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Pandolfo (2010) theorizes the psychoanalytic and spiritual effects of collective trauma and violence, through the work of Fanon and contextual research in Morocco. Her writing raises valuable questions about how collective violence and trauma penetrate the psyche/soul. “I pursue this question of ‘soul murder’, and its implication for a possible ethics of struggle (jihad/jihad al-nafs) through an analytic description of the therapeutic practice of a Moroccan Imam, not a traditional healer, indeed also not a Sufi, but an active member in the local Islamic revival” (31).

Listen, are you breathing,just a little, and calling it life?-Mary OliverThis article was deeply moving, as well as informative, and continued to carve away at how I relate to psychology as a science and cornucopia of variables which can be measured, observed, manipulated, and analyzed. I have always understood why people are drawn to religion - not just to faith or a higher power - because religion and religious communities (and their offspring, like AA) often engage in [faith-based] practices of radical, compassionate soul work.

“What will we do, before this death?

"I read Fanon side by side with a parallel reflection on destruction, trauma, and the possibility of ethical-political struggle in a contemporary Islamic tradition, in the context of a renewed problematization of the concept of jihad al-nafi, "the struggle of the soul" (but also struggle at such), in relation to the experience of oppression, violence, pain, melancholy, and what Fanon calls the "annihilation of being." I will consider the figure of "spiritual murder" (tadbih al-ma'nawi) in a sermon by the Moroccan Shaykh Abdessalam Yassine, and reflect on the practice and thought of