Reviewed by: The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis by Sarah Pinto Sean M. Dowdy Sarah Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 256 pp. Sarah Pinto's latest book, The Doctor and Mrs. A., is a soaring re-analysis of a psychoanalytic case study, a mere 40 pages lodged in an obscure text published in Lahore during India's Partition. Dev Satya Nand's The Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (1947), though largely forgotten, argues for a regenerative process of transforming and reconceiving one's desires through their re-experience in dream states. As Pinto in turn argues, the experimental nature of the text, especially in its accidental ambulations and openness to new ways of living, affords a framework for theorizing the flipside of ethics, or what she dubs "counter-ethics"—i.e., departures from or reversals/reorganizations of ethical formulations. Pinto's entire book can be read as a fleshing-forth of this concept in its gendered, decolonial, and socio-cosmic implications—all the while keeping its defining contours fluid and open enough to do the work that counter-ethics is supposed to do. Being "indifferent to content…a position not a set of principles" (193), a counter-ethic responds to ethical claims with a modest, yet indomitable rejoinder: "Don't get too comfortable" (181). So, let's get a little uncomfortable and dive into the voices of a small and strange conversation once lost to the archives… The Doctor Dev Satya Nand was an Indian psychiatrist trained at the University of Edinburgh who later assumed psychoanalytic training under the supervision [End Page 163] of Owen Berkeley-Hill. While employed at the Punjabi Mental Hospital in the early 1940s he began work on his "objective method." Satya Nand's effort to re-work Freudian dream analysis—unscientific "mumbo-jumbo," in his words (89)—was meant to be both a correction and an elaboration. A correction in the sense that Satya Nand was trying to bypass the partial insights of free-association in order to impartially observe the rock-bottom truth of psychical reality. For the eponymous case re-analyzed by Pinto, the case of Mrs. A., Dr. Satya Nand had the analysand "promise to tell 'the whole truth and nothing but the truth' about whatever 'came into her mind during our investigations'" (7). This overhaul of Freud's "fundamental rule" in the incongruous language of legalist oath-taking removes the "free" from "association," but in doing so it—almost ironically, and perhaps counter to the intentions of Satya Nand—shifts analytic attention away from intrapsychic content and toward the dynamic forms of mutual interpretation. Thus, as an elaboration, elements of Satya Nand's approach were way ahead of their time. His technique for analyzing dreams (a day-dream in the case of Mrs. A.) was to parse and fragment "stories" of the analysand into "dream smudges," divide them up with elliptic gaps of silence (which he called "dream spaces"), then offer an interpretation with the intention of encouraging the analysand to reflect on the soundness of his interpretation as well as its unvoiced connections. Interpretation as an anti-authoritative offering, a proposal for the analysand to accept, refute, reinterpret, or fill in the blanks—this is a technical innovation most often attributed to D. W. Winnicott (1976), a quarter of a century later! And while Satya Nand's approach seems to avoid the transference/countertransference—i.e., the analytically essential, unconscious tango of projections, identifications, etc. stirred up between therapist and patient—his dialogical and narrativefocused technique is strikingly original enough to hold our attention. For Pinto, this technique became central to her conceptual development of counter-ethics. Mrs. A.'s "small arguments," her rebuttals and refutations of Satya Nand's interpretations, all demonstrate counter-ethics through "the choreographies of transformation, the forms taken by ethical imaginaries in their encounters with one another and with the world…often in moments when the terms of ethical formulations are revalued, or their meanings parsed" (27–28). Additionally, as Pinto historicizes in...
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Jan 1, 2022
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