In what is now an oft-cited argument, Jacques Derrida begins “Geopsychoanalysis,” a cautionary essay on the failure of international psychoanalysis, by poking fun at a formulation in the International Psychoanalytic Association's proposed constitution of 1977: “The Association's main geographical areas are defined at this time as America north of the United States–Mexican border; all America south of that border; and the rest of the world.”1The formulation, “rest of the world,” dominates Europe, “the native land and old mother country of psychoanalysis,” Derrida observes: “the self-same ‘rest of the world’ also connotes all that virgin territory, all those parts of the world, where psychoanalysis, to put it bluntly, has never set foot.”2 Derrida is not the first thinker to point out the Eurocentric and middle-class location of psychoanalysis. In his pathbreaking essay of 1932, Erich Fromm concedes that most analysts had “almost completely overlooked the fact that the family itself . . . is the product of a specific social and . . . class structure” and that in doing so “they had turned bourgeois capitalist society into an absolute.”3 Fromm argues that the blame for this ideological distortion did not rest with psychoanalysis as such but with the bourgeois investigators who “did not utilize this method in a correct way when they transferred it from the individual to social groups and social phenomena.”4 When the classical psychoanalytic method is applied to social phenomena in a logical way, psychoanalysis and historical materialism are seen to dovetail harmoniously, Fromm argues. We comprehend, then, that the Oedipus complex, for instance, is not a universal human mechanism and that it describes power relations in patriarchal societies in particular. Historical materialism enriches psychoanalysis by bringing to light the economic conditions that influenced psychic structures and psychoanalysis could, hypothetically, enrich historical materialism by providing a more comprehensive knowledge of the nature of the human.Luce Irigaray's 1977 article titled “The Poverty of Psychoanalysis,” published in the journal Critique, also criticizes mainstream psychoanalysis for egregious class and gender occlusions. Irigaray is referencing Karl Marx's 1847 text The Poverty of Philosophy here. Marx's work is an attack on the economic doctrines of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whom he accuses of ignoring the historical relativity of economic categories. Marx argues that Proudhon is guilty of one of the characteristic fallacies of bourgeois ideology: in de-historicizing the ideas of his society, Proudhon presents capitalism not as a transient mode of production but as a universal feature of the human condition. “These ideas, these categories,” Marx argues, “are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.”5 In referencing this work by Marx, Irigaray makes it clear that her article will proceed along the same lines. Just as Marx criticizes Proudhon for his failure to realize that his economic concepts were products of a specific historical epoch, so Irigaray accuses Lacan and his followers of ignoring the contexts and historical referents of their theoretical fabrications. According to Irigaray, Lacanian analysts foreclose all questions in relation to the history in which psychoanalytic theory was inscribed, as if this theory were “whole, absolute and without any historical foundations.”6 Irigaray accuses Lacanians of conferring universal validity on the social relations that characterized a specific movement in history, thus becoming “the defenders of the existing order, the agents or servants of repression and censorship ensuring that this order subsists as though it were the only possible order.”7The upshot of the Derrida, Fromm, and Irigaray critiques is that classical psychoanalysis is a symptom of both European expansionism and jealous Eurocentrism, built on entrenched class, race, and gender privilege yet claiming a universal psychoanalytic unconscious. It is absolutist, its cogent dream of mastery suppressing cultural diversity and dissent, and history itself. It has gone global, but not quite traveled. The two books I discuss are on what Freud, in a letter to Jones, called the “foreign policy” of the global institution of psychoanalysis. Both demonstrate, albeit in singular ways, how psychoanalysis has traveled and how it can thrive as a dynamic, translatable theory as well as a cosmopolitan entity.Omnia El Shakry's Arabic Freud asks if the vicissitudes of the soul in Arabic works are translatable to the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis, and whether Freud can be repurposed to understand the status of either or both in the psychic life of postwar Egypt. Freudian psychoanalysis is invoked here as a “multivalent tradition and metonym”8 for understanding psychic life, the unconscious, and the very question of self in the clash of interpretations around modernity and the modern. Not simply “provincializing” psychoanalysis, the work aims to draw attention to “traditions and individuals who contributed to psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge” in an international frame and field (11). In the process of staging this knowledge exchange between psychoanalysis and Islam, El Shakry questions and dismantles artificial binaries such as religious and secular, or Islamic and modernist, which influence flawed metropolitan understandings of Arab discursive traditions as pre- and antimodern or belatedly modern.El Shakry traces the rising popularity of Freud since the late 1920s, when notions of the unconscious started surfacing in Arabic writings in Egypt, bearing testimony to a youthful engagement with ideas such as the unconscious, the sexual drive, Oedipus complex, and dream interpretation in Arabic public discourse. Midcentury interventions by writers such as Sayyid Qutb, who read Freud in translation, broadened the remit of psychoanalytic criticism to literary interpretation, identity, and sexuality. Following the scholarship of Ranjana Khanna, Stefania Pandolfo, Mariano Ben Plotkin, Rubén Gallo, and others, El Shakry draws attention to the false universalism and normative secularism of middle-European psychoanalysis, seeing in secularism in particular a colonialist disavowal of non-European articulations of (religious) selfhood. Arabic Freud ambitiously takes on the psyche, the self and the soul, the psychosexual subject, and, finally, the law, describing how the contours of these concepts are redefined in the traffic between Islam and psychoanalysis. The primary authors discussed are Yusuf Murad, whose theory of integrative psychoanalysis had a lasting legacy on the humanities and social sciences in postwar Egypt; two preeminent exponents of Sufi thought, namely, Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani and his mentor Muhammad Mustafa Hilmi; and Professor Muhammad Fathi, who shaped mid-century debates on criminal psychology. El Shakry sheds valuable light on the print culture that emanated from these cultural contestations: the journal Majallat ‘Ilm al-Nafs, specifically, and a host of popular and didactic works.Psychoanalysis, in El Shakry's intervention, implies the foundational ideas of Sigmund Freud, albeit in dialogue with Carl Jung, Pierre Janet, Jacques Lacan, Karen Horney, Julia Kristeva, and others. In the works of psychology professor Yusuf Murad, it acquires a positivist dimension not seen in articulations of the split or decentered self in, for example, Lacan. It bespeaks the dynamic unity of psychic, physical, and social aspects, echoing the notion of wahda (unity) Murad had inherited from the medieval mystic Ibn ‘Arabi, an interpretation Murad subsequently puts to good use in his social vision of “multiplicity in unity” (38). In the strongest section of the study (which occurs in the second chapter), El Shakry masterfully reads psychoanalysis as a mode of reception comparable to Sufism, its knowledge not merely hermeneutic but intuitive and affective, “an ethical encounter with the Other mediated by the domain of the unconscious” (59). This, however, the author points out, is an “elective affinity” (59), and should not allow the ethics of one epistemology to subsume that of the other. El Shakry also takes on the tricky domain of psychosexuality, seeing in Yusuf Murad's writings on sexuality a balancing of the autonomy and the heteronomy of the self through a propagation of “virtue ethics” (82). If we are to characterize Freudian psychoanalysis as a desiring dialectic—and it serves El Shakry's argument to reduce it to “a theory of desire” (80)—the Islamic tradition brings to it “ethical attunement” (82). However, the author seems to have her cake and eat it too when she absolves Murad's championing of heteronormativity on the grounds that it is modeled on homoerotic love and friendship. The text in question is Sikulujiyyat al-Jins (1954), where Murad argues that gender difference is biological as well as psychic, drawing on the material substratum and societal factors such as tarbiya (or upbringing) alike. When it comes to same-sex desire, however, he marks homosexuality as aberrant though treatable, with companionate marriage posited as “the telos of proper psychosexual health” (78). Homosexual desire threatens to derail individual psychology: while the dysfluencies and failures of its attachments are allowed to shape adolescent maturation, homosexuality is eventually overpowered in this growth story.One of the focal points of Arabic Freud is Muhammad Fathi's advocacy of psychoanalysis as a supplement to the law. Carefully contextualizing the political psychology of the period under discussion against its violent history, El Shakry demonstrates by example how the worlding of psychoanalysis, which considers political and social factors in the evolution of the unconscious, could lead to a keener understanding of pathology and psychopathology. In its singular approach to the relationship between Islam and the West, this work is very timely. It is enriched by the sophistication of its critical insights, and the rigor and refinement of El Shakry's understanding of both Freudian psychoanalysis and the intellectual history of its Egyptian interlocutors. In the end, however, it struggles to be more than a sum of its parts: the minute examinations of Egyptian psychoanalytic thinking do not lead to a robust revision of the monolith of psychoanalysis itself in the aftermath of foreign translations and extrapolations. In the concluding sentence of chapter 2, El Shakry suggests that the medieval Sufi notion of tahdhib al-nafs or al-mujahada al-nafsiyya “could be” combined with or translated into Freud's idea of sublimation (60). While this gesture demonstrates that Freudian theory is not perhaps antithetical to Islamic discourse, it does not unsettle the positional and cultural supremacy of the former. Psychoanalysis remains pristinely itself while lending its meanings to hybrid and recombinant forms that could emerge from engineered encounters. And the “something more,” the remainders of subjectivity that are not comprehended, let alone disciplined, by Western or hybridized Western psychological discourse are left undisturbed, with El Shakry dismissing these untranslatable psychic integers as “an opacity at the heart of the human subject” (81). That said, this outcome is probably inevitable in a project that sets out to examine “a creative encounter of ethical engagement” between psychoanalysis and Islam (2). Arabic Freud captures well the texture of human and cultural difference shaping this impossible, but also at times illuminating and exhilarating, confrontation.If El Shakry's scope is excursive, embracing as it does a gamut of Arabic works in post–Second World War Egypt, Sarah Pinto's The Doctor and Mrs. A. examines the contact point of psychoanalysis and India in the (guarded) intimacy of the analyst's chamber. And, if the binaries El Shakry dismantles are Islam and Western culture, here it is Hindu myth and religion and the cultural and epistemological traditions of the West. The story begins during World War II, a few years before the Indian Independence in 1947, with Dev Satya Nand, a young psychoanalyst, therapizing a young woman, his friend, in Punjab, “perhaps Lahore, perhaps Amritsar.”9 Mrs. A. had not approached Satya Nand to alleviate psychic distress: she was not ill at all, and Satya Nand had invited her to take part in an experiment. They would discuss daydreams, not the eruptions of the unconscious in sleep. Satya Nand published Mrs. A.’s case study, titled “An Analysis and Resolution of a Daydream, Namely, the Daydream of Hindu Socialism,” in his book Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State, published around 1947.Satya Nand is Christian, the child of converts from Hinduism (father) and Islam (mother). A psychiatrist trained by Owen Berkeley-Hill, who also initiated him into psychoanalysis, Satya Nand developed a unique system of dream analysis. For this, he not only extrapolated elements from Freudian, Jungian, and Adlerian theory, or the Hindu philosophy and mysticism of his cultural and intellectual formation, but also eclectic sources such as Jane Austen novels, Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, and Charles Scott Sherrington's neurophysiology. Pinto argues that Satya Nand saw the mythopoeic as a “universal human library,” not belonging to any one nation or religion (23). “Speaking, as Satya Nand did, from a world of literatures . . . suggests creative ways of thinking that break through the weary line between the details of locations (ethnography) and concepts that might orient them” (24). The orientation of this new canon, which is a product of the mobilization and cross-fertilization of canons of literature, philosophy, myth, and psychoanalysis, is “to all it is not,” Pinto writes eloquently (24).As Sanjeev Jain et al. state, a key distinction between Freudian dream interpretation and Satya Nand's was that in the latter's schema “dreams are a mechanism in the struggle for existence,” rather than a representation of “suppressed Id-impulses.”10 The meaning of the dream, in other words, is exogenous, with a collective (sociocultural) dimension, and not simply pertaining to the subject's private theatre of individuation. Moreover, the dimension Satya Nand added to the temporal logic of Freudian psychoanalysis through his focus on the daydream was “a present that had not yet happened” (Doctor, 1). The daydream was a memory-to-come, according to Satya Nand, and he would curate sentences into what he called dream smudges, cutting them into fragments. The fragments were organized in pairs, divided by ellipses (Nand called these dream spaces), and these were offered to the analysand in turns, inviting her to free associate and start actualizing the possibility latent in the daydream. For instance, when Mrs. A. narrated her daydream of joining the Rama Krishna Mission the dream smudge was the sentence fragment “I have joined the Rama Krishna Mission,” which prompted Mrs. A. to contemplate her attitudes toward villages. Satya Nand believed that this “Oriental” technique, attuned to the Hindu concept of the samadhi, or a meditative trance, would offer pathways to the subject's occluded truth.Mrs. A. turns to three towering women figures in the Sanskrit epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata—Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya—each myth indissociable from the vast corpus of accretive stories and interpretations that followed in its wake. In chapter one of Doctor and Mrs. A., Pinto shows how the twenty-one-year-old Mrs. A. makes use of Draupadi to narrativize desire and marriage, singularity and conjugality, duty and intimacy. Intriguingly, the Draupadi Mrs. A. evokes is not the firebrand of the dice game, a woman coerced into polyandry yet unprotected by its promise of superadded security. (Not only do the husbands powerlessly spectate as she is sexually violated, the most righteous of the five brothers has actively visited this fate on her by making her the collateral in a dice game.) Mrs. A. fixates on Draupadi's exile instead, and how the displaced queen utilizes this experience to win over villagers, start a cooperative movement, and make people submit to Pandava rule voluntarily. Draupadi's unconventional domesticity and the mesmeric power she exerts over handsome, heroic men, also become grist for the mill as Mrs. A. dares to fantasize about figures of difference (and nonconjugal sexuality) in monogamous marriages. Evoking the words of Amrita Pritam, a poet with whose works Mrs. A. may have been familiar, Pinto argues that the latter seemed to be moving “from Draupadi to Draupadi” (84), from Draupadi the pawn to Draupadi the gambler and the game. To the failed ethic of marriage, and its failed protections, Mrs. A., also let down resoundingly by her husband (and heteropatriarchy), poses the counter-ethic of being single. Pinto's term for it is “singularity”: not individualism, nor a binary opposite of being married, but a state that is the battleground between the two, “an alternate reality” (85) that rearranges the terms of social connection.Ethics or “an ethical encounter with the Other” (Arabic Freud, 115) is a constitutive element of both Islam and psychoanalysis—and one that El Shakry weaves into her narrative of the encounter between mid-century Muslim thinkers and psychoanalytic theories. The idea of bearing responsibility to an incommensurate other challenges hermetically sealed traditions to interact with each other, drawing them out of comfort zones, just as it challenges the autonomy of the self in singular ways in each of these traditions. The Doctor and Mrs. A. addresses ethics in two related ways. It looks at the counterpoint to and revisions of the codes of Hindu ethics; it also examines the relationship of ethics to critique through its explorations of Mrs. A's identifications with mythic characters. Critique becomes ethics when the psychoanalytic method questions “the givenness of the sense . . . that the means of understanding is reading, and the goal of reading to ‘expose’ the ways in which normalising demands establish how subjects must perform themselves” (140). Pinto is drawing on Michel Foucault and Judith Butler here, in particular Foucault's definition of modern ethics as “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself” (cited at 140). The cultivation of the self and its cognates—self-care, self-improvement, self-realization, and so on—is the modality through which the modern subject acquiesces to operations of power. The kind of relationship “you ought to have with yourself” shows the vice grip of regulatory ethics and technologies of self (another Foucauldian idea) on any self-fashioning. The Doctor and Mrs. A. charts the trajectories of Mrs. A.’s regulation by moral codes but also the ways in which she overwrites these codes in the vicissitudes of performance: “they do not find truth but reanimate it; they do not interpret a story but retell it,” observes Pinto. This transgression is posed as a counter-ethic, rife with the possibility of freedom and change.Pinto's explorations of the analytic process through the case studies draw attention to the psychic processes of the analyst as well as the analysand. The narratives of the mythic women, especially that of Shakuntala, not only enabled Mrs. A.’s singular trajectory of individuation, they also helped Satya Nand “hear Mrs. A.” (103). It is in these refined acts of hearing the analysand that the originality and innovativeness of Satya Nand's postcolonial technique may be found: “Analysands may have initiated them [chains of association] with their correlations, but Satya Nand glorified them, rising above even Freud in the complexity of connections, reorganising ‘smudges’ and weaving in mythic plot points in epic stretches” (103).The constructed binary between “adaptive propensity” (associated with Shakuntala) and “individualist propensity” (associated with Draupadi) begins to lose shape as Mrs. A. starts treating both models as constructive work (105). For his part, Satya Nand sets aside his own analytic vocabulary and schema when they seem to reach their conceptual limit, resisting the specialized method of Freudian dream analysis in favour of an observation unfettered by theory or doctrine. He termed this the “objective method,” one which finds an analogue in Mrs. A.’s acts of uninhibited movement, such as dancing alone in her room, “losing (or ‘loosing’) oneself in music (143). These moments in The Doctor and Mrs. A. offer the strongest advocacy for a recombinant psychoanalysis, which is dynamic and traveling. “This is a glimpse of process, of conversation, not conviction” (143).Sarah Pinto defines the category of counter-ethics, or counter-ethic, as a zone of moral complexity where the woman analysand negotiates implacable social forces which compromise and victimize women in patriarchal societies, recoding their traumatized state as ethical failure. The counter-ethical offers the possibility of treating the plight of Ahalya, turned into stone, as not simply the (unconscionable) punishment for being a rape victim, but also seeing that state of petrification as “a form or effect of witnessing” (190). Pinto's recording of Mrs. A.’s voice consciousness in this case study with the Ahalya story is riddled with doubt and murky with ambivalence. Mrs. A. seems to fixate more on Lord Ram's redemption of Ahalya than the plight of Ahalya herself: Ram, not Ahalya, is given agency, in a departure from the way in which Mrs. A. had reanimated the stories of the other mythic women. Does Mrs. A. register Ram's command to Ahalya that she tell her story as an act of redemption, or does she see it as a form of crushing male authoritativeness? There are only hints that make us think it could be the latter, not the former. The counter-ethic is in the stillness Pinto detects, between Mrs. A.’s voice and her silence, which seems to reproach “structures that would seem to offer justice” (199), such as Ram's pardon of Ahalya for a crime she did not commit. The stillness also captures something of the reality of her own desire (and Ahalya's desire) scrutinized as both losing control and being forced into the act.Psychoanalysis in Egypt was a discourse that engaged “the collective ends” of human life, “rather than the phantasmatic lure of the ‘I,’” El Shakry observes (114). Similarly, the psychoanalysis of Mrs. A. connects the vicissitudes of an individual story to epic, myth, the depredations of sexism and casteism, class exclusion, and India's freedom struggle. Both works move beyond their initial “psychoanalysis and religion X” formulation to imagine creative acts of ethical engagement and counter-ethics: both decolonize a Western master discourse by making it answerable to the perplexities of the soul, desire, individuation, and identification in other metapsychologies of the modern. Whether in their attention to the languages of the unconscious or the vagaries of the unsaid, the works of Pinto and El Shakry valorize smaller moments over big theory, the everyday over the exceptional.