Indian psychoanalysis consistently finds itself in a space of translation—concepts and praxis generated through Euro-American epistemes are translated on the page and in the clinician’s office. Concepts forged in specific Euro-American contexts encounter Indian affective, political and cultural worlds that resist and reshape them. In India, these juxtapositions between lived worlds and psychoanalytic theory have often been navigated through recourse to Hindu mythology, or rarely, through strict adherence to European epistemes. However, the dominating presence of a far-right religio-political order that insists on a similar “return” beseeches an expansion beyond Indian psychoanalysis’s enchantment with Hindu mythology or European precedence, towards a grammar of contemporary Indian psychoanalysis.

This edited collection furthers the grammar of contemporary Indian psychoanalysis by foregrounding the fissures between Euro-American psychoanalytic theory and the lived, local specificities of the Indian cultural and clinical scene, as a productive category in its own right. That is, instead of focusing on how Indian psychoanalysis moulds itself around a Hindu mythology or defies a European predicament, this edited collection seeks to analyse the lived experiences in Indian culture, media and the clinic as generative categories. The aim of this collection, therefore, is to ground the dissonance, disruption and deconstruction that Indian psychoanalysis must encounter, as spaces worthy of debate, discussion and analysis.  

This proposal invites thinkers to locate these fissures in psychoanalysis through a variety of sources, such as cinema, literature, digital media, clinical case studies, commentaries on existing psychoanalytic texts, or autoethnography, among others. We wish to emphasise that any source is considered relevant and important so long as it is being used to theorise the modern Indian society from a psychoanalytic viewpoint (whether it be a dataset, short-form digital videos, music videos or a book). We invite submissions that conceptualise this fissure as a locus of generativity. What emerges when universalist frameworks encounter the heterogeneity of Indian social life—its caste hierarchies, religious imaginaries, urban transformations, queer and trans negotiations of space, digitally mediated intimacies, or the psychic architectures of neoliberal aspiration? How do these collisions illuminate what current psychoanalytic theories cannot fully contain—and thus must be compelled to rethink?

The abstracts are welcome to surprise us; also, please find below three broad sub-themes for guidance if needed:
- Gender and sexuality: What are the new formations of consent, desire, intimacy and reparation in modern India? Do Indian trans and non-binary experiences reveal a fissure in universalist models? How do these relationalities operate, and how does psychoanalysis encounter these?
- The neoliberal drive: How does Indian capitalist culture, with its postcolonial nuances, encounter psychoanalysis? How do Indian psychic lives operate under the psychic economy of aspiration, precarity and “respectability” in present-day India?
- Translating psychoanalysis: How do global vocabularies of trauma, desire, or selfhood get translated, resisted, or reconfigured within Indian contexts? What are the moments where the analytic technique must be improvised?

Note on limits: We invite abstracts from post-graduate students, PhD fellows, clinicians, and early-career research scholars under 40 years of age that illuminate how psychoanalysis is reconfigured when it meets the lived realities of contemporary Indian landscapes. We want to foreground younger voices who are too often positioned at the margins of formal academic and clinical spaces. Early-career scholars frequently have fewer platforms from which to speak, despite being uniquely attuned to emerging experiences of desire, technology, kinship, and social rupture in India today. By creating room for their work, we hope to support the development of ideas and practices that may otherwise struggle to find visibility within established psychoanalytic institutions. We are particularly interested in scholarship that moves beyond mythological or civilisational framings and instead situates its analysis in the present—urban, digital, local, embodied, precarious.

Proposal Submission Instructions:

Please include a 500-word abstract, partially-completed or completed chapter (if you already have one), along with an 80-100-word biography, as two separate documents, by 30th June 2026 at psychoanalysisinanindianidiom@gmail.com.

Please anonymise your draft to ensure a blind peer-review process. To be clear, please send us an anonymised document containing your abstract/partially-completed chapter/full chapter, and a separate document with your bionote. Non-anonymised submissions might be automatically rejected.

Questions or concerns can be directed to aratghosh@gmail.com and oishiki.ganguly3@gmail.com (please CC both).

Selected papers will be submitted to the IPA COWAP-Routledge book series for consideration and editorial guidance before publication in an edited volume.