Girindrasekhar Bose (31 January 1887 – 3 June 1953) was an early 20th-centuryIndianpsychoanalyst, the first president (1922–1953) of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society.[1] Bose carried on a twenty-year dialogue withSigmund Freud. Known for disputing the specifics ofFreud'sOedipus complex theory, he has been pointed to by some as an early example of non-Western contestations of Western methodologies. Apart from this, he also started the first general hospital psychiatry unit (GHPU) in Asia at the R.G. Kar Medical College, Calcutta in 1933.[2]
Bose's doctoral thesis,Concept of Repression (1921) blendedHindu thought with Freudian concepts. He sent the thesis to Freud,[3] which led to a correspondence between the two men and to the formation of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in 1922 in Calcutta. Of the fifteen original members, nine were college teachers of psychology or philosophy and five belonged to the medical corps of the Indian Army, including two British psychiatrists. One of them was Owen A.R. Berkeley Hill,[4] famous for his work at theRanchi Mental Hospital. In the same year, Bose wrote to Freud in Vienna. Freud was pleased that his ideas had spread to such a far-off land and asked Bose to write toErnest Jones, then President of theInternational Psychoanalytic Association, for membership of that body. Bose did so and the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, with Bose as president (a position he held until his death in 1953) became a full-fledged member of the international psychoanalytic community.[1][5] The review of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society is calledSamiksha[6] and its first edition appeared in 1947.
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Mehta, P. (1997). "The Import and Export of Psychoanalysis: India".Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis.25 (3):455–471.doi:10.1521/jaap.1.1997.25.3.455.PMID9513126.
Nandy, Ashis. 'The savage Freud: the first non-Western psychoanalyst and the politics of secret selves in colonial India', inThe savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 81–144
T.G. Vaidyanathan & Jeffrey J. Kripal (editors):Vishnu on Freud's Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, Oxford University PressISBN0-19-565835-3, Paperback (Edition: 2003)
Amit Ranjan Basu,"Girindrasekhar Basu and the coming of psychology in colonial India," Theoretical Perspective, Vol.6, 1999, pp. 26–55.
Amit Ranjan Basu, "Emergence of a Marginal Science in a Colonial City: Reading Psychiatry in Bengali Periodicals." Indian Economic and Social History Review, 41, 2004, pp 103–141.
