Shefalee Vasudev, 55, thinks people have different temperaments: that of a guitar player, footballer, or perhaps a carpenter. She herself has the temperament to listen and engage with the complexities of the human mind. A veteran journalist and editor-in-chief of digital magazine The Voice of Fashion, Vasudev’s shelves in her New Delhi home are full of books not about fashion but psychology. From Stephen Grosz’s The Life Examined to Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, to books by Carl Jung, Adam Phillips and Sudhir Kakar, she has been a serial collector and reader of psychoanalytic books. It’s what first prompted her to take up grief therapy to work through the death of her parents.
At some point, Vasudev muses, she might have given up her full time job to become a psychotherapist. But she didn’t have to — the pandemic offered the opportunity to do a number of online and hybrid courses, allowing her to start a diploma in narrative psychotherapy alongside her job. “Why narrative psychotherapy? Because it comes closest to what I know as a journalist. It combines social, political and cultural ideas in order to understand an individual. It places them amid the context of who they were born to, what were the social and political trends, who ruled the country, class and caste issues, financial and economic circumstances, inequalities, and then understands their problems. Which is what I’ve been doing as a journalist all along,” she says.
