Mathai Fenn, Ph.D.

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• Speaker’s Introduction If you need to introduce Mathai Fenn to an audience, you can print this document to read out.

Education

Mathai Fenn has a B.A. in Psychology from Union Christian College (1984), an M.A. in Psychology from the Dept. of Psychology, Kerala University, Trivandrum (1986), and finally a PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay (1996).

During his B.A. days, Fenn focussed on understanding the individual. This was informed by his readings in Post Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Existentialism. It was also the time he laid the foundations for his interest in Cognitive Psychology (how do we perceive the world around us? How much of it is true and how much is made up by our mind?). For example, in this Tedx video, Hinze Hogendoorn, asks the question of how we perceive time.

During his M.A. program, he saw the question of Consciousness as a coming together of existential questions (the experience – phenomenology) and cognitive science (how we create the world around). It was also a time when he was introduced to Transpersonal Psychology, and his impassioned plea against reductionism got a warm response and a life long membership at the Association of Humanistic Psychology. It also resulted in a long term relationship with Tom Greening, the editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

His PhD was under two supervisors, Prof Meenakshi Gupta from Psychology and Prof. P.R. Bhat (from Philosophy), both at HSS Dept of IIT Bombay. Graduate courses in Philosophy gave him the vocabulary to express what he had always felt. Taking a page from Wilhelm Dilthey, Mathai subscribes to the view that the reductionistic methods for understanding Natural Sciences (Naturwissenschaft) were not appropriate for understanding the Human Being (Geisteswissenschaften). His interest in symbols that began with his exploration of Psychoanalysis blossomed into an interest in Semiotics that has its roots in Ferdinand Saussure and was further developed by Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes and others into what we now know as Post Structuralism / Post Modernism.

Click here to read about Gestalt Theory that he subscribes to (pdf)

A curated list of authors that he has enjoyed and has influenced him would include:

Work Experience

Mathai Fenn’s work is based on his theoretical outlook. When the opportunity presented itself for tenure at XLRI Jamshedpur, he took it because it gave him an opportunity to look at organizations as a microcosm of society and Marketing Communications gave him the opportunity to look deeper into symbolic communications. Apart from XLRI, he has also delivered lectures at