Soul murders, wolf mother: Re-reading the Mowgli stories of The Jungle Book in a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective

Abstract

Kipling’s (1894) ‘Mowgli stories’ a trio of tales set in India and written by an Englishman during the colonial period, are a natural bedfellow with cultural psychoanalysis; an approach to the unconscious that takes into account regional geography. While psychoanalysis’ interest in The Jungle Book began early and affectionately with Freud, both he and his successors read Kipling from the viewpoint of a certain geography and history associated with early European psychoanalysis. As such, psychoanalytic and post-colonial literary ways of reading Kipling, have, like the East and West of the writer’s ballad, generally resisted meeting. In this paper, I re-read the Mowgli Stories of Kipling’s Jungle Book with an awareness of how geography might have affected the subjectivity of prior analytic readers, offering the Mowgli stories anew to modern – by which I mean post-colonial – readers.

Keywords:

• psychoanalytic
• Kipling
• Freud
• post-colonial
• mourning
• geography

Notes

1. Writing about the infant’s aggression towards the aspect of mother that does not belong to him, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1928) speaks of envious impulses, oral and anal sadistic in nature, operate from the beginning of life, initially directed against the feeding breast and then against parental coitus.

2. Contemporary Indian literature has also treated this theme of India as feminine context for England and colonialism as a literary evacuation of ‘dark matter’. See my elaboration of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis on scroll.in.