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Sudhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst and writer who lives in Goa, India.

Kakar took his Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Gujarat University, his Master’s degree (Diplom-Kaufmann) in business economics from Mannheim in Germany and his doctorate in economics from Vienna before beginning his training in psychoanalysis at the Sigmund-Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany in 1971. Between 1966 and 1971, Sudhir Kakar was a Lecturer in General Education at Harvard University, Research Associate at Harvard Business School and Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

After returning to India in 1975 , Dr. Kakar set up

a practice as a psychoanalyst in Delhi where he was also the Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology. He has been 40th Anniversary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard (2001-02), a visiting professor at the universities of Chicago (1989-93), McGill (1976-77), Melbourne (1981), Hawaii (1998) and Vienna (1974-75) and a Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton and Berlin. Since 1994, he is Adjunct Professor of Leadership at INSEAD in Fontainbleau, France.

A well-known figure in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, as well as a novelist, Dr. Kakar’s person and work have been profiled in some of world’s leading newspapers such as The New York Times, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Die Zeit and Le Nouvel Observateur, which listed him one of 25 major thinkers of the world. His many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Distinguished Service Award of Indo-American Psychiatric Association, Fellowship of National Academy of Psychology, the Bhabha and Nehru Fellowships and the National Fellowship in Psychology of the Indian Council of Social Science Research.. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, International Psychoanalytical Association and the Academie Universelle des Cultures in Paris.

Sudhir Kakar’s seventeen books of non-fiction and four of fiction, include The Inner World (now in its 16th printing since its first publication in 1978), Shamans, Mystics and Doctors,


Sudhir with Katharina Poggendorf Kakar

The Analyst and the Mystic, Culture and Psyche, The Colors of Violence as also the novels The Ascetic of Desire, Ecstasy and Mira and the Mahatma. His books have been translated into twenty languages around the world.

His most recent book is Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World.

His work in progress includes the novel "The Crimson Throne"on the last years of the Mughal emperor Shahjahan's reign.The novel will be published by Penguin-Viking in June, 2010. An edited book of essays On Dreams and Dreaming is slated for publication by Viking in December, 2010 and a book of memoirs Off the Couch will be published in February, 2011.

Sudhir Kakar is married to Katharina, a writer and a scholar of comparative religions. He has two children, a son Rahul who is in financial services, and a daughter Shveta, a lawyer, both in New York.