You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
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