'No full understanding of power of love'

JAIPUR: Madhu Trehan, moderator of the session "Mind Fields" on the last day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, asked one trenchant question: "Sometimes, a doctor will tell you that a patient with brain damage is too far gone, that there is no hope. But there are cases where families won't give up, and continue to engage with the patient. And there are occasions when these patients begin to respond.What would you say to that?"
Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakkar offered a simple and touching response: "There is no full understanding of the power of love. We refer to it with such terms as 'transference' in psychoanalysis, but that is because we are embarrassed to call it love."
The session started with a discussion on memory - can we say that what we recall is indeed true? There are perhaps several versions of the truth? Casey Schwartz, whose book "In the Mine Fields" lent its name to this session, spoke of her experience researching the frontiers of brain science, the relationship between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
For long, neuroscience dismissed as non-existent the "unconscious" that Freud discussed in the 19th century.
However, clinical experiments like the one by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s in Yale University, who studied subjects' obedience to authority, led to new lines of inquiry.
Milgram was attempting to understand, in the wake of the Second World War, how easy it would be to get volunteers to inflict cruelty. He found that given the right circumstances, there was a predictable tendency to obey.
At one point in the discussion, Kakkar said 95% of one's mental life is unconscious - this part has a significant impact on personality, but is unknown.
Kakkar went on to suggest that this part is unknown perhaps because we do not wish to know.