Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam

Cultural and Clinical Dialogues

Ian Parker, Sabah Siddiqui, Ian Parker, Sabah Siddiqui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429657238
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This pioneering volume brings together scholars and clinicians working at the intersection of Islam and psychoanalysis to explore both the connections that link these two traditions, as well as the tensions that exist between them.

Uniting authors from a diverse range of traditions and perspectives, including Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Object-Relations, and Group-Analytic, the book creates a dialogue through which several key questions can be addressed. How can Islam be rendered amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation? What might an 'Islamic psychoanalysis' look like that accompanies and questions the forms of psychoanalysis that developed in the West? And what might a 'psychoanalytic Islam' look like that speaks for, and perhaps even transforms, the forms of truth that Islam produces?

In an era of increasing Islamophobia in the West, this important book identifies areas where clinical practice can be informed by a deeper understanding of contemporary Islam, as well as what it means to be a Muslim today. It will appeal to trainees and practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as scholars interested in religion and Islamic studies.

1

‘The unity in human sufferings’

Cultural translatability in the context of Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique

Eva Tepest

The literature on psychoanalysis and the Arabic-speaking Islamicate,¹ or the Arabo-Islamicate world is marked by the ‘assumption of an alleged incommensurability between psychoanalysis and Islam’ (El Shakry 2014, 90). Hence, on the one hand, writers such as the scholar of modern Arab politics and intellectual history Joseph Massad (2009) have criticised the neo-colonial nature of psychoanalysis and its incorporation by – mostly French-based – Arab psychoanalysts (2009, 195). On the other hand, Arab psychoanalysts themselves have put forward a resistance hypothesis. Accordingly, Arabs (due to Islam, or the patriarchal nature of their communities) are inherently less responsive to the benefits of psychoanalysis than others (El Khayat 1993; Osseiran 2010). Ultimately, both of these arguments represent one side of the same coin: They claim the untranslatability of Islam and psychoanalysis. This assumption, far from being incidental, is based on views according to which modern notions of subjectivity are specifically and uniquely Western (El Shakry 2014, 94). Elsewhere, it has been argued that these views are often bound up with the presupposition of a secular psychoanalytic subject (Toscano 2009, 112) as opposed to the inherently religious non-Western subject in general, and the Muslim subject in particular.

In contrast, this chapter, by looking at the translatability of psychoanalysis and the Arabo-Islamicate in Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique, aligns itself with those endeavours that, presuming the universality of the unconscious (El Shakry 2014, 94–95; Gorelick 2009, 2015; Hartnack 1990, 2001; Homayounpour 2012; Kapila 2007; Khanna 2003), consider cultural translation as a reciprocal, multi-layered process ‘through which both psychoanalysis and Islam will be forced to confront the distinct challenges that each poses to the other’ (Gorelick 2009, 189). Specifically, I will suggest to what extent the study of Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique through the lens of cultural translatability will not only nuance our understanding of the status of ‘culture’, ‘Islam’ and ‘psychoanalysis’, but also generate knowledge on the distinctions and transgressions between couplets such as psychoanalysis/religion, religion/the secular, religion/culture.

In order to accomplish this, I will begin by tracing the emergence of Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique from within Arab contemporary thought. Second, I will discuss cultural translatability from the interdisciplinary perspective of the social sciences, the humanities and psychoanalysis. In the main part of this chapter, I will discuss the reciprocal epistemological resonances of studying Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique through the lens of cultural translatability by considering the multiple ramifications at the conceptual field defined by the conjunction of religion, culture, science and psychoanalysis and pointing towards the crucial importance of considering cultural translation as always embedded in the concrete social reality of power. I will argue that focusing on the collapse of distinctions (identity) as well as the persistence of boundaries (difference) is essential for any study of ‘Islamic psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic Islam’. Hence, I will offer some methodological guidelines for studying psychoanalysis in the context of the Arabo-Islamicate.

‘All of its culture became Salafist’: Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique post-1967

Arab cultural critique, according to Lebanese philosopher Elizabeth Kassab in her seminal work Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (2010) is deeply marked by the paradigm shift of the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel, in the wake of which she attests to a shift of focus from a united front against colonialism to self-reflexivity and criticism (2010, 73).² This shift – brought about by the apparent failure of the pan-Arab nationalistic project and the ensuing demise of the Arab left – led to a focus on questions of cultural identity. According to Kassab, these concepts are often embedded in a nostalgic and essentialising framing of identity, ‘eclipsing to a great extent the political aspect of the malaise and privileging identity issues over questions of critique’ (2010, 115). Against this authenticist turn of Arab thought in the 1970s and 1980s, which she identifies with the rise of the Islamist movements,³ Kassab makes a case for those radical thinkers who urge a ‘radicalization of critique’ (Kassab 2010, 2; see also Ajami 1992) by employing a historicising, contextualising framing of identity. Among them is the Syrian translator and intellectual Georges Tarabishi. His cultural critique, being distinctly psychoanalytic, differs from most of his contemporaries in that it addresses the reactions to 1967 not merely in terms of the evolution of political thought, but rather in terms of its psychological effects. He argues that Gamal ʻAbd al-Nassers defeat in 1967 and his death in 1970 inflicted a ‘terrible narcissistic wound upon the Arab world’ (blessure narcissique terrible du monde arabe) (Zoueïn and De Rochegonde 2004, 93). This represented the second stage in the ‘neurosis of the Arab world’ (névrose du monde arabe), the first being the shock of colonialism (2004, 93). As a result, Arabs – particularly male intellectuals – turned to the consolation promised by Islamic ideologies of tradition (turāṯ) and authenticity (Tarabishi 1991).⁴ It was like the ‘“fall of the Father”, a symbolic Father. […] The Arab world, the Arab way, was completely dismantled, and all of its culture became Salafist’ (C’était comme la «chute du Père», d’un Père symbolique […]. Le monde arabe, la rue arabe, a été totalement défait et toute la culture devint salafiste) (Zoueïn and De Rochegonde 2004, 93).

According to Tarabishi’s diagnosis, regression replaced the work of mourning⁵ as the formation of the Arab subject became deeply compromised by neurosis.⁶

Tarabishi and his contemporaries continued the earlier project of Arab secular critique by addressing Islam not as a faith, but as a cultural formation and socio-political project.⁷ It is against the backdrop of the history of Arab thought and practice post-1967 that not only Tarabishi’s works, but the remainder of the texts that constitute Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique need to be understood. In the following, I identify these by the following characteristics (1) an engagement with Arabo-Islamicate culture as one’s own, (2) an embeddedness within a psychoanalytic epistemology, (3) an analysis that takes phenomena such as identity or religion as historically, socially and culturally bound.

Houria Abdelouahed is a French-Moroccan psychoanalyst, translator and philosopher. She is currently an associate professor at Université Paris Diderot, and has, in addition to several other works, among them translations of works by the Syrian poet Adonis, published two monographs on questions of femininity in Islam, Figures du Féminin en Islam (2012), and Les Femmes du Prophète (2016).

Fethi Benslama likewise is a professor at Université Paris Diderot, where he directs the psychoanalytic studies programme. Born and raised in Tunis, he moved to France in 1972 where he has been practising psychoanalysis ever since 1987. He has published extensively on questions of what he termed the ‘clinique of the exile’, culturalism, Islam, violence and gender. Among his recent monographs are Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, first published in French in 2002, and Un Furieux Désir de Sacrifice: Le Surmusulman (2016).

Rafah Nached has spent most of her life in Syria, where she became the first practising psychoanalyst and established a psychoanalytic training programme. After being incarcerated by the Syrian regime in 2011, she emigrated to France shortly after. Nached reads Lacan’s jouissance against ideas of Sufi mysticism. To the best of my knowledge, only a small collection of her essays have been published in the French volume La Psychanalyse en Syrie (2012).

Georges Tarabishi was a Syrian translator and intellectual. He has translated more than 200 books, among them most of the Freudian oeuvre, into Arabic. This is how he spent most of the Lebanese civil war before eventually emigrating to France, where he passed away in 2016. At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, he published a range of Arabic monographs in psychoanalytic literary criticism (e.g. 1981, 1983). Throughout, he investigates the question of masculinity, ideology and the status of the intellectual in Arab cultural life and literary production.

Between identity and difference: conceptualising cultural translatability

In epistemological terms, this research takes the discussion of cultural translation as a point of departure. Extensively discussed in fields such as translation studies, the social sciences (particularly migration studies), postcolonial studies, anthropology and the study of culture,⁸ cultural scientist and literary scholar Doris Bachmann-Medick (2016) defines cultural translation firstly as ‘the translation of cultures as well as translation between cultures’ (2016, 175). Furthermore, she goes on to demonstrate how scholars have transcended this extension of the object field to inter- and intra-cultural processes by assessing the ‘translatory character’ of cultural objects themselves (2016, 180): ‘Culture is no longer viewed as a special “original” life-world, but as an impure, blended, “hybrid” stratification of meaning and experience’ (2016, 182). From this follows

a non-dichotomous model of translation that no longer assumes fixed poles but stresses the reciprocity of transfers as well as the state of always having been translated […]. Conceived in this way, translation resists the seeming purity of concepts such as culture, identity, tradition and religion and shows all claims of identity to be deceptive because identity is always infused with the other.

(2016, 181)

Cultural objects are inherently ambiguous. They are reciprocally constitutive, while at the same time remaining insurmountably distinct. Through the workings of distinctions, differences between semantically inter-dependent cultural objects are established. Inevitably, these acts of distinction (drawing a boundary) bring miscomprehension (irritation/collision/friction) and conflation (transgression) in its wake (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2016, 181).⁹ This understanding of the translatory character of cultural objects is grounded in the paradigm of cultural translatability. Developed as a counter-concept to the alleged untranslatability of cultures (cf. Samuel Huntington’s proverbial ‘clash of civilizations’ hypothesis), it claims the ‘mutuality’ governing cross-cultural relations (cf. Iser 1994, 8). According to Bachmann-Medick (2016), this paradigm can be based on the deconstructivist vantage point of the ‘differential character of [all] language’ (2016, 181) or studied from the action-analytical perspective of ‘the practical manner in which interdependencies and reciprocal influences are dealt with’ (2016, 181).

I argue that engaging with Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique allows for an important complication of cultural translatability as conceived in the social sciences and humanities. In Figures du Feminine, French-Moroccan psychoanalyst Houria Abdelouahed, starting with the question of the Text in Muslim culture, that is, the Quran and Hadith and classical interpretations thereof, goes on the meditate upon the question of translation. Briefly speaking, she operates with the idea of a real experience, which, once lived through, is irretrievably lost. Any subsequent act of signification, then, is separated from this brute experience, nevertheless bearing its trace. ‘Signification happens in the aftermath that transforms the brute experience into a signifying experience’ (Car ca ce signifie dans ce temps de l’àpres-coup qui transforme l’expérience brute en experience signifiante) (Abdelouahed 2012, 163). The subject can only address the subconscious in a language that is socially, culturally and historically bound, that is imperfect. Translation, on a subconscious, textual or collective level, manifests the desire to bridge the insurmountable gap between the contingent frame of reference and ‘that residue of the human experience that sticks to the margins’ (Gorelick 2015, 4). Any translation, while indispensable for semiotic exchange, is bound to fail.

According to Abdelouahed, the translation of finite texts is related to translations within cultural communities and translation as individual, subconscious process: ‘No trace, no writing, without the trace of the sexual’ (Nulle trace, nulle écriture sans la trace de sexuel) (164). These dimensions, in her work, are not mere facets of the same metaphor, but equivalents of a similar structuring momentum, and variously intertwined. Notably, her analysis hinges on psychoanalytic writings as well as Arabic textual tradition. Freud, in Moses and Monotheism (1955 (1939)), describes psychic life as dialectically related to the development of the religious community. It is the individual’s denial, suppression, renunciation, or repression of the erotic and aggressive instincts – their translation – that shapes the culture at large and vice versa.¹⁰ Similarly, in Arabic, the word tarǧama, a loanword from Aramaic, is equally fluid and points out various ‘acts of interpretation in which the self, as interpreter, is he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. ‘The unity in human sufferings’: cultural translatability in the context of Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique
• 2. Islam: a manifest or latent content?
• 3. Representations of the psyche and its dynamics in Islam: the work of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyah
• 4. Politics of secular psychoanalysis in India: hindu-Muslim as religious and political identities in Sudhir Kakar’s writing
• 5. Between neutrality and disavowal: being Muslim psychotherapists in India
• 6. The repressed event of (Shi’i) Islam: psychoanalysis, the trauma of Iranian Shi’ism, and feminine revolt
• 7. Becoming revolution: from symptom to act in the 2011 Arab revolts
• 8. Decolonizing psychoanalysis/psychoanalyzing Islamophobia
• 9. Connectedness and dreams: exploring the possibilities of communication across interpretive traditions
• 10. Islam, the new modern erotic
• 11. Enduring trouble: striving to think anew
• Index