The story of Satyanand.

Abstract

Byline: Sanjeev. Jain, Pratima. Murthy, Alok. Sarin The statement that Indian psychiatry has been eclectic is an oft-repeated one. From the days of Berkeley-Hill and Dhunjibhoy to the days of Wig and Kapur, the willingness to embrace a multiplicity of ideas has been the hallmark of Indian psychiatry. In a sense, one person who seems to embody this in independent India is Satyanand, who was the director of the Central Institute of Psychiatry from 1957 to 1963. He was one of the early teaching faculties at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (established in 1954), where he started one of the first studies on community psychiatry; and was adviser to the Ministry of Health on psychiatry and mental health related issues. He trained in psychiatry at Edinburgh and obtained a diploma in child health from Bombay. He had also been “in charge” of training of army psychiatrists for “forward areas,” when he was an officer in the Indian Medical Service (IMS), and had served earlier as the Deputy Medical Superintendent at Punjab Mental Hospital, Lahore. [Inline:1] In his ideas, writings, and personal journey, Satyanand retains a multi-dimensionality, an elusive, hard to categorize quality that distinguishes him. The work of Satyanand offers a unique insight into the way 20[sup]th-century ideas in psychiatry influenced developments in India. The accompanying picture is the cover page of a book by Major Satyanand, IMS.[sup][1] By then, he had trained with Owen Berkeley-Hill at Ranchi, and had taught physiology at the Amritsar Medical College, and worked at the Lahore Mental Hospital. Early in his career, he was initiated into psycho-analysis by Berkeley-Hill and acknowledges the debt. The book itself is dedicated to his parents, and his belief in the “past and future intellectual supremacy of India.” [Inline:2] Satyanand realized by the 1930's (he trained with Berkeley-Hill in 1934) that neuroses and dysfunctions of personality could not be “dealt with satisfactorily without psychoanalysis,” and tried to develop an amalgamated theory that included Freud, his followers and revisionists, as well as philosophical, biological insights, and religion. This early book was one of the first, of many by him, to appear. Both symptoms described and techniques used make interesting reading. He tries to analyze dreams from Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian perspectives, as well as by extending his tools of understanding to mysticism, “samadhi” states, and religious symbolism in Indian life, which he then synthesizes into the “oriental reminiscence state.” The subjects themselves are facing problems not just with personal dilemmas, but also with anxieties regarding social reform, the need to join the Indian freedom struggle, with efforts to spread socialist thinking within the Hindu population (Satyanand here uses the cooperative effort of the five villages of the Pandavas as an early example of socialist thinking). He suggests that there has been too much, and too early, an over-simplification of the concepts of psycho-analysis. The individuals who seek his help include a young professor of psychology, who is seeking self-analysis, and a young married woman who wants to reform Hinduism and join Nehru and Gandhi (against the wishes of her family); who is ambiguous about her own sexual desires and is attracted to a female friend. The second subject is hurt by a friends' comment that she was willing to compromise with capitalism while the true path was obviously socialism. These cases suggest that to an extent, urban life in India in the mid-20[sup]th century was not quite dissimilar to the tensions in politics and society in Vienna, and more broadly, Europe. Satyanand goes on to develop an elaborate system of dream analysis that he contrasts with Freudian methods in many aspects. …