What I learned from psychoanalysis

“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 “Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani outlined a unique Sufi perspective on the architecture of the self, narrating the composition of the self as an interconnected network of self or soul (nafs), spirit (ruh), heart (qalb), and mystery or inner secret (sirr). Taken together these components constituted the soul or the human “seat of subjectivity.”-ascribing words and terms that may be viewed differently depending on the culture, but clearly illustrating the similarities and where psychoanalysis and Islam can converge in theme and theory. “In many ways analogous to the “topographical aspect” of Freud’s model of consciousness and the unconscious as “systems in the mind that are superimposed one upon another,” … Rather than a straightforward concern for “regions in the mental apparatus” however, al-Taftazani’s topography concerned the very nature of man’s soul, that which enables a being to “bear what is intolerable in this world”-emphasizing the interconnected nature and how you cannot just pick one facet to examine to understand someone but ultimately it’s the combination and combined influence of all of the factors “The term nafs has two meanings. The one relates to that entity in man in which the power of anger and the power of desire are found. This use is the most prevalent among the Ṣūf īs. For them nafs means the element in man that includes all the blameworthy qualities. . . . The second meaning is [that of] the subtle entity . . . that is man’s true reality, soul (nafs) and essence.” “Within this Sufi ontology the nafs was a specified evil—representing the locus of base instincts and reprehensible acts. According to al-Qushayri (d. 1074), “the soul is nothing but darkness; its secret [heart] is its lamp; and the light of this lamp is Godspeed. Whoever is not accompanied by God’s assistance in his secret [heart], lingers in total darkness.” As a spiritual essence the nafs was distinct from the body, a Neoplatonic presence that existed previously in another world (ʿalam al-amr, the world of Divine command) outside of time and matter.Yet in its earthly manifestation it was trapped in the prison house of the body, a source of evil.51 The nafs thus oscillated between its bodily and spiritual manifestations, functioning as a barzakh or isthmus between spirit and matter. This spectrum of darkness and luminosity expressed itself in a tripartite conceptualization of the nafs, derived from the Qurʾan and loosely echoed in Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul--compares in a way to the composition and understanding of the ego and the id “The shifting between psychoanalytic and Sufi registers enabled the knowledge of the nafs developed in the science of the soul, ʿilm al-nafs, to contribute to the knowledge of God, maʿ rifa.”-we can see how both sufism and psychoanalysis deal with ethics and morality and how the “Other” mediates the domain of the unconscious; however, sufism does not just accept the unknowableness of the other and instead seeks to engage its impact in the conversation with psychoanalysis; In comparison to Kant, Freud’s work offered “a more somatically, socially, and historically grounded approach to the formation of rational and ethical capacities.”