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Published online: 3 January 2023
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
It was through the topological shape of a Möbius strip that Lacan came to view two separate elements in a paradoxical relation. Lacan pierced our habitual mode of perceiving physical objects in opposition by demonstrating that it is possible to imagine a surface that is not separated by inner and outer borders. When an object travels on one of its surfaces, it reaches an open passage between two binary realms. Opposites, such as inner-outer, love-hate, and the parts and the whole, are held in essential inseparability. In psychoanalysis, mind and body have been recognised as flowing cohesively in Möbius connectivity (mind-body); but, psychoanalysis struggles to imagine culture and the personal unconscious in an enjoyable paradoxical inseparability. It is therefore interesting to imagine a knot in our thinking to consider a complex dissolvable relation between elements that might be equal in their persuasiveness. A knot collapses the links between opposites into a captivating intertangled non-hierarchical relation.
There was for Lacan an exquisite connection between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary registers, brought together in a Borromean knot. In her book Knot of the Soul, Stephania Pandolfo brings to our knowledge a delicate, vexing and rewarding encounter with a different knot - a fruitful intertanglement of madness, psychoanalysis and Islam. What if we imagine an area, an experience or a question where the grips of these three discourses meet, fuse and become indiscriminate? The knot of the soul (l-‘uqda nafsiyya in Arabic) is also a wound, a place where one’s suffering intertwines with the other. In this brilliant book, Paldolfo turns to Islamic healing to rewrite the subject of madness and psychoanalysis as matter of the soul. The book is a reflection on the development and emergence of psychoanalysis, drawing on an ambit of equally complex and insight