A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY ON THE INDIAN SIGMUND FREUD
Most of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s theories and concepts are controversial in nature- there are people who follow these as well as those who strongly oppose them. However, there is no dispute as to how large a contribution he had made to the field of psychology- entitling him to be the ‘father of modern psychology’. Now, when I say, Indian Sigmund Freud, I don’t mean the father of Indian psychology- because there are two other gentlemen in the queue for that position ( N.N Sengupta and David Gunamudian Bose). By the header- Indian Sigmund Freud, I mean the most dominant proponent of psychoanalysis in India. And it was Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose.
Girindrasekhar Bose was born in 1886. Bose, the youngest of nine children, was the son of a chief minister of a minor princely state in British India and a mother who was a poet. After finishing school, he studied chemistry in Calcutta’s Presidency College and then joined the Medical College where he received his medical degree in 1910. He was married at the age of seventeen to Indumati, who later became the mother of two of his daughters. He was greatly interested in yoga, magic, and hypnotism and, in fact, used hypnotic therapy in his medical practice during his early years and also occasionally after he became a psychoanalyst.
While practicing, as a doctor, Bose studied psychology in the newly opened department of psychology at Calcutta University. Appointed lecturer at the age of 31, after he finished his Master’s degree in two years, he made psychoanalysis compulsory for all students of psychology. His doctoral thesis, Concept of Repression (1921) in which he blended Hindu thought with Freudian concepts which he sent to Freud, led to a correspondence between the two men and to the formation of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society on January 22, 1922. He developed his own overly didactic therapeutic technique, primarily aimed at cognitive change, which was based on his theory of “opposite wishes” (1933). He occupied the presidential post of the society until he passed away in 1953.
Both Sigmund Freud and Girindra Shekhar Bose have so much in common with one another. Both were initially physicians to start with. And both of them had an appreciation for the inert aspects or unconscious elements of human behaviour. Maybe, these common grounds could have been the foundation stone in the one-of-a-kind friendship that existed between the two. Just like that of Sigmund Freud, most of Girindra Shekhar Bose’s teachings and concepts are less agreed upon today. However, his contributions were pivotal in the entry of the Indian subcontinent in the scientific arena of Psychology.
