![]() ![]() Presenting Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a “Copernican revolution” to his audience, Murad identified psychoanalysis as the dialectical synthesis of philosophical introspection, positivism, and phenomenology.īeyond its contribution to the study of Arab intellectual history, an understanding of the body of work developed by Murad and his students enables us to reconsider that quintessential question of modernity, the question of the self, in a non-European context. Gathered to discuss the latest intellectual trends in psychology and philosophy, those meetings, we are told, revolved around two central questions: how can the scholar be a philosopher? And how can the teacher be a mentor? Footnote 1 Through a capacious body of work that touched on subjects as diverse as the epistemology of psychoanalysis and the analytic structure, and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi's medieval treatise on physiognomy, Murad developed what he termed an integrative ( takamuli) psychology based on the fundamental philosophical unity of the self. ![]() On Friday mornings in Cairo in the mid- to late 1940s and the 1950s, scholars and students of all disciplines would assemble at the house of psychology professor Yusuf Murad. The coproduction of psychoanalytic knowledge across Arab and European knowledge formations definitively demonstrates the outmoded nature of historical models that presuppose originals and bad copies of the global modern subject-herself so constitutively defined by the presence of the unconscious. Moving away from binary models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, it examines the points of condensation and divergence, and the epistemological resonances that psychoanalytic writings had in postwar Egypt. In stark contrast to the so-called “tale of mutual ignorance” between Islam and psychoanalysis, the essay traces a tale of historical interactions, hybridizations, and interconnected webs of knowledge production between the Arab world and Europe. Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychoanalytic thought, embodied in a rejection of the dissolution of the self and of the death drive. This essay considers how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt through an exploration of the work of Yusuf Murad, the founder of a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences, and provides a close study of the journal he co-edited, Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |