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Gohar Homayounpour's Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning begins with the story of suddenly losing her father and ends with her realizing that she had mourned him when she learned ‘how to really love’ him. In melancholia, she says ‘we hate too much’ (p. 138). Loss frames this wonderful, moving and experimental text. Her journey of mourning her father ends with a story of a dream of her limping, reminding her and her readers that mourning is a voyage in limping, not flying. The author's fragments of time are ‘out of tune’ sequels. In the preface of the Persian Blues, Homayounpour wonders if ‘it is possible to genuinely write anything other than sequels’ (p. x). The book certainly reads like an uncoordinated collection of sequels that transform loss into improvised music. As readers, we are invited to listen, or witness, all that is conjured in free association: be it political events, love of friends, care of patients, or engagements with literature and myth. It does not dwell on her father; instead, a ‘map-less’ and wandering mind shapes her carnivalesque ensemble. Page after page, sequel after sequel, through stories of grief, conflict, beauty, humor and philosophical meanderings, what unfolds is the work of psychoanalysis, illuminating how the psyche refuses the artificial boundaries of self, other, art and culture. There are many reasons that make this book unusual, but what is striking is how it tells an affective story about psychoanalysis itself.
The clinical setting of psychoanalysis requires boundaries to create the conditions for the unconscious to flourish as boundlessly as possible for the work of
DINA GEORGIS is Associate Professor at the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada. Her work is situated in the fields of postcolonial studies and queer theory. She draws on psychoanalytic concepts to think through how expressive cultures are responses to loss and desire. Her book, The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Mid
DINA GEORGIS is Associate Professor at the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada. Her work is situated in the fields of postcolonial studies and queer theory. She draws on psychoanalytic concepts to think through how expressive cultures are responses to loss and desire. Her book, The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Mid