On Friday mornings in Cairo in the mid- to late 1940s and the 1950s, scholars and students of all disciplines would assemble at the house of psychology professor Yusuf Murad. Gathered to discuss the latest intellectual trends in psychology and philosophy, those meetings, we are told, revolved around two central questions: how can the scholar be a philosopher? And how can the teacher be a mentor?Footnote 1 Through a capacious body of work that touched on subjects as diverse as the epistemology of psychoanalysis and the analytic structure, and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi's medieval treatise on physiognomy, Murad developed what he termed an integrative (takamuli) psychology based on the fundamental philosophical unity of the self. Presenting Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a “Copernican revolution” to his audience, Murad identified psychoanalysis as the dialectical synthesis of philosophical introspection, positivism, and phenomenology.
Beyond its contribution to the study of Arab intellectual history, an understanding of the body of work developed by Murad and his students enables us to reconsider that quintessential question of modernity, the question of the self, in a non-European context. Indeed, the story of the historical emergence of modern languages of the self in twentieth-century Egypt moves us away from binary models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, and unsettles the assumption of an alleged incommensurability between psychoanalysis and Islam.Footnote 2
Responsible in large part for the introduction and formalization of an Arabic-language lexicon of psychology and psychoanalysis, Murad introduced into scholarly vocabularies, as the “unconscious,” the Arabic term la-shuʿur, a term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn ʿArabi and redolent with mystical overtones.Footnote 3 Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and the French tradition of philosophical psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychological and psychoanalytic thought.
The coterie of students in attendance on Friday mornings were born sometime between 1920 and 1930, making them the generation that would later become instrumental in transforming the role of the intellectual and of knowledge production within Arab postcolonial polities.Footnote 4 Among the regular attendees were several scholars training in philosophy: Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim, who was to play a decisive part in the fierce debates over existentialism and the role and purpose of literary production for decolonizing political action; Yusuf al-Sharuni, the meticulous and socially conscious short-story writer and literary critic who was active in the avant-garde post-World War II literary groups that formed in Egypt; and Murad Wahba, the author of philosophical commentaries on Averroës, Kant, and Bergson, and of a large body of work on philosophy, civilization, and secularism. Other attendees included Mustafa Suwayf, later a well-known psychology professor at Cairo University (and father to novelist Ahdaf Soueif); Sami al-Durubi, the Syrian translator and later ambassador to Egypt, who wrote on psychology and literature and translated Henri Bergson's Spiritual Energy and Laughter, as well as Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth; and Salih al-Shammaʿ, the author of texts on childhood language and on the semantics of Qurʾanic ethics, later a professor of psychology and head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Baghdad.
Yusuf Murad (1902–66), then, founded a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences in Egypt and the Arab world, best thought of as part of a shared Arab intellectual heritage of blending traditions, of which Murad represented the consummate “philosopher of integration.”Footnote 5 Training a generation of thinkers who then went on to become literary critics, translators, university professors, and mental health professionals in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, he left a wide imprint on psychology, philosophy, and the wider academic field of the humanities and the social sciences. Indeed, as one of his former students, Farag ʿAbd al-Qadir Taha, noted, Murad's imprint on psychology in Egypt was thought to be so great that the majority of Egyptian professors of psychology had studied under him either directly or indirectly through his textbook, a popular handbook of psychology published in 1948 that went through at least seven editions.Footnote 6
Murad was himself well versed in the traditions of experimental psychology as well as in European psychoanalytic and neo-psychoanalytic approaches. Born in Cairo, he studied philosophy at Fuʾad I University (later Cairo University), graduating in 1930 and traveling to France, where he received his doctorate in psychology in 1940 from the Sorbonne.Footnote 7 Upon his return, he taught psychology in the Philosophy Department at Cairo University, and was the first to do so in Arabic, eventually becoming chair of the Philosophy Department between 1953 and 1957.Footnote 8 Murad, along with his colleague Mustafa Ziywar, a psychoanalyst who had trained in philosophy, psychology, and medicine in France in the 1930s, founded the Jamaʿat ʿIlm al-Nafs al-Takamuli (Society for Integrative Psychology) and the Egyptian Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs (Journal of Psychology) in 1945, and supervised the translation and publication of numerous psychology publications.Footnote 9Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, the first psychology journal published in Egypt and the Arab world, was illustrative of the emerging disciplinary space of psychology in Egypt in the 1940s; it was understood as a science of selfhood and the soul (ʿilm al-nafs) rather than delimited as the empirical study of mental processes.Footnote 10 The journal, which ran from 1945 to 1953, served as a wide-ranging platform for academic psychology, and was meant to serve as a bridge between the psychological sciences and philosophy, while introducing its audience to the major concepts of psychoanalysis and psychology.
Although the journal was crucial in the dissemination of psychoanalytic knowledge to a scholarly community, the “unconscious” in Egyptian public intellectual thought was, by 1945, taken for granted. Notions of the unconscious had seeped into Arabic writings, albeit in an imprecise and lay fashion, since at least as far back as the late 1920s through a myriad of sources, including Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung.Footnote 11 Salama Musa had referred to the unconscious by the somewhat awkward compound phrase al-ʿaql al-batin (inner mind), which he had to define extensively for his audience, in a 1928 text.Footnote 12 Yet the imprint of Freudian psychology was becoming increasingly visible in the 1930s and 1940s in the focus on unconscious sexual impulses, as synopses and translations of Freud began to appear.Footnote 13 For example, a 1938 article in al-Hilal noted that a generational shift had taken place and that Egyptian youth were avidly reading Freud and were familiar with his ideas on the unconscious, the interpretation of dreams, psychoanalysis, and the sexual instincts.Footnote 14 By the mid-1940s a burgeoning popular literature on psychology was so well developed that scholars felt compelled to critique the unscientific literature “drowning the marketplace”—a testament to the increased salience of psychology to popular public discourse.Footnote 15 And by 1951 Kamal al-Din ʿAbd al-Hamid Nayal, a secondary-school philosophy teacher, proposed prenuptial psychological exams in order to prevent unhappy marriages due to unresolved Oedipal complexes.Footnote 16
Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, however, presented to its academic readers a rich and scholarly understanding of psychoanalysis, drawing on the entire corpus of Freud's work, which many had read in English, and to a lesser extent French. Beyond that, authors integrated a multitude of diverse conduits of psychoanalytic thought, from the United Kingdom (John Flügel, Ian Suttie, James Wisdom), France and Switzerland (Daniel Lagache, Henri Wallon, Charles Odier), and Hungary (Sándor Ferenczi, Franz Alexander). Yet, in so doing, psychoanalysis in Egypt emerged as “not simply a derivative exercise,” but rather “a reflexive process of appropriation.”Footnote 17
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ISLAM: A TALE OF MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING?
In his Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor discusses the shift that occurred in the moral topography of modern selfhood in the early modern West.Footnote 18 In particular, he locates the emergence of a space of moral interiority characterized by a language of inwardness, and separated from the divine, with the thought of Descartes. Post-Cartesian thought, he argues, located the sources of the self within humans, rather than in relation to a path towards the divine. Revisiting the Western European archive of selfhood, Jerrold Seigel departs from Taylor's account, which, he argues, overemphasizes the punctual and disengaged nature of selfhood as a “rejection of moral sources exterior to human existence (the original sin of modernity, in Taylor's story).”Footnote 19 Rather than speak of modern selfhood in the singular, Seigel's more capacious conception of selfhood allows for variation and vicissitude, to include those, for instance, who were animated by a “desire to preserve a connection with the very premodern conceptions of a transcendent universe able to guarantee the harmony between self and world whose decline Taylor laments.”Footnote 20 Moreover, Seigel departs from views that “regard the notion of an individual and subjectively grounded selfhood as peculiarly Western and modern.”Footnote 21
This more nuanced and expansive understanding of the history of modern selfhood helps us unsettle binary assumptions between Western and non-Western selfhood, assumptions that have been usefully undone by a growing body of literature on the globalization of the unconscious that has placed European and non-European selfhood within a single analytic lens. Thus Ranjana Khanna has introduced the notion of “worlding” psychoanalysis, arguing that “understanding psychoanalysis ethnographically involves analyzing its use, both by Europeans and by the colonized,” thereby “provincializing a language that presented itself as universal.”Footnote 22 Shruti Kapila has investigated “Freud and his Indian friends,” demonstrating how psychoanalytic knowledge was challenged and reappropriated in the context of colonial India, particularly with respect to religion, which was placed within a normative rather than pathological domain.Footnote 23 Similarly, Christiane Hartnack has detailed Girindrasekhar Bose and the Indian Psychoanalytic Society's integration of classical Hindu texts and popular cultural traditions into their psychoanalytic theory, while Mariano Ben Plotkin has traced the emergence of a psychoanalytic culture in Argentina and its institutional dissemination throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 24 Such reformulations of the global modern subject have refused to see the emphasis on the divine, for example, within non-European models of selfhood as atavistic remnants to be worn away by modernity and secularization. They have thus belied the implicit, albeit unsayable, of European psychoanalysis, “the impossible achievement of selfhood for the colonized, who remain primitive and concealed.”Footnote 25
This essay concerns itself with how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt, invoking Freud as a touchstone or metonym for broader Arabic debates surrounding the status of the unconscious in psychic life. I offer, then, not a literal history of Freud in Egypt, but rather a history of ideas and debates spawned by Freudianism as a multivalent tradition. This project is, therefore, distinct from that of analysts writing about the problematic of psychoanalysis and Islam, such as Fethi Benslama, whose writings have been motivated by and large by a concern for political Islamism as a return of the repressed.Footnote 26 In seeking to explore the psychic reasons for an alleged Islamic resistance to psychoanalysis, such thinkers have proffered explanations of an Arab culture “dominated by the figure of the persecuting Master outside its ranks and the paternal Master within them.”Footnote 27 Even when such explanations purport to be historical, they fail to take into account the specific history through which “Islam” and “psychoanalysis” became iconic signifiers representing allegedly distinct civilizations and political positions. Such debates reduce theoretical models to political signifiers largely evacuated of meaning (a “Western self” signified by psychoanalysis and an “Eastern self” signified by Islam).
In stark contrast to Benslama's “tale of mutual ignorance” between Islam and psychoanalysis, I trace a tale of interconnected webs of knowledge production between the Arab world and Europe. Analyzing the dense interdiscursive network that constituted the field of psychological inquiry in postwar Egypt, I explore historical interactions and hybridizations, between and within traditions of psychological inquiry. Moving away from binary models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, autonomous or heteronomous, I examine the points of condensation and divergence, and the epistemological resonances that psychoanalytic writings had in postwar Egypt. In so doing, I eschew an interpretation that would view psychoanalysis as yet another technology of the late colonial state or of anticolonialism, or as epiphenomenal to larger political developments.
I explore the coproduction of psychoanalytic knowledge, across Egyptian and European knowledge formations, through the concept of the point de capiton. For Lacan, quilting points are signifiers around which dense webs of meanings converge, thereby providing ideological cohesion to discursive formations.Footnote 28 In what follows, I draw attention to a number of quilting points that sutured the discursive field of psychology and psychoanalysis in mid-century Egypt. Such points de capiton were, quite tellingly, terms or concepts that were pregnant with epistemological resonances drawn from nonpsychological and prepsychoanalytic discursive formations, such as from Ibn ʿArabi's metaphysics or Aristotelian philosophy. I focus on a number of concepts: integration and unity as central both to the self and to knowledge formations (wihdat-al-nafs, wihdat ʿilm al-nafs, or ʿilm al-nafs al-takamuli), insight and intuition (firasa and kashf) as a mode of knowledge production distinct from positivist or empirical epistemology, and the socius or community of/in the other (al-nahnu, al-akhir). The coproduction of psychoanalytic knowledge, itself an ethical encounter with the other (an écoute) thus definitively demonstrates the outmoded nature of historical models that presuppose originals and bad copies of the global modern subject—herself so constitutively defined by the presence of the unconscious.
THE INTEGRATIVE SUBJECT
Yusuf Murad's corpus embodied an approach he termed integrative psychology, which presented the self not solely as a body, or a psyche, or even a psyche added to a body; but rather as wihda nafsiyya, jismiyya, ijtimaʿiyya, the unity of psychic, bodily, and societal aspects.Footnote 29 Murad's integrative psychology both constituted, and was constituted by, the larger sociopolitical context within which it was embedded, namely Egypt's emergent postcoloniality. If, as Jan Goldstein has demonstrated, Victor Cousin provided a postrevolutionary psychology and pedagogy that enabled the production and reproduction of bourgeois subjectivity in nineteenth-century France,Footnote 30 then Murad provided the contours for what we might term a postcolonial subjectivity for twentieth-century Egypt.
Murad's integrative curriculum was part of a larger intellectual context that spanned French philosophical and empirical psychology, psychoanalysis, Aristotelian philosophy, and medieval and modern Arabic thought. Murad's integrative subject was clearly not the disintegrative subject of postwar Lacanian psychoanalysis, nor was it the instrumentalist subject of American ego-psychology.Footnote 31 Indeed, rather than the ego, the key term of reference for Murad and his cohort was the Arabic term nafs (soul, spirit, âme), a term etymologically imbued with a primordial divinity.Footnote 32 In particular, the emphasis on integration can be seen, at least partly, as a response to the events of World War II in the postcolonial context, which arguably led to vastly differing notions of selfhood in the former colonies. Thus, in contrast to the decentered self that was the product of France's interwar cultural crisis and was embodied in the Lacanian notion of split subjectivity, Murad's integrative subject was an agent of synthesis and adaptation.Footnote 33
In another Middle Eastern context, Stefania Pandolfo has detailed the emergent locus of subjectivity under the shadow of colonialism as situated within an interstitial zone, both a limit and an entre-deux. The modern postcolonial subject emerged in the aftermath of the trauma of colonization, to quote Moroccan novelist Driss Chraibi as an “arabe habillé en français”; indeed, the interstitial zone where encounter became possible (between East and West, past and present, modernity and tradition) was also the space of subjectivity.Footnote 34 Murad's integrative subject was thus dialogically constituted across the space of social and cultural difference, and embodied translations and borrowings from Europe, while maintaining an irreducible heterogeneity from the emphasis on the dissolution of the self in postwar French philosophy. In so doing, Murad theorized a new relationship with temporality, progress, and the social body, which I discuss in turn.
At a lecture delivered at the Dar al-Salam Center in Cairo in December of 1946, Murad discussed the psychological foundations of social integration.Footnote 35 Murad's notion of biopsychosocial integration was embedded in a complex notion of the temporality of the psychological subject and a rejection of monocausality. Thus biological, psychological, and social factors were to be considered in terms not of a superimposition, “but of mutual penetration on a convergent concourse of these three factors.”Footnote 36 By “social” Murad referred to the social order and the individual's integration within the community, and, more fundamentally, the order of language in the socius; “psychological” referred to memory and consciousness; and “biological” to the nervous and circulatory systems. Each level, he noted, operated according to different laws, but taken together functioned, ideally, harmoniously.
Criticizing conventional classifications that categorized human psychology in terms of affect, cognition, and behavior, as static and artificial in character, Murad argued that from an integrative perspective an emphasis on movement—whether generative or degenerative—was essential.Footnote 37 Stated differently, an integral perspective was eminently genealogical and connective—concerned with the past and present biopsychosocial development of man as brought to bear on his future orientation. Further, rather than a linear temporal conception of human personality or social progress, Murad's conception was helicoidal (fr. hélicöidal), an ascending spiral or corkscrew temporal movement that he referred to as haraka lawlabiyya.Footnote 38 That is to say, that personality involved, like lived time, “partial regressions in the course of the process of maturation, thereby preparing for new progress and a new differentiated level of emergence.”Footnote 39 Thus even radically opposing and contradictory tendencies could be integrated into a psychosocial personality. Movement, contradiction, and struggle, rather than stasis and stability, were at the heart of his conceptualization of human personality.
Murad's conception of temporality as radically heterogeneous yet holistic was reminiscent of Bergson's notion of duration, with which Murad would certainly have been familiar. Several of Murad's students, Mustafa Suwayf, Murad Wahba, and Sami al-Durubi most notably, had written extensively on or translated Bergson's works.Footnote 40 Bergson provided what Suzanne Guerlac refers to as a “dynamic ontology of irreversible time.”Footnote 41 Temporality as conceptualized by Bergson was dynamic and synthetic, embodying qualitative progress and a radical heterogeneity.Footnote 42 For Murad, the past was significant, of course, not in terms of a mere repetition of the same,Footnote 43 however, but rather in the way in which the repetition of the past was experienced in the present bearing its future orientation in mind.Footnote 44
This noncontinuous view of psychic history as marked by the lack of a simple linear progressive evolution was, of course, itself partially derived from psychoanalysis. As Murad noted, psychic development was neither linear nor cyclical, but rather involved partial regressions and latencies. That is to say, in the course of the process of maturation, a new differentiated and complex level of psychic development arose out of the preservation of a previous stage, or, to use Murad's turn of phrase, each level of psychic development emerged “because of and in spite of” the previous level of development.Footnote 45 This radical critique of unilinear progressive temporality is thus itself nestled within the Freudian status of the event. Progressive time is continuously disrupted by the time of repetition and the structure of delay (Nachträglichkeit).Footnote 46 The temporalization of psychic reality was thus distinct from Hegelian teleology, while other elements of Bergsonian idealism remained in Murad's conceptualization of integration, most notably in the idea of psychic integration and social holism. Suffice it to say that the operations of mental syntheses, or the interpenetration of multiple states of consciousness, resulted in an organic whole, one that Murad referenced as biopsychosocial integration—“realized most perfectly in the voluntary act or act of will.”Footnote 47
Admittedly, integration within the social body would be polymorphous due to the multiplicity of social situations within which the individual was immersed. Social integration, according to Murad, attempted to bridge differences while realizing the unity of goals and the harmony of means, “a community of ends” which thus excluded total domination and exaggerated particularism, blind obstinacy, aggression, and servitude.Footnote 48 What I term Murad's “pastoral optimism,” namely the possibility of social integration, was rooted in a rejection of Freud's discussions in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents.Footnote 49 According to Freud, Murad argued, true integration was impossible, as the fundamental variable in all social conduct was aggression, a mask for frustration. The role of fear and guilt in the relations between individuals and nations would lead one to conclude that civilization contained the seeds of its own destruction, and that the final word rested with the death instinct.
In contrast to this philosophical pessimism, Murad juxtaposed the ideas of other psychoanalysts, such as Ian Suttie, Karen Horney, and Ranyard West.Footnote 50 For Suttie, love is given in its total capacity, and constitutes the premier resort of social conduct; it is the contingencies of milieu that give rise to the diverse emotions and sentiments that divide humanity. Suttie's ideas functioned for Murad as a counterpoint to Freud. Further, the analytic experiences of Horney and West, he noted, justified this optimism, with the social instinct geared toward the mitigation of aggression. But if social integration were possible, the means of its realization remained to be found. Murad was particularly concerned with what he termed the “bedrock of collective life,” which could only be sought by overcoming fear, and allowing the discovery of the common goal that transcends individuals and nations to live in the community of the other, without subjecting them to the will of the other. The integrative curriculum was thus one that embraced sociopolitical optimism and a dynamic temporal coefficient of movement; it critiqued egocentricity, and put forth the self in the community of the other as a model for social integration and cohesion, thereby envisioning a harmonious totality whose intersubjective nature was suited to the imagined postcolonial polity to come.
UNITY AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL SELF
What were the intellectual wellsprings of Murad's philosophy? Indeed, conceptually it can be argued that the overarching concept, the quilting point, both in the integrative curriculum and in Murad's conceptualization of the significance of psychoanalysis, was the notion of wihda or unity. What was the overarching significance of wihda? 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 perception of objects and in the synthesis of experience. There was, however, another older reference point for unity, namely the writings of Ibn ʿArabi that Murad had actively relied upon during his doctoral research in the 1930s. For Ibn ʿArabi unity was “the Lord's gift to mankind.”Footnote 51 Threaded throughout his work, and in particular his treatise on Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, which Murad had consulted in manuscript form in Europe, was the idea that “division is incidental, unity is principal,” a unity created from the apparent multiplicity of man.Footnote 52 Ibn ʿArabi elaborated on the metaphysical aspects of unity:
The unity of essence is the concept that there is only one existence, one cause—inconceivable, unknowable, yet responsible for the existence of all and everything. The quality, the characters, the attributes, the identity of all and everything are the manifestation of this one cause . . .
Everything is from God, and yet is not God. He is before the before and after the after He is the outer and the inner, the visible and the invisible. His outward manifestation is the unity of everything, and still He is hidden in his Oneness.Footnote 53
Arguably, Murad's interest in Ibn ʿArabi was rooted in an intense personal spirituality, and an abiding interest in Islamo-Christian metaphysics that had led him to believe in the underlying spiritual unity of all religious traditions.Footnote 54
Yet clearly Murad's emphasis on unity was not derived solely from the holism of Ibn ʿArabi. Murad's training at the Sorbonne had entailed a blend of academic philosophy and empirical psychology, most notably through the writings of Ribot, Janet, Wallon, and Piéron.Footnote 55 The reigning paradigm in experimental psychology at the time of his studies was Gestalttheorie or psychologie de la forme, imparted through “the exceptional personality” of his dynamic adviser Paul Guillaume.Footnote 56Gestalttheorie had maintained an organismic view of experience, and is most famously known for the idea that the whole constitutes more than the sum of its parts:
Taken together, the fundamental theses of Gestalttheorie are an expression of that systematic view which regards experience as an organic whole or, at least, as made up of organic wholes . . . Wholes, and—if Gestalttheorie goes all the way with absolute idealism—ultimately the single whole which constitutes the total system of reality, are not mere collections of parts, but are organized in such a way that their parts necessarily derive their natures from the relations in which they stand.Footnote 57
While holism is thus clearly fundamental to Gestalttheorie, in point of fact, their emphasis was on empirical experiments and demonstrations, rather than on the elucidation of a general philosophical structure.Footnote 58 But some have argued that gestaltists, adamant in their critique of atomism, shared elements of idealism and monism, particularly in their account of experience as a single systemic whole or in Guillaume's discussion of the inherent order of experience.Footnote 59 Murad's emphasis on the fundamental unity of the self and its integrative nature, as well as his refusal to abstract selfhood from society or biology, was in keeping with Gestalttheorie, but he departed from Gestalttheorie in his overarching philosophical concerns, which, as will soon be clear, were of an idealist nature. It would be a mistake, then, to conclude that his research was dominated by concerns of an empirical sort.
Bearing in mind the diversity of his influences we could say that Murad's general orientation towards psychology was thus in keeping with larger trends within the French academy, namely the enduring impact of eclectic spiritualism. Eclectic spiritualism, founded by Victor Cousin, combined eclecticism (the preservation of what was best in any philosophical doctrine, or what John I. Brooks refers to as a bricolage), spiritualism (the recognition of a thinking substance, a notion of the moral sciences—ethical and spiritual), and scientism (the science of observation), and was emblematic of the French philosophical tradition in the human sciences.Footnote 60 Brooks has examined the relation between academic philosophy and scientific psychology, demonstrating strong interconnections between the two in the early Third Republic, through figures such as Ribot, Janet, and Durkheim, although the two disciplines had begun to diverge by 1914.Footnote 61 Simply put, the importance of academic philosophy to the human sciences thus created a philosophical discourse that included empirical psychology. Murad very much embodied this tradition of combining academic philosophy and psychology, and in the Egyptian postwar context where the territorial division of the human sciences within the academy had not yet solidified, there was no reason to keep the two fields separate.Footnote 62 In fact, Murad had founded the Association of Philosophy Graduates in 1947 with himself as president, and devoted a substantial part of Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs to publishing philosophical works.
THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE ANALYTIC STRUCTURE
The disciplinary divide between psychology and philosophy was not as pronounced in postwar Egypt as it was elsewhere, and epistemological questions in the production of psychological knowledge were of great importance to the founding figures of psychology. In fact, Yusuf Murad directly addressed the question of psychoanalytic epistemology in a series of articles, dividing knowledge between deduction or analogical reasoning (istinbat) and conjecture or intuition (al-hads). Characterizing psychology as a branch of metaphysics concerned with the question of the human self, he posited intuition as a direct window into the substance of the self (nafs).Footnote 63
Murad outlined three possible modalities for conceptualizing psychological inquiry and, by extension, the structure of analytic experience: introspection, positivism, and phenomenology, each of which emerged dialectically from the critique of the other. Overviewing introspection, or what he termed “psychology in the first person,” he noted that its status as a means for direct knowledge of the self had been critiqued by Comte, and thus led to the emergence of positivist or experimental psychology (“psychology in the third person”) in the forms of behaviorism and Gestalttheorie, most prominently.Footnote 64 Murad argued that the positivist perspective remained unable to grasp human complexity, viewing selfhood as an object among other material objects.Footnote 65 It could not capture being or thinking, and above all it elided the relationship between the self and the other (or the self and the we), and the way that man knows himself through the other. This critique of positivism thus led to “psychology in the second person,” or phenomenology and existential psychology.Footnote 66 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 one spoken to. It was a journey that began with Freud and Breuer in 1895, and that entailed the analyst and analysand, the intersubjective discourse of the unconscious of both, and the conflicts within the self.Footnote 67 Or, as Lacan noted, in the analytic situation “[t]here are two of us—and not only two.”Footnote 68 Indeed, Lacan argued that the interanalytic situation was best understood as triadic, or a three-term relation (if speech were understood as a central feature). Murad's use of the grammatical first-, second-, and third-person constructions underscores this linguistic component so central to analytic discourse.Footnote 69
Murad thus considered psychoanalysis’ position with respect to the three major forms of psychological inquiry: positivist, phenomenological, and introspective.Footnote 70 Murad's aim was nothing short of demonstrating the way in which psychoanalysis had provided a synthesis of the three epistemologies, and as such demonstrated its unification (tawhid) of psychology itself.Footnote 71 Murad outlined this synthesis by approaching the development of psychoanalysis genealogically, showing how it emerged and transformed itself over time, dialectically working though each of these distinct methods. Murad's portrait of Freudianism emphasized its emergence out of a materialist and positivist framework of physiology, laboratory work, and neurology. He emphasized Freud's enduring interest in the reciprocal causality of biological and psychological factors, his insights from anatomy and philosophy, leading to his view of man as a total unity (al-insan ka wihda kamila). This exposition was levied at those who accused psychoanalysis of being drawn from the “fabric of dreams” (nasij al-khayyal). Above all, he emphasized how psychoanalysis began as an experimental treatment for psychopathological phenomena before becoming a general theory of psychic phenomena and personality.Footnote 72
Freud's “Copernican revolution,” however, lay in the discovery of the unconscious, of that which is not available to consciousness (ghayr mashuʿur, al-amr al-majhul).Footnote 73 Through his research into abnormal phenomena, whether of abnormal individuals or abnormal or subnormal activity in normal individuals (such as dreams, forgetting, slips of the tongue), the unconscious could be accessed. According to Murad, the Interpretation of Dreams was Freud's most important work, and it demonstrated the workings of the unconscious and of all of the major defense mechanisms. It represented his abandonment of hypnotherapy for free association, dream interpretation, and a more dynamic conception of the unconscious. Further, Freud originally conceptualized the unconscious as dominated by two drives: sexual and self-preservative. Later, after World War I, the exigencies of life and death led Freud to shift his emphasis from sexual factors to social antagonisms and aggression. Murad thus posited the psychoanalytic study of the formation of personality as a dynamic and comprehensive view that integrated three trends: biological, civilizational, and psychological.Footnote 74
It was, however, in the analytic experience itself that the shortcomings of other methods and the advantages of psychoanalysis became clear. Introspection, Murad noted, was required for the recollection of memories and the description of feelings. The use of language by the analysand would not only exceed description passing into interpretation by necessity, but would also be insufficient. Indeed, the individual's knowledge of himself would be influenced by various unconscious factors, most notably the presence of the other within the unconscious, leading to a variety of defense mechanisms. In sum, introspection or self-analysis was impossible in practice.Footnote 75 Murad went further by drawing on his own clinical experience. Introspection, he pointed out, most often became an impediment to analysis, which needed to rely on a less willful, more free-flowing discourse characterized by less organization, preparation, and critique. The analyst must lessen the justificatory introspection of the analysand. He noted the difficulty in his own practice, of moving patients away from an enumerative litany of negative experiences stored in memory, toward experiencing them in the clinical situation, which would function as a proxy for childhood experience.Footnote 76
Turning to phenomenology, which at first glance appeared to be closest to the psychoanalytic school, Murad asked to what extent could the analyst apply self-knowledge to his patient? Stated differently, to what degree was there an identification between the analyst and the analysand, given the fact that the distinctiveness of psychology itself rested on the similarity between the observer and observed. Identification, however, could not signify a unity of the two persons, which would lead to a loss of all therapeutic value. Simply put, it is not possible to say in the session, “I am you, and you are me.”Footnote 77 In fact, the question of identification led Murad directly into a discussion of transference, one of the greatest resistances encountered in therapy, which he argued distinguished psychoanalysis from second-person psychology. Transference enabled the transformation from phenomenology to a third-person position, without eliminating the other two approaches. The shift that occurred in the analytic experience from imagined experiences to lived experiences enabled transference and other experiences that phenomenology could not account for.Footnote 78 The analyst, Murad noted, must remember that the patient lies to himself and his analyst from a place that he knows not (min haythu la yadri) even when he tries to be as authentic as possible.
Murad thus anticipated Ricoeur's juxtaposition between phenomenology and psychoanalysis by over a decade, in which he argued that the analytic method was unique in its emphasis on technique and the fact that analytic experience unfolds in the realm of speech.Footnote 79 Indeed, the primacy of technique over interpretation left analysis radically distinct from phenomenology. It was in the Durcharbeiten, the working through of the analytic situation as an intersubjective technique that encompassed the analytic encounter itself, as well as past dramas as they unfold within it (resistance, transference, repetition), that insight was attained, as well as through the practice of the frustration of transference love.Footnote 80 For Murad, the analyst must then embody several roles at once: that of a researcher collecting evidence, contemplating possible interpretations of the collected materials, subjecting them to verification during analysis; that of a screen onto which the analysand projects his experiences, complexes, and problems; and that of a caregiver who represents the reality principle against the pleasure principle, the cause of new deprivations and sustenance.Footnote 81 Murad envisioned the analytic situation as one in which the individual's psychic energy could be freed from repetition, enabling a renewed psychic energy, eventually leading to integration. “Thus we see the analyst in the position of the scientist who deals with his patient as an interpretative bloc in the web of a total situation that envelops the patient, his environment, and his analyst in a single instance.”Footnote 82
If the previous discussions have seemed, in a certain sense, to be too similar to the letter and spirit of European psychology, it is in the discussion of specific modalities of understanding that Murad exemplifies the points of contact, and the epistemological resonances with earlier pre-analytic traditions. We turn now to a discussion of the significance of insight and intuition in psychological understandings as an epistemological mode that exceeded the limitations of psychoanalysis and other epistemological formations.
INSIGHT: PHYSIOGNOMY AND HERMENEUTICS
Yusuf Murad's thesis on Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209), an annotated translation of Kitab al-Firasa (The Book of Physiognomy), was intended to be of interest not only to orientalists, but also to historians of science as part of a larger series of translated Arabic medico-psychological texts.Footnote 83 Murad's interest in al-Razi was part of his concern for the recuperation of the Arabic tradition as part and parcel of the history of the human sciences, and was also evident in his translations of psychological terminology, in which he consistently chose terms that had resonances in an earlier Arabic literature.Footnote 84 Murad's choice of physiognomy as a vehicle for the communication of Arab science to a Western audience may appear a strange one to modern sensibilities. Physiognomy, however, enabled him to trace Greek influence and the significance of Arab culture in scientific traditions, as well as to locate numerous points of convergence between the newer psychological sciences and the medieval Arab scientific art of firasa.Footnote 85Al-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.Footnote 86 The text, widely attributed to Aristotle in the medieval Arab world, although of dubious authenticity, was constructed as an epistolary book of advice to Alexander, a compendium of useful knowledge. Philosophically the text illuminated the strength of the Greek tradition in Arabic. The first printed edition was edited in 1954 by ʿAbd al-Rahman Badawi, a philosopher who was a student of Alexandre Koyré at Fuʾad I University and one of the main transmitters of the existential tradition into Arabic, most notably through Heidegger.Footnote 87
Considered a conjectural science and often disputed—al-Ghazali considered it a natural science while Ibn Rushd (Averroës) thought it closer to the divinatory or occult sciences—physiognomy was so widely practiced in the high Middle Ages that Hanbalis used it juridically to determine culpability, and al-Shafiʿi was reputed to have practiced it.Footnote 88Sirr al-asrar asserted the veracity of physiognomy and was transmitted through numerous writers, including the medieval Sufi master Ibn ʿArabi.Footnote 89 In its mystical translation by Ibn ʿArabi, al-firasa undergoes something of an alchemic transformation, which Murad argued was among the most original and productive forms of thought on physiognomy.Footnote 90
According to Ibn ʿArabi there were two forms of firasa: natural firasa and divine firasa, the latter a divinatory power that God granted to saints and mystics. 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.Footnote 91 Divine or spiritual insight was like a divine light that illuminated the conscience of the believer and was therefore infallible; with it one could judge the hearts and souls of men. Al-Qushayri (d. 1072) recounted al-firasa or spiritual insight as etymologically related to the prey of a wild animal, and, like prey, the human heart cannot oppose the flashes of insight that strike it no matter how hard it tries.Footnote 92 In the words of Ibn ʿArabi:
Know that insight is a light shed by the divine light, with which the faithful find their way to reach salvation. That light also makes visible all that there is to see in the material world. If we could see the real realities, they would become signs and proofs of the existence of the Creator, and teach us divine wisdom.
The natural, inborn, human insight enables us to identify and isolate these realities, one by one, while the insight taught by religion sees all as a whole, because religion has come upon us as a divine order and mercy from the one and unique God . . .Footnote 93
Indeed, Ibn ʿArabi argued that natural insights based on intellectual operations such as associations, theories, past experience, and logic were “but veils which can only be lifted by true spiritual insight.”Footnote 94
Murad's interest in Ibn ʿArabi was echoed in some of the precepts of one of his early and enduring interests in Gestalttheorie. For Murad Gestalttheorie had introduced form and structure into empirical psychology, and was nothing short of a study of human spirit that offered the possibility of reconstructing psychic life in its totality and dynamism. Following Koffka, he noted that if we were to abandon our scientific attitudes and join poets and artists (and mystics, he added), we would strengthen our perception of the world.Footnote 95 Drawing the analogy between Sufism and Gestalttheorie further, Murad analogized Einsicht and firasa as sagacity, intuitive intelligence, and illumination. Firasa was therefore not a pure act of the intellect but a combination of feeling, sentiment, and knowledge.Footnote 96 For Ibn ʿArabi firasa was the interior light that illuminated the spirit much in the same way that vision was the organ of perception for the visual world.Footnote 97
This defense of mystical or philosophical intuition as a valid means of knowing was in many ways analogous to Bergson's attempt to critique neo-Kantian positivism,Footnote 98 and perhaps accounts for his popularity in Arabic writings. Indeed, Bergson is taken by many to be the consummate philosopher of intuition.Footnote 99 And as Guerlac rightly points out, intuition need not be viewed as a symptom of fuzzy thinking or a mere ruse for mysticism, but rather as a vigorous effort of abstraction.Footnote 100 Like the Sufi thinker Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani's discussion of Sufi intuition, Bergsonian intuition also relied on the immediate data of conscious experience, but in a manner which may best be described as pre-linguistic, resisting symbolization absolutely.Footnote 101
In an article on the notion of the unconscious in Bergson, Murad Wahba discussed the significance of Bergson in terms of his critique of materialism, and his rethinking of the relationship between spirit and matter.Footnote 102 Indeed, his reversal of materialism and his emphasis on vitalism, Wahba argued, was a welcome change from the dominance of materialism, as was his precise use of language.Footnote 103 In particular, it was Bergson's emphasis on the use of intuition to understand duration, or the struggle to understand the interiority of exterior signs (batin al-zawahir), that was appreciated and that made the philosopher a psychologist by necessity.Footnote 104 Providing a detailed discussion and comparison of Bergson's notion of duration with Freud's notion of the unconscious, he analogized duration not to the Freudian unconscious, but to the preconscious.Footnote 105 Wahba was not alone in his meditation on the significance of Bergson to psychoanalytic theory, and there were others who engaged Bergsonian thought, particularly as it related to the question of social integration and egocentricity.
THE socius: SELF AND OTHER
A central topic that emerged in mid-twentieth-century psychological discourse was the question of the relation between self and other, and by extension the socius. Egyptian critiques of the egocentricity of psychoanalytic notions of the self led authors to expand on notions of the self in the community of the other. Thus, for example, Mustafa Ismaʿil Suwayf critiqued Bergson's egocentricity.Footnote 106 Suwayf situated Bergson's critique of science and his development of the notion of intuition through an analysis of its sociohistorical context, namely the loss of faith in science and the identification of science with mechanical conceptions. Overviewing his emphasis on intuition over rational thought and his positing of élan vital as the highest principle, Suwayf questioned the psychological bases of social integration in Bergson's thought. He argued that Bergson insisted on egocentricity as man's first and most profound characteristic, namely that we are first individual egos and acquire social egos later, which are superficial and dictated from without (here referencing Bergson's notion of the two selves, one fundamental and the other a social projection). Suwayf took Bergson to be Sartre's forerunner in many respects, and critiqued his social theory for the elevation of stability to its highest principle, its dichotomous view of relations between the individual and his social environment, its absence of any dialectical conception, and, ultimately, despite its vitalism, its lapse into mechanism.
Tellingly, Egyptian writers preferred thinkers who lauded the collective nature of selfhood, such as the Marxist psychologist Henri Wallon and the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, to those who championed an ontological egocentricity. 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. Prior to Wallon, work in child psychology had emphasized the primordial constitution of an “I” prior to the child's acknowledgment of the other. The wildly popular work of Jean Piaget was, of course, exemplary in that respect. Wallon, by contrast, contested the view of the child's self-generated autotelic 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.Footnote 107
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 ʿIlm 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.”Footnote 108 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:Footnote 109
The ego as it seeks to particularize itself, cannot avoid treating society as opposed to it in the shape of a primitive and larval socius—to use Pierre Janet's term, the individual, when he apprehends himself as such, is social in his essence. He is social not as a result of external contingencies, but by virtue of an internal necessity, by virtue of his genesis. The socius, or other, is the ego's constant partner in mental life . . . The relations between the ego and its indispensable complement—the internal other [autre intime, al-akhir al-khafi]—can thus be used to explain or identify basic states or complexes of consciousness ranging from the normal to the pathological. In this way the normal development of personal consciousness in the child can be seen in its connections with the entire range of attitudes making the human being in his innermost essence a social being.Footnote 110
The dialectic of self and other thus resembled the Hegelian dialectic, but emphasized reciprocity rather than the dialectic of mastery and submission. In a similar vein, numerous authors in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs approached the question of self-consciousness as a problem of self and other.
Zakariyya Ibrahim, discussing the problem of consciousness, argued that Descartes and other philosophers had incorrectly elevated self-consciousness to a primary state. In fact social life, he argued, facilitated self-consciousness. We experience ourselves in the mirror of others. Thus, he noted, self-consciousness was belated in psychological life; and cogito was not a primary state.Footnote 111 Above all, however, it was in his engagement with Sartre that Ibrahim departed most decisively from the idea of egocentricity as a primary and natural state of man.Footnote 112 Focusing on the gaze, he argued that it embodied “being for the other.” Recapitulating, in essence, Wallon's argument, he noted that for children and parents the gaze establishes the other, or more precisely existence for others, al-wujud li-l-akhirin. Or, stated differently, one cannot have being for self (wujud li-l dhaat) without being for the other (wujud li-l ghayr).
Viewing the gaze as a sociopsychological phenomenon, much like language, Ibrahim thus contested Sartre's notion of the gaze. According to Sartre's exposition in Being and Nothingness, it is through the gaze of the other that one can confirm his external existence as an object, while the other is free to pass judgment upon him—I am thus the object of the other's freedom, which is not my freedom; this objectification, in turn, robs us of our freedom as a subject. “It is in this sense that we can consider ourselves as ‘slaves’ in so far as we appear to the Other.”Footnote 113 Ibrahim critiqued, in particular, Sartre's generalization of shame (which he translated as khajal) as a medium through which the self is created as an object. He argued, instead, for a more contextually specific argument in which the other shapes us even when not present, in other words as possible presence. In particular, he noted that the gaze of the other does not in all cases reduce one to the status of an object, as for example in the case of love, a sentiment which, he observed, presented extreme analytic difficulty for Sartre. Indeed, Sartre must reduce love to its most instrumental manifestation (love as seduction) in order to make the case for a relationship of a self with an object, rather than a relationship between two selves. For Ibrahim, “the gaze,” in other words, “signals the deepest sign of humanity.”Footnote 114
The gaze, of course, has numerous intellectual genealogies, of which Sufism provides perhaps one of the most sophisticated and elaborated conceptions. Within Sufism, this differential economy of the gaze exists within an alternative understanding of relations between the lover and the beloved. Analogous to Ibn ʿArabi's distinction between the two types of firasa is the Sufi distinction between basar and basira, or mere eyesight and spiritual insight. Within this latter economy of the gaze, the beloved's form may be imprinted on the very existence of the lover, “that image of the beloved which resides in the innermost recesses of the secret heart.”Footnote 115 What, indeed, could be further from the Sartrean conception of the gaze as the objectification of the other, from his absolute refusal, in the words of Martin Jay, “to posit a redemptive notion of the visual”?Footnote 116
CONCLUSION
Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs and the debates contained within it represented, in part, the attempt to develop an integrative science of self and psyche. According to leading literary critic Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim, Yusuf Murad influenced a generation of thinkers in philosophy, literature, and psychology through his integrative curriculum, which sought nothing less than the exploration of “the secrets of the human soul.” Rather than a view of individuals as atomistic units, mono-causally determined by biological, sociological, or psychic factors, Murad envisioned the nafs as an assemblage of overdetermined factors that functioned, ideally, within a unified totality whose boundaries were porous both to the outside world and to the discourse of the other. This porousness of the self to the other was embodied in the coproduction of psychological knowledge across European and Arab knowledge formations, sutured through quilting points drawn largely from pre-psychoanalytic discursive formations. Thus may we better understand Murad's predilection for the dynamism of psychoanalysis, the holism of Gestalttheorie, and the eclectic spiritualism of Janet and Cousin, echoed in the philosophy of Ibn ʿArabi, all of which lent itself to his reading of personhood best conceived of as a multiplicity in unity.
Above all, for Murad, the psyche was forged in the vortices of the social body. Devoting considerable attention to the socius, the social element introjected into the self since childhood in an unconscious fashion, he espoused a view of community without subjection or domination in his integrative conception of selfhood. In his own writings, Murad's pastoral optimism was geared towards the achievement of psychic integration. Yet, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it would also provide a structure for the integration of psychology into the governance of everyday life and labor. Indeed, the young Free Officers who led Egypt's 1952 revolution readily absorbed Murad's integrative psychological theory. Murad had presented a series of lectures to the Higher Military Academy beginning in December of 1946 on topics such as the importance of applied psychology, the use of psychological testing in the selection of army officers and pilots, perception and military camouflage, and psychology and international law. So inspired were the young Officers that they enlisted his services immediately following the revolution, in August and September of 1952, in order to introduce psychological and intelligence testing into the military, and to create psychological clinics alongside medical clinics.Footnote 117
It is easy to understand why the Free Officers might have found Murad's theories appealing, beyond the “belief that psychological theory could be pressed into the service of sociopolitical engineering.”Footnote 118 After all, in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution the regime strongly identified itself with the language of science and scientific rational planning, and relied increasingly on the armature of social-scientific expertise for the formulation and implementation of its major schemes, such as land reclamation.Footnote 119 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.Footnote 120
In sum, the Free Officers lifted the language of integration, harnessing the psychic to the cause of building productive, national, and socialist citizens while discarding and disarticulating other elements of Murad's integrative psychology, most notably the revival of hermeneutics, and the critique of the instrumental rationality, positivism, and progressivism that characterized the late colonial and postcolonial state. The tensions between a postcolonial political program whose singular goal lay in the creation of a national subject, on the one hand, and the radical critique of the present and of the subject offered by psychoanalysis and philosophy, on the other, would become clearer over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. While Murad himself would increasingly distance himself both from the regime itself, and from the language of socialist realism, these tensions were embodied in the intellectual trajectory of some of his students. For example, Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim, as Yoav Di-Capua and others have detailed, would become one of the main literary proponents of existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of engagement (iltizam), recast in terms of the committed Marxist intellectual in opposition to colonialism, the postcolonial regime, and the literary old guard.Footnote 121 Yet al-ʿAlim's appropriation and dissemination of the figure of the committed leftist intellectual who stood in an antagonistic relationship to the state increasingly “came to mirror the authoritarianism and didacticism of the regime's political discourse” and quickly turned into a “critical ‘terrorism’” of a Stalinist sort.Footnote 122
Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim's dogmatic take on existentialism as part of an arsenal in the fight against colonialism and the oppressive elements of the postcolonial state was a far cry from the nuanced discussions of Sartre as they had appeared just a few years earlier in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. Thus Najib Baladi's thoughtful 1949 essay on “Freedom and the Past” analyzed the dense metaphysical and ethical questions posed by Sartrean existentialism, concluding that existentialism took anguish (angoisse, hasr, angst, anxiety) as a sign of individual liberty, while simultaneously cutting off the individual from the depth of the past as both a lived reality and historicity; it remained, therefore, imprisoned as a symptom of the historical moment it purported to analyze.Footnote 123 This brief juxtaposition, between an existentialism reduced to political commitment, and an existentialism understood as part of a dialogue with the other, is meant to underscore the types of tension that emerged between critical philosophical programs and pragmatic political concerns once intellectual agendas became tethered to postcolonial political programs.
In this essay, I have tried to recover debates that were not centered on the creation of national or socialist citizens, but which sought, rather, to address the formation of the subject as the complex product of unconscious psychic and societal factors. Rather than characterize Murad's intellectual agenda as epiphenomenal to political developments in the Arab world or read postwar Arab intellectual thought as essentially a political allegory for decolonization, I have emphasized instead the substance of Arab intellectual thought. The depth and complexity of Arab engagement with European psychoanalytic discourses was, however, simultaneous with its assertion of an ethical and epistemological heterogeneity embodied in a rejection of the dissolution of the self and of the death drive. The hybridization of psychoanalytic thought with pre-psychoanalytic Arab discursive formations further illustrates that the “Arabic Freud” emerged not as something developed in Europe only to be diffused at its point of application elsewhere, but rather as something elaborated, like psychoanalysis itself, across the space of human difference.
