Alf Hiltebeitel is Professor of Religion at George Washington University. He works mainly on the two Sanskrit epics, the Mah

"meticulous reconstruction of the disagreements between Freud and Bose" -- Robert A. Segal, Reading Religion

"[a] wonderful book ... This volume, like its companion, marks another crucial contribution to the emerging study of global Freudianism ... Students of comparative religion, psychoanalysis and psychology, and the history of thought will find this volume immensely rewarding ... Highly recommended." -- M. Uebel, CHOICE

"Spectacularly impressive. You can dip into these amazing volumes and find all manner of marvelous things--not only the valuable information about Freud, Bose, goddesses, and the Mahabhrata, but Hiltebeitel's highly creative ideas about them." --Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago

"These volumes comprise the magnum opus of a distinguished historian of religions. It lovingly orbits around two cultural oeuvres of roughly the same length: the great Hindu epic of the Mahabharata and the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. It is as if Hiltebeitel has treated the Mahabharata as one immense psychoanalytic exploration of the maternal polytheisms of Indian Hindu culture and the Collected Works as an unintended but appropriate mythology of Western civilization and its male monotheisms. Behind this astonishing comparison haunts the question: 'Can psychoanalytic methods work in different ontological structures? Can they work here, for example, in the panpsychic nondualism of the Bengali founder of Indian psychoanalysis Girindrasekhar Bose?' The answer appears to be: 'Yes, they can, uncannily so. And the analysis goes both ways.'"--Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions

"This fascinating study gives nuanced attention to a specific historical focus—the Freud/Bose letters—to open up a profound and comprehensive exploration of the place of the feminine in Hindu myth and thought and the lack of recognition of the feminine in Freud and in most of western thought." --Marshall Alcorn, author of Resistance to Learning