Growing up in India, I vividly remember the gendered words pagli (feminine) and pagla (masculine) in Hindi and paithiyam in Tamil, all of which captured some version of the word “mad” or “crazy.” Like their English counterpart, the words are used under a range of circumstances—from ridiculing idiosyncratic behavior to what we may call more severe mental illnesses. Coming from India to the United States, I entered an overmedicalized country with a plethora of conditions and terminologies that had entered everyday vocabularies. It is routine in the United States to hear people diagnose others with comments such as, “Oh, he's a sociopath,” “she must be bipolar,” or “that looks like the beginnings of dementia.” I remember for a time that I found the lack of Indian vocabulary a sign of an underdeveloped mental health culture. While India's investment in health care—physical and mental—is indeed shockingly low, Sarah Pinto's work challenged and transformed my views. Following the path of medicalization may not be the best path to understanding the complexities of mind and behavior.

In her most recent book The Doctor and Mrs. A., Pinto focuses on one particular book, one psychoanalyst, and one woman analysand. From this she builds a world, weaving a complex and vibrant tapestry of cultural life on the eve of Indian independence filled with history, mythology, politics, feminism, family drama, all infinitely nuanced. The context is simple. Set in the years before Indian independence, an Indian military psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Dev Satya Nand, begins to analyze a twenty-one-year old upper-caste housewife, Mrs. A. Through their interactions—more like conversations than analysis—the rich world and psyche of Mrs. A emerges. They are not strictly patient and doctor, since she challenges him at many a moment. The narratives themselves defy categorization—between fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and reality, daydreams and night dreams. Most importantly, Mrs. A. channels mythological heroines, sometimes feeling an allegiance to them, and at times even becoming them. Satya Nand subsequently self-published his analysis in a book, The Objective Method of Dream-Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (or “The Objective Method”).

Pinto's book is unusual, to say the least, but utterly riveting. How do you write about the “objective method,” yet write a text filled with dreams, daydreams, ambitions, sexual exuberance, class allegiances, and grand mythological canvases in which women are turned into stone and vice versa? How do you do justice to resplendent worlds without mocking, trivializing, on the one hand, or reinforcing them by taking them literally, on the other? Pinto is up to the task, and this is her real achievement. Pinto's narrative style deftly weaves these narratives with sympathy and understanding as she translates the symbolism of mythology and myth in the dreams of Mrs. A. This is no easy task, since, as Pinto tells us, there is no one mythological story for Draupadi, Shakuntala, or Ahalya. But she effortlessly weaves their significance and symbolism. We cannot but be transported into these worlds, sucked into the dreams and the vivid imagination of Mrs. A. It should be said that Mrs. A is an endlessly imaginative and passionate character. She has rich and thoughtful views on politics and Indian independence, on socialism and nationalism, on gender and sexuality, on fidelity and marriage. Pinto's care to recognize the complexities of Mrs. A goes a long way in getting us to stay with the narrative with growing curiosity.

I would have read this book just to meet this fascinating character at a consequential moment in Indian history. But Pinto's broader theoretical innovation is in developing the idea of ethics and counter-ethics through the retelling of the conversations between the doctor and the analysand. As Pinto argues, we cannot pin down truth or ethics or counter-ethics. They swirl around in multiple versions, in nuanced retelling and contestations through creating “dream smudges” and dreamscapes—therefore, what is right and wrong, good and evil, or just and unjust are not absolutes, but always contextual. In many ways, “The Objective Method” seems to presciently gesture to epistemological innovations that are to come in feminist and postcolonial studies many decades later.

Returning to my opening reflections on Western frameworks of mental health, Pinto reminds us that the psyche is a space of richness, shaped by the contexts in which it thrives, and overdetermined medical vocabularies can never do it justice. Pinto offers ethics and counter-ethics as a more capacious and generative method to think about lives and living. But the resonance of the book may have less to do with Satya Nand and his objective method and more with the brilliance of Sarah Pinto, who captures the spirit of freedom, possibility, and promise on the eve of India's independence. It is a timely book. At a moment when Indian politics are overdetermined, when words like “treason” and “anti-national” are tossed about with wild abandon, the rich, engaged, and thoughtful conversations between Satya Nand and Mrs. A remind us of other times, and other worlds that were and are possible.