What I learned about psychoanalysis

Quotes that I found impactful in answering this question as well as my responses underneath:“integrative psychology, which presented the self not solely as a body, or a psyche, or even a psyche added to a body, but rather as “wahda nafsiyya, jismiyya, ijtimaʿiyya,” the unity of psychic, bodily, and societal aspects. Murad’s integrative psychology both constituted and was constituted by the larger sociopolitical context within which it was embedded, namely, Egypt’s emergent post coloniality.”-positing a more intersectional approach to psychology; not just behavior or affect, but the processes behind such behaviors, including thoughts, intention, and motive. “The modern postcolonial subject emerged in the aftermath of the trauma of colonization…. The interstitial zone where encounter became possible (between East and West, past and present, modernity and tradition) was also the space of subjectivity. Murad’s integrative subject was dialogically constituted across the space of social and cultural difference and embodied translations and borrowings from Europe while maintaining an irreducible heterogeneity from the emphasis on the dissolution of the self in postwar French philosophy. In so doing Murad theorized a new relationship to temporality, progress, and the social body, which I discuss in turn.”-illustrating not only the current influence but historically the influence of various cultures and dominant thought in influencing the formation and thought-processes associated with conscious thought and the self and how such subjectivity then lends itself to certain cultures adapting such theory to not only fit the schemas existing within the culture, but also to help explain deviations or changes; “Murad discussed the psychological foundations of social integration.27 Murad’s notion of bio-psycho-social integration was embedded in a complex notion of the temporality of the psychological subject and a rejection of monocausality. Biological, psychological, and social factors were to be considered not in terms of a superimposition, “but of mutual penetration on a convergent concourse of these three factors.”28 By “social” Murad referred to the social order and the individual’s integration within the community, and more fundamentally, the order of language in the socius; “psychological” referred to memory and consciousness; and “biological” to the nervous and circulatory systems. Each level, he noted, operated according to different laws but taken together functioned, ideally, harmoniously”-a long quote but I found this got to the heart of the first chapter and an overview of the convergence between psychoanalytic theory and its interpretation alongside Islam. It was fascinating to examine how the same text and merits can not only be applied to various spaces, but how historically such influences already existed to further allow such evolutions to psychoanalysis. This framework reminds me of intersectionality and the more holistic approach the authors are speaking of. “Murad’s conception of temporality as radically heterogeneous yet holistic was reminiscent of Bergson’s notion of duration, with which Murad would certainly have been familiar…For Murad, the past was significant, but not in terms of a mere repetition of the same; rather, in the way in which the repetition of the past was experienced in the present bearing its future orientation in mind”-highlighting the influence the past has on one’s present as well as how one will perceive and react based on past history and other factors; draws in the collective history and environmental factors that can align with such memories in the past and how it affects the future; diverges by not focusing on the past but instead how the past impacts the present “According to Freud, Murad argued, true integration was impossible, as a fundamental variable in all social conduct was aggression, a mask for frustration. The role of fear and guilt in the relations between individuals and nations would lead one to conclude that civilization contained the seeds of its own destruction, and that the final word rested with the death drive”-this illustrates how Freud’s psychoanalysis emphasized the chaos and anxiety that results from the never ending questions of the universe and the conscious, which can never truly be known, whereas Murad evolves such thought processes to include a divine power, which not only provides comfort but resolution in allowing for a final product; a drive that leads to something worth seeking; an antithesis to Freud’s conception This noncontinuous view of psychic history as marked by the lack of a simple linear progressive evolution was, of course, itself partially derived from psychoanalysis.-acknowledging how development is not linear but constantly changing depending on what one is exposed to and going through, as well as the environmental and cultural influences one encounters; a process of complex interactions, not simply linear development “Rather than a view of individuals as atomistic units, monocausally determined by biological, sociological, or psychic factors, Murad envisioned the nafs as an assemblage of overdetermined factors that functioned, ideally, within a unified totality whose boundaries were porous both to the outside world and to the discourse of the other”.  “The Arabic term nafs (soul, spirit, âme, psyche) is thus imbued with this primordial divinity. Psychology itself is referred to in Arabic as the science of the “nafs” (ʿilm alnafs) and is intimately bound up with preexisting meanings, its genealogical reach extending into classical Islamic invocations of the term such as those of Ibn ʿArabi and others.”-underscores how Arabic traditions have evolved to resituate psychoanalysis to include the soul, or a moral and more divine aspect, that has largely replaced Freud’s emphasis on the ego and the id. “I explore how articulations of selfhood were an innovative synthesis of Islamic ethics (the human kingdom as the path toward the divine kingdom) and Western psychoanalytic psychology, that was at once “self-realizing and other directed.” Islamic thinkers in the postwar period emphasized points of contact between Freud’s interpretation of dreams and Islamic dream interpretation, as well as between the manifest and latent content of religious knowledge, and they noted that the analyst-analysand relationship and the shaykh-disciple relationship of Sufism were nearly analogous” “It is important to note that such epistemological resonances between Sufism and psychoanalysis were not related solely to the “infiltration” of Western ideas into the Middle Eastern world. They were related, as well, to the nature of psychoanalysis itself.”-THIS; psychoanalysis and its themes of the self and consciousness are prevalent throughout cultures and how communities structure belief systems and morality; “Kenneth Reinhard has argued that “scripture is the unconscious of psychoanalysis, at once its model of dream interpretation, its grammar of law and desire, and its treasury of unspeakable words and absurd commandments.” “Perhaps more directly, we may note that mysticism has continued to play a role within analytical theory as a nexus for understanding the relationship between the self and the Other”-Exactly! The process of trying to self-actualize or psychoanalyzing someone else predates Freud’s psychoanalysis and very much aligns with theology as there has always been an “unknowable” factor for humans that often is considered mysticism, and is used to describe and attribute certain characteristics or behaviors to people when others feel they cannot understand or “rationally” determine one’s actions