Knot of the soul : madness, psychoanalysis, Islam / Stefania Pandolfo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pandolfo, Stefania, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Islam and psychoanalysis--Morocco.

Islam and psychoanalysis.

Pastoral psychology (Islam).

Mental health--Religious aspects--Islam--Morocco.

Mental health.

Mental health--Religious aspects--Islam.

Islam.

Mental illness--Alternative treatment.

Morocco.

Mental illness--Alternative treatment--Morocco.

Mental illness.

Islam--Morocco--Customs and practices.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Summary:

In this unsettling and innovative book, anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo addresses the problematic of the subject through a dual examination of psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, reflecting on the unconscious maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and sensitively listening to contemporary patients in Morocco, she offers both an ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair and a philosophical and theological exploration of the vicissitudes of the soul. Pandolfo's study spans a breadth that encompasses experiences of psychosis in psychiatric hospitals, visionary torments of the soul in urban life, the difficulty of undocumented migration, and the liturgical space of Quranic healing. Demonstrating how contemporary Islamic cures for madness address some of the core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she reveals how a religious and ethical relation to the "ordeal" of madness might actually allow for spiritual transformation. Altogether, this work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.

Contents:

Psychiatric fragments in the aftermath of culture. Testimony in counterpoint ; The hospital ; The jinn and the pictogram ; The knot of the soul

Interlude. islam and the ethics of psychoanalysis

The passage: imagination, alienation. Taʻbīr: figuration and the torment of life

The burning

The jurisprudence of the soul

Overture: the vertigo of history

Faqīh al-nafs: the jurist of the soul

Shariʻa healing: "knowledge of the path to the hereafter"

Prophetic medicine and the ruqiya

The jouissance of the jinn

The psychiatrist and the imam

Black bile and the intractable jinn: threshold of the inorganic

The argument of shirk (idolatry)

Extimacy: the battlefield of the nafs

The writing of the soul: soul choking, imagination, and pain

Concluding movement: the passion of Zulikha, theater of the soul.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

9780226465081

9780226464923

022646492X

022646508X

OCLC:

1035297483