He was the 40th Anniversary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard (2001–02) and a visiting professor at the universities of Chicago (1989–93), McGill (1976–77), Melbourne (1981), Hawaii (1998) and Vienna (1974–75), and at INSEAD, France (1994–2013).
His analyses of personages include that of Swami Vivekananda in The Inner World (1978), Mohandas Gandhi in Intimate Relations (1989), and Ramakrishna in The Analyst and the Mystic (1991).
[11][12] Kakar’s novel Ecstasy (2003) was "written exclusively for the senses of the skeptic and the mind of the mystic" and "is the beginning of a journey through the soulscape of spiritual India".
[14] Psychoanalyst Alan Roland (2009) writes that when Kakar applies his psychoanalytic understanding to these "three spiritual figures [Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi, Ramakrishna]", his analyses are as "fully reductionistic as those of Jeffrey Masson".
Roland also disputes the Kakar's theoretical understanding of mysticism from a psychoanalytic standpoint, and writes that it is "highly questionable whether spiritual aspirations, practices, and experiences essentially involve regression.
[16] He received the Order of Merit, Federal republic of Germany, Feb. 2012, Distinguished Service Award, Indo-American Psychiatric Association, 2007, Fellow, National Academy of Psychology, India, 2007, Member, Academie Universelle des Cultures, France, 2003, Abraham Kardiner Award, Columbia University, 2002, Rockefeller Residency, Bellagio.
Oxford University Press, Delhi is in the process of publishing 4 volumes of Kakar’s essays in their series Great Thinkers of Modern Asia.