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To read Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran is to enter a very personal world, and to encounter the intriguing vision of Gohar Homayounpour, psychoanalyst and professor of psychology at Shahid Beshesti University in Tehran.
The title alone sets up expectations, as it echoes and evokes Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Nafisi (2003). Yet the two books are very different, with the major similarities being the titles of the books, the fact that both authors are
women, and that they both have been educated in the West and are highly accomplished, intellectual, cultured, and deeply thoughtful. Whereas Reading Lolita in Tehran focuses on the forbidden act of teaching Western literature to women in the early days of the overthrow of the Shah and the establishment of an Islamic government in Iran, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran is about what psychoanalysis is about—the hidden, the forbidden, internal conflict and splits, and, ultimately, the road to reconciliation, integration, and authenticity, Professor Homayounpour's personal journey. She lives within the experience of being totally immersed in both Persian and Western culture. Her presentation of her personal journey and her clinical work is deliberately a crazy quilt, a jigsaw puzzle of perceptions and understandings, of puzzlements and challenges—the formal aspects of her writing a fitting and meaningful correlative of her actual experience.
In reviews of two memoirs, published online in the “Reviews” section of the website of the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education (Molofsky, undated), I set forth the premise that the structure of a memoir can replicate certain aspects of the mind's attempt to deal with challenges and conflicts, with the memory of trauma. The voice of the memoirist is of the person who had to come to terms with what we defend against.
Of course, a memoirist like Homayounpour, with her psychoanalytic sophistication and her depth of insight, does not escape her defenses. She faces h