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The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt by the historian Omnia El Shakry is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the interconnections between Islam and psychoanalysis. El Shakry focuses on the points of commensurability between Islam and psychoanalysis and elucidates a little-known history of psychoanalytic theory and practice in Egypt, primarily during the 1940s and 1950s. El Shakry provides an insightful and careful consideration of “how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt” (p. 1). The introductory chapter (“Psychoanalysis and Islam”) provides a map to the current debates on the interrelationship between psychoanalysis and Islam. Her main goals are to elucidate the psychoanalytic framework that developed in Egypt and to unsettle the commonplace notion that psychoanalysis is incompatible with Islamic thought and culture. El Shakry considers the intersection between Islamic thought and psychoanalysis as something that will enable us “to reconsider that quintessential question of modernity, the question of the self, in a non-European context” (p. 1). The matter of understanding modernity and the constitution of the self is perhaps the pervasive concern of our time.
There is a growing body of literature exploring the interconnections between Islam and psychoanalysis, inevitably with different foci. A broad-brush summary of this work is as follows: Copjec and Jottkandt (2009) edited a special issue of the Lacanian journal S, offering an intriguing collection of articles exploring various aspects of Islam and psychoanalysis. The Lacanian analyst Gohar Homayounpour’s Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (Homayounpour, 2012) is concerned with crossing the commonly perceived divide between human beings from the West and Arab worlds. She elaborates, incisively and tenderly, the suffering of human beings and the pains and losses that all of us have to bear.
Fethi Benslama, however, in Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam (Benslama, 2009), is preoccupie