A Passage to India
Lorena Preta

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Anyone travelling to Delhi, will certainly have visited the Old City.
An incredible maze of streets where hundreds of people, rickshaws, carts, voices, scents, uninterrupted sounding horns, all rush hastily together.
Stalls displaying meat, birds and dogs scrambling to seize any morsel left on the ground, and car parts which seem unlikely to be used as replacements. Huge piles of colored fabrics covered in millenary dust.
And then occasionally the haste interrupt. Everything seems to stop and be blocked in a tangle which is apparently inextricable and disordered. Yet with the same incomprehensible logic, suddenly everything starts over again. Traffic resumes, rickshaws and people who seem to return on precise routes which were interrupted, tracing sense in the total chaos. Looking at the whole, it seems impossible to know how and where this crowd of people is directed. Every movement seems to happen by chance or to follow and indescribable logic. Yet the net is woven again, fragments seem to recompose as a dismembered body reforming, despite everything, into an integrate organism, even if only for a few minutes. 
How can disorder, chaos, access an order which can describe and organize it? Can this also somehow represent psychic life in general?
And how can psychoanalysis move in this context, one of the many complex contexts of Indian culture and society?

The Fifth International Psychoanalytic Conference took place at Ambedkar University, the only University in which Psychoanalysis is available, and at the Indian International Centre, under the auspices of Sudhir Kakar, psychoanalyst and writer, member of the IPA, who has greatly contributed to the formation of many analysts in India.
Organized by the Centre of Psychotherapy and Clinical Research & School of Human Studies of Ambedkar University in collaboration with The Delhi Chapter of Indian Psychoanalytic Society & Psychoanalysis India, together with Geographies of Psychoanalysis. Following up on the meetings between psychoanalysts from different countries of the world, this year the Conference planned an Indo-Italian Meeting with the meaningful title 
Psychoanalytic  Explorations of Darkness in Culture and Clinic. 
Conference work was aimed at exploring the dynamic of those psychic processes which compelled by the Eros drive, contribute to the expression of human creativity but also all the aspects of violence, anger, envy and destructivity which remain obscure and negated forces of psychic life.
It was intense and important to verify through the reports of the direct experiences of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, who are working in very difficult social situations, how psychoanalytic practice may be brought to such particular settings, with rigor, passion and the ability to never step away from the theoretical references which are the basis of the psychoanalytic model but indeed reviving them, through courageous interaction.
It was especially important to see many young analysts who are able to apply the psychoanalytic therapeutic intervention as a fundamental and essential instrument  for comprehension and transformation.
Psychoanalysis in India has an ancient tradition and there were many presentations by distinguished psychoanalystis and psychiatrists, starting from  Prof Ashok Nagpal and Prof Honey Oberoi, who promoted psychoanalytic thought and training at the University in Delhi for years, Dr Shifa Haq Assistant professor and psychotherapist who is involved in research on social violence, Ashis Roy Psychoanalytic therapist and faculty who used psychoanalysis in engaging with intimacy in Hindu -Muslim couples,c going to important psychoanalysts from various Indian Psychoanalytic Institutes, such as Jhuma Basak, Vinita Kshetrapal, the psychiatrist Anurag Mishra, and some very young students and psychotherapists as well, whom I mentioned before.
The Indian group was distinguished and varied and it would be impossible here to mention everyone.
Among the speakers was also the Argentinian psychoanalyst Mariano Horenstein who is one of the pillars of Geographies of Psychoanalysis. The group of Italian psychoanalysts composed by Andrea Baldassarro, Alfredo Lombardozzi, Lorena Preta and Cosimo Schinaia, provided an interesting and multifocal picture of Italian Psychoanalysis, successfully initiating a dialogue between different experiences.
Psychoanalysis for everyone, East and West, remains a "ray of intense darkness", of which we cannot let go in order to build a space where diversities may live together.

Some of the papers from the Conference which I hope will acknowledge at least in part, the work carried out, will soon be posted on the web page of Geographies of Psychoanalysis.