Losing Freud

Abstract

Sigmund Freud haunts us, no doubt. But at a time when canons are being reexamined and intellectual genealogies (including hauntology) are being questioned, how relevant is it to excavate Freud and psychoanalysis more generally? Is it to undertake some sort of exorcism of our critical identifications, projections, and attachments vis-à-vis his work? There is a way, perhaps, to read Freud's text and our relation to it not in order to uncover Freud's truth or express loyalty to his theses and legacy. There is a way, no doubt, to enter through Freud's text not in order to find him at the end but precisely to lose him and upend in the process those readings that exclusively situate Freud within a specific genealogy of Western philosophy and theory.As a scholar of theory and literature, I grapple with these questions all the time, recognizing that the voices of the thinkers we study resonate deep within us and echo in our works. Psychoanalysis more specifically draws us to the text with the promise of illuminating the relation to the self and the other, and understanding the workings of desire, fantasy, and the relation to the past. Soon we realize that attaining this understanding is constantly deferred; what is gained instead is an appreciation for a reading practice that follows the trail of the hidden, the secret, and those wild connections that never coalesce. I point to this process in the literary theory seminar that I teach in comparative literature. Starting with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899), I ask students to pay attention to Freud as a reader of texts regardless of his final interpretation and diagnoses. I invite them to notice his attempt at vulnerability—though failing according to Jacques Lacan and others—by allowing himself to free associate as he recalls and then interprets Irma's dream. The process of Freud's associations, unfolding across various myths and hermeneutical traditions, theories and hypotheses, is what interests me as a comparatist. This process that winds and meanders is also a reading practice that identifies conversations, exposes connections, and activates comparative frameworks that were hitherto unimaginable. At the end, there must be a way to turn the work of theory into a work of imagining, which is precisely what the two scholars with whom I engage here do.Reproducing conversations and tracing associations with no promise of closure or recognition are the main characteristics of Omnia El Shakry's The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and Sarah Pinto's The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis. These scholars enter through the psychoanalytic portal but end up encountering mysticism and literature, Ibn ‘Arabi and the Mahabharata, Hindu socialist fantasies in 1940s Punjab, and criminology and psychology journals in 1940s Egypt. Each in her own way, they identify new intellectual constellations and texts that have never been read before or not in this way. In fact, they bring in these texts and devise reading practices directed at them that could not be reduced to the imposition of or resistance to Western concepts and methods and to the hegemonic place of the modern episteme in postcolonial imaginaries. These reading and critical practices, as they are being articulated and imagined in Pinto's and El Shakry's works, construct new objects and fields of study that connect time periods and locales and rewrite in the process the history of modernity from the perspective of the global South. Specifically, the reader discovers a language of subjectivity that draws on Islamic philosophy and mysticism and on Sanskrit myth and literature. Psychoanalysis, in the end, becomes misrecognized. The portal through which these scholars enter reveals an intellectual wonderland where Freud himself becomes irretrievable or absorbed consciously and unconsciously by psychological, national, and literary projects that connect Egypt to India and beyond.In Pinto's work, there is no production of an ethical subject but rather of a fictional one, moving from the Freudian text and couch into performances from Sanskrit mythology and their popular adaptations. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Pinto tells the story of Mrs. A. and Dr. Satya Nand. She describes an encounter between analyst and analysand wherein the desire for knowledge and the proprietor of knowledge that Lacan theorized is no longer central. The analyst who recorded and anonymized his sessions with Mrs. A. is referred to as an “archivist” and “collaborator.” As their conversation opens up to a world of connections, fantasies, and political utopias, Mrs. A. and Dr. Nand engage in a form of creative imagining. The reader is brought into this conversation to listen, discover, and associate in new ways.Dr. Satya Nand, a psychanalyst trained in Britain, was trying to develop a therapeutic model that is not only adapted to the Indian context but one that is also universal. The heroine of his book The Objective Method (1947) is a patient known only as Mrs. A. An upper-class woman in her early twenties, Mrs. A. talks about her unhappy and childless marriage and household intrigues, discusses homosexuality and polyandry, and expresses admiration for Nehru and socialism. Pulling at the threads of Dr. Nand's text, Pinto reveals not so much a Dora-like case study or an attempt at “finding, naming, or fixing pathology but seeking a new way to talk about thinking and think about talking. It is a record of a conversation, and Satya Nand's translations of Mrs. A.’s words into his method are as apparent as the little, intimate performances that occurred in the room where they spoke.”1 Entering Dr. Nand's text, Pinto shifts the attention of the reader from the psychoanalytic encounter's models of talking and listening in a therapeutic context to a kind of exchange through which unfold histories of Hindu socialism and theories of a holistic self that draws on the Mahabharata and other cultural influences. The analyst-directed speech veers from revealing the truth of the subject in order to bring forth a new kind of telling, listening, and reading practice. Pinto leads her reader to hear differently, other things, and make new meaning.Mrs. A.’s daydreams and fantasies collected in Dr. Nand's book lose the Freudian subject itself, projecting it as a fiction that moves and signifies comparatively across multiple traditions: Where Hinduism and psychoanalysis are concerned, after decades and decades of what scholars like to call cross-fertilization, and given intertwined pre-histories mediated by roving ideas and narratives, does it even make sense to think of these domains as encountering each other, now, or in 1947? . . . Speaking, as Satya Nand did, from a world of literatures, places with their own canons, terminologies, and intellectual traditions, let alone myths, suggests creative ways of thinking that break through the weary line between the details of locations (ethnography) and concepts that might orient them. (127)Thus, Pinto's work breaks the stronghold of disciplinary linearity to suggest multiple and uneven ways of reading. What is revealed in the sessions allows us to imagine a different understanding of modernity that is simultaneously literary and political, performed in Dr. Nand's cabinet but also in the villages and households of 1940s Punjab.Equally breaking with a linear reading of influence and resistance vis-à-vis the Western episteme, El Shakry writes in The Arabic Freud, maps out the topography of modern selfhood and its ethical and epistemological contours in postwar Egypt. What does it mean, I ask, to think through psychoanalysis and Islam together, not as a ‘problem’ but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement? Rather than view Islamic discourses as hermetically sealed, or traffic in dichotomous juxtapositions between East and West, this book focuses on the points of intersection, articulation, and commensurability between Islamic discourses and modern social scientific thought, and between religious and secular ethics.2El Shakry explores how the encounter with psychoanalytic thought and writing produced a rethinking of Islamic mysticism and subject formation in postwar Egypt. Moving from the anxiety of influence to the ethics of the encounter—thinking of Édouard Glissant here—El Shakry's work allows us to sit with concepts and traditions and engage their development on their own terms.Trained as an intellectual historian, El Shakry aims at “understanding psychoanalysis ethnographically, not simply by provincializing psychoanalysis's European provenance, but rather by demonstrating the non-Western traditions and individuals who contributed to psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge that was always already hybridized with the discourse of the other” (11). Rather than applying psychoanalysis to Islam or examining the influence and reception of psychoanalysis and the work of Freud specifically, El Shakry tells instead the story of an interaction and an exchange that informed and shaped multiple traditions. Engaging with figures such as Ibn ‘Arabi and al-Taftazani, El Shakry reads psychoanalysis through Islamic mysticism and Islamic mysticism through psychoanalysis. The reader is brought into the comparative secret (Arabic, sir) of the historical and theoretical analysis. The reader is at times disoriented, creatively led to explore the division of the self in the Sufi tradition, losing sight of Freud and Lacan, coming back to them, connecting, and then diving again into an exploration that takes them on different journeys and associations. The writing is never direct; it circles and curls, rises and descends, following the rhythm of the nafs (the breath but also the self), meandering into its depths in the hope of revealing its secrets.Just like Sarah Pinto enters through the door that Dr. Nand opened in his chronicle of Mrs. A., El Shakry enters through the door of Yusuf Murad. Editor of Majallat ‘ilm al-nafs (Journal of Psychology), Murad was a key figure of psychology (Gestalttheorie, especially) and psychoanalysis in postwar Egypt. Continuing in the tradition of nahda thinkers such as Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq,3 “In his midcentury dictionary, editor Yusuf Murad noted that he often returned to classical Arabic texts in order to create new translations for words and clear, precise, and capacious meanings” (65). The translation and engagement that Murad initiated have their place in the larger history of psychoanalysis and are not merely on its receptive end. El Shakry elaborates on Murad's rigorous and multifaceted engagement with psychology and philosophy thereby precluding the kinds of foreclosure that simplistic readings assume by painting the native as a passive receptor of European thought and knowledge. She portrays someone like Murad as translator and complicator of those very theories as he contributes to and potentially displaces their genealogies in the West. El Shakry's work exposes the superficial readings of Western knowledge and its effects on local contexts in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, portraying instead interactive and critical intellectual translations and in this case therapeutic models. Engaging with questions of the social through phenomenology and gestalt, Murad draws on the rich legacy of Islamic mysticism including al-Razi and Ibn ‘Arabi to think with psychoanalysis about the self, language, love, and subjectivity.El Shakry's thesis follows the course of critical nahda studies. The nahda, or Arab renaissance, which is associated with the project of Arab cultural and political modernity starting in the nineteenth century, simultaneously engages with Western knowledge and practices and Arab-Islamic ones. In this context, Majallat ‘ilm al-nafs and its editor Yusuf Murad express through translation, engagement, and critique a model of acknowledgment involving multiple intellectual traditions and subject formations. Ultimately, El Shakry argues that “it is not about the alleged modern presence or medieval absence of interiority, nor a simple narrative of modernity's claim to individual autonomy in the face of medieval heteronomy. Rather, what one finds in the modern period is a coexistence of autonomy and heteronomy, of the traditional practice of ethical self-attunement (tahdhib al-nafs) and the modern science of psychology (‘ilm al-nafs)” (60).El Shakry's work resonates with my reading of madness as junun but also as queerness and possession in Trials of Arab Modernity,4 and my engagement with the tradition, let's say, of akhbar (news, lore), integral to the understanding of the Arab blogosphere in Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals.5 The modern is not the negation of what precedes it, nor does it constitute a historical epistemic break as Michel Foucault would have it. In effect, multiple discourses continue to operate within modernity. Both in El Shakry and Pinto's works there is a rigorous deconstruction of the epistemological formations that lend themselves to hegemonic structures and models of reading especially psychoanalysis. In their works, the Freudian subject is engendered through the nafs of Ibn ‘Arabi and that of Shakuntala from the Mahabharata.Psychoanalysis as El Shakry and elsewhere Moneera al-Ghadeer6 argue is already in dialogue with the Arab-Islamic tradition, from Lacan's turn to Ibn ‘Arabi in his first seminar, to Freud's melancholia that could be traced to Avicenna's Canon on Medicine. This comparative trajectory adopted by El Shakry as well as by scholars such as Sahar Amer,7 Yoav Di-Capua,8 and others traces encounters and conversations that lead us to rethink what theory means. This is the kind of work I did in my reading of Arab modernity as a somatic condition, bringing al-Tahtawi and Walter Benjamin in conversation, reading al-Tahtawi through Benjamin and Benjamin through al-Tahtawi. This reading revealed that the modern could also be traced to a café in Marseilles, some thirty years before Charles Baudelaire's “À une passante,” wherein an Egyptian Imam turns to poetry as a repoussoir as he experiences fragmentation.9 Decolonizing psychoanalysis or theory more generally doesn't mean to extract or remove it in a futile quest for cultural or literary authenticity, but rather to take it on a journey that makes it lose itself, misrecognize itself, in the double meaning of the term. The comparative framework in El Shakry proliferates with critical associations. This proliferation makes connections when least expected and enables the deconstructive work to become truly generative, truly decolonial. The aim is to wonder, at the end, are we in Freud or in Ibn ‘Arabi?This comparative framework that can never reduce a complex and multifaceted relation between Arab-Islamic and European traditions allows us to rethink the question of modernity. The history of the subject and its trials and collapses at the intersection of literature and politics, East and West, the classical and the modern, is present in El Shakry's and Pinto's works as well. Modernity in its Western constellation involving the subject, the novel, and the nation-state to name a few is not produced in Europe and then imported to the global South but rather emerges in between, read from the perspective of a Sudanese village and its prodigal son who has returned after a long trip.10 To engage with this legacy is to look at selfhood and its development by examining the narratives and fictions of subjectivity and the genres to which these fictions give rise.More broadly, El Shakry's and Pinto's works raise the question of theory and of its application or histories beyond the Western context. Theory has been used or applied to the non-Western object—and to the object, period—be it a literary work or a cultural context or a time period. Theory has also been understood as a hegemonic structure that neutralizes or at least permanently reshapes in its own image works that are outside of its context. Few are those critics who are able to activate the kinds of dialogue that truly intervene in theoretical genealogies, excavating connections and stakes that reverberate beyond the particular trajectories with which theory is associated in its Euro-American context. This is the work that El Shakry, Pinto, and others do. It is meant to expose, upend, and imagine new intellectual trajectories and reading practices. Specifically, these practices deconstruct and decolonize epistemological formations not by extracting the foreign and framing its presence as a hegemonizing structure from psychology to madness to sexuality, but rather by initiating dialogues and identifying new critical trajectories. More important, as these practices meander and associate, they show vulnerability, which gives Freud's attempt at vulnerability in Interpretation of Dreams a new meaning. At a time when calls for purity in all forms unleash a violent and utopian cribble that seeks to split and isolate, El Shakry's and Pinto's works lead the way toward rigorous intellectual projects and political interventions.