GANDHI'S TRUTH

Gandhi's Truth

Gandhi's Truth

Introduction

Erik Erikson's Gandhi's Truth is a remarkable book. Erikson, with his characteristic insight, has portrayed a period of Gandhi's career with understanding and, it would seem, a good deal of truth. One can argue, as several Indian reviewers have, that the particular incident which Erikson picked was not as important as he supposes. Nonetheless the book provides what is perhaps the most “human” analysis of Gandhi to date. The book is basically a study of a limited event in Gandhi's life, his leadership of a strike of textile workers in the Indian city of Ahmadabad in 1918. Though not directly related to the independence movement, which was then taking shape, the event, according to Erikson, was indicative of Gandhi's tactics and underlying personality. (Laidlaw, 2009)

Within the context of the strike, Erikson has tried to examine Gandhi's relationships with those around him-the various members of his ashram (the small religious-communal community which he founded in Ahmadabad), his family, the workers and the management of the mills. Erikson discusses Gandhi's views toward sex, which sound quite strange to a Westerner but which are within accepted traditions of Hinduism, and his efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to educate his wife. He proved to be a more effective bargainer with the mill-owners. (Altbach, 2011)

Erikson sees Gandhi's devotion to “truth” and his inability to compromise with the truth as he saw it, as one of the key elements of his character and of his political success in the Indian context. In his personal life, Gandhi was totally devoted to the truth: if his son committed an indiscretion, Gandhi would publicity chastise him. Similarly, in his relationships with the mill-owners, he was completely open. He demanded that his adversaries confront not only himself and the workers, but also a higher truth. His reliance on non-violence and personal renunciation, again in the Hindu context, added to the credibility of his position. Erikson makes much of Gandhi's relations with individuals and his tremendous power over people in such relationships. (Snow, 2008)

Reviews

The early practitioners of the method, including Freud himself, used it almost exclusively to debunk and deflate. Erikson understands that to reduce illustrious men to their symptoms explains everything except the one thing that most needs to be explained -- their greatness itself. He has made this problem the central focus of his biographies and thereby produced works as subtle, delicate, evocative, and allusive as the early models were clumsy and one-dimensional. (Sharp, 2007)

To have restored psychoanalysis to intellectual respectability, not only among biographers but among social scientists generally, would along have established Erikson as one of the outstanding exponents of psychoanalysis now writing. In a series of other works, however -- on youth, identity, culture, and many related subjects -- Erikson has begun a major reorientation of psychoanalysis itself. Breaking with the rigid determinism according to which the personality takes its final shape during infancy, he has insisted on the importance of later experience and especially of the "identity crisis" so soften experienced ...