Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam

"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