Arabic Freud

"Homo psychoanalyticus was thus not characterized by "the neutralization of ethics and of the political realm" and a dissociation of the "psychoanalytical sphere from the sphere of the citizen or moral subject in his or her public of private life." Rather, psychoanalysis presented the possibility of enjoyment in the use of the other as an instrument or object, while at the same time offering a means of undermining that sovereign pleasure, precisely by critically analyzing one's own psychic implication in it. Simply put, psychoanalysis oscillated between ethical ideals centered on the opacity of the human subject (her resistance to intelligibility and understanding) and the belief in the transparency of humans and the possibility of their instrumentalization" (14)"I therefore eschew an analysis that would view psychoanalysis as merely yet another technology of the late colonial state or of postcolonial nationalism, or as epiphenomenal to larger political developments in the Arab world. Psychoanalysis found outlets in theoretical and philosophical debates where thinkers elaborated on the conceptual history of the unconscious and of desire, while attuned to the ethical countours of the subject" (15)"The Gestalt theorists to whom Murad was indebted retained residual elements of absolute idealism in their concept of holism - which entailed a fundamental unity in the perceptions of objects and in the synthesis of experience. There was, however, another older reference point for unity, namely, the writings of Ibn 'Arabi that Murad had actively relied upon during his doctoral research in the 1930s" (28)"This complex conception of the "unity of manyness" and the "manyness of the one," or of unity and alterity within Ibn 'Arabi's thought, was further echoed in Murad's conception of psycho-social integration" (28)"Arguing that, ultimately, phenomenology could not overcome the difficulties faced by introspection and empiricism in psychological inquiry, he noted the need for a deeper and more comprehensive and explanatory view. Such a view was to be found in psychoanalysis, which entailed the perspective of the observer, the speaker, and the spoken to" (30)"Al-firasa or the science of judging internal meanings from external forms (how to discern the unknown from the known) was transmitted through the pseudo-Aristotelian text the Secretum Secretorum or Kitab Sirr al-Asrar." (33)"natural firasa and divine firasa... Mystical firasa, sometimes referred to as al-firasa al-dhawqiyya, was only given to a few; whereas the physiognomist learned how to judge character or temperament from exterior signs such as physical appearance, the mystic judged spiritual essence" (34)"The research of Henri Wallon (from whom Lacan had derived his idea of the mirror stage), whose writings were widely read and translated in Egypt, is instructive in this regard... Wallon, by contrast, contested the view of the child's self-generated autotellic consciousness, arguing instead that self-consciousness itself was the effect of the encounter with the other, whether the mother or the child's own mirror image. In his foundational text, "The Role of the Other in the Consciousness of the Self" which was foregrounded in the October 1946 issue of Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs, Wallon stated, "there is no more widely held assumption in psychology than the notion that the subject must become conscious of his own ego before being able to imagine that of the other person." Critiquing Piaget's widely held view that the child's consciousness passes from autism to egocentrism, Wallon posited the shaping of the child's individual consciousness by the collective milieu, pointing to Freud's own view of consciousness as delimited by species-being" (37)"The themes of psychological unity and harmonious totality were echoed in the revolution's call for national unity in the aftermath of colonization and its desire to create a "happy family of workers and peasants." Murad's integrative framework anticipated the totalizing framework of social welfare that was to become the hallmark of Nasserism, a framework meant to encompass social, political, and psychological factors at one and the same time" (39)"Situating figures such as al-Taftazani within the larger intellectual and religious context of mid-twentieth-century Egypt illustrates that we must remain attentive to the ways in which differing discursive traditions and their subjects come into contact, rather than the presumption of hermetically sealed traditions, Western, Islamic, and otherwise" (43-44)"The delineation of a subjective pathway enabled Sufi travelers to imagine their own psychic and spiritual journey within the "ocean of the soul" (bahr al-nafs). Despite the esoteric nature of these faculties, al Taftazani encoded them within a series of stages. As a result he argued that a Sufi might move beyond his nafs, removing all base instincts and allowing his heart to be filled with faith and righteousness, then he could shift to the spirit, and finally once his spirit was able to see, he moved on to the sirr. This transformation of the self is best conceptualized not as a sequential progression but as a process of harmonization" (49)"Noetic knowledge through mystical intuition (kashf) and the experience of intimate tastings (dhawq) was thus epistemologically and ethically distinct from psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalysis the mystic mistakes the Symbolic for the Real, or in Freudian terms the "obscure recognition... of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored... in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious"" (58)