Volume 13, Number 9 · November 20, 1969
Gandhi: Non-Violence as Therapy
By Clifford Geertz
Gandhi's Truth, or the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
by Erik H. Erikson
Norton, 474 pp., $10.00
'Whence, however,' the Mahabharata asks, 'does Hope arise?' For twenty years, since his Childhood and Society announced the Freudian vocation to be the empowerment of the ego, Erik Erikson has been asking the same question. His whole career has proceeded from a settled determination to turn psychoanalysis away from fascination with weakness toward detection of strength, to dissolve its hospital odor and connect it up with the public aspirations of men. In modern India, where despair is more than an emotion—a quality of the landscape, a dimension of the weather—hope arose most eloquently with Gandhi. In addressing himself to the question of whence, in the convolutions of the Mahatma's life, that hope came, what it consisted in, and why, at least for a while, it caught most of India in its grasp, Erikson has found a most appropriate subject. But he has found as well a most refractory case.
Review, 3412 words
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