Freud's Mahābhārata

This book has a three-part structure, with the first and last chapters being the first and third parts, respectively. Chapter 1 examines Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” and works back from it to the Mahābhārata as we see what Freud had in mind as “uncanny.” The chapter thus offers a pointillistic introduction to a promissory Freud’s Mahābhārata, one in which many points get fuller treatment in later chapters. Chapters 2 through 5 are a medley of post-Freudian readings of Mahābhārata scenes, themes, and episodes. These are viewed through the lenses of authors who are sympathetic with Freud, the author included; in chapters 2 and 3, including Andre Green with his “dead mother complex”; and, in chapter 5, including Stanley Kurtz’s notion that “all the mothers are one” and Freud’s Indian correspondent, Girindrasekhar Bose’s concept of the “Oedius mother”. Chapter 6 is about Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, and shows that, for the Mahābhārata, religious traditions must be studied not only through conscious representations of their history but also regarding unconscious trauma, loss of memory, and a return of the repressed. The book posits a new theory of the Mahābhārata with its central myth of the Unburdening of the goddess Earth, as reflecting Brahmanical trauma from India’s second urbanization, ca. seventh to third centuries BCE.