In this lengthy study of Gandhi's advance from his Bania childhood
to the assumption of all-Indian Mahatmaship, Erik H. Erikson draws
together some threads from his earlier and influential
psychoanalytic works. He focuses on a little-known incident when
Gandhi, then 48, and leading a strike in Ahmedabad, first used the
technique of fasting. But in leading up to and in moving away from
Ahmedabad, Erikson touches many other bases. As a student of human
growth, he analyzes the illusion within Gandhi of his parents, of
Hindu ethics, of Indian lifestyles, and of a uniquely personal
vision - all of which underlay the Gandhian doctrine of Satyagraha,
or militant nonviolence. Erikson discusses also the methodology of
psychohistory, which he first attempted in his widely-acclaimed
Young Man Luther. Though in a sense a sequel to that work, the
present book is less orthodox as either straight biography or
psychoanalytic case history. It is immensely diffuse and
meandering, in places as hard to follow as an analysand's
monologue. Erikson never convinces the reader of the central
importance of Ahmedabad Event in Gandhi's life. Nor does he clarify
the significance of some other recognized turning points. Despite
his own well-known preoccupation with the search for identity, he
fails to explain why the young Gandhi, on being kicked off a
whites-only first class carriage in South Africa, so swiftly found
his mission. Still, the book does convey the complex texture of a
charismatic personality. And it contains a masterly essay on the
complementary nature of Gandhian and Freudian insights, both of
which Erikson endorses. Suggestive and difficult, this book will
reward the patience of the reader interested in the potential of a
psychoanalytic understanding of history. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this study of Mahatma Gandhi, psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson
explores how Gandhi succeeded in mobilizing the Indian people both
spiritually and politically as he became the revolutionary
innovator of militant non-violence and India became the motherland
of large-scale civil disobedience.
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