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This short book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, written by Dr. Gohar Homayounpour, a gifted Iranian psychoanalyst who received her psychoanalytic training in Boston, describes the thoughts, memories, and
emotions the author experienced in returning to Tehran after a twenty-year absence. The author calls her book a biographical novel that expresses the pain of rupture and displacement as well as the reimagining of a self. On her return to Iran, Homayounpour felt the need to write a personal history that expressed a search for unconscious phantasies: “These pages are my phantasies and my phantasies alone (not that anybody can get away from doing anything else), where I once again indulge in the challenge of coming face to face with my own unconscious” (p. xvii).
Homayounpour starts her book by questioning the usefulness of some theoretical assumptions about Iranian culture and the concept of national character that can lead, in her view, to stereotypical ideas about the “Other,” in this case the Iranian Other. She warns the reader about the danger of “orientalism,” as conceptualized by Edward Said, when analyzing the psyche of non-Western nations. While acknowledging the role of cultural differences, she wants above all to emphasize the shared human tragedy of suffering and pain across cultures.
Using the work of Sigmund Freud and postmodern thinkers such as Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and above all Julia Kristeva, Homayounpour takes us along on a journey of discovery of the stranger/alien within herself and indirectly within us too. Using her analytical work with patients after her return to Tehran, she analyzes her own conflicted rediscovery of the Iranian culture and explores oscillations between her Eastern and Western identities. Her reflexivity and self-questioning are intertwined with the work of Milan Kundera, especially The Unbearable Lightness of Being, whose characters she analyzes psychoanalytically using the Lacanian model of symbolic s