GCAS: You began your PhD at GCAS as a practising psychotherapist, having already trained in applied and clinical psychology, as well as Logotherapy and Existential Analysis. Why did you decide to pursue a PhD at GCAS, and how do theory and practice coexist and inform each other in your work?
Ritika Singh: I decided to pursue a PhD because clinical practice kept producing questions that could not be answered responsibly within the consulting room alone. Psychotherapy places one in the presence of extraordinarily singular lives, yet the suffering brought into the room is never exclusively private. A person may speak in the first person, but that first person has been formed through families, histories, institutions, gendered expectations, economic conditions, caste locations, cultural fantasies and inherited languages of shame, duty and desire. I wanted to understand what becomes visible when psychic life is considered alongside the social and historical worlds that make particular forms of suffering possible.
My earlier training had already given me several distinct intellectual languages. Clinical psychology offered an engagement with diagnosis and psychological organisation, while Logotherapy and Existential Analysis introduced me to questions of freedom, responsibility, meaning, finitude and the irreducibility of the person. Psychoanalysis subsequently gave me a way of thinking about what escapes conscious intention: repetition, ambivalence, transference, fantasy, aggression, unconscious loyalty and the many ways in which a person can remain attached to the very arrangements from which they seek liberation.
The PhD allows me to bring these languages into conversation with feminist, existential and decolonial philosophy. Theory and practice coexist in my work as forms of mutual interruption. Clinical work interrupts theory whenever theory becomes too certain, too universal or too elegantly removed from the disorder of an actual life. Theory interrupts practice whenever clinical intuition begins to appear self-evident, or when the therapist risks interpreting a person entirely through the conventions of the profession. The clinic continually reminds me that no concept can exhaust a subject. At the same time, philosophical and psychoanalytic thought allow me to recognise that what appears to be an individual difficulty may also be an adaptation to a relational or political reality.
I therefore do not experience research and psychotherapy as two separate careers. The clinical encounter often reveals the question, while scholarship gives that question a history, a conceptual vocabulary and an ethical horizon. Conversely, research changes the way I listen. It makes me more attentive to the assumptions concealed within ideas such as autonomy, maturity, dependence, separation, adjustment and health. The movement between theory and practice is less a synthesis than a continuing tension, and I have come to regard that tension as intellectually and clinically productive.
GCAS: Can you share more about your research focus? Your thesis is entitled The Illegible Daughter: On Psychic Survival and Maternal Refusal in Contemporary India. What prompted this research direction, and can you speak to its significance in the context of contemporary India? Was it personally motivated as well?
Ritika Singh: The project began with a recurring figure: the daughter who is exceptionally skilled at reading the emotional environment around her, particularly the mother, yet remains strangely unread within that environment herself. She may know the temperature of the household, anticipate anger, disappointment, illness, sacrifice or withdrawal with remarkable precision. She becomes an interpreter of atmosphere and an administrator of relational stability, while her own interior life becomes difficult for others, and eventually for herself, to recognise.The “illegible daughter” is therefore not simply a daughter whom no one understands. She is often highly legible in terms of what the family requires her to be: dutiful, successful, emotionally available, self-regulating, marriageable, resilient or capable of translating the suffering of others. What remains illegible is the daughter as a separate psychic subject whose desires, refusals, aggressions and uncertainties cannot be entirely assimilated into the needs of the family.
My research examines how maternal suffering is transmitted to daughters through affect, embodiment, interpretation and relational obligation. Maternal refusal, as I use the term, does not refer only to an openly rejecting or unloving mother. It can also describe the mother’s difficulty in recognising the daughter as psychically separate, especially when the daughter has become a witness to, container for, or continuation of the mother’s own unrealised life. The daughter may be loved intensely and still encounter a refusal of her separateness. The thesis develops several concepts for describing this relational field. “Maternal epidermalisation” considers how maternal and social histories become inscribed upon the daughter almost as a second skin, shaping what she can feel, express and imagine before she possesses a language for it. “Interpretive attunement” describes the daughter’s heightened capacity to read the mother and the emotional environment, a capacity that may be experienced as intimacy while also functioning as vigilance. “Proximal rebellion” names forms of resistance that occur from within continued proximity, since rebellion in many Indian familial contexts does not necessarily take the form of geographical or emotional departure. “Relational disalienation” asks whether freedom can be conceived without requiring the fantasy of complete severance from the relationships through which the self was formed.
The project draws upon conversations with urban Indian women across different age, caste and professional locations, together with psychoanalytic, philosophical, cultural and clinical material. It is situated in contemporary India because daughterhood here is being reorganised by several simultaneous and sometimes contradictory demands. Women are encouraged to become educated, economically independent and publicly ambitious, while remaining responsible for the emotional coherence of the family. The language of individual freedom circulates alongside highly persistent structures of caste, marriage, filial duty, gendered respectability and intergenerational dependence. A daughter may be asked to become modern without causing the family to experience her modernity as abandonment. The mother and daughter relationship can easily become romanticised as inherently intimate, sacrificial or culturally sacred. It can also be reduced to a story of maternal domination, which risks isolating the mother from the patriarchal, caste-based and economic conditions under which her own subjectivity was formed. I am interested in holding both the mother’s suffering and the daughter’s claim to psychic life within the same frame. The mother may herself have been refused forms of freedom, but the inheritance of that refusal does not become harmless merely because it has a history. The daughter’s duty is often to understand the mother without allowing understanding to become an endless postponement of her own life.
The project is personally motivated in the sense that every sustained intellectual question has a personal vicinity. Personal motivation, however, does not mean that the thesis is a disguised autobiography or an attempt to resolve a private relationship through academic language. The personal enters as a susceptibility to a question: why certain relational arrangements become visible to us, why particular silences remain audible, and why some concepts feel inadequate to experiences we have repeatedly encountered. My own life, my clinical work and the accounts of the women participating in the research belong to different ethical registers. The purpose of the research is to produce a conceptual language capable of honouring those distinctions while still acknowledging that scholarship is never generated from a position of complete psychic neutrality.
GCAS: What differences do you see between approaches to psychoanalytic theory and practice in India, where you practise, and in the West, where the tradition originated?
Ritika Singh: I am cautious about treating “India” and “the West” as internally unified psychoanalytic worlds. Psychoanalysis originated within a particular European intellectual and social history, but it has never remained singularly European. India also has a substantial psychoanalytic history, extending back to Girindrasekhar Bose and the early Indian Psychoanalytic Society. The question is therefore less about whether psychoanalysis belongs in India and more about what occurs when its concepts encounter psychic lives organised through different structures of kinship, language, authority, spirituality, caste and dependence. One of the central differences concerns the meaning assigned to autonomy and separation. Many Western developmental models have treated increasing differentiation from the family as an important marker of maturity. In India, the self is often organised through enduring relational obligations that do not disappear with adulthood, financial independence or geographical distance. Decisions concerning work, marriage, sexuality, caregiving and residence may remain distributed across a family network. Dependence cannot automatically be read as regression, just as separation cannot automatically be equated with freedom. This does not mean that collective or familial life should be romanticised. Relational embeddedness can offer care, continuity and belonging, while also becoming the medium through which coercion, caste endogamy, gendered obedience and emotional surveillance are maintained. A culturally responsive psychoanalysis has to retain the capacity to criticise oppressive arrangements without assuming that a more individualised Western self represents the universal destination of psychic development.
Language also matters enormously. Much psychoanalytic work in India, especially within metropolitan settings, takes place in English, even when the patient’s earliest emotional life was organised in another language. People may move between Hindi, English and other regional languages depending upon whether they are speaking about sexuality, family authority, grief, anger or childhood. Certain emotions become speakable only in one language; others become bearable because they are narrated in a language acquired later. Translation in the consulting room is consequently both linguistic and psychic. There may also be a greater presence of somatic expressions, spiritual idioms, family narratives and culturally specific forms of silence in some Indian clinical settings, although these should never be treated as fixed characteristics of an “Indian psyche.” A person may speak through the body because the available relational world has not permitted direct speech. Another may use religious or astrological language to formulate questions of fate, guilt, persecution or hope. The therapist has to listen to these idioms without prematurely translating them into a familiar psychoanalytic code, and without withdrawing from interpretation in the name of cultural respect. Caste presents another indispensable question. Psychoanalysis has often been more comfortable speaking about family romance, sexuality and unconscious conflict than about the psychic organisation of caste privilege, humiliation, purity, contamination and inherited social rank. In India, caste is neither external to intimacy nor confined to explicit political identification. It enters marriage, food, domestic space, embodiment, aspiration and the unconscious imagination of who may be approached, desired, envied or repudiated. Any psychoanalysis that claims cultural relevance in India has to become capable of thinking with caste rather than treating it as sociological background. The challenge is to avoid two symmetrical errors: mechanically transplanting European concepts into Indian lives, and romanticising cultural difference so thoroughly that interpretation becomes impossible. Psychoanalytic theory requires translation, revision and, at times, conceptual disobedience. India should not merely provide colourful clinical illustrations for concepts formulated elsewhere. The encounter with Indian psychic life should be capable of changing the concepts themselves.
GCAS: GCAS is a globally distributed institution originally founded in Ireland. What do you think is important for our community to consider in order to better include and reflect global majority perspectives?
Ritika Singh: A globally distributed institution has an opportunity to do more than gather people from different geographical locations into the same digital space. Geography alone does not produce epistemic plurality. An institution can be internationally populated while its assumptions about knowledge, authority, citation and intellectual legitimacy remain remarkably narrow. For global majority perspectives to be meaningfully included, scholars from these locations must be able to produce theory rather than being positioned primarily as informants about culture.
There is a familiar arrangement in which a European concept retains the status of theory, while work emerging from India, Africa, Latin America or the Caribbean is treated as context, testimony or application. Genuine inclusion requires a redistribution of conceptual authority. A scholar working from Delhi should not have to present India as a case study through which an already established Western framework is confirmed. The experiences and intellectual traditions emerging from that location must be permitted to reorganise the framework. This requires attention to curricula and citation practices. Which thinkers are assigned as foundational, and which appear during a specialist week on race, colonialism, gender or the Global South? Whose concepts can be used without extensive explanation, and who must continually provide historical background before entering an argument? Which forms of writing are recognised as philosophical? These questions determine whether global majority thought becomes structurally present or ceremonially included.
Language is equally important. English enables communication across the GCAS community, but it also creates asymmetries. Many scholars are required to translate not only their words, but entire cultural and intellectual worlds into a language whose academic conventions were formed elsewhere. Institutions can acknowledge this by encouraging multilingual research, translation projects and serious engagement with texts that do not enter English-language canons easily. Intellectual complexity should not be confused with proximity to a particular Euro-American academic style. Material conditions also shape intellectual participation. Time zones, fees, currency differences, visa restrictions, internet access, caregiving obligations and the uneven availability of archives all affect who can participate and how visible they can become. A globally distributed community needs to recognise these conditions as part of academic life rather than as private logistical difficulties that individual students are expected to manage silently.
I also think institutions need spaces in which disagreement across cultural and political locations can be sustained without either demanding premature consensus or retreating into relativism. Global intellectual community is difficult precisely because concepts such as freedom, family, secularism, religion, sexuality and emancipation do not arrive with identical histories. The goal should not be to remove that difficulty. It should be to develop the ethical and intellectual capacity to remain in conversation through it. GCAS has been important for me because it has allowed philosophical, psychoanalytic and political traditions to encounter one another outside some of the ordinary disciplinary enclosures. Its distributed structure contains a real possibility: scholars can become more than representatives of their countries and can participate in creating a shared intellectual world. For that possibility to deepen, global majority perspectives must become constitutive of the institution’s thought rather than supplementary to it.
GCAS: One brilliant project we saw you involved in was a public lecture on the Ethics of Love at a bar in New Delhi. What was it like talking to a crowd enjoying their pints about psychoanalysis and desire? Were there any insights or surprises along the way?
Ritika Singh: It took place as part of Pint of View in New Delhi, which brings intellectual conversations into a bar rather than a conventional university or conference setting. I was interested in what would happen when psychoanalysis, philosophy and the question of love were removed from their usual institutional surroundings and placed among pints, food, interruption, laughter and the ordinary sociability of an evening out. Freud in a bar proved far less incongruous than one might imagine. Love is already theorised constantly in such spaces, through stories about former partners, new attractions, betrayals, marriages, loneliness and the question of whether someone has changed or merely become more recognisable. The difference was that we slowed those stories down and asked what forms of psychic life they disclosed. I spoke about love as an encounter with alterity, repetition and dependence. We considered why people often desire what injures them, why being chosen can feel less secure than longing to be chosen, and why intimacy may provoke aggression precisely when it begins to matter.
Psychoanalysis makes it difficult to sustain the comforting idea that love is always benevolent or that knowing what is good for us allows us to desire it. Existential philosophy, meanwhile, raises the problem of how two freedoms can remain in relation without one person turning the other into a possession, witness, rescuer or guarantee. The ethical question was therefore whether love can bear the other person’s separateness. Can I remain in relation to someone whose interiority I cannot fully know, whose freedom may frustrate me, and whose existence cannot be reduced to the role they perform in my psychic life? Love becomes ethically serious when the other person is allowed to exceed the fantasy through which I first encountered them. What surprised me was the audience’s appetite for complexity. There is sometimes an assumption that public talks require theory to be simplified into advice, preferably advice that can be condensed into a few rules concerning attachment styles, red flags or communication. The audience did not seem to want a formula. They wanted a language for contradictions they already knew intimately: wanting freedom and reassurance at once, resenting dependency while longing to be depended upon, confusing recognition with agreement, or remaining faithful to an old injury because it has become part of one’s identity. The questions were intellectually engaged and personally vulnerable.
The bar setting changed the hierarchy between speaker and audience. People were more willing to interrupt, laugh, disagree and connect an idea immediately to their own lives. The event convinced me that psychoanalysis belongs in public spaces. Its concepts do not need to remain confined to clinical institutions or academic journals, especially when the experiences it addresses, desire, shame, jealousy, repetition, loneliness, ambivalence, are already being lived and discussed everywhere. I came away thinking that public philosophy should not offer certainty more quickly than ordinary life does. Its role may be to help people formulate better questions and tolerate the difficulty of remaining with them.
GCAS: Finally, what is the current focus of your work? What is next for you, and where can people find you or work with you?
Ritika Singh: My central focus remains the completion of The Illegible Daughter. I am continuing to develop its account of maternal transmission, daughterhood, caste, embodiment and psychic survival, while refining the concepts of maternal epidermalisation, interpretive attunement, proximal rebellion and relational disalienation. I am particularly interested in how a daughter creates a life that neither repeats the mother’s suffering nor depends upon repudiating the mother entirely. Alongside the dissertation, I am developing several related strands of work. One project examines addiction as a form of psychic hunger and affect regulation, particularly in people whose inner lives are organised through shame, hyper-control and a relentless demand for self-regulation. Another considers Krishna, melancholy and the “only-child structure” of ethical solitude in the Bhagavad Gītā. I am also working on a broader psychoanalytic study of only children and identical twins, considering solitude, mirroring, sibling absence, psychic rivalry and the fantasy of being uniquely remembered.
These projects may appear distinct, but they share a concern with how a subject becomes possible in relation to others. What kind of solitude permits ethical life? What happens when another person becomes indispensable to one’s sense of reality? How do secrecy, addiction, maternal identification or sibling absence organise the boundaries of the self? I remain interested in the point at which a deeply personal conflict reveals a philosophical problem. I continue to practise as a psychotherapist in New Delhi, working both online and in person. I also offer clinical supervision, teach seminars and courses, and speak publicly on psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, feminism, relationships and contemporary psychic life. In the coming years, I hope to develop collaborative research that brings psychoanalytic thinking into sustained conversation with public policy and social questions in India, particularly gendered violence, antisociality and the psychic conditions under which violence becomes imaginable. People can find me through my GCAS profile, LinkedIn and professional social media regarding psychotherapy, supervision, lectures, teaching or research collaborations.