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In his foreword to gohar homayounpour's engaging, lyrical book, film director Abbas Kiarostami writes, “[i]n the format of a biographical novel, and using psychoanalytic free association, she opens up windows and sheds light onto the darkness of the human soul” (p. xii). That is a succinct summary of a complex book that explores pain across cultures and within vastly different and yet strikingly similar human beings. Homayounpour writes that the book is nothing but her fantasies, acknowledging that we can never write more than our fantasies, more than our subjective point of view.
My response from colleagues I told I was reviewing a book on doing psychoanalysis in Tehran was similar to the reaction Homayounpour often encounters, namely, given our view of Iran as an exceedingly repressive society, Westerners find it hard to imagine that psychoanalysis can function in Iran at all. While explaining that Iranians love to talk and tell stories, Homayounpour shows us the universality of human suffering. She also speaks eloquently about how our fear of our own internal desires