Two Psychiatrist

Family of the Heart - DIALOGUE & DISCUSSIONS 

Sohail;

 

Your article on 'Human Psych" is interesting. I admire your courage in attempting to synthesize these very broad, very complicated ideas into something the average lay reader can understand. My approach to writing is a little different. I am an unabashed Marxist/Socialist (thus my admiration for Azeem's writings) though far enough along in my life to understand and accept that my views and ideas apply wholly to myself alone. However, I do find any view point that stresses the 'individual' over the 'social/collective' a little incomplete. Of course, as Azeem pointed out in one of the chapters in "Samaaji tabdeeli", EVERY point of view is incomplete since life itself is incomplete (a very authentic appreciation of the Marxist Dialectical method, I must say).

I also am somewhat reluctant to write overarching syntheses about political, social or psychological themes unless I feel I have a firm grasp on all their complexities (but that probably goes back to my relationship with my father (see below).

The 'Sufi/dreamer' in me also, of course, firmly believes in 'wahdat-ul-wajood'. We are all one, part of the cosmos and will forever remain so even though in the span of our brief lives in this world, we fancy ourselves as 'someone/something'.

It would take a long essay to describe my loving yet complicated relationship with my authoritarian, affectionate, marxist, learned psychologist father who continues to tower over me even though I ran away as far as I could to get away from his shadow and before him, that of my illustrious grandfather. I feel a little hesitation as I type this since I don't know how much or what to disclose. I will, instead, attach an essay published on chowk several years ago that provides a glimpse.

http://www.chowk.com/articles/9966

 

More later. We should save this correspondence. Maybe put it on Family of the heart or somewhere similar?

 

Ali  

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