A Psychiatrist who wanted to be a filmmaker: an Obituary for Dr. Mangesh Ghulghule by Devdutt Trivedi

Dr Mangesh Ghulghule

Psychiatric healing is not a process entirely about knowing your neuro-divergence or perhaps, feeling sorry for yourself about the unpredictable cycles of this particular neuro-divergence, but a process of practicing psychiatry itself by applying one’s readings to the actual unpredictable and variable-length sessions of the psychiatrist.

It is well known that one cannot know or understand Lacan’s writings without first being analysed by Dr. Lacan: the specific approach to the sessions, in which Dr. Lacan makes many mistakes whilst analysing the patient with his specific formations of symbolisations that are sometimes based on an a priori diagram that do not have anything to do with the reality of his specific Freudian psychoanalytical approach.

The diagrams in those Lacan Seminars need not be true, since during practice if the phantasy consciousness misfires, Lacan is in trouble and may even damage the patient, which it is claimed he did. In other words, someone “shrinking” you is a method to Socrates’ dictum know thyself through the a priori assumptions, empirical behaviour in reality, and the feedback that contradicts the a priori and empirical.

Dr. Mangesh Ghulghule wanted to be a film maker with a passion for the Roscharch psychoanalytical methodology of Ingmar Bergman and also wrote a script, before turning to his psychiatric practice. With me, he was aware of my specific reading which he categorised as “Freudian” with the statement “Since you are Freudian” and then negated Freud, Lacan and Deleuze and replaced it with a new jargon: usually “Consciousness Studies”, a precisely Freudian way of reinforcing the super-ego to negate one’s readings as incorrect or outdated and therefore problematic.

My earliest sessions with Mangesh depicted a specific affect of reading too much of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical books, throughout the day. Heidegger has a philosophy of Dasein, or simply existence;  that is documented in his 1927 Being and Time, the only book he wrote; but his lectures have been documented by Indiana University Press. These rare books most notably Basic Problems of Phenomenology and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics by Indiana University Press, use a specific approach to language in the lecture that uses the root radicle Sein, Da, Mit, En and concatenates them into repetitive but different permutations and combinations that even in the English translation seem like the speaker: Heidegger, is possessed to speak of a gibberish that has many simultaneous connotations. Two things are known about these lectures, that Heidegger was dismissed from many universities for his lecturing style, and that several students were disillusioned with two attempting suicide by Heidegger’s incomprehensible style, since he himself was bombastic in the confidence with which he gives the lectures.

Mangesh went to great lengths to cut out the influence of Heidegger’s Nietzscheanism, with his favourite philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, that the essence of Freud, which Freud frames as counter-will, is a will-not-to-will as proposed by Schopenhauer; that Nietzsche later reverses as Will to Power.

Similarly, Mangesh would associate the infantile part of the psyche or id, through the Master Signifier Instagram Reel to connote the vulgar without defining it: I would not respond and then he would produce a statement as empty signifier, as I know at that time reacting would create a number of super-ego rights and wrongs that I would deliberately avoid through silence. This went to such an extent where after a cinema studies lecture Mangesh’s question was: “Did you teach transference neurosis in Bergman’s Persona correctly?” The jargon transference neurosis is precisely what I had been studying for the lecture, specifically through P. Adams Sitney’s article on the said film: how did he know exactly that I was going to teach precisely that? I never mentioned it?

I have also interacted with Mangesh outside the clinic to give me a taste of the difference between clinical practice and reality and the entry for a few seconds or minutes of the practice at a cafe. Mangesh would communicate through his eyes, which I had not assumed, that is, I was not in session and the gestures, articulations and feedback did not make the collective “language” my unconscious, I was back to everyday reality from which I could extract a narrative-reel/real back to the clinic. Once outside I mentioned how all kinds of doctors: allopaths, vaids, hakims responded to my ideas on cinema to receive this statement from Mangesh: “Doctors will be interested in cinema, since all doctors are first and foremost trained in observation”

Most importantly after my behaviour once, Mangesh demonstrated the splitting of the ego in Freudian analysis which made my study of Jacques Lacan and Felix Guattari experiential and not simply theory. The awareness of reality finds its excess in the unintentional cathexis, or neuronal flow: that is the excess of behaviour that negates and refines awareness itself.

Dr Mangesh Ghulghule passed away on 10 March 2025.

Devdutt Trivedi is a Mumbai based film scholar.