The New York Review Abroad (21 page)
Read The New York Review Abroad Online
Authors: Robert B. Silvers
J. S. Neki of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi has suggested a different model for the therapeutic relationship in India, that of guru and disciple. Though there are obvious differences between the roles of guru and therapist—the guru teaches the control of negative emotions rather than their exploration, and he does not withhold himself emotionally from the disciple—Neki sees many similarities: both are dispassionate and persevering, preferring to help the pupil formulate questions rather than give the answer
themselves, and both teach him to look inward rather than outward.
8
Neki has also examined the great difference between India and the West in attitudes toward dependency. In psychotherapy it becomes a key issue: the Western patient fights against dependence, the Western therapist treats it as a problem that has to be managed and kept under control. Neki sees both partners as caught in an anxiety specific to Western culture: “both of them engage in a struggle to defend their own personal independence in a climate that inevitably becomes charged with anxiety and sometimes even with hostility.”
9
In India, he argues, dependency of one person on another is taken for granted, and “where letting others take charge of you is not considered ignoble or undignified, no outrage of personal dignity occurs by depending on them.” The Western therapist’s formality is taken for unfriendliness; the Indian’s natural behavior is to
strive to establish a friendly relationship, and look for signs of reciprocity in the therapist’s behaviour and utterance. [Indians] offer gifts, extend invitations to visit their residences or to marriages and other social functions.… A distrust of formal contacts and a cosy feeling of security and reassurance in informal contacts is the common characteristic of our people. Even if we are buying some goods from a shopkeeper, we either try to transact business with a known person or attempt to develop familiarity during the business.
10
Psychotherapeutic work in India may be developing a pattern of its own that incorporates these attitudes.
In a study of the inner world of the Indian, Sudhir Kakar, trained on the Continent, a former lecturer at Harvard who practices in New Delhi, discusses the pervasive and seldom examined world-picture of a culture, the “heart of a community identity”: the Indian, he believes, is deeply molded by his background of belief in a progression of incarnations, of an inescapable karma, of the
samskaras
(innate dispositions) with which he is born. He is consequently—by our standards—more passive as well as more dependent and gregarious.
With the cultural acceptance of the notion of
samskara
, there is little social pressure to foster the belief that if only the caretakers were good enough, and constantly on their toes, the child’s potentialities would be boundlessly fulfilled. With the Hindu emphasis on man’s inner limits, there is not that sense of urgency and struggle against the outside world, with prospects of sudden metamorphoses and great achievements just around the corner, that often seem to propel Western lives.
11
Yet the Indian, he continues, always knows above all that he is part of a network of his fellows, always functions as part of a close group.
Perhaps they have always been the norm, and the Western sense of separateness and lonely achievement an aberration of the past hundred years or so. Through the eyes of Indians we can catch a glimpse of our own cultural peculiarities. The Western therapist’s anxiety about dependency is understandable, Neki says, because “most Western patients are lonely in life and have unsatisfied dependency cravings,
and therapists are afraid that resolution of dependency will be resisted by the patient. In India, patients nearly always have a variety of ‘significant others’ around them to whom dependency-leanings can always be transferred by a deft therapist.” And the Westerner “has become cut off from introspection and meditation. Psychotherapy perhaps serves to provide him with a substitute for it.” He quotes a colleague who puts it even more strongly:
The institution of psychotherapy, indeed the movement for mental health itself, may be viewed as both a symbolic and substantive cultural undertaking to meet the deficits in the Western way of life and to cope with the negative psychological implications of its premises.
12
Whether India, with its close and comforting network of family and community ties, should ever aim at psychiatric provision on the Western scale is doubtful. If it needs to, it will perhaps be a sign of social disintegration. Nor should we assume that therapeutic methods and attitudes adapted to Westerners are the only ones for the less isolated, less striving, less intellectualized Indian patient. Indian psychiatry will surely begin to reject what feels inappropriate and foreign. Surya has written that the present-day Indian psychiatrist “has learnt his medical and psychiatric lessons in a language and in conceptual frameworks which are wholly foreign to the milieu of his birth and habitation”; that unless this is changed “we will end up as ineffectual caricatures of Western psychiatric theory and practice, or reduce our living patients into a set of prestige-loaded foreign
jargon.”
13
Perhaps India has acquired all it needs from Western concepts of mental health and Western methods of trying to restore it, and will draw more confidently now on its own.
—November 19, 1981
1.
D.N. Nandi,
Psychoanalysis in Urban and Rural India
. National Seminar on Psychotherapeutic Processes (National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, Bangalore, 1978).
2.
Erna Hoch,
Process in Instant Cure
. National Seminar on Psychotherapeutic Processes (National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, Bangalore, 1978).
3.
G. M. Carstairs and R. L. Kapur,
The Great Universe of Kota
(University of California Press, 1976).
4.
Medard Boss,
A Psychiatrist Discovers India
(Dufour Editions, 1965).
5.
Erik H. Erikson,
Gandhi’s Truth
(Norton, 1969).
6.
Identity and Adulthood
, edited by Sudhir Kakar, with an introductory lecture by Erik H. Erikson (Oxford University Press, 1979).
7.
Erna Hoch, “A Pattern of Neurosis in India,”
American Journal of Psychoanalysis
, 1966.
8.
J. S. Neki, “Guru-Chela Relationship: The Possibility of a Therapeutic Paradigm,”
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
, 1973, pp. 755–766.
9.
J. S. Neki, “An Examination of the Cultural Relativism of Dependence as a Dynamic of Social and Therapeutic Relationships,” I and II,
British Journal of Medical Psychology
, No. 49 (1976), pp. 1–22.
10.
A. S. Mahal, “Problems of Psychotherapy with Indian Patients,” in
Personality Development and Personal Illness
, edited by J. S. Neki and G. G. Prabhu (Mental Health Monograph No. 2, New Delhi: All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, 1974).
11.
Sudhir Kakar,
The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India
(Oxford University Press, 1978).
12.
S. K. Pande: “The Mystique of ‘Western’ Psychotherapy and Eastern Interpretation,”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
, No. 146 (1968), pp. 425–432.
13.
N. C. Surya and S. S. Jayaram, “Some Basic Considerations of Psychotherapy in the Indian Setting,”
Indian Journal of Psychiatry
, No. 6 (1964), pp. 153–156.
In El Salvador
Joan Didion
This was the heyday of Roberto D’Aubuisson, also known as “Blowtorch Bob” after his favorite torture methods, a man who learned his grisly trade in the US from American military instructors. He was just one of many killers able to run around shooting, maiming, and terrorizing their own people in the name of anti-communism
.
You had them in Asia, you had them in Latin America, you had them anywhere in the world where the red tide of revolution threatened an assortment of strongmen, Big Men, and Caudillos, who were on the right side of communism
.
In El Salvador, “Blowtorch Bob” could have an archbishop murdered, or Maryknoll sisters, or anyone he goddamn liked, for he was “our boy.”
The heyday did not last. The national murder spree ended in the 1990s. Roberto D’Aubuisson died in 1992, in his bed, of cancer. In 1984 he received a prize in Washington DC for being “an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere.”
—I.B
.
1.
THE THREE-YEAR-OLD
El Salvador International Airport is glassy and white and splendidly isolated, conceived during the waning of the Molina “National Transformation” as convenient less to the capital (San Salvador is forty miles away, until recently a drive of several hours) than to a central hallucination of the Molina and Romero regimes, the projected beach resorts, the Hyatt, the Pacific Paradise, tennis, golf, waterskiing, condos, Costa del Sol; the visionary invention of a tourist industry in yet another republic where the leading natural cause of death is gastrointestinal infection. In the general absence of tourists these hotels have since been abandoned, ghost resorts on the empty Pacific beaches, and to land at this airport built to service them is to plunge directly into a state in which no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse.
The only logic is that of acquiescence. Immigration is negotiated in a thicket of automatic weapons, but by whose authority the weapons are brandished (army or national guard or national police or customs police or treasury police or one of a continuing proliferation of other shadowy and overlapping forces) is a blurred point. Eye contact is avoided. Documents are scrutinized upside-down. Once clear of the airport, on the new highway that slices through green hills rendered phosphorescent by the cloud cover of the tropical rainy season, one sees mainly underfed cattle and mongrel dogs and armored vehicles, vans, and trucks and Cherokee Chiefs fitted with reinforced steel and bullet-proof Plexiglas an inch thick.
Such vehicles are a fixed feature of local life, and are popularly associated with disappearance and death. There was the Cherokee Chief seen following the Dutch television crew killed in Chalatenango province in March. There was the red Toyota three-quarter-ton pickup sighted near the van driven by the four American
Maryknoll workers on the night they were killed in December 1980. There are the three Toyota panel trucks, one yellow, one blue, and one green, none bearing plates, reported present at each of the summer mass detentions (a “detention” is another fixed feature of local life, and often precedes a “disappearance”) in the Amatepec district of San Salvador. These are the details—the models and colors of armored vehicles, the makes and calibers of weapons, the particular methods of dismemberment and decapitation used in particular instances—on which the visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue.
Terror is the given of the place. Black-and-white police cars cruise in pairs, each with the barrel of a rifle extruding from an open window. Roadblocks materialize at random, soldiers fanning out from trucks and taking positions, fingers always on triggers, safetys clicking on and off. Aim is taken as if to pass the time. Every morning
El Diario de Hoy
and
La Prensa Gráfica
carry cautionary stories. “Una
madre y sus dos hijos fueron asesinados con arma cortante (corvo) por ocho sujetos desconocidos el lunes en la noche
”: a mother and her two sons hacked to death in their beds by eight
desconocidos
, unknown men. The same morning’s paper: the unidentified body of a young man, strangled, found on the shoulder of a road. Same morning, different story: the unidentified bodies of three young men, found on another road, their faces partially destroyed by bayonets, one face carved to represent a cross.