The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.66 (999 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0691174792 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-06-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. 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 psychologyor “science of the soul,” as it came to be calledwas inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. 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 betwee
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.
El Shakry’s beautiful book shows, definitively, that what counts as psychoanalysis could beindeed wasjust as well produced in decolonizing Cairo as in Vienna or New York. 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 demonstratesspectacularlythat nothing could be further from the truth. This is a major contribution to the intellectual history of modern Egyptand 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