Mother as Shelter and Storm
The Dharmic self and the analytic couch
By Chandra Rai
Roy’s book cover prompted a parapraxis in one of the author’s patients.
“Is there an Indian way of thinking?”—A. K. Ramanujan
The answer to Ramanujan’s question begins to unfold in a seventy-year-old Delhi bookstore. In a hole-in-a-wall shop, books rise like pillars from floor to ceiling, sustained by a logic both precarious and permanent. A poetic chaos. Personal space surrenders to intimacy as people bustle around me, brushing shoulders. And there, face-out in front of a tall stack, I see Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, which seduces me with a single glance.
Against a vivid red background—bold, almost bleeding with intensity—the title glows in golden script at the top. Below, a black-and-white photograph of Roy, as a young woman, voluminous curly hair cascading around her face. In long dangling earrings, while smoking a beedi, the thin hand-rolled cigarette common in South Asia. The picture captures her youth, her spirit unapologetically daring. She wears what could be a traditional Indian saree or just as easily a Western dress.
I feel compelled to pick up the book and immerse myself in the story of a woman—of motherhood, vulnerability, transformation, and everything else that had led her to write.
The seduction had begun weeks prior, thousands of miles away, in my consulting room in California, as my patient narrated her experience of reading Roy’s memoir about the well-understood but unspoken aspects of Indian motherhood. At our last appointment before my break, she had made sure to finish the book. She didn’t want to be left behind with “the ending”—an unconscious anxiety in which even a temporary parting in analytic treatment can stir up the echoes of all the goodbyes that came before.
Roy’s memoir is about her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy. Mary Roy challenged her brother in a landmark inheritance case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, securing equal property rights for Syrian Christian women in Kerala. She also rescued women and children from domestic violence, yet was a volatile mother who erupted in violent rage that Roy could never anticipate. The memoir speaks of the journey of a daughter who ran away from home at 18 and spent another four decades trying to understand why she could not stop returning home.
But my analytic mind snagged on something. Of all the stories my patient had shared about this memoir, she had never once mentioned the image on the cover. In psychoanalysis, we call this a parapraxis—a significant omission that reveals the unconscious at work. Usually, it’s a misspoken word or a forgotten name, but here the parapraxis was the omission of an image from the narrative. An assumption at play? Bion suggested that assumptions are a hiding place for the unconscious—where one is already convinced that there is nothing to be seen.
Not-to-see, not-to-think, and not-to-speak are learned through osmosis by children in many families, especially in India, because to see what the family has worked for generations to keep silent (not secret) means renegotiating one’s belonging in the family system.
This dynamic of not-seeing shows up frequently on my analytic couch, in the encounter between the Western individuated self and the Indian dharmic self: the former bounded and contained, and the latter permeable with fluid boundaries and interlocked in relations. Each reveals what the other cannot see. I carry both inside me.
I recognize that the contrast is not between two monoliths but between two different centers of gravity. Western psychoanalysis contains its own relational strands: Winnicott reminded us that there is no such thing as a self without a mother; Klein mapped the ferocious inner world in relation to the maternal object; intersubjective traditions challenge the myth of the isolated, autonomous mind. Indian traditions, too, contain their own forms of individuation. These heuristic distinctions are not absolute ones. What I am navigating—in my psychoanalytic training and on the couch—is not a clash of opposites, but an encounter of two maps, each partially true, neither complete on its own. The focus of this essay is that powerful intrapsychic experience lived within a single person.
To write of a mother’s violence is more than critique; it is blasphemy.
The Parapraxis
Why did the patient edit out the cover image in her free associations? I first questioned whether the erotic had been silenced. Had I become the “inciting object,” one who spoke of sexuality, assuming the role of the mother granting permission before the patient could cross the threshold of her own desire? A standard interpretation of the repression of desire and the erotic.
But then, my own mind free associated to two unpleasant memories from my first analysis.
The first was one of those routine afternoon sessions on the couch, when I suddenly remembered a dream: I was in a hospital gown smoking a cigarette. I was sinking into the strong antibacterial smell of Dettol common in the corridors of Indian hospitals, the dread of people dressed in white around me, and the sound of a death cry. I still hadn’t found words to express these fragments of images and sensations, when my analyst (male, White, and European) overzealously voiced his association to my dream: the western image of the femme fatale. He elaborated on the erotic power, desirability, and the cigarette as symbolic of pleasure, power, and the phallus itself.
It’s was as if he knocked me off the couch to lie on it himself. The dream was his, associations his, and the interpretation of the unconscious his. If he had made space for my associations, we would have arrived at the rich latent content of my grandmother and her relationship to tobacco—a maternal figure riddled with contradictions, a rebel by her own right.
The second memory was a moment of my analyst’s parapraxis, when he revealed he saw me as a “Western patient with an exotic background.” Sensing his slip, he hastily backpedaled, from “exotic” to “novel”—a correction that only sealed my erasure. Even in that painful moment, I could not but appreciate the comic timing of the unconscious: It is a rare efficiency when an analyst diagnoses his own inadequacy in a single sentence. My culture had been flattened into a Western cliché; his unconscious had leaked the very fragmentation my psyche suffered within the transference. The analysis collapsed under the weight of his projection. I needed a room with a higher ceiling, and an analyst who did not see my culture as a redaction to “White-out,” but as a foundation on which the entire analysis had to be cocreated.
The Dharmic-Relational Self and the Idealized Mother
Roy’s memoir arrives speaking the unspeakable. Roy embraces, breathes, and agonizes over the contradiction of loving and hating, idealizing and resenting her mother. Roy writes with due respect for her mother’s achievements as a social worker and activist, applauding her grit in rising from nothing to become a successful educator and a founder of a prestigious school. She resists reducing her to a “toxic mother,” and instead shows the agony of never having been nurtured while watching her mother care for hundreds of other children.
Roy’s ambivalence toward her mother is matched by a transgressive presentation of herself. Seen through an Indian lens, the portrait of Roy with a beedi is the portrait of a woman taking pleasure, uninhibited, self-possessed. Roy is sensual, unguarded, amused, her gaze playful and unrestrained. This goes against the social expectation of sharam. Sharam is not an external prohibition but an internalized regulation that a woman is expected to feel and live out. Any female desire expressed in gesture, in gaze, or in laughter is a transgression of sharam. That beedi on the cover is a flare from the trenches of defiance: a refusal to be shackled, an assertion to exist outside social permission, and even an act of castration.
But at a deeper register, it’s about Roy’s audacity to touch the holy grail of Indian motherhood. To write of a mother’s violence is more than critique; it is blasphemy. The whole image captures independence and transgression in a single frame. The woman—timeless, untamed, unrepentant—emerges from history but refuses to be contained by it.
My patient’s unconscious registered these nuances that led to a parapraxis of not seeing, not thinking, and not voicing a picture that speaks a thousand words. The sensuality is inseparable from what is transgressed, and what is reclaimed—on that cover both are fused. The beedi is erotic, but it is also about a woman committing the deeper blasphemy of having spoken at all. My patient could not name one without unsealing the other. Her parapraxis honored both dangers at once: the forbidden truth and the forbidden desire.
A great theorist of these dynamics is A. K. Ramanujan, whose essay “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” was an eye-opening experience—a moment of finally seeing Indian life named. He writes from his experience of being Indian while having lived in the West, sitting with the question of whether something distinctly Indian persists across modernized and traditional India. He proposed that Indian thought is context-sensitive rather than context-free—the Indian ethics, beliefs, values, and logic become highly dependent on who you are, with whom you are, your stage of life, and your relationship or position in hierarchy relative to others. Reading Ramanujan, I felt like I was being handed a language for something I had always already known.
This context-sensitive thinking, in my own reading (and I suspect for many steeped in Indian culture), can be further traced back to the principle of dharma. To translate dharma into English as “duty” loses the full weight of its meaning. The word comes from the Sanskrit root “dhr,” meaning “to hold” or “to sustain.” Here, the self is relational from birth to death and beyond. This is not an ethical system; it is ontology, a viewpoint on the nature of existence. You are not born alone into this world. Instead, you are born into a web of interlocked relations: your ancestors, parents, teachers, lineage, and the intergenerational debts, obligations, and inheritances. The self is cyclical inside-out and outside-in.
In contrast, every school of psychoanalysis, whether focused on drives, objects, self, language, attachment, development, or intersubjectivity, has a common starting point: the individual. But the dharmic relational self is about the self in the interlocked universe of connections.
This dharmic ontology is embodied in the figure of the mother. In India, motherhood is the dharmic order made flesh, carrying a reverence that can be found in few other societies. Mother is enshrined in the identity of the nation itself as Bharat Mata, in the holy water of the Ganges as Ganga-Ma. She is personified not merely in her humanness but as a symbol of nourishment, sacrifice, and moral order. To question the mother is to question the dharma itself.
You can see these idealized messages inscribed on tuk-tuks, public buses, street posters, and woven into the famous dialogues of Hindi cinema, as though the culture itself cannot stop writing love letters to the mother. The latest version I read: “Never let the lips that kiss you make you forget the hands that fed you.” I was stunned when A. R. Rahman, in his acceptance speech at the Oscars, quoted the iconic dialogue from the Hindi film Deewaar (1975)—“Mere paas maa hai” (I have my mother)—and then pointed to his mother in the auditorium, locating himself not in his accomplishment but in her presence. The mother is the ultimate moral and spiritual symbol, the one reference point that requires no further explanation.
Psychoanalysis clearly shows such idealization is an imprisonment, a gilded cage, where the culture provides no reprieve for a mother who feels resentment or frustration with the role. To bear these feelings is considered unnatural, and this value system is transmitted intergenerationally from mother to daughter.
Today, Indian women entrepreneurs build startups, climb corporate ladders, and achieve financial success—but the unconscious is not impressed by résumés. On the analytic couch, many Indian daughters walk a path similar to Roy’s, inhabiting the irresolvable ambivalence of loving and hating the mother. Some take years before thoughts or feelings of resentment toward the mother can surface. What comes first is shame and the guilt, woven so deeply into the psyche that interpretations of individuation and separation can be trauma-inducing. As a woman analyst working with Indian patients, I find my authority in the room inseparable from the mother-transference. For me, the idealized mother-transference is the most challenging to embody—feeling, beneath it, the scaffolding of repressed rage lying dormant on the couch. Sometimes years into the analysis, individuation feels like a betrayal at the core: to have needs separate from the mother is to be selfish, to speak of pain is to dishonor the mother’s sacrifice, and to keep one’s financial success—hard-earned dollars—held close is to rob the mother’s womb.
What gets played out on the couch is this agony of endless cycles of avoiding, orbiting, returning, and reshaping oneself around an absence that was once a presence, neglect, abuse, or abandonment. Roy names this outside the consulting room, writing of how she became a very strange shape, trying to hold both love and terror in the same body. She calls her mother “my shelter and my storm.” My patients arrive having had the same experience, in a thousand different forms, without ever having had language for it.
Roy’s memoir ends with no clear resolution, but with a shadow of a mother—neither dead nor fully alive. For the many daughters who have never had language for what they carried, who have never seen their ambivalence reflected back with such unflinching clarity, Roy’s book is a true gift. Like the dharma and the analytic couch, it does not promise liberation. It promises something harder and more necessary: the capacity to bear what is true.
Chandra Rai is a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst affiliated with the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. She serves as an adjunct clinical instructor at Stanford Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She has a private practice in San Jose.
Published April 2026