Community Talks: Farhad Anklesaria

Farhad Anklesaria is currently a psychoanalyst in training. He previously co-founded an educational start-up Essai Education in India and was a strategy consultant at ReD from 2010-11.

What inspired you to co-found a startup? Why was it important for you to address a need in the educational space in India?

I didn’t go into it with the idea of being a start-up. I left ReD with a heavy heart because I really loved the people I was working with, but was passionate about education, and I wanted to be a teacher without really knowing what form it would take. I really liked creative writing and wanted to help teenagers – that age group was interesting to me. Primarily, because I had a teacher outside of school who taught me how to write, how to express myself – matters that are not foregrounded in the traditional educational system in India. That particular experience was important for me in and I wanted to replicate it for other people. Eventually, I co-founded Essai Education holding classes for kids to help them write creatively and prepare Indian students for studying abroad. I had a really difficult time when I first got to Yale, in terms of knowing how to read critically, how to write papers, how to discuss in seminars – three essential skills required for a liberal arts education. I started these classes without thinking about a start-up, but eventually I met my co-founder in Delhi,and he was teaching the SAT. He had gone to Harvard and written a textbook on the SAT and we slowly became friends sharing the same passion for teaching and merged what we were doing.  

We went into it thinking it would be part-time as a way to fund this imaginary life we would have as writers, but demand grew to hold more classes, to teach more, to take on more students, and we were also approached by teachers interested in our approach, atmosphere and workplace. The company grew organically and with five years we grew to 10 employees, and then to 25. I enjoyed spending time with this age group, a lot of them don’t grow up with a deep interest in reading or an understanding of English grammar. So, I wrote a textbook addressing these needs, not only for them to be able to pass the test, but to foster an interest in grammar, words, expression, storytelling. Reading is an important part of how I look at the world or make sense of an experience, and how I shape an identity. But it can’t be forced, the person doing it has to be connected to it.  

You’re currently undergoing training as a psychoanalyst, could you speak to what drove you to go into this? 

There’s been a few things. It’s really hard to say why people do what they do. My experience with mental health was one factor, I went through six years of psychoanalysis when I was in Delhi to learn how to cope with my own mental health issues. The second aspect was an interest in the theory which started in college and developed when I was going through the analysis myself. The third would definitely be from my experience at ReD and teaching. In both of those jobs, there was a priority and an importance to understand the people who were in front of you, and a priority to listen to people rather than talk at them. You might think when it comes to teaching that doesn’t sound right, but excellent teachers are the ones who are able to bring out implicit knowledge from their students. There are many opinions about psychoanalysis, but in my opinion, it is about making the implicit explicit, and making the unknown knowns into known knowns (or unknowns). I’ve  completed one year so am at the beginning of my training. I was at the Tavistock and Portman Clinic in London for my first year, and now I have shifted to a Lacanian institute in London called CFAR, which is the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research – it’s another five years of training from here.   

What kind of understanding and tools do you think can be derived from your social scientist perspective to the world of psychoanalysis? Where do they differ? 

As an ethnographer, you have to try to be quite naive and try to gather as much information from somebody. As a psychoanalyst I don’t think you pretend to be a blank slate necessarily because you have certain frameworks in your mind, but you’re also never trying to impose a certain world view on somebody. The manner of that interaction is often quite similar, where you are listening extremely intently to somebody. You are trying to ask questions that make people question the things that they’re saying, and to try and bring out implicit beliefs in people. 

Obviously, the relationship is slightly different. When you’re doing ethnography, you’re looking at what defines a group of people, and you’re looking for a certain trend or a culture. In psychoanalysis, you’re trying to understand the subjective experience of a particular phenomenon, and in Lacanian analysis how that subjective experience talks to or is informed by their broader symbolic order or culture. Even with something like performance – Goffman’s idea that people maintain a certain kind of performance with other people all the time – that would be a social scientist’s way of looking at it. A psychoanalytic way of looking at it would be how does that person feel about that performance at the time, how is that feeling influencing their experiences of everyday life and is that causing them pain and why?

Do you have any anecdotes you can share from your training? 

On one of the last days of the course, they had organised the rooms in this strange way. You walked into the room and there were about 15 chairs in a circle, and three chairs in the middle. That was supposed to be the class. As you came in, you just found a chair and sat down, and everybody was quite confused. Obviously the last three people who came in sat in the middle; there was no topic, nor was anything given, you just had to sit down and start a conversation with the larger group. The arrangement was so unique and tense because those in the centre were observably in everybody’s field of vision whereas people in the periphery were not. This started conversations suddenly about how this made everyone feel: there were feelings of compassion, people offering to change seats, but the professor wasn’t allowing us to move around. The arrangement forced you to really sit with the feeling of being uncomfortable. That’s another thing about psychoanalysis you have to be able to deal with: being uncomfortable. You have to tolerate discomfort and tolerate the feeling of ambiguity. There’s a lot of focus on the term negative capability, this key notion of being able to tolerate ambiguity, being able to tolerate not knowing without searching for the answer all the time. Often, when you don’t know something there’s a desperate need to know the solution. How you sit in that feeling of not knowing is a large part of the training.  

That was one thing I carried with me from my time at ReD, the ability to form relationships with people relatively quickly and to enter intimate conversations by developing a sense of trust with them

How did your work at ReD prepare you for your educational venture?  

Two things were really important. When I was there, ReD had a focus on people. I felt appreciated, respected, loved and everyone had a fun time at the office, and it wasn’t very siloed. I wanted to do something similar when I was hiring people. I wanted to make sure that people felt the same way working for me through simple things from organising events to having happy hours. In retrospect, it’s a difficult thing to do when companies are SMEs between 20 and 50 people.  

The other thing I took from ReD was aesthetics. I tried to make sure that everything we did at Essai – from the website to the textbook to the font to the office in Delhi – had an identity and felt good when people looked at it. I carried ReD’s brand director Nanna Sine Munnecke with me in my head very often! That was important. My co-founder didn’t have the same regard for aesthetics (he was incredible at getting the job done), and I knew a lot of it came from my time at ReD. It was really appreciated by the people who eventually worked for us, and it was appreciated by the parents and the students who came to us as clients because that was not the norm in India. 

What lessons did you take away from your time at ReD, and what was you most memorable memory in the field? 

On my first project for a medtech client, the research was understanding incontinence. I was with a senior consultant in the field where we went to Houston to meet a gentleman who was using diapers. The participant was in his 50s, wore three diapers underneath his pants and believed nobody could see he was wearing diapers. I remember there was a moment where he said, “I’m going to change my diaper now, do you want to see how I do that?” The female senior consultant was not to go into the men’s bathroom, but said, “Farhad can go.” I didn’t realize this is what working at ReD involved. I followed this man into the bathroom. I stood outside with my camera, taking pictures of him while he changed his diaper. At the same time, another hotel guest walked into the bathroom and saw me filming, which caused a huge panic for everybody. But I knew I had to get the job done, I needed to get those pictures, I needed to see how difficult this particular ritual was for somebody and what it meant for them. We came out of it with a certain amount of insight about this person, and I learned a lot about how you can get close to a participant. That was one thing I carried with me from my time at ReD, the ability to form relationships with people relatively quickly and to enter intimate conversations by developing a sense of trust with them. That also falls into my interest in psychoanalysis.