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“although the chador as a social object is embedded in the sphere of culture and politics, in its psychic dimensions it carries multiple meanings and functions in women’s (as well as men’s) individual psychic economies.”-absolutely, there is meaning behind the object, which is then interpreted and associated with certain connotations depending on the context and who is viewing the object“It is a complex entity located within the public and private contexts at varying intra- and interpsychic axes.”-particularly, for Western individuals that only see things through their lens and thus as a fo

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

Buckley (1994) looks inward at the effects of field work on neophyte anthropologists. This piece is premised on the idea of the anthropologist entering a completely foreign environment, where they are forced to look inward, in the midst of a chaotic alien environment. The examples aren’t totally applicable to most ethnography now. Buckley uses Malinowski’s journal and the analysis of a young female graduate student. Ultimately, he argues that the ethnographer may likely experience regression and changes of the Self amidst field work in a foreign world.

“in the ethnographer Evans Pritchard’s words (1962), the capacity “to abandon himself without reserve,” “to think and feel alternately as a savage and as a European” and for whom the native society is “in the anthropologist himself and not merely in his notebooks.”-is this really achievable?

"In this paper, I shall attempt a psychoanalytic hypothesis concerning the psychological nature of fieldwork for the anthropologist who possesses, in the ethnographer Evans-Pritchard's words (1962), the capacity "to abandon himself without reserve," "to think and feel alternately as a savage and as a European" and for whom the native society is "in the anthropologist himself and not merely in his notebooks"" (614)"Briefly stated, the hypothesis postulated here is that in the course of fieldwork the anthropologist establishes a new object relationship with the culture being studied.

Luhrmann (1998) provides a comparative piece on the overlaps and divergences between psychoanalysis and anthropology. Both fields look at an underlying human essence and the human experience. However, Luhrmann argues that the morals and underlying orientations of the two fields are different, therefore producing different academic cultures of research and discourse. Below were some helpful quotes for understanding this piece: 449 - “Anthropology and psychoanalysis are not unalike. The task of each is to understand other human lives. Their practitioners have trained for years.

“The struggle that anthropologists and psychoanalysts have in common, then, is the struggle to come to terms with a sense of partial failure.”“Anthropologists and analysts are usually interested in the experience of the chess-playing, and yet it is not clear that an analyst/anthropologist of mediocre chess ability can ever understand the experience of a profoundly skilled player”-exactly; the patient will only be treated as good as the analyst, but what makes a good analyst, and what are the constant limitations?“The authors of Writing Culture ask how the fact that anthropologists write eth