Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam

This pioneering volume brings together scholars and clinicians working at the intersection of Islam and psychoanalysis to explore both the connections that link these two traditions, as well as the tensions that exist between them.

Uniting authors from a diverse range of traditions and perspectives, including Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Object-Relations, and Group-Analytic, the book creates a dialogue through which several key questions can be addressed. How can Islam be rendered amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation? What might an ‘Islamic psychoanalysis’ look like that accompanies and questions the forms of psychoanalysis that developed in the West? And what might a ‘psychoanalytic Islam’ look like that speaks for, and perhaps even transforms, the forms of truth that Islam produces?

In an era of increasing Islamophobia in the West, this important book identifies areas where clinical practice can be informed by a deeper understanding of contemporary Islam, as well as what it means to be a Muslim today. It will appeal to trainees and practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as scholars interested in religion and Islamic studies.

“"A real contribution in times of rapid social change, this book sheds new light on the complex relationships between Islam, understood as a religion and host culture, and psychoanalysis. Destined to be controversial and enlightening, this remarkable collection of essays exposes open and subtle forms of mutual engagement, appropriation and transformation behind this encounter. A much-needed corrective to conventional understandings, this timely volume reveals the dynamic and subversive logic of psychoanalysis when thought of outside its secular adaptations, and beyond enduring references to Greek mythology and Judeo-Christian symbolism. This book is a must read." --Andrea Mura, Goldsmiths, University of London”

"A real contribution in times of rapid social change, this book sheds new light on the complex relationships between Islam, understood as a religion and host culture, and psychoanalysis. Destined to be controversial and enlightening, this remarkable collection of essays exposes open and subtle forms of mutual engagement, appropriation and transformation behind this encounter. A much-needed corrective to conventional understandings, this timely volume reveals the dynamic and subversive logic of psychoanalysis when thought of outside its secular adaptations, and beyond enduring references to Greek mythology and Judeo-Christian symbolism. This book is a must read." --Andrea Mura, Goldsmiths, University of London

"This important collection explores unexpected sites of resonance and resistance between Islam and psychoanalytic theory and practice in the context of Western colonial narratives of "civilizational clashes," fundamentalist religious discourses, and liberal cultures of political correctness. The contributors to this collection seek to transpose the contradictions between faith and scientific rationality into tensions between two types of modernities, Western and Islamic, recharting familiar and not-so familiar encounter zones where both meet, clash, and demystify, even decolonize each other. The originality of this collection lies in its intercultural and transcultural framework, which rejects the simplistic discourses of hybridity and synthesis that attempt to conjoin these modernities in the safety of cultural respect, in favor of disclosing the deeper divisions and inconsistencies within these modernities." --Jamil Khader, Professor of English and Dean of Research, Bethlehem University, Palestine

"Over the last several years the faint outlines of a previously unimaginable theoretical juncture have appeared; Islam with psychoanalysis. What can it mean to think the two together? Why even try? The essays in this important collection provide substantive answers to these questions and fresh diagnoses of the impasses and possibilities defining our current socio-political situation." --Joan Copjec, Brown University

Ian Parker is a Psychoanalyst in Manchester, and Sabah Siddiqui is a Researcher and author of Religion and Psychoanalysis in India (Routledge, 2016). They are both members of the Discourse Unit and the Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix.

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