“It is the other who can see my form.” My friend Omnia El Shakry, also a participant in this forum,…
In-capacities of the soul: A reply to Largier and Iqbal
psychoanalysis
Knot of the Soul: Voices, textures, resonances
More than any other book I have read recently, Stefania Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul made me ask myself time…
Vectors of translation
Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud is both admirably ambitious in its quest to map “the topography of modern selfhood”…
The Arabic Freud: Discourse interruptus
The Arabic Freud masterfully excavates the neglected archives of psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth century Egypt, and offers a doubly contrapuntal account…
What does a son want?
To discuss fathers and their divinization and not mention Sigmund Freud would be surprising, albeit a welcome surprise in some…
Understanding the president’s reality: Our unconscious, not his
The matter of the love-hate relationship between psychoanalysis and public life has an unexpected link to the complexities of secularism…
Understanding the president’s reality: A psychoanalytic contribution to public life
It would not have taken long for French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to realize that President Donald Trump has a paranoid…
Mirror, mirror on the wall
After the manner of psychoanalysis, political theology reflects the larger, darker, contours that liberalism—the discourse of the modern nation-state—fails to…
Secularism . . . a really interesting problematic: A conversation with Joan Wallach Scott
At a March 2010 conference, “Gendering the Divide: Conflicts at the Border of Religion and the Secular” (sponsored by Arizona…
Psychoanalysis as spirituality
What are our moral and spiritual sources? In his magnificent and magnanimous recent book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor investigates…