Event overview
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What might it mean to think through psychoanalysis and Islam together, not as a problem, but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement? How might we think through the relationship between psychoanalysis and the Islamic tradition, while respecting the “ontological stakes” of the latter, namely, the belief in divine transcendence? Drawing on scholarly writings as well as popular literature on self-healing, Omnia El Shakry shows how postwar thinkers in Egypt translated and blended psychoanalytic theories with classical Islamic concepts. She explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in fields as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis debated the temporality of the psyche, mystical states, the sexual drive, and the Oedipus complex, while offering startling insights into the nature of psychic life, ethics, and eros. Rather than view Islamic discourses as hermetically sealed, or traffic in dichotomous juxtapositions between East and West, El Shakry focuses on the points of intersection and articulation between Islamic discourses and modern social scientific thought, and between religious and secular ethics. The hybridization of psychoanalytic thought with Islamic discursive formations thus illustrates that the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.
Bio: Omnia El Shakry is professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt and editor of the multi-volume Gender and Sexuality in Islam. Her new book, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt, is just out with Princeton University Press.
centrepostcolonialstudies.org/up-coming-events/
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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23 Oct 2017 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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