Reviewed by: The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt by Omnia El Shakry Dr. Karim Dajani The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt by Omnia El Shakry. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017, 225 pages. Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud is a scholarly book about deep and surprising epistemological resonances between Freudian theory and classical Islamic texts on the self and the soul. The author is an Egyptian immigrant and a professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her academic interest in Sufi Islam and psychoanalysis led her, with the support of the university and several grants, into a research odyssey. She travelled to Egypt to secure guidance from several academics with a deep familiarity in the history of psychoanalysis during that time period. Her fluency in Arabic gave her direct access to original source material. She read countless publications by Arab and Egyptian psychoanalysts as well as a wide range of academics and theologians who made use of the theory in their analysis of literature, sexuality, religious texts, and understanding of criminality under the law. The book is replete with transliterations of key Arabic terms, journals, and publications adding richness and texture. The thesis of this book is timely. The dialectical engagement of two seemingly disparate discursive traditions—classical Islamic discourse and psychoanalysis—produced “a theory of the self that was at once in concert with and heterogeneous to European analytic traditions” (p. 2). In other words, the two traditions can intermingle in a generative manner. To illustrate her argument, she “focuses on the points of intersection, articulation, and commensurability” between these traditions, “while uncovering epistemological resonances between modern European and Arab discursive traditions” (p.13). This is a book about the development of psychoanalytic theory across cultural systems, “across the space of human difference.” The setting of this book is 1930–1960 Egypt. The context is the meeting of two cultural systems—European individualism [End Page 413] and Arab collectivism. How does a theory rooted in individualistic cultural dispositions modify when it migrates into a collective cultural system organized around a theistic sensibility? And why is that particularly relevant at this moment in time? We are currently living during a period of intense “cultural intermingling.” Our society is divided largely around cultural fissures as we live in a multi-cultural society in rapid change. The internet and increased migrations around the globe have made it possible and necessary for billions of people from vastly different cultures to interact in real time through a virtual medium. This emerging reality of billions of interactions between people from different cultural systems is producing changes in cultures and traditions at warp speed. Learning how to make the intermingling of vastly different cultural systems produce generative bridges—distinctions instead of divisions, and capacious engagements instead of closures—is urgent. The introduction meanders through dense terms, such as the unconscious and the Oedipus complex, and even delves deeper into the communal and religious subjects of mysticism, Islam, the psychology of criminality, and the decolonization of the self. The richness of the topics and the depth of her reading and analysis are quite engaging. However, the denseness and organization of the text can be cumbersome at times. For this reason, I will not summarize the contents of the book in their entirety. Instead, I will focus on a few chosen points of comparison that clearly demonstrate her thesis: Islamic discursive traditions and psychoanalysis can be mutually enriching systems. Much of the book revolves around the work of the pioneering Egyptian intellectual and psychoanalyst, Yusuf Murad (1902–1966), a “philosopher of integration” who founded a “school of thought within the psychological and human sciences in Egypt” replete with its own society Jama’at ‘Ilm al-Nafs al-Takamuli (Society of Integrative Psychology), and its own publication Majallat ‘Ilm al-Nafs (Journal of Psychology). She introduces us to the translation of the word unconscious into Arabic: al-la shu’ur, locating the Arabic term within the well-established tradition of Sufi philosophy, theology, and psychology. This sets the stage for developing the main theme of the book—Islam and psychoanalysis have important points of commonality that can be...
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Jun 5, 2019
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