by Swati Chopra

Don't let the title of the book (The Psychology of Love) fool you into thinking that it is a boring treatise on what is the most spontaneous of all human emotions. Rashna Imhasly-Gandhy not only details the gamut of the modern love experience, but also does so with sensitivity and compassion. Far from assuming a know-all, omniscient voice, the author is vulnerable at times, unabashedly intermeshing her own life and feelings with whatever stage of man-woman relationships she might be delineating. You feel as if drawn into a circle of friends, huddled together sharing confidences. This is accentuated when Rashna extracts from what we might only assume to be a personal diary. For instance, she says in the last chapter, Merging with the Soul, after a client realizes her 'inner feminine': "I was deeply moved by these images and wisdom that came through in this session. I could not sleep that night. I lay awake thinking about the essence that had been captured in her poem."

Although each premise begins in the personal experience, the territory charted is unbounded. The book stretches from the intensely personal to the infinite, from Rashna's falling victim to Kama's arrows to the merging of Shiva with Shakti, from love to eternity, and everything that lies in between. A delicate tapestry is woven, which 'integrates myth with reality' so that the personal gives way to the Western psychological (archetypes, anima/animus, for instance), which in turn finds unique expression in Indian myths. We are made to dip into the collective unconscious and emerge with something to better explain ourselves with. Problems may not get miraculously solved, they never do, but one does obtain a unique tool for self-analysis.

The use of myths to heal and treat relationships a la Jung is something of a pioneering attempt in India. Rashna, as a psychologist, has been doing just that, and has now written about it as well. The Psychology of Love is a first in an altogether different sense too, for it is the first of 'Namita Gokhale editions' launched by Roli Books. For the first time in Indian publishing histroy are books being commissioned, edited and presented by author Namita Gokhale, noted for works of fiction like Paro and The Book of Shadows.