9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hindu mythology, family relationships + psychoanalysis, March 9, 2000
This review is from: All the Mothers Are One (Paperback)
After some 35 years close connection to India, in personal and academic terms, I feel I have a fair grasp of Indian culture, religion, and family life. Anyway, if I'm not a world expert on such large areas of knowledge, I can claim to know more than the guy in the street in Boston or Lancaster. However, I never specialized in psychoanalysis. That is the dilemma for readers of this book. Unless you are an expert in both these fields--a specialist really-you are going to find ALL THE MOTHERS ARE ONE pretty rough going. This is the epitome of a specialist's book; meant for a handful of people in North America, Europe and India. If you are looking for easy reading, forget it.
On the other hand, if you want to read a difficult, but very intelligent, well-constructed book, and are willing to tackle subjects that you may not know so well, this is a challenging, interesting book that can provoke a lot of thought and shake up a few of your preconceived ideas. Kurtz begins with Santoshi Ma, a slightly unusual form of the Indian Mother Goddess, and notes that really, she is the same as all the other mother goddesses; that Hindus see her that way, even if Westerners are more interested in her individual characteristics. From there, he goes on to describe a particular "common psychological profile" for Indian Hindus, stressing over and over that to focus solely on the natural mother-child relationship is mistaken in terms of Hindu culture. Hindu children ideally (and often really) are raised by several "mothers" in a joint or extremely-close knit family and their ties to their natural mother are not at all the same as in the West. Hence, `all the mothers are one'. From here, Kurtz goes in several directions, perhaps a bit too diffusely. First, he connects the psychology developed through parent-child relationships and in the wider family life to analysis of Hindu mythology. To tell the truth, I had a hard time swallowing this part, finding it all too reductionist. It is possible to read a lot into mythology: others have tried to use it to prove different things. Secondly, and much more fruitfully in my humble opinion, Kurtz endeavors to develop a new theory of psychoanalysis, more suited to Indian culture than the standard Western model. He rejects any attempt to cling to a "universal" system of psychological development a la Freud or a la Jung, which as he points out, defines other cultures' psychology as pathological or abnormal because it doesn't resemble our own. He says "In the absence of the approved Western mode of child rearing, all diverse cultural practices come off as too much or too little of a good thing. Whatever is foreign to the classic notion of proper child rearing thus appears pathogenic." [p.52] Kurtz suggests that "the family group, and not merely the individual mother and her child, lies at the core of this suggested model of Hindu child rearing." [p.60] In his drive to set the study of psychoanalysis in India on a new tack, the author re-interprets such well-known writers as Carstairs and Kakar, pointing out where, in his view, they have gone wrong. In a later chapter he critiques two other well-known writers too, Obeyesekere and Spiro. In the last chapter he makes some interesting observations on the relevance (or non-relevance) of his findings for American society. It is all very thought-provoking to a reader not so familiar with the arguments. (That would include almost everyone.) It seemed to me that his great weak point is lack of his own data, either anthropological or clinical. This volume is basically one of interpretation and reinterpretation. A more solid grounding in field work, with cases familiar to him first-hand, might have produced a less "in your face" kind of book. Nobody can accuse Kurtz of lack of breadth or paucity of ideas, though. If you are ready for an academic challenge, read it. This book is going to be a classic in the field, no doubt.
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