The Haunted Body Politic: Psychoanalysis, War Trauma, and National Identity in Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad

This article offers an applied psychoanalytic reading of Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, examining how the monstrous Whatsitsname embodies collective trauma in post-2003 Iraq. Building on Freud's Moses and Monotheism, the study theorizes the novel as a conceptual laboratory for understanding how societies metabolize violence when symbolic authority collapses. Using a qualitative interpretive methodology grounded in psychoanalytic hermeneutics with structured textual indexing, the analysis develops two interrelated concepts: collective superego failure—the erosion of shared symbolic structures that ordinarily regulate aggression through law and memory—and distributed traumatization—a form of collective psychic life in which unassimilated historical violence circulates across subjects, institutions, and generations without integration into a unified national ego. The novel's stitched, decaying creature materializes Iraq's unresolved founding trauma, transforming Gothic horror into diagnostic allegory. By demonstrating how literary narrative can function as a site for theorizing institutional trauma, the article extends Freud's account of transgenerational transmission into the domain of state failure and contributes to applied psychoanalytic thinking about post-conflict recovery, symbolic repair, and the reconstruction of civic authority.