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THE ARABIC FREUD: THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE MODERN SUBJECT*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2014

OMNIA EL SHAKRY
OMNIA EL SHAKRY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Davis E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 89 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Middle East Center of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (with commentaries by Patricia Clough and Robert Tignor), at EUME of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and at the Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age conference at Princeton University, where I received valuable feedback from organizers and participants. I am especially grateful to Samuel Moyn, Michael Saler, Stefania Pandolfo, Sara Pursley, and the four anonymous reviewers at MIH for their deeply engaging comments and constructive criticism. I thank Dr Samir Mourad for the pleasure of his friendship and conversation and for his invaluable assistance in providing information on the life of his father and facilitating access to primary source material. Research for this essay was funded by an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship.

References

1 Suwayf, Mustafa, “Yusuf Murad: Raʾid al-Manhaj al-Takamuli,” Al-Fikr al-Muʿasir, 21 (1966), 62–68.Google Scholar I render Murad's name as Yusuf Murad in keeping with the conventions of Arabic transliteration; his name appears as Youssef Mourad in his French writings.

2 Very few studies have addressed the grammar and vocabulary of modern selfhood within Middle Eastern societies. Anthropologists, however, have paved the way in this regard. See, for example, Stefania Pandolfo, “‘Soul choking’: Maladies of the Soul, Islam, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” Umbr(a) (2009), 71–103; and Mittermaier, Amira, Dreams That Matter: An Anthropology of the Imagination in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, CA, 2011)Google Scholar.

3 Although earlier usages of la-shuʿur exist, Murad formalized its entry into the Arabic language. Murad was a member of the committee on psychological terms at the Academy of Arabic Language, and he routinely published an annotated “Dictionary of Psychological Terms” in the journal Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. See, for example, Murad, Yusuf, “Bab al-Ta ʿrifat: Niwa li Qamus ʿIlm al-Nafs,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 1 (1945), 100–6Google Scholar.

4 For more on this generation see Di-Capua, Yoav, “Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization,” American Historical Review, 117/4 (2012), 1061–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 In an erudite and moving obituary Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim placed Murad amongst the luminaries of twentieth-century Egyptian literature, such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Najib Mahfuz, and the doyen of Arabic letters Taha Husayn. Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim, “Al-usbuʿ al-siyasi wa-l-fanni wa-l-adabi,” Al-Musawwar, 30 Sept. 1966.

6 Murad, Yusuf, Mabadiʾ ʿIlm al-Nafs al-ʿAmm, 7th edn (Cairo, 1978; first published 1948)Google Scholar. Murad's other key publications include Shifaʾ al-Nafs (Cairo, 1943); Sikulujiyat al-Jins (Cairo, 1954); Dirasat fi al-Takamul al-Nafsi (Cairo, 1958); and ʿIlm al-Nafs fi al-Fann wa-l Haya (Cairo, 1966). His collected articles are published as Yusuf Murad wa-l-Madhhab al-Takamuli, ed. Murad Wahba (Cairo, 1974). Biographical information on Murad is from Farag ʿAbd al-Qadir Taha, Mawsuwʿat ʿIlm al-Nafs wa-l-Tahlil al-Nafsi (Cairo, 1993), 702–4. See also Suwayf, “Yusuf Murad”; al-Sharuni, Yusuf, “Yusuf Murad: Raʾidan wa Ustadhan,” Al-Majalla, 19 (1966), 21–8Google Scholar.

7 Murad's dissertation, “L’éveil de l’intelligence,” in the words of his thesis supervisor, Paul Guillaume, “presented to French scientists experimental truths and results that they themselves, unfortunately, had ignored.” Taha, Mawsuwʿat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 702.

8 Psychology had been taught at the Philosophy Department of the Egyptian University as early as the university's founding in 1908. By mid-century there were academic psychologists in all of the major universities and institutes in Cairo and Alexandria, such as the Higher Institutes of Education and Ibrahim University. For surveys of psychology in Egypt see Prothro, E. Terry and Melikian, H. Levon, “Psychology in the Arab Near East,” Psychological Bulletin, 52 (1955), 303–10CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Farag, S. E., “Egypt,” in Gilgen, A. R. and Gilgen, C. K., eds., International Handbook of Psychology (New York, 1987), 174–83Google Scholar; Abou-Hatab, Fouad, “Egypt,” in Sexton, Virginia and Hogan, John, eds., International Psychology: Views from around the World (Lincoln, 1992), chap. 12Google Scholar.

9 Mustafa Radwan Ziywar (1907–90) was the first Arab member of the Paris Institute for Psychoanalysis. Upon his return to Cairo, he taught at Faruq University in Alexandria, and later established a Psychology Department at Ibrahim University in 1950. Ziywar specialized in psychosomatics and combined medical knowledge, psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. In addition, he supervised translations of Sigmund and Anna Freud, as well as other critical publications in psychoanalysis. See Taha, Mawsuwʿat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 372–7.

10 Murad, Yusuf and Ziywar, Mustafa, “Tasdir,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 1 (1945), 10–12Google Scholar.

11 Musa, Salama, Al-ʿAql al-Batin, aw Maknunat al-Nafs (Cairo, 1928)Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 7.

13 Safwan, Mustafa (Moustapha Safouan) translated Freud's Interpretation of Dreams into Arabic in 1958. See Tafsir al-Ahlam, trans. Safwan, Mustafa and reviewed by Ziywar, Mustafa (Cairo, 2004)Google Scholar, although Arabic synopses and English and French translations of Freud were readily available.

14 Naji, Ibrahim, “Al-Shabab al-Misri wa-l-Mushkila al-Jinsiyya,” Al-Hilal, 47 (1938), 57–60Google Scholar. Naji noted that students were reading Freud outside their university curriculum and in a rather haphazard and at times refracted fashion.

15 See, for example, Ziywar, Mustafa's book review of ʿIlm al-Nafs al-ʿAmali, in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 1 (1945), 75–78Google Scholar.

16 Nayal, Kamal al-Din ʿAbd al-Hamid, “Athar ʿAlaqat al-Tifl bi Walidiyhu fi al-Zawaj,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 7 (1951), 25–33Google Scholar.

17 Kapila, Shruti, “The ‘Godless’ Freud and His Indian Friends: An Indian Agenda for Psychoanalysis,” in Mahone, Sloan and Vaughan, Megan, eds., Psychiatry and Empire (Basingstoke, 2007), 124–52, 145Google Scholar.

18 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989)Google Scholar.

19 Seigel, Jerrold, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005), 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 25.

22 See Khanna, Ranjana, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2003), 5, 10–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similarly, the recent edited volume Unconscious Dominions asks, “How, indeed, did the modern psychoanalytic subject—a distinctive style of imagining one's subjectivity or psychic makeup—go global?” and explores the “conflicted cosmopolitan figure of the universalized, psychoanalyzable subject” as a constitutively “colonial creature.” Anderson, Warwick, Jenson, Deborah, and Keller, Richard, eds. Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham, NC, 2011), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Kapila, “The ‘Godless’ Freud and His Indian Friends.”

24 Christiane Hartnack, “Colonial Dominions and the Psychoanalytic Couch: Synergies of Freudian Theory with Bengali Hindu Thought and Practices in British India,” in Anderson, Jenson, and Keller, Unconscious Dominions, 97–111; Plotkin, Mariano Ben, Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina (Stanford, 2001)Google Scholar. For a brief discussion of the Iranian reception of Freud see Najmabadi, Afsaneh, “Genus of Sex: or the Sexing of Jins,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 45/2 (2013), 211–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for an exploration of the relationship between psychiatry, psychology, and “medicalized modernity” in Iran see Schayegh, Cyrus, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950 (Berkeley, CA, 2009)Google Scholar; and for a discussion of the relation between the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and pedagogy in Iraq see Pursley, Sara, “The Stage of Adolescence, Anticolonial Time, Youth Insurgency, and the Marriage Crisis in Hashimite Iraq,” History of the Present, 3/2 (2013), 160–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Khanna, Dark Continents, 6.

26 Benslama, Fethi, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, trans. Bononno, Robert (Minneapolis, 2009)Google Scholar; see also Raja Ben Slama, “The Tree That Reveals the Forest: Arabic Translations of Freudian Terminology,” Transeuropéennes, 5 Nov. 2009, available at www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/106/The_Tree_that_Reveals_the_Forest, accessed 22 Sept. 2011. For a critique see Joseph Massad, “Psychoanalysis, Islam, and the Other of Liberalism,” Umbr(a) (2009), 43–68.

27 Slama, Raja Ben, “La psychanalyse en Égypte: Un problème de non-advenue,” Topique, 110 (2010–11), 83–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain, trans. Russell Grigg (New York, 1993), 267–8Google Scholar.

29 Yusuf Murad and Mustafa Ziywar, “Tasdir,” 11.

30 Goldstein, Jan, The Post-revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Lacan was not widely engaged in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. There was, however, one prominent Egyptian member of Lacan's circle, Moustapha Safouan. Safouan had studied psychoanalysis with Mustafa Ziywar and Islamic philosophy with Abu al-ʿAlaa Afifi (who had written extensively on Ibn ʿArabi) at Faruq I University in Alexandria. Safouan began training in Paris with Lacan in 1949 and was one of his first students after the war. Other than his translation of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams into Arabic, Safouan is not well known in Egypt. He writes widely in French on psychoanalysis, speech, and language and is considered an eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst.

32 For a definition of the nafs see Murad, “Bab al-Taʿrifat,” 106. An extended discussion of the etymology of the nafs would be beyond the scope of the present essay. Briefly, according to Qurʾanic lore, the Lord breathed the spirit into Adam and into Mary mother of Jesus, imparting the primordial Breath (nafas) into the dark matter. As R. W. J. Austin elaborates, the root nafasa “clearly denotes the living reality of God, His living consciousness, which as the active pole inflates, inseminates, irradiates, and informs the dark passivity of primal substance, of original Nature.” al-ʿArabi, Ibn, The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. Austin, R. W. J. (Mahwah, 1980), 172Google Scholar.

33 As Carolyn Dean outlines, “whereas elsewhere psychoanalysis rescued the rational subject, the self, from the domination of the unconscious, in France it was tied in with the dissolution of the self,” most notably in the writings of Jacques Lacan, who rejected Freud's post-1920 conceptualization of the ego as an agent of adaptation, integration, and synthesis. Dean, Carolyn, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca, 1992), 13–14Google Scholar. As noted, Murad's emphasis was on the nafs (self, soul) and not the ego. Further, as I discuss below, he disagreed with Freud's foreclosure of the possibility of social integration.

34 Pandolfo, Stefania, “The Thin Line of Modernity: Some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity,” in Mitchell, Timothy, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis, 2000), 115–47, 121, 127Google Scholar.

35 Murad, Yusuf, “Al-Usus al-Nafsiyya li-l-Takamul al-Ijtimaʿi,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 2 (1947), 425–41Google Scholar.

36 Ibid., 441.

37 Murad, Yusuf, “Al-Manhaj al-Takamuli wa Tasnif Waqaʾiʿ al-Nafsiyya,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 1 (1946), 273–304Google Scholar.

38 This element of Murad's thought was highlighted in almost all of the academic obituaries; see, for example, Mustafa Suwayf, “Yusuf Murad,” 62; Yusuf al-Sharuni, “Yusuf Murad,” 25.

39 Murad, “Al-Manhaj al-Takamuli,” 303.

40 See, for example, Suwayf, Mustafa Ismaʿil, “Maʿna al-takamul al-ijtimaʿi ʿind Birjsun,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 5 (1949–50), 203–36Google Scholar; Soueif, M. I., “Bergson's Theory of Social Integration,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 5 (1949–50), 326–32Google Scholar; Wahba, Murad, “Al-la shuʿur ʿind Birjsun,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 8 (1952–3), 213–22Google Scholar; Bergson, Henri, Al-Taqa al-Ruhiyya (Spiritual Energy), trans. al-Durubi, Sami (Cairo, 1946)Google Scholar, reviewed in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 2 (1947), 527–30; Bergson, Al-Dahik: Bahth fi Dalalat al-Mudhik (Laughter), trans. Sami Durubi (Cairo, 1947).

41 Guerlac, Suzanne, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, 2006), 19Google Scholar.

42 Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 47 n. 2, 90–91.

43 Or, as Bergson states, “turning backwards is meaningless,” Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. Pogson, F. (New York, 1960), 153Google Scholar.

44 Murad, “Al-Manhaj al-Takamuli,” 287–90.

45 Murad uses the Arabic phrase bi fadl . . .wa ʿala al-raghm minu. Thus, for example, unity exists, because of, and in spite of, multiplicity. Ibid., 290.

46 Derrida poses the structure of delay in contradistinction to Hegelian teleology. Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Bass, (Chicago, 1985), 21Google Scholar.

47 Murad, “Al-Manhaj al-Takamuli,” 304; cf. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 128, 183, 221.

48 Murad “Al-Usus al-Nafsiyya.”

49 On the pastoral see Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain, trans. Dennis Porter (New York, 1992), 88–100Google Scholar.

50 Murad cites Suttie, Ian, Origins of Love and Hate (London, 1935)Google Scholar; Horney, Karen, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York, 1939)Google Scholar; and West, Ranyard, Conscience and Society (London, 1942)Google Scholar. Murad, “Al-Usus al-Nafsiyya,” 436.

51 Ibn ʿArabi, Ibn, Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, trans. al-Jerrahi al-Halveti, Shaikh Tosun Bayrak (Louisville, 1997), 8Google Scholar.

52 Ibid., 49, see also 155, 260–61. Murad had consulted Ibn ʿArabi's Al-Tadbirat al-Ilahiyya fi Islah al-Mamlaka al-Insaniyya and Kabs al-Anwar wa Bahjat al-Asrar in manuscript form and Al-Futuhat al-Makiyya in print form; see Mourad, Youssef, La physiognomonie arabe et le Kitab al-Firasa de Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (Paris, 1939), 145–7Google Scholar.

53 Ibn ʿArabi, Divine Governance, 260.

54 Murad had converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism in his early 20s and remained in close contact with Dominican and Sufi religious leaders in Cairo throughout his life. Samir Mourad, Personal communication with the author, 15 Jan. 2012 and 29 Sept. 2012.

55 On the significance of the experimental approach to psychology in France and the eventual dominance of Gestalttheorie or psychologie de la forme see Andler, Daniel, “Cognitive Science,” in Kritzman, Lawrence D., Reilly, Brian J., DeBevois, M. B., eds., The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (New York, 2007), 175–81Google Scholar. Much of the imprint of this training can be traced in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. See, for example, Mourad, Youssef, “La conduite de l’effort d’après Pierre Janet,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 5 (1950), 478–90Google Scholar; see the translated selections from Paul Guillaume, Psychologie (1931); Henri Piéron, Psychologie experimentale (1927); Ribot, Th., Les maladies de la personalité (1881) in “Nusus mukhtara fi ʿilm al-nafs,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 1 (1945), 233–42Google Scholar; and the review of Henri Wallon, L’évolution psychologique de l’enfant (1941), in ibid., 209–10. Wallon's De l’acte à la pensée: Essays de psychologie comparée (1942) and Les origines de la pensée chez l’enfant (1945) were also reviewed in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 2 (1946), 176–80; and Piéron's La psychologie différentielle (1949) in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 5 (1949–50), 315–18.

56 Andler, “Cognitive Science,” 177.

57 Weber, Alden O., “Gestalttheorie and the Theory of Relations,” Journal of Philosophy, 35/22 (1938), 589–606, 590CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Ash, Mitchell, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.

59 According to Weber, “Gestalttheorie,” 605–6, part of the difficulty was Gestalttheorie's vacillation between absolute idealist rationalism and empiricism.

60 Brooks III, John I., The Eclectic Legacy: Academic Philosophy and the Human Sciencesin Nineteenth-Century France (Newark, DE, 1998)Google Scholar. On Cousin see Goldstein's masterful study, The Post-revolutionary Self.

61 See Brooks, Eclectic Legacy; Goldstein, Jan, “Foucault and the Post-revolutionary Self: The Uses of Cousinian Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Goldstein, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (London, 1994), 99–115Google Scholar; Goldstein, “The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France: An Alternate Narrative,” in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences (Baltimore, 1994), 190–209; and Carroy, J. and Plas, R., “How Pierre Janet used Pathological Psychology to Save the Philosophical Self,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 36 (2000), 231–40Google Scholar.

62 In some respects Murad's interest in the unity of the self also resonated with many of Janet's writings; see Carroy and Plas, “How Pierre Janet used Pathological Psychology.”

63 Yusuf Murad, “Min al-Istibtan ila al-Tahlil al-Nafsi,” in Yusuf Murad wa-l-madhhab al-Takamuli, 113–22, 113–14. This was originally published in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 7 (1952), 301–10.

64 Murad, “Min al-Istibtan ila al-Tahlil al-Nafsi,” 115–18.

65 Ibid., 118–19

66 Ibid., 120–21.

67 Ibid., 121–2.

68 Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain, trans. Forrester, John (New York, 1991), 2Google Scholar.

69 Ibid., 11–12.

70 Murad, Yusuf, “Min al-Istibtan ila al-Tahlil al-Nafsi (2): Manhaj al-Tahlil al-Nafsi wa Tabiya ʿtuhu al-Takamuliyya,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 8 (1952), 15–32Google Scholar. This piece contained an exhaustive review of Freud's major texts and his Collected Papers.

71 Ibid., 15.

72 Ibid., 18–22.

73 Ibid., 16, 22–3.

74 Ibid., 23–7.

75 Ibid., 28–9.

76 Ibid., 29.

77 Ibid., 30.

78 Ibid., 30.

79 Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, 1970), 366–7Google Scholar. For the similarities between Murad and Ricoeur see “Epistemology: Between Psychology and Phenomenology,” in ibid., 344–418.

80 Murad, “Min al-Istibtan ila al-Tahlil al-Nafsi (2),” 30–31, cf. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 386–7, 406–18.

81 Murad, “Min al-Istibtan ila al-Tahlil al-Nafsi (2),” 31.

82 Ibid., 32.

83 Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe.

84 Murad's use of Ibn ʿArabi's la-shuʿur for “unconscious” is a classic example of this, as compared to later translators who rendered it as la-waʿy. See Ben Slama, “The Tree That Reveals the Forest.”

85 Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe, 7–21. See also Stimilli, Davide, The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism (Albany, 2005)Google Scholar.

86 Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe, 46–52. Firasa refers to keen observation, perspicacity, acumen, discernment, and an intuitive knowledge of human nature. It was originally referred to as qiyafa, referring to the ability to deduce the interior of a thing from its exterior. See also Sarton, George's review of Mourad, La Physiognomonie in Isis 33/2 (1941), 248–49Google Scholar.

87 See Manzalaoui, Mahmoud, “The Pseudo-Aristotelian ‘Kitab Sirr al-asrar’: Facts and Problems,” Oriens, 23–4 (1974), 147–257CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on Badawi see Di-Capua, “Arab Existentialism.”

88 Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe, 1–3, 57–61.

89 Ibid., 61–3. Ibn ʿArabi discusses firasa in Divine Governance, chap. 8. Mourad also notes his lengthier discussion in Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (Cairo, 1207), ibid., 61.

90 Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe, 34.

91 Ibid., 61–3.

92 al-Qushayri, Abu’l Qasim, Al-Qushayri's Epistle on Sufism: Al-Risalah al-Qushayriyya fi ʿIlm al-Tasawwuf, translated by Knysh, Alexander (Reading, 2007), 242–52Google Scholar.

93 Ibn ʿArabi, Divine Governance, 95.

94 Ibid., 96.

95 Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe, 17.

96 Ibid., 17–18.

97 “Man is to God, what the pupil is to the eye.” Ibn ʿArabi, quoted in Benslama, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, 133.

98 Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 21.

99 Ibid., 2–4, 63–4; and Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York, 1991).

100 Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 63–4.

101 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 164; Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 5, 43, 92. I discuss Taftazani's conception of intuition in “Reconfiguring the Soul: The Aesthetic Sensibility of Mysticism,” unpublished manuscript.

102 Wahba, “Al-la shuʿur ʿind Birjsun.” He noted that Bergson provided a critique of associationism, and a critique of the moments in which science tried to touch the soul. Cf. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 24.

103 Wahba cited Bergson's Al-Taqa al-Ruhiyya, a translation of L’énergie spirituelle. See Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London, 1920).

104 Wahba, “Al-la shuʿur ʿind Birjsun,” 214–15.

105 Ibid., 216–19.

106 Suwayf, “Maʿna al-takamul al-ijtimaʿi ʿind Birjsun”; Soueif, “Bergson's Theory of Social Integration.” For a critique, see Jaʿfar, Muhammad, “Naqd Maqal ‘Maʿna al-takamul al-ijtimaʿi ʿind Birjsun,’” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 5 (1950), 454–6Google Scholar.

107 On the “textual concealment” of Henri Wallon see Stavrakakis, Yannis, “Wallon, Lacan and the Lacanians: Citation Practices and Repression,” Theory, Culture & Society, 24 (2007), 131–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108 Wallon, Henri, “The Role of the Other in the Consciousness of the Ego,” in Voyat, Gilbert, ed., The World of Henri Wallon (New York, 1984), 91–103, 91Google Scholar. Wallon's writings appeared as “Le rôle de ‘l’autre’ dans le conscience du ‘moi’,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 2, (1946), 215–26, and “Athar ‘al-Akhir’ fi Takwin al-Shuʿur bi-l-Dhaat,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs 2 (1946), 252–67, translated and annotated by Yusuf Murad. On the repression of Wallon in the French analytic archive see Roudinesco, Elisabeth, “The Mirror Stage: An Obliterated Archive, in Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge, 2003), 25–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109 Wallon, “The Role of the Other in the Consciousness of the Ego,” 94.

110 Ibid., 100, 103. See Murad's extensive discussion of the socius in “Athar ‘al-Akhir’ fi Takwin al-Shuʿur bi-l-Dhaat,” 264 n. 3. As he points out, Janet uses the Latin term socius to indicate the social aspect introjected into the self since childhood in an unconscious fashion.

111 Ibrahim was a teacher at the Suez secondary school. Ibrahim, Zakariyya, “Mushkillat al-shuʿur,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 3 (1947), 259–62Google Scholar.

112 Buqtur, Zakariyya Ibrahim, “Al-Dallala al-Siykulujiyya li-l-Nazra,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 6 (1950–51), 225–32Google Scholar.

113 Ibid., 227. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York, 1966), 243Google Scholar.

114 Ibrahim Buqtur, “Al-Dallala al-Siykulujiyya li-l-Nazra,” 232.

115 Ormsby, Eric, “The Poor Man's Prophecy: Al-Ghazali on Dreams,” in Marlow, Louise, ed., Dreaming across Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands (Boston, 2008), 142–52, 150Google Scholar. For a discussion of the alternative Sufi economy of vision within a contemporary context see Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter, chap. 3.

116 Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 291Google Scholar.

117 Wahba, Yusuf Murad wa-l-Madhhab al-Takamuli, 17.

118 Goldstein, The Post-revolutionary Self, 100.

119 Murad, Yusuf, “ʿIlm al-Nafs al-Sinaʿi,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 3 (1948), 329–42Google Scholar; Murad, “ʿIlm al-Nafs fi Khidmat al-Intaj al-Qawmi,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 8 (1952–3), 145–52Google Scholar. Even when discussing the role of applied psychology for national production, Murad was keen to point out that it should never aim merely at maximizing production at the expense of spiritual principles.

120 I term this a social-welfare mode of regulation. See El Shakry, Omnia, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 Di-Capua, “Arab Existentialism,” 1076–8.

122 Selim, Samah, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1885–1985 (London, 2004), 140–41Google Scholar. To be fair, as Selim outlines, al-ʿAlim and Anis represented one segment of a highly complex literary field that included more multifaceted and less dogmatic positions.

123 Baladi, Najib, “Al-huriyya wa-l madi,” Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, 4 (1949), 393–406Google Scholar.