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"Though Freud never overtly refers to the Mahthe companion volume to Freud's India, Alf Hiltebeitel offers what he calls a ""pointillist introduction"" to a new theory about the Mah"

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9780190878368

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Spectacularly impressive. You can dip into these amazing volumes and find all manner of marvelous things--not only the valuable information about Freud, Bose, goddesses, and the Mahabharata, but Hiltebeitel's highly creative ideas about them. --Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago These volumes comprise the magnum opus of a distinguished historian of religions. It lovingly orbits around two cultural oeuvres of roughly the same length: the great Hindu epic of the Mahabharata and the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. It is as if Hiltebeitel has treated the Mah?bh?rata as one immense psychoanalytic exploration of the maternal polytheisms of Indian Hindu culture and the Collected Works as an unintended but appropriate mythology of Western civilization and its male monotheisms. Behind this astonishing comparison haunts the question: 'Can psychoanalytic methods work in different ontological structures? Can they work here, for example, in the panpsychic nondualism of the Bengali founder of Indian psychoanalysis Girindrasekhar Bose?' The answer appears to be: 'Yes, they can, uncannily so. And the analysis goes both ways.' --Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions At a time when scholarship in both religion and psychoanalysis seeks to recover a repressed or marginalized anti-colonial past, Hiltebeitel's manuscript offers a wealth of information which scholars of both religion and psychoanalysis will find fascinating and stimulating. This is the kind of research that stimulates more research. --Marshall Alcorn, author of Resistance to Learning

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Alf Hiltebeitel is Professor of Religion at George Washington University. He works mainly on the two Sanskrit epics, the Mah

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