Beauty in Brokenness – A Book Discussion

Speaker and Content

As a segue from our event with Indian Psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakar, Shalini Masih will build on Kakar’s concept of the ‘cultural unconscious’.

She will present ideas from her debut book which is about broken psychoanalytic conversations with broken selves of people who felt themselves to be possessed by spirits of various kinds. Her research was undertaken in order to extend psychoanalysis outside the clinic’s realms into spaces of traditional healing in Northern India.

Her book offers a hugely productive interface between cultural manifestations and concerns of psychoanalysis without reducing the phenomenon of spirit possession to something formulaic. Instead, her book came to highlight the intrinsic beauty of this complex experience, illustrating relevant themes through culturally sensitive psychoanalytic conversations with participants who felt haunted and possessed by ghosts. Her presentation is about meeting symptoms from an ‘aesthetic vertex.’

Here is the link to her book – (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666902112/Psychoanalytic-Conversations-with-States-of-Spirit-Possession-Beauty-in-Brokenness)

DR SHALINI MASIH, is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and writer who lives in Worchestershire but was brought up in India, growing up in the stimulating environment of priests and healers, witnessing firsthand states of spirit possession and exorcism.

She trained in the University of Delhi where she gained a PhD Degree in Psychology and has been supervised and mentored by esteemed colleagues including Michael Eigen and Sudhir Kakar.

She has written and published many papers and chapters. One of her papers titled ‘Devil! Sing me the Blues – A Life Struggling to be Born’ was awarded the Critics Award for Best Psychoanalytic Writing in the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Conference held in New Delhi India in 2018 and was also nominated for Gradiva Awards 2020.

She was awarded the Scholar Award by Division 39 of American Psychological Association for her Clinical and Research work in the field of Psychoanalysis. “Psychoanalytic Conversations with States of Spirit Possession: Beauty in Brokenness” is her first book