia’s background from East Galicia on the Ukrainian-Polish border. “They . . . had little grace and no manners; and their women were not what we should call ‘ladies.’ But . . . they, alone of all minorities, stood up against the Nazis.”

(6.) For other details and context, seeHeller 1973, 335–39.

(7.) All quotes are fromAbraham 1982, 443.

(8.) SeeHiltebeitel 2016a,the essay I gave in Wulff 2016.

(9.) Quotations fromGreen 1983, 142 and 153.

(10.)Green 1983, 148–49, 158, 163, 168; see FM, ch. 2.

(11.) Max Schur frequently uses this term for Freud’s response to Julius’s “sudden disappearance” (1972, 159–72, 240–41).

(12.)Vaidyanathan and Kripal 1999.

(13.)Hiltebeitel 2016.

(14.)Burke 2006.

(15.) Two exceptions prove the rule. Parsons read the Vermorels’ book after completing his dissertation on Freud and Rolland’s correspondence while turning it into a book (1999a). He cites theirs only where it confirms things he says, and ignores its originality.Armstrong (2001)then reviews both books favorably, overlooking Parsons’s deficiency. Armstrong’s review of the Vermorels’ book is thoughtful, but he overrides one of their most fruitful insights and replaces it with his own mediocre solution (see the end of chapter3, this volume).

(16.)Vermorel and Vermorel 2013.

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Access brought to you by: (17.) In the electronic journal écopsychologie http://eco-psychologie.com (18.)H. Verrmorel, A. Clancier, and M. Vermorel [1992] 1995 (19.) SeeSchorske 1993

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Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001

(p.xix) Acknowledgments

Alf Hiltebeitel

THIS VOLUME, FREUD’S INDIA, was for a long time conceived of as one with its companion volume, Freud’s Mahābhārata, down even to the time of its submission to Oxford University Press. It was the word-count maximum of another press that led to its split into two books. The second book could thus take shape independently—as I describe further in the preface and acknowledgments of Freud’s Mahābhārata, so that readers will have a clearer path to intelligibility in both books. Of those acknowledged here, none read the second volume separately; thus, the acknowledgments made here count for both volumes.

I lead off by thanking this book’s most steady reader through its many changes and developments, from its earliest chapter to its completion: the psychoanalyst Dr. Christopher Keats, who offered many timely and valuable suggestions, as well as much encouragement. Toward the end, the project got a long-overdue full critical discussion by its two anonymous Oxford University Press readers, one of whom discarded his anonymity, Jeffrey Kripal, and the other whom I could recognize as Marshall Alcorn. Both had the unusual combination of psychoanalytic insight and experience of India that this project could really benefit from, and both made invaluable suggestions that I followed. Also, my friend Randy Kloetzli can be a curmudgeon on Freud, but that did not stop him from reading two drafts with care and insight, knowledge of Indology, and a sense of much-appreciated humor. I also thank Christiane Hartnack, who read a draft in 2016. Thanks go to Vasudha Narayanan for getting into the spirit of my search for answers to questions about Bose’s seventy-fifth birthday gift to Freud and for contributing her insights. Thanks also are due to Diane Jonte-Pace for an early note of encouragement.

I thank Bryony Davies at the Freud Museum in London for her help during my visits there in August 2014, and for sending me and giving permission to publish four images of the “Viṣṇu on Freud’s desk.” I thank (p.xx) Mark Baron and Elise Boisanté for giving me access to pertinent images in their collection, and for their permission to publish three of them as figures. Thanks are likewise due to Raoul Goff and to Parabola Books for permission to print two figures, and to Pandita Geary for helpfully making those arrangements. All five of those permissions concern images that appear in Gods in Print: Masterpieces of India’s Mythological Art. A Century of Sacred Art (2012) by Richard H. Davis, who was also encouraging and helpful. I also thank Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce five images from Dennis H.Hudson’s The Body of God: An Emperor’s Palace for Krishna in Eighth-Century Kanchipuram (2008).

I thank Lewis D. Wyman, Reference Librarian at the Freud Archive at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., for his help with navigating the collection there. Thanks are due to my George Washington University Religion Department colleagues for supporting my pre-retirement two-year leave of absence that allowed me to write the two books, and to the GWU Committee on Research and University Facilitating Fund for the 2014 award that supported my summer research at the Freud Museum in London.

Midway through the writing, before I read Henri and Madeleine Vermorel, and before I really knew what I would be doing with this project, I sent a draft to William “Hank” Abrashkin, who had asked to see what I had written. Hank is the younger brother of my oldest and best friend West, who died in 1996. His own Freud-resistant questions and off-the-cuff comments were helpful in envisioning a general current-day readership, and often were a reminder of things his Buddhist brother might have said. I thank my sons Simon and Adam for their help, encouragement, and timely consultations, and Simon moreover for being willing to put his own writing and editing skills to the potential task of being my literary executor, should Father Time put an end to my oversight of the two volumes. Through the five years of work on this project, my wife Elena Eder has been the real beacon, with her wonderful and supportive ways, carving out time and workstations for me to make my portable offices in Cali, Colombia; Washington, D.C.; and Middleburg, Virginia. Elena read many of my books on Freud while backing up my studies with her own library that includes the Standard Edition of Freud’s works translated by William Strachey and Ernest Jones’s three-volume biography of Freud. She had the prescience fifteen years ago to insist that I read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Bruno Bettelheim’s Freud and Man’s Soul, neither of which I had finished until this project was underway. My love, debts, and thanks cannot be measured.

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Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001

(p.xxi) Abbreviations

Alf Hiltebeitel

KNOWING THE FOLLOWING abbreviations for works cited and discussed in this book may be helpful to the reader.

Freud’s Mahābhārata, the companion volume to this book

BhG

Bhagavad Gītā

Devī-Māhātmyam

Mbh

Mahābhārata

Upaniṣad

(p.xxii)

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Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001

Introduction

Beginnings of Tension and Drama in the Surviving Bose–Freud Correspondence

Alf Hiltebeitel

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190878375.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

Chapter 1 compares Freud and Bose biographically: their childhoods, early psychoanalytic discoveries, marriages, residences, careers, founding of psychoanalytic movements in Europe and India, respectively, and later years. Freud’s writings on his own life are compared to Bose’s silence about his. The chapter opens discussion of Freud’s relation to his father Jacob and mother Amalia, and Freud’s screen memories about the death of his baby brother Julius when Freud was not yet two. It then goes into the first phase of their correspondence, which centers on a drawing of Freud made sight unseen by an Indian artist and forwarded by Bose, and a photograph of Freud sent by himself that Bose had requested.

Keywords: Jacob Freud,Amalia Freud,Julius Freud,Freiberg Moravia,Vienna,Hindu joint family, Parsibagan Lane,Calcutta,iconography

SIGMUND FREUD IS much better known than Girindrasekhar Bose, and has been the subject of many full-length biographies, whereas no one has written one about Bose. I suspect the main reason for the latter’s lack is the scarcity of details Bose left about himself—particularly that he sought to advance his career without leaving a record of self-promotion. Even adding what has been said in a few sketchy pages about him by others leaves the impression that a Bose biography would have to be filled in with life-and-times detail about the development of his career. This book will mention all the known details available from these sources, but only as they emerge from his correspondence with

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Freud. It is there that I will address the biographical asymmetry. And I will attempt to level the field simply by treating them as equal partners in their correspondence.

It is important to state at the outset that both wrote to develop the science of psychoanalysis. We can best view Bose as an original psychoanalytic thinker who sought out Freud as a mentor and offered him an intelligent critique. Bose’s letters show him respecting Freud as the founder of a discipline in which he pursued both discipleship and local leadership in Calcutta. Differences emerged between them, but they shared a commitment to the psychoanalytic movement’s claims to being science.

(p.2) True, we shall find that Bose had distinctive ideas about psychoanalysis that contained his own Indian and Hindu experiences. But he seems not to have advanced them as a colonial or anti-Western critique from the standpoint of a “secret self under colonialism,” as Ashis Nandy has taken him to have done, particularly in his Bengali writings. Amit Ranjan Basu, “after reading most of Bose’s Bengali writings,” says that “one finds Nandy’s essay limited in scope, and not adequately representative of the wide-ranging variety of Bose’s secret selves.”1 Basu adds, “Unlike the straight-jacketed nationalist projects which saw the colonial demon everywhere, the discipline of psychology provided a more flexible nuanced space for consent and contest. In this endeavor, no ‘Hindu psychoanalysis’ like the ‘Hindu alchemy’ was born.”2

Bose was also not looking for a “Hindu modal personality,” as were two of his British colleagues working in India, as well as many since his time who have taken up the question of “the Indian Oedipus” to profile a distinctive Hindu psychology. Nor did Bose develop a notion of a “split mother” (variants of this construct are good/bad mother; spousified/unspousified goddess; and breastgoddess/tooth-goddess) in discussing Indian childrearing or goddesses.3 I see nothing particularly Hindu or Indian about a “split mother”4—a formulation that owed a debt to Freud.5 I will also not pursue the idea of a Hindu or Indian modal personality based on an alternative Oedipus, since I agree with Robert P. Goldman,6 as would Bose, (p.3) that the Freudian Oedipal triangle is wellattested in India, even if Bose thought that Freud’s formulation of it needed rethinking. Both ideas have served to promote Indian exceptionalism.

This chapter begins with features of Freud’s and Bose’s home lives that are roughly comparable. My inclination is to see a basis for sympathies between Bose and Freud. Pre-World War II Europe and late colonial India between 1922 and 1937 offer a period when both men knew that varied voices sought to link their own familiar enough Judaisms and Hinduisms not only with the origins of religion but also with attacks for their alleged backwardness, and with emerging

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nationalisms and essentialisms that neither signed on to.7 Both also felt the impact of hegemonic Christianities and insidious understandings of the Aryan.8

Based on Freud’s own writings, almost everyone who writes about Freud has something to say about his home life: natal, growing up, married, and aging. Each period has also been mined for things Freud was silent about, including scandals, but the evidence for the scandals is thin.9 In contrast, Bose maintained total silence about domestic matters, never writing about his own life as an object of analytic self-scrutiny.

Madalon Sprengnether observes that for Freud’s first three years in Freiberg, Moravia, “we find a family structure that differs considerably from the one that characterized his subsequent years of development in Vienna.”10 Freud spent his earliest years quartered in the same single room as his parents, in which a younger brother (Julius, who died) and sister Anna were born. His two halfbrothers from his father’s first marriage, Emmanuel and Philipp, also lived close by, and Emmanuel’s children, John and Pauline, were Freud’s closest playmates. There was also Freud’s (p.4) Catholic nanny. Sprengnether characterizes the domestic arrangement in Freiberg as “what we would now call a ‘blended family,’ ”11 which is not a far cry from an Indian “joint family.” It contrasted to the Vienna household, which was more patriarchal and organized around the father, Jacob Freud. “In Vienna, [Sigmund] faced the inevitable Oedipus situation alone.”12 The Vermorels say that Vienna was a tough place for Jacob, who became inactive as opportunities ran out during an economic crisis, while the family lived on subsidies given to Freud’s mother, Amalia. They cite Ruth Abraham (Freud’s disciple Karl Abraham’s daughter), who suggests that Freud had resentments toward Jacob that were aggravated near the end of his failing life, and that the humiliations he felt toward him went back to a prior period of his life. Freud’s adolescent fantasies of identification with political leaders and prophets (Hannibal, Napoleon, Moses, etc.) reflect a tentative idealization that contrasted with the age of Jacob’s feebleness. Meanwhile Amalia, whom we met in this book’s preface, held her weekly Sunday and holiday gatherings, to which Sigmund would always come late. Abraham even concludes “that the Oedipal father is constructed largely from characteristics and experiences with Freud’s mother. These characteristics and experiences were originally projected by Freud onto his father, and later, by extension, onto the universal Oedipal father.”13 But Freud surely knew his father better than this implies. I suspect that Freud grew up with a grudging admiration of his father’s ability to keep his attractive young wife pregnant.14

No doubt Freud’s success owed much to the positive overinvestment that he says his mother made in him, but he seems to have been willing to sacrifice very little of his personal life to fit her ambitions for him. Freud (p.5) said that his relationship to his mother was behind what the Vermorels call his “conquistador persona.” As he says in “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” “When one has been the uncontested

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favorite of his mother, . . . his conquering sentiment, this assurance of success, . . . is not rare.”15 “The hero,” says Freud, “was probably afforded by the youngest son, the mother’s favorite, whom she had protected from paternal jealously, and who, in the era of the primal horde, had been the father’s successor. In the lying poetic fancies of prehistoric times the woman, who had been the prize of battle and the temptation to murder, was probably turned into the active seducer and instigator to the crime.”16

With this strained relationship in mind, it is possible to make a revealing, if uneven, comparison between Freud and Bose in the manner of handling their mothers’ deaths. Bose reportedly showed no affect at the time he learned of his mother’s death in 1929, which might remind one that Freud’s felt “no grief” (kein Trauer) when his mother died, and he did not mourn her. As Hartnack retells Bose’s story, “The Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who met him on a world tour in 1929, was surprised at how well he controlled his emotions”; Hirschfeld had seen Bose get some news urgently whispered into his ear while they were having a conversation, and learned some days later that the news had been of Bose’s mother’s death.17 Freud wrote about his mother’s death with relief:

I will not disguise the fact that my reaction to this event has, because of special circumstances, been a curious one. Assuredly, there is no saying what effects such an experience may produce in deeper layers, but on the surface I can detect only two things: an increase in personal freedom, since it was always a terrifying thought that she might come to hear of my death; and secondly, the satisfaction that at last she has achieved the deliverance for which she had earned a right after such a long life. No grief otherwise, such as my ten years younger brother is painfully experiencing. I was not at the funeral; again Anna represented me.18

(p.6) Their differences in age at their mothers’ deaths are, of course, striking. When Bose’s mother died, he and she were about forty-two and seventy, respectively.19 Freud and his mother were seventy-five and ninety-five, respectively. Having written “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud knew what he was talking about when he told friends he did not mourn his mother’s passing, which occurred only six years before his own. All this we know through Freud’s own writings. With Bose, it is only through a virtual stranger’s report that we learn of his lack of emotion when his mother died.

Like anyone else, Freud could never bring his pre-Oedipal years into clear focus. Says Max Schur of his first three years in Freiberg, “Being unable to reconstruct these events completely, he had to create maximum distance. And yet he did it with a maximum of ingenuity, which makes one regret not being able to follow him in this flight of imagination.”20 But as he “rationalized an ideal patriarchy, one he may have wished to experience as a child and which he strove to

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establish in the context of his own marriage and extended family,” so “casting his lot with that of Oedipus”21 must have something to do with a felt tension between the two household structures. That would not have pertained to Bose, who moved from a smaller joint-family household to a bigger one.

Two additional similarities are striking. Both considered themselves sons of their fathers’ second marriages, in which their mothers were much younger than their fathers and the fathers’ first wives.22 And both were uprooted from rural towns and moved to an “imperial” city—Freud by age four, Bose by age five. In Freud’s case, we have his efforts at psychoanalytic self-analysis in those formative years; in Bose’s case, there’s nothing of the kind.

A comparison of Freud’s and Bose’s adult residences also yields obvious similarities, as has been set forth by Hartnack, who knows Vienna intimately:

Like the Berggasse in Vienna, Parsibagan Lane is not located in but near the heart of the city. The Alsergrund district in Vienna, (p.7) where Freud lived and worked, is close to the university, but not inside the “Ring” as it is called in Vienna, where all the buildings and offices of imperial importance were located. Likewise, the Bose residence is also close to Calcutta University, but not to the Maidan, and the former “saheb para.” Parsibagan, like the part of Vienna in which Freud lived, was a typical upper middle class residential area. In both cases the houses were new and imposing. Yet they were far from being the kind of urban palaces that the wealthy elite in Calcutta or Vienna could afford.23

Freud’s residence, to which he moved in 1881, was his own purchase after he married, and it remained his headquarters for the next forty-seven years, until his forced move to London.24 Bose moved into his home in 1905 at age five, after it was purchased by his father. Sharing it with his brothers, Bose lived there the rest of his life.25

Each residence became a place for both Freud and Bose to meet with the respective psychoanalytic societies they founded. Freud says the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was begun in 1902, with the impetus of Wilhelm Stekel, when “a number of younger physicians gathered around me with the declared intention of learning, practicing, and disseminating psychoanalysis.”26 It “met around a long table in his waiting room amidst cigar smoke and spittoons.”27 Margolis describes the scene in connection with Freud’s self-proclaimed “addiction.” When colleagues “arrived for their weekly meeting, they found all prepared for the hours of presentations and discussions that were to follow, not least the preparations for smoking.”28 In 1911, Stekel joined Alfred Adler’s break with Freud, but Freud reconstituted the group and kept it going.

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Bose hosted similar gatherings. Bose and the fifteen other founding members of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society met regularly in the residence of the Bose family.29 Bose also met there regularly with a group (p.8) of Bengali writers, who read and discussed their latest works in progress. The Bengali term for the gatherings was an adda, “a place for careless talk or the chat of intimate friends . . . for it was bound by no rules or regulations. Among its members could be counted many great names, artists, poets, journalists, historians, litterateurs, medical men, psychologists, and scientists. It was known as the Arbitrary Club,” and the Utkendra Samiti (“Eccentric Club”) in Bengali. “Along with tea, chess, and cards, members would hold discussion on all possible topics. . . . The atmosphere of the Club was at that time surcharged with the electric current of psychology and literature.”30 At these meetings psychoanalytic ideas were related to prevailing concepts and conditions in Bengali Hindu culture.31 Both Freud and Bose encouraged a combination of strictly psychoanalytic purposes and what Freud called “applied psychoanalysis,”32 discussing art and literature at their respective gatherings. For instance, Freud read a draft of his Leonardo da Vinci study at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.33

As we have seen, Bose and Freud differed in the ways their public and private— or outer and inner34—domains were recorded.35 According to Nandy, once the Bose family moved to Calcutta and began to keep “the social company of reformist Brahmos . . . the Brahmos now began to make fun of the orthodox ways of the Boses,” including their domestic pieties.36 The Bose family’s “orthodox ways” are said to have included their devotions to their Kāyastha caste’s “family divinities” (kuladevatās). Although I risk the charge of jāti-profiling to mention it, if (as seems altogether likely) Bose’s own “family deity” was the typical one for Kāyasthas, Citragupta, his kuladevatā could have provided him with a culturally iconic figure identified with nothing less than the writing technique Bose used for the transcription of his psychoanalytic cases. The Boses would have maintained a domestic cult for Citragupta, the patron deity and eponymous (p.9) ancestor of their scribal Kāyastha caste, and the record-keeping assistant of Yama, god of the dead. Like Citragupta, Kāyasthas “set the greatest store by their profession of writing and say that the son of a Kāyasth should be either literate or dead”; the term lekhak, or “writer” for a Kāyastha is defined “in Purāṇic literature” as one “who can express much thought in short and pithy sentences, who is able to understand the mind of one when one begins to speak.”37 Consider how Bose details his methods and purposes in transcribing his sessions with patients:

It was the original custom for the analyst to note down in writing the ideas brought up by the patient by free-association. . . . I have however continued to use the old method because, in the first place, I can always adopt a mechanical attitude towards the writing, and bring about a partial dissociation of this particular activity from my main mental current. My mind is not much distracted by the act of taking down the patient’s

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thoughts. . . . My patients get habituated to the condition in a very short time and do not feel any distraction either. As they are generally asked to keep their eyes closed they do not even see me writing.38

As Bose seems to be aware, Freud began likewise by writing notations during sessions with patients, up through the time he corresponded with Wilhelm Fliess, to enable “the work of synthetic cogitation, which remains dependent on a written record.” Freud, however, alternated his notetaking with periods of “evenly suspended attention, without taking notes.”39 Bose extends his advocacy for the practice in terms of the analyst’s implicit contract with the patient:

The psychologist takes a note of his own mental states and asks other individuals to do the same under certain specific settings which constitute the conditions of his observation and experiment and having collected as many data as he can [he] submits them to (p.10) statistical treatment and arrives at certain conclusions regarding the operations of the mind. . . . [H]is deductions have the same validity as the physicist.40

As concerns objectivity: “I can certainly claim a greater scientific objectivity and validity for my data.”41 As to theories that might arise from the records kept: “A reliable and permanent record of past cases is of great use in testing the correctness of a theory that may suggest itself at a later period.”42 As concerns length and summarization: “the actual records of [the case studies] . . . run into several hundred pages each.”43 And as confirmation of one of the corollaries to his theory of opposite wishes: “an analyst, who takes care to note down the freeassociations of his patients, is sure to come across the see-saw mechanism as I have described it.”44

Whether or not Bose reflected on Citragupta’s ledgers in defending his own in this way, or indeed on Citragupta assessing the acts of persons passing through death in Yama’s court, the comparison enables one to encapsulate Bose’s manner of recording the detailed and orderly case histories that show him prompting patients to fix circuits by making opposite-wish “adjustments.”45 Hartnack contrasts Freud’s metaphor for the psychoanalyst as “an archaeologist who digs into an individual instead of a cultural past” with Bose’s belief “that he worked like an engineer who fixes circuits that are not functioning properly.”46 But Citragupta also brings up the question of karma, raising questions about it that must be asked of Bose, as we shall do in chapter4. Citragupta assesses the current state of the circuits of karma so that Yama, judge of the dead, can assign a suitable rebirth that might fulfill or punish leftover conscious wishes, presumably including formerly unconscious opposite ones that have become conscious over a terminated lifetime or await another life to come to fruition; or he may pronounce the cure: salvation. Bose is not talking about karma, but his theory of opposite wishes has what I will call (p.11) a “penumbra of karma” about it. The seesaw mechanism may remind one of Citragupta’s scale on which

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he weighs the good and bad karma of those who arrive before him.47 Bose even goes one-up on Citragupta, in that he brings unconscious opposite wishes directly into the adjustment or the cure in this life, not between this one and the next.

I turn now to the first phase of the Bose–Freud letters. Their correspondence raises two main “dramatic” questions, even if scholarship to date has not formulated them. The first, to be explored in chapter3, is, why Bose never complied with Freud’s repeated invitations to contribute an article on his theory of opposite wishes to one of the Freudian circle’s international psychoanalytic journals. The one article Bose did submit to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, on“The Duration of Coitus” (1937), relates his case studies to contemporary literature on sexology and the Kāmasūtra. It says nothing direct or theoretical about wishes, and it was certainly not what Freud asked for. The second question, to be discussed in chapters7and9, is why Bose and his colleagues sent Freud an obscure image of Viṣṇu from distant Kerala, rather than a Bengali image, which would suggest a Goddess.

But tension and drama are felt earlier in the correspondence than with these two questions, as even this introductory chapter will begin to show. My interpretation of the letters derives from reading between the lines and giving careful attention to dates, to Freud’s contemporary exchanges with others, and to the two authors’ concurrent scientific writings. No such dynamic is imagined in other accounts of either Bose’s or Freud’s careers, and readers should make what he or she will of my invasions of the men’s privacy. Bose’s widow Indrumati Bose gave the Bose–Freud letters to the Freud Archives in London, at Anna Freud’s request in 1963.48 The correspondence makes several references to lost letters; if found, the letters might alter the drama—but very little, I will argue. The remaining letters reflect three clear phases:

1.Twelve getting-to-know-you letters (December 1920–December 1923), examined in this chapter. These letters center on Bose’s requests for a photograph of Freud.

2.Ten letters exchanged more than six years later (January 1929–February 1933), examined in chapter2. These show a surge of increasing (p.12) collegiality, even bonhomie, until they end, revealing strains in the relationship.

3.A 1933 New Year’s letter from Freud that is answered with Bose’s last letter. Freud closes out the correspondence on November 27, 1937, with his only letter in German, which is followed by a “friendly letter” in English from Anna Freud.

The first two phases both begin with Bose’s sending Freud his current writings on psychoanalysis. In each case, Freud responded with appreciation but also

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with consistent reservation. All three phases end abruptly, and probably on both sides but more clearly on Freud’s, with signs of withdrawal.

Rather than reproducing the Bose–Freud letters in full, summaries will suffice for the purposes of this book.49 I will do the same in the next two chapters both with their letters and with the Freud—Romain Rolland correspondence that was mentioned in the Preface. When I quote passages in discussions, to avoid repetition I sometimes shorten the summary by marking the segments omitted with an asterisk, followed by an ellipsis (*. . . ). Where this is done, it means the asterisked passage will get a later airing and discussion.

It should be mentioned that Freud’s letters to Bose are mostly short and that he never exhibits in these letters the literary flair that has been noted in much of his other correspondence. Presumably, feeling restricted to the English language has something to do with this nonexpansiveness, but Bose’s own brevity also sets the tone. Bose likewise developed a literary side, becoming a novelist and children’s fiction writer in Bengali. The opening phase of twelve letters is interesting for its air of tentativeness, as both authors feel each other out.

Phase 1

1. Bose to Freud

December 1920

The initial note accompanies Bose’s dissertation, “The Concept of Repression,” and requests Freud’s “opinion and suggestions about my work.” Bose says, “Along with my friends and relations I have been a warm admirer of your theories and science, and it might (p.13) interest you to learn that your name has been a household word in our family for the past decade.”

2. Freud to Bose

May 29, 1921

Acknowledging receipt of “your book,” Freud writes that he is “glad to testify [as to] the correctness of the principal views and the good sense appearing in it,” to which he adds: “It is interesting that theoretical reasoning and deduction play so great a part in your demonstration of the matter which with us is rather treated empirically.” Freud registers “surprise . . . that Psycho-analysis should have met with so much interest in your far country.” He ends, “P.S. I shall always be glad of more of your news.”

3. Bose to Freud

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[Undated]

Bose asks for details on the price and publisher of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and he writes, “I hope you will pardon my liberty if I ask you to send a photograph of yours. Myself, my relations and friends and a wide circle of admirers have been eager for it. Such a gift from your hands would have valuable associants [sic].” He asks on behalf of his book’s agent whether Freud could write “an expression of opinion” for its publication, and whether the book “has got any chance of success in Austria and Germany”; and what periodicals it might be advertised in. Bose is “sorry to have troubled you but my ignorance about Austria and Germany is my excuse.”

4. Freud to Bose

August 3, 1921

Freud writes a postcard while “away in the mountains and likely not to return until October 1,” after which he will send the blurb for “The Concept of Repression” and the photo. He will also see to it that contact information on the two journals, including the English-language Journal of Psychoanalysis, is sent from the publisher.

5. Bose to Freud

November 24, 1921

Having thought to wait until Freud returns to Vienna from his holidays, Bose repeats his two requests and thanks him for the (p.14) information about the Journal of Psychoanalysis; “I have now been receiving the publication regularly and I like it very much.” He mentions his efforts through Ernest Jones “to have an Indian Psychoanalytical Association at Calcutta affiliated to the International Association,” and hopes to send Freud soon a copy of the Indian Association’s draft rules and regulations. He also sends a paper, the first half of which he has written, on “Mental Pathology,” one of four “practical papers” for M.A. and M.Sc. students of Calcutta University. He concludes, “Psycho-analysis is daily gaining popularity here and even the lay periodicals and dailies in vernacular are discussing the subject now.”

6. Bose to Freud

January 26, 1922

“Most likely you have received my last latter to which I am expecting a reply.” Bose adds, “we have been able to start a Psycho-analytical Society in Calcutta” while having applied for international affiliation, and sends the

11 of

Proceedings of the inaugural meeting, welcoming Freud’s suggestions. He adds, “A friend of mine, Mr. J. Sen—a celebrated Indian artist and an ardent admirer of yours—has drawn from imagination a pencil sketch which he thinks ‘you ought to look like.’ ” Bose sends Freud the original, “keeping a copy for myself which I would like to compare with your photo when it arrives. . . . He has not the slightest information about your features.” Bose asks, “Will it be possible for you to come out to India for a few weeks and deliver a course of lecture[s] in the Calcutta University? If so, I shall be glad to know about your terms so that I might place them before the proper authorities.”

7. Freud to Bose

February 20, 1922

“At last I can send you the photograph you wished for—it will come to you from Hamburg—and write the few lines which you ask on behalf of your agent.” He invites Bose “to change my expressions so as to suit your purpose” since “my English is very deficient.” Freud’s blurb reads, “It was a great and pleasant surprise that the first book on a psychoanalytic subject which came to us from that part of the world (India) should display so good a knowledge of psychoanalysis so deep an insight into its difficulties and so much of deep-going original thought. Dr. Bose has singled out the concept of repression (p.15) for his inquiry and in treating this theoretical matter has provided us with precious suggestions and intense motives for further study. Dr. Bose is aiming at a philosophical evolution and elaboration of our crude practical concepts and I can only wish, Psychoanalysis should soon reach up to the level, to which he strives to raise it.” Freud has heard about Bose’s founding of the Psychoanalytic Association of Calcutta and sends his congratulations, adding, “May we meet one day not too far off, as I am rather old (66 years).”

8. Freud to Bose

March 1, 1922

[This is apparently the postcard mentioned by Bose in his undated reply. Freud begins answering Bose’s letter 6; their two last letters had crossed.]

“The imaginative portrait you sent me is very nice indeed, far too nice for the subject. You will soon have occasion to confront it with the photo and see that the artist did not take into account certain racial characters.” . . . P.S., “I am too old to come over to India and very busy here. Try it the other way around and come to Europe.”

9. Bose to Freud