Psychoanalysis and the Psyche

Well now, this year I am proposing not simply to be faithful to the text of Freud and to be its exegete, as if it were the source of an unchanging truth that was the model, mold and dress code to be imposed on all our experience.

— JACQUES LACAN, ETHICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

ON FRIDAY MORNINGS in Cairo in the mid- to late 1940s and 1950s, scholars and students of all disciplines would assemble at the house of psychology professor Yusuf Murad. Gathered to discuss the latest intellectual trends in psychology and philosophy, at those meetings, we are told, the attendees' concerns revolved around two central questions: how can the scholar be a philosopher and how can the teacher be a mentor? Through a capacious body of work that touched on subjects as diverse as the epistemology of psychoanalysis and the analytic structure, and Abu Bakr al-Razi's medieval treatise on spiritual medicine, Murad developed what he termed an integrative (takamuli) psychology based on the fundamental philosophical unity of the self. Presenting Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a "Copernican revolution" to his audience, Murad identified psychoanalysis as the dialectical synthesis of philosophical introspection, positivism, and phenomenology.

Responsible in large part for the formalization of an Arabic language lexicon of psychology and psychoanalysis, Murad introduced the Arabic term "al-lashu'ur," a mystical term taken from the medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn 'Arabi, as "the unconscious" into scholarly vocabularies. Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and the French tradition of philosophical psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychological and psychoanalytic thought.

The coterie of students in attendance at Yusuf Murad's Friday morning salon were born sometime between 1920 and 1930, making them the generation that would later become instrumental in transforming the role of the intellectual and of knowledge production within Arab postcolonial polities. Among the regular attendees were several scholars training in philosophy: Mahmud Amin al-'Alim, who was to play a decisive part in the fierce debates over existentialism and the role and purpose of literary production for decolonizing political action; Yusuf al-Sharuni, the meticulous and socially conscious short story writer and literary critic who was active in the avant-garde post–World War II literary groups that formed in Egypt; and Murad Wahba, the author of philosophical commentaries on Averroës, Kant, and Bergson, and of a large body of work on philosophy, civilization, and secularism. Other attendees included Mustafa Suwayf, later a well-known psychology professor at Cairo University (and father to novelist Ahdaf Soueif); Sami al-Durubi, the Syrian translator and diplomat, who wrote on psychology and literature and translated Henri Bergson's Mind-Energy and Laughter, as well as Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth and numerous Russian novels, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time; and Salih al-Shamma', the author of texts on childhood language and on the semantics of Qur'anic ethics, later a professor of psychology and head of the philosophy department at the University of Baghdad.

Translating the Unconscious

Yusuf Murad (1902–1966) founded a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences in Egypt and the Arab world, best thought of as part of a shared Arab intellectual heritage of blending traditions, of which Murad represented an exemplary "philosopher of integration." Training a generation of thinkers who then went on to become literary critics, translators, university professors, and mental health professionals in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, he left a wide imprint on psychology, philosophy, and the wider academic field of the humanities and the social sciences. As one of his former students, Farag 'Abd al-Qadir Taha, noted, Murad's mark on psychology in Egypt was thought to be so great that the majority of Egyptian professors of psychology had studied under him either directly or indirectly through his textbook, a popular handbook of psychology published in 1948 that went through at least seven editions.

Murad was himself well versed in the traditions of experimental psychology as well as in European psychoanalytic and neo-psychoanalytic approaches. Born in Cairo, he studied philosophy at Fu'ad I University (later Cairo University), graduating in 1930 and traveling to France where he received his doctorate in psychology in 1940 from the Sorbonne. Upon his return, he taught psychology in the philosophy department at Cairo University, and was the first to do so in Arabic, eventually becoming chair of the philosophy department between 1953 and 1957. Murad, along with his colleague Mustafa Ziywar, a psychoanalyst who had trained in philosophy, psychology, and medicine in France in the 1930s, founded the Jama'at 'Ilm al-Nafs al-Takamuli (Society of Integrative Psychology) and the Egyptian Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs (Journal of Psychology) in 1945, and supervised the translation and publication of numerous works of psychology. Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs, the first psychology journal published in the Arab world, was illustrative of the emerging disciplinary space of psychology in Egypt in the 1940s; it was understood as a science of selfhood and the soul ('Ilm al-Nafs) rather than delimited as the empirical study of mental processes. The journal, which ran from 1945 to 1953, served as a wide-ranging platform for academic psychology and was meant to serve as a bridge between the psychological sciences and philosophy, while introducing its audience to the major concepts of psychoanalysis and psychology.

In the inaugural issue of Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs, Yusuf Murad introduced a dictionary that provided the Arabic equivalents to English, French, and German terms in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. Murad was himself a member of the Academy of Language for the committee on psychological terms and was therefore crucial in the creation and standardization of an Arabic lexicon of psychology. Emphasizing the difficulty and importance of precise terminology, he remarked that in some instances multiple terms were needed to convey the meaning of a single word and to adumbrate the different interpretations of terms by different schools of thought in psychology. Murad's dictionary was likely partly inspired by his former university professor André Lalande, and his Vocabulaire technique et critique de la...