ABSTRACT
This chapter, by looking at the translatability of psychoanalysis and the Arabo-Islamicate in Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique, aligns itself with those endeavours that, presuming the universality of the unconscious, consider cultural translation as a reciprocal, multi-layered process ‘through which both psychoanalysis and Islam will be forced to confront the distinct challenges that each poses to the other’. Specifically, I will suggest to what extent the study of Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique through the lens of cultural translatability will not only nuance our understanding of the status of ‘culture’, ‘Islam’ and ‘psychoanalysis’, but also generate knowledge on the distinctions and transgressions between couplets such as psychoanalysis/religion, religion/secular, religion/culture. In order to accomplish this, I begin by tracing the emergence of Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique from within Arab contemporary thought. Second, I will discuss cultural translatability from the interdisciplinary perspective of the social sciences, the humanities and psychoanalysis. In the main part of this chapter, I will discuss the reciprocal epistemological resonances of studying an Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique through the lens of cultural translatability by considering the multiple ramifications at the conceptual field defined by the conjunction of religion, culture, science and psychoanalysis and pointing towards the crucial importance of considering cultural translation as always embedded in the concrete social reality of power. I will argue that focusing on the collapse of distinctions (identity) as well as the persistence of boundaries (difference) is essential for any study of ‘Islamic psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic Islam’. Hence, I will offer some methodological guidelines for studying psychoanalysis in the context of the Arabo-Islamicate.
