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Freud once wrote that psychoanalysis does not limit itself to the consulting room but goes outside ‘to the marketplace’ (Freud, 1933, p. 110). In ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ he argues that psychoanalysis is of relevance to the study of religion, art, social order, philology and history (Freud, 1926). While this is an example of his ambitions for psychoanalysis, it is also an indication of the wide range of influences upon psychoanalysis, the catholicity of its metaphors. The sheer vertiginous scale of Freud's sources is dizzying - these are a gift to his reader - but also a reminder that Freud imagined psychoanalysis to be, not a province of psychiatry, but a form of dialogue with persistent human questions. The two books discussed here bear witness to the mobility of psychoanalytic thought. They are concerned with the traces Freud's travels left in his writing, and the ability of his work to travel.
The Psychopolitics of the Oriental Father, by Bülent Somay, is a psychoanalytic interpretation of the political as it is elaborated around the figure of the father/leader. The urgency of his questions allows Somay to make links between psychic, political and economic processes. The focus is on Turkey - Somay discusses the Ottoman Empire, Kemalist Turkey and brings his analysis up to the present. The book begins by challenging the binary between East and West - between Orient and Occident: the first two chapters are titled ‘L'Orient n'existe pas’ and ‘Is the East East and West West?’. These chapters take the reader beyond discussions of western fantasies of the Orient, by showing how the ‘West’ was itself an object of fantasy for those who felt themselves to be outside it, and crucially, that
European cultural, economic and military occupation had changed Oriental history by invalidating the method by which the Orient wrote its history prior to this occupation, and radically transformed Oriental internality by invalidating the old Oriental methods of introspection. In t