Summary, Questions, & Quotes

Pandolfo (2010) theorizes the psychoanalytic and spiritual effects of collective trauma and violence, through the work of Fanon and contextual research in Morocco. Her writing raises valuable questions about how collective violence and trauma penetrate the psyche/soul. “I pursue this question of ‘soul murder’, and its implication for a possible ethics of struggle (jihad/jihad al-nafs) through an analytic description of the therapeutic practice of a Moroccan Imam, not a traditional healer, indeed also not a Sufi, but an active member in the local Islamic revival” (31). In exploring ‘soul murder,’ Pandolfo highlights the overlap in Islamic thought and psychoanlytic theories. Below I have included quotes that helped me think through this piece: 27 - “It is in terms of my work with the Imam, in the concluding section of the paper, that I more specifically address the Fanonian question as that of a the struggle for a repossession of the imagination; a struggle that is not solely framed in terms of sovereignty, but as a transformation of pain in a space of mourning.” 27-28 - “Fanon, a psychiatrist, analyzes the intrusion as a psychotic invasion, in a phobic and paranoid universe where the inner and the outer mirror each other and coincide, and the subject’s unconscious aggressively performs the logic of the colonial state. “ 29 - “‘Spiritual murder’ is the destruction, or crippling, of this ethical faculty. It describes the subjugation of the soul and the oppression of the collectivity. The question becomes, for Shaykh Yassine, as well as many others, that of shedding light on, disclosing this state of things.”  38 - “The point is that inhabiting pain in this second sense, bearing witness to pain without succumbing to it, can engender an opening of the soul. Pain, in this sense, crosses a limit, beyond the paralysis of being, the impossibility of movement; it transforms.” Questions: One thing that I have been thinking a lot about throughout this quarter are the overlapping concepts between mystical and psychoanalytic thought. Both psychoanalysis and religious/mystical thinking is interested in a deeper human essence (soul or psyche), therefore, at what point is something considered scientific/psychoanalytic or mystical/religious? What are the overlaps between the two and what separates them? Is it useful to separate the categories? What does one gain from blurring the categories?