The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt - Hardcover

El Shakry, Omnia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691174792 ISBN 13: 9780691174792

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2017

Synopsis

The first in-depth look at how postwar thinkers in Egypt mapped the intersections between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn 'Arabi--al-la-shu'ur--as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. In The Arabic Freud, Omnia El Shakry challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blended psychoanalytic theories with concepts from classical Islamic thought in a creative encounter of ethical engagement. Drawing on scholarly writings as well as popular literature on self-healing, El Shakry provides the first in-depth examination of psychoanalysis in Egypt and reveals how a new science of psychology--or "science of the soul," as it came to be called--was inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. She explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis, she shows, debated the temporality of the psyche, mystical states, the sexual drive, and the Oedipus complex, while offering startling insights into the nature of psychic life, ethics, and eros. This provocative and insightful book invites us to rethink the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in the modern era. Mapping the points of intersection between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought, it illustrates how the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.

About this title

About the Author

Omnia El Shakry is professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt and the editor of Gender and Sexuality in Islam.

From the Back Cover

"In a world in which Islam is all too often thought to be incompatible with a 'secular' Western thought system like psychoanalysis, The Arabic Freud demonstrates--spectacularly--that nothing could be further from the truth. El Shakry's beautiful book shows, definitively, that what counts as psychoanalysis could be--indeed was--just as well produced in decolonizing Cairo as in Vienna or New York. This is a major contribution to the intellectual history of modern Egypt--and of modern ideas of selfhood more generally."--Dagmar Herzog, author of Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes

"El Shakry provides a wonderful resource for thinking about the particularities of psychoanalysis in Egypt and its complex relationship with Islam, and gives us the history to understand psychoanalysis as a syncretic form. Elegantly argued and thoroughly researched, The Arabic Freud demonstrates that when psychoanalysis and Islam are pitted as strangers today, this is not only historically inaccurate but also colonial in its ideology."--Ranjana Khanna, Duke University

"Much more than just tracing the history of psychoanalysis in Egypt, The Arabic Freud reopens the archive of the unconscious in psychoanalysis and allows it to proliferate and disclose its secret connections with the problematic of the soul, in Islam and in religious traditions at large. By returning to us the Egyptian translations of the unconscious as divine unknowing and the drive as ethical self-transformation, Omnia El Shakry brings something new and far-reaching to the way we think now. At issue is not just the question of the nafs as psyche, but of the psyche as soul."--Stefania Pandolfo, University of California, Berkeley

"A much-needed addition to modern Arab intellectual history. El Shakry rebuts the binary opposition between a Western, liberating, and modern psychoanalysis and a local, traditional, and constraining Islam."--Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, author of Contemporary Arab Thought

"El Shakry brings to light figures who are virtually unknown to an American audience--from Yusuf Murad to Muhammad Fathi--while focusing on topics that have been subjects of intense debate in recent years: the relation between Islam and Western culture and the role of religion in the formation of the self."--Rubén Gallo, author of Freud's Mexico

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Arabic Freud

Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt

By Omnia El Shakry

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17479-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Note on Transliteration and Translation, xiii, 
INTRODUCTION Psychoanalysis and Islam, 1, 
PART I THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE MODERN SUBJECT, 
CHAPTER 1 Psychoanalysis and the Psyche, 21, 
CHAPTER 2 The Self and the Soul, 42, 
PART II SPACES OF INTERIORITY, 
CHAPTER 3 The Psychosexual Subject, 63, 
CHAPTER 4 Psychoanalysis before the Law, 83, 
Epilogue, 110, 
Notes, 117, 
Glossary, 165, 
References, 169, 
Index, 191, 

CHAPTER 1

Psychoanalysis and the Psyche

Well now, this year I am proposing not simply to be faithful to the text of Freud and to be its exegete, as if it were the source of an unchanging truth that was the model, mold and dress code to be imposed on all our experience.

— JACQUES LACAN, ETHICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

ON FRIDAY MORNINGS in Cairo in the mid- to late 1940s and 1950s, scholars and students of all disciplines would assemble at the house of psychology professor Yusuf Murad. Gathered to discuss the latest intellectual trends in psychology and philosophy, at those meetings, we are told, the attendees' concerns revolved around two central questions: how can the scholar be a philosopher and how can the teacher be a mentor? Through a capacious body of work that touched on subjects as diverse as the epistemology of psychoanalysis and the analytic structure, and Abu Bakr al-Razi's medieval treatise on spiritual medicine, Murad developed what he termed an integrative (takamuli) psychology based on the fundamental philosophical unity of the self. Presenting Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a "Copernican revolution" to his audience, Murad identified psychoanalysis as the dialectical synthesis of philosophical introspection, positivism, and phenomenology.

Responsible in large part for the formalization of an Arabic language lexicon of psychology and psychoanalysis, Murad introduced the Arabic term "al-lashu'ur," a mystical term taken from the medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn 'Arabi, as "the unconscious" into scholarly vocabularies. Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and the French tradition of philosophical psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychological and psychoanalytic thought.

The coterie of students in attendance at Yusuf Murad's Friday morning salon were born sometime between 1920 and 1930, making them the generation that would later become instrumental in transforming the role of the intellectual and of knowledge production within Arab postcolonial polities. Among the regular attendees were several scholars training in philosophy: Mahmud Amin al-'Alim, who was to play a decisive part in the fierce debates over existentialism and the role and purpose of literary production for decolonizing political action; Yusuf al-Sharuni, the meticulous and socially conscious short story writer and literary critic who was active in the avant-garde post–World War II literary groups that formed in Egypt; and Murad Wahba, the author of philosophical commentaries on Averroës, Kant, and Bergson, and of a large body of work on philosophy, civilization, and secularism. Other attendees included Mustafa Suwayf, later a well-known psychology professor at Cairo University (and father to novelist Ahdaf Soueif); Sami al-Durubi, the Syrian translator and diplomat, who wrote on psychology and literature and translated Henri Bergson's Mind-Energy and Laughter, as well as Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth and numerous Russian novels, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time; and Salih al-Shamma', the author of texts on childhood language and on the semantics of Qur'anic ethics, later a professor of psychology and head of the philosophy department at the University of Baghdad.

Translating the Unconscious

Yusuf Murad (1902–1966) founded a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences in Egypt and the Arab world, best thought of as part of a shared Arab intellectual heritage of blending traditions, of which Murad represented an exemplary "philosopher of integration." Training a generation of thinkers who then went on to become literary critics, translators, university professors, and mental health professionals in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, he left a wide imprint on psychology, philosophy, and the wider academic field of the humanities and the social sciences. As one of his former students, Farag 'Abd al-Qadir Taha, noted, Murad's mark on psychology in Egypt was thought to be so great that the majority of Egyptian professors of psychology had studied under him either directly or indirectly through his textbook, a popular handbook of psychology published in 1948 that went through at least seven editions.

Murad was himself well versed in the traditions of experimental psychology as well as in European psychoanalytic and neo-psychoanalytic approaches. Born in Cairo, he studied philosophy at Fu'ad I University (later Cairo University), graduating in 1930 and traveling to France where he received his doctorate in psychology in 1940 from the Sorbonne. Upon his return, he taught psychology in the philosophy department at Cairo University, and was the first to do so in Arabic, eventually becoming chair of the philosophy department between 1953 and 1957. Murad, along with his colleague Mustafa Ziywar, a psychoanalyst who had trained in philosophy, psychology, and medicine in France in the 1930s, founded the Jama'at 'Ilm al-Nafs al-Takamuli (Society of Integrative Psychology) and the Egyptian Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs (Journal of Psychology) in 1945, and supervised the translation and publication of numerous works of psychology. Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs, the first psychology journal published in the Arab world, was illustrative of the emerging disciplinary space of psychology in Egypt in the 1940s; it was understood as a science of selfhood and the soul ('Ilm al-Nafs) rather than delimited as the empirical study of mental processes. The journal, which ran from 1945 to 1953, served as a wide-ranging platform for academic psychology and was meant to serve as a bridge between the psychological sciences and philosophy, while introducing its audience to the major concepts of psychoanalysis and psychology.

In the inaugural issue of Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs, Yusuf Murad introduced a dictionary that provided the Arabic equivalents to English, French, and German terms in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. Murad was himself a member of the Academy of Language for the committee on psychological terms and was therefore crucial in the creation and standardization of an Arabic lexicon of psychology. Emphasizing the difficulty and importance of precise terminology, he remarked that in some instances multiple terms were needed to convey the meaning of a single word and to adumbrate the different interpretations of terms by different schools of thought in psychology. Murad's dictionary was likely partly inspired by his former university professor André Lalande, and his Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, a text known for its analytical rigor. Notably, Murad observed that he often returned to classical Arabic texts in order to create new translations for words and clear, precise, and capacious meanings. Murad's felicitous translations were oftentimes closer to the German spirit of Freud's terms than the standard English translations, as for example in his choice of Arabic terms for psyche (nafs), ego (al-ana), and superego (al-ana al-a 'la).

Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs presented to its academic readers a rich and scholarly understanding of psychoanalysis, drawing on the entire corpus of Freud's work, which many had read in English, and to a lesser extent in French. Beyond that, authors integrated a multitude of diverse conduits of psychoanalytic thought, from the United Kingdom (John Flügel, Ian Suttie, James Wisdom); France and Switzerland (Daniel Lagache, Henri Wallon, Charles Odier); and Hungary (Sándor Ferenczi, Franz Alexander). Yet, in so doing, psychoanalysis in Egypt emerged not simply as an importation or "a derivative exercise" but rather "a reflexive process of appropriation."

This chapter explores the work of Yusuf Murad, the founder of a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences, and provides a close study of the journal he coedited from 1945 to 1953, Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs. I offer not a literal history of Freud in Egypt but rather a history of ideas and debates spawned by Freudianism as a multivalent tradition. I analyze the dense interdiscursive web that constituted the field of psychological inquiry in postwar Egypt, tracing historical interactions and hybridizations between and within traditions of psychological inquiry. Moving away from models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, I examine the points of condensation, divergence, and the epistemological resonances that psychoanalytic writings had in postwar Egypt.

More specifically, I explore the coproduction of psychoanalytic knowledge, across Egyptian and European knowledge formations, through the concept of the point de capiton. For Jacques Lacan quilting points are signifiers around which dense webs of meanings converge, thereby providing ideological cohesion to discursive formations. In what follows, I draw attention to a number of quilting points that sutured the discursive field of psychology and psychoanalysis in midcentury Egypt. Such points de capiton were, quite tellingly, terms or concepts that were pregnant with epistemological resonances drawn from pre-psychoanalytic discursive formations, such as from Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysics or Aristotelian philosophy. I focus on a number of concepts: integration and unity as central both to the self and to knowledge formations (wahdat al-nafs, wahdat 'ilm al-nafs, or 'ilm al-nafs al-takamuli); insight and intuition (firasa and kashf) as a mode of knowledge production distinct from positivist or empirical epistemology; and the socius or community of/in the other (al-nahnu, al-akhir).

The Integrative Subject

Yusuf Murad's corpus embodied an approach he termed integrative psychology, which presented the self not solely as a body, or a psyche, or even a psyche added to a body, but rather as "wahda nafsiyya, jismiyya, ijtima 'iyya," the unity of psychic, bodily, and societal aspects. Murad's integrative psychology both constituted and was constituted by the larger sociopolitical context within which it was embedded, namely, Egypt's emergent postcoloniality. If, as Jan Goldstein has demonstrated, Victor Cousin provided a postrevolutionary psychology and pedagogy that enabled the production and reproduction of bourgeois subjectivity in nineteenth-century France, then Murad provided the contours for what we might term a postcolonial subjectivity for twentieth-century Egypt.

Murad's integrative curriculum was part of a larger intellectual context that spanned French philosophical and empirical psychology, psychoanalysis, Aristotelian philosophy, and medieval and modern Arabic thought. Murad's integrative subject was not equivalent to the split subject of postwar Lacanian psychoanalysis, but nor was it the instrumentalist subject of American egopsychology. In fact, rather than the ego, the key term of reference for Murad and his cohort was the Arabic term nafs (soul, spirit, âme), a term etymologically imbued with a primordial divinity. In particular, the emphasis on integration can be seen, at least partly, as a response to the events of World War II in the postcolonial context of decolonization, which arguably led to differing notions of selfhood in the former colonies, and within Europe as well. If we take that exemplar of anticolonial thought, Frantz Fanon, we see that the political question that was most pressing for him was how to reconstitute the psychic life of the colonized indigenous subject from the scattered and fragmented elements that remained after colonialism. In contrast, then, to the decentered self that was in part the product of France's interwar cultural crisis and embodied in the Lacanian notion of the split subject, Murad's integrative subject was an agent of synthesis, embodying a complex unity of multiplicity and heterogeneity.

In another Middle Eastern context, Stefania Pandolfo has detailed the emergent locus of subjectivity under the shadow of colonialism as situated within an interstitial zone, both a limit and an entredeux. The modern postcolonial subject emerged in the aftermath of the trauma of colonization, to quote Moroccan novelist Driss Chraibi as an "arabe habillé en français"; the interstitial zone where encounter became possible (between East and West, past and present, modernity and tradition) was also the space of subjectivity. Murad's integrative subject was dialogically constituted across the space of social and cultural difference and embodied translations and borrowings from Europe while maintaining an irreducible heterogeneity from the emphasis on the dissolution of the self in postwar French philosophy. In so doing Murad theorized a new relationship to temporality, progress, and the social body, which I discuss in turn.

At a lecture delivered at the Dar al-Salam Center in Cairo in December 1946, Murad discussed the psychological foundations of social integration. Murad's notion of bio-psycho-social integration was embedded in a complex notion of the temporality of the psychological subject and a rejection of monocausality. Biological, psychological, and social factors were to be considered not in terms of a superimposition, "but of mutual penetration on a convergent concourse of these three factors." By "social" Murad referred to the social order and the individual's integration within the community, and more fundamentally, the order of language in the socius; "psychological" referred to memory and consciousness; and "biological" to the nervous and circulatory systems. Each level, he noted, operated according to different laws but taken together functioned, ideally, harmoniously.

Criticizing conventional classifications that categorized human psychology in terms of affect, cognition, and behavior, as static and artificial in character, Murad argued that from an integrative perspective an emphasis on movement — whether generative or degenerative, was essential. Stated differently, an integral perspective was eminently genealogical and connective — concerned with the past and present bio-psychosocial development of man as brought to bear on his future orientation. Further, rather than a linear temporal conception of human personality or social progress, Murad's conception was helicoidal (fr. hélicöidal), an ascending spiral or corkscrew temporal movement that he referred to as "haraka lawlabiyya." That is to say, that personality involved, like lived time, "partial regressions in the course of the process of maturation, thereby preparing for new progress and a new differentiated level of emergence." Consequently, even radically opposing and contradictory tendencies could be integrated into a psychosocial personality. Movement, contradiction, and struggle, rather than stasis and stability, were at the heart of his conceptualization of human personality.

Murad's conception of temporality as radically heterogeneous yet holistic was reminiscent of Bergson's notion of duration, with which Murad would certainly have been familiar. Several of Murad's students, Mustafa Suwayf, Murad Wahba, and Sami al-Durubi most notably, had written extensively on or translated Bergson's works. Bergson provided what Suzanne Guerlac refers to as a "dynamic ontology of irreversible time." Temporality as conceptualized by Bergson was dynamic and synthetic, embodying qualitative progress and a radical heterogeneity. For Murad, the past was significant, but not in terms of a mere repetition of the same; rather, in the way in which the repetition of the past was experienced in the present bearing its future orientation in mind.

This noncontinuous view of psychic history as marked by the lack of a simple linear progressive evolution was, of course, itself partially derived from psychoanalysis. As Murad noted, psychic development was neither linear, nor cyclical, but rather involved partial regressions and latencies. In the course of the process of maturation, a new differentiated and complex level of psychic development arose out of the preservation of a previous stage, or to use Murad's turn of phrase, each level of psychic development emerged "because of and in spite of" the previous level of development. This radical critique of unilinear progressive temporality is itself nestled within the Freudian status of the event. Progressive time is continuously disrupted by the time of repetition and the après coup (nachträglichkeit). The temporalization of psychic reality was thus distinct from Hegelian teleology, while other elements of Bergsonian idealism remained in Murad's conceptualization of integration, most notably in the idea of psychic integration and social holism. Suffice it to say that the operations of mental syntheses, or the interpenetration of multiple states of consciousness, resulted in an organic whole, one that Murad referenced as bio-psycho-social integration — "realized most perfectly in the voluntary act or act of will.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691174792
• ISBN 13: 9780691174792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224