We have heard some fringe elements saying that Hinduism is danger. If one takes this claim rationally, we do not find any basis for it. Perhaps we may say that Hinduism is really in danger. Hindutva is destroying it. But mere rational approach to this issue is in adequate. It is unreasonable to think that a majority in a country feels threatened. But to understand these anxious voices, we may have set aside purely rational approach and take a trans-rational leap.
Psychoanalysis might put some light on the sense of threat and danger perceived by several Hindu fundamentalist groups. Psychoanalysis is a great tool to understand the dynamism of any culture. The panic stricken rant that shouts that Hinduism is in danger is actually expressing a fear of loss of something precious. The loss is already acutely felt even before the actual loss has occurred. This felt loss (anticipated loss) is being mourned through claims like Hinduism is in danger. But how are we to relate the aggression that accompanies what may be a mourning of felt loss of an object. Maybe we have to move beyond Sigmund Freud.
Freud teaches that aggression was a block for mourning. As a result mourning and aggression were thought to be unrelated. Thanks to the work of British psychoanalytic thinker Melanie Klein, mourning and aggression can be thought together. Klein tried to heal the rift between mourning and aggression. This helps us understand the relation between loss and aggression. There is an adhesive bandage of libido to the lost object and therefore brings pain of its loss. The case of the loss that we are studying (in the context of the Hindu fundamentalist) is not actual loss but a felt loss. All loss ultimately is a felt loss and feels the dismantling of the adhesive bandage to libido to the lost object.
Klein thinks that psychoanalysis has overstressed libido and have underestimated the dynamism of aggressive instinct. She believes that aggressive drive is more potentially pathogenic than libido. She says that an inert aggressiveness produces an object relationship. The object is chiefly psychical and not fully physical. For this reason the relation of loss that some of our Hindu brethren are feeling is not about a physically lost object. The object is profoundly complex and intimately sensed as lost. Hence, loss that is afflicting some of the Hindus is not physical but psychical and cannot be dismissed as trivial. We have to understand and devise a response that is emancipatory. We may find an insight towards this in the work of Klein.
Klein teaches that it is because of the aggressive drive, metal processes from their origin have an object. The nature of object relationships decides the quality of psychic life of a person. A good object relation brings about satisfaction and contentment while a bad object relation brings about discontent. All relations at the psychic level are object relations. They mimic the primal milk giving breast of the mother. Nurturing relations reproduce the original physic experience while disrupting relation reproduces a loss of the original. Hence, the psychic loss/ felt loss that we are trying to understand here is a sense of loss of the original. Any sense of loss of the original brings about a loss of innocence. Maybe, we have to discern carefully the felt loss of innocence that afflicts several of our Hindu brethren.
The felt loss of any nature produces and drives what may be called the ‘loss recovery dynamism’. The recovery dynamism attempts to restore the primary object relation. Freud suggests that recovery dynamism is arousal of the super-ego. Klein agrees with Freud on this issue and views the recovery dynamism as defence mechanism of the self. This defence can be aggressive depending on how intensely one feels the pain. Maybe we can see how the world previously experienced as safe and good by some Hindus is felt as being ruptured. It is this sense of rupture felt by some of the Hindus produces a sense of loss. We may argue that this sense of loss is not real. True, but it really afflicts the fringe. Maybe the fringe exhibits a melancholic mourning of an anticipated loss. Klein sees mourning as time of repair. It has the power to heal our wounds.
We can re-integrate our aggressive instinct with compassion through positive mourning. If we do not positively mourn the loss, we end up displacing our aggression on others. Perhaps to some extent some of our brethren have reached a point of displacement. It happens complexly in our society. We seem to have deflected our anger against the colonizer, external aggressor on the internal other. Maybe we continue to try to recover the lost and are trapped into a chain of displacements. It is time that we understand the consequences of this pathological mourning. There are several emancipative ways of dealing with melancholic or pathological mourning afflicting our society. Klein has also expounded her own approach. Maybe here, we shall try and understand her response.
Klein teaches that we develop a highly idealised relationship with our internal psychic objects. She stresses that the internal objects have a psychic life of their own. We protect the good psychic objects and direct all bad feelings on the bad objects. She teaches that any threat to the good objects triggers pain and sets in the dynamics of recovery. The positive mourning that she teaches is different from Freud’s approach of sublimation which is leading us to re-channel our destructive energies to socially therapeutic ways. Maybe, those Hindus who feel the pain of some kind of loss to Hinduism can integrate through Freudian sublimation. Klein proposes the first step towards the solution to any society trapped in pathological mourning is recognition of the internal psychic world as different but profoundly linked to the external world. Next, she calls us to recognise the creative ways we construct symbols and examine how they stand for internal love objects that are threatened.
(The author is Professor of Rachol Seminary)
