<p>Sudhir Kakar’s notion of “the cultural imagination” was central to his understanding of psychoanalysis and to his revisionist approach to theory and practice. Written from a contemporary psychoanalytic standpoint, this essay focuses on Kakar’s complex experiences as a young, Indian analyst in training and how they led him to consider culture and the imagination as the key ingredients of a globalizing psychoanalysis. An intimate look at Kakar’s problematic experiences in his own analysis shows how it motivated the writing of his first and foundational book, <i>The Inner World</i>, which prefigured all of his later writings. The essay establishes this volume as distinctive in relation to other psychoanalytic studies of India at the time, owing to its balanced consideration of psychoanalytic and Hindu-Indian worldviews. The overall trajectory of Kakar’s work is resonant with “ontological” psychoanalytic orientations that emphasize dream-like and imaginative thinking as generative of self and the fullness of experience. Drawing mainly from Thomas Ogden’s description of the major trends within psychoanalysis, and from philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s characterization of Freud’s writing as a “mixed discourse,” the essay highlights the different and in some ways divergent modes of Kakar’s psychoanalytic thinking and the “creative tension” that enriches his explorations of Indian experience.</p>