The Wound That Waited
Islam puts Freud on the couch.
The Four Recenterings, III: Freud.
Malik Badri needed a Muslim psychologist who had gone too far. In Mustafa Ziywar, he found one.
Badri’s 1979 book argued that Muslim clinicians had absorbed a psychology built on assumptions about human nature that contradicted Islam. Many of them, Badri believed, hadn’t noticed the conflict. His strongest evidence came from Ziywar, founder and longtime chair of the psychology department at Ain Shams University in Cairo. Here was a Muslim analyst, writing in Arabic, apparently making Badri’s case for him.
Badri quoted Ziywar tracing religious feeling back to childhood. The child first imagines his father as perfect and all-powerful. When the father proves to be an ordinary man, the child transfers those attributes up into the sky, where they are safer. For Badri, a Muslim psychologist who accepted this account had kept his psychology and his faith in separate compartments. It was “truly heartbreaking,” he wrote, “to see Muslim scholars dogmatically accepting such unfounded theories” to explain religious awareness and the worship of God.
Ziywar had written this in July 1955, in the foreword to a study of how religious feeling develops in Egyptian children and adolescents. Its author had followed fourteen children, some of them over several years. He also put a long questionnaire to a hundred boys and seventy girls in Egyptian schools. He asked them about God, angels and devils, death and prayer, and whether they had ever stopped believing. He collected their drawings.
A book like that can be read two ways, and Ziywar knew it. A psychologist who explains how a child arrives at the idea of God can be understood to be explaining the idea away. So the foreword does two things. It states the psychoanalytic case without embarrassment, which is the part Badri used. Then it stops and draws a line:
“We must state at once that the nature of religious beliefs does not admit of refutation or confirmation by means of scientific inquiry. For there are two levels that cannot be brought together: the metaphysical level, that is, the level of doctrine; and the empirical level, that is, the level of scientific inquiry. To say, for example, that the human being’s idea of God amounts to nothing more than an idea descended from the child’s idea of his father merely betrays a deficiency in one’s grasp of the psychology of emotional development.”
Ziywar then gave a simpler example. In the unconscious, the king stands for the father. Nobody concludes from this that kings don’t exist. The formative idea, he wrote, had met a real existence.
Badri stopped quoting several sentences before that. The qualification wasn’t hidden in another book or added in a later edition. It appeared in the same foreword, only a couple of paragraphs later. Badri quoted the passage that made Ziywar look divided against himself and omitted the passage in which Ziywar explained why he saw no division. He didn’t discuss the main body of the study at all.
The comedian Anthony Jeselnik summarizes most of what people know about Freud in one sentence: “Every young man wanted to murder his own father and have sex with his own mother.” That is the Oedipus complex. His Arabic readers began somewhere else.
Freud began with gaps in consciousness. Dreams, slips, symptoms, and ideas that seemed to come from nowhere made sense, he wrote in 1915, only by “presupposing other acts, of which . . . consciousness affords no evidence.” He called those acts unconscious. A person could explain what they had done and still not know what had moved them. For Freud, the trail often led back to childhood, parents, and desire.
From the child’s helplessness, Freud built the account Ziywar would later summarize in his foreword. He called religious doctrines illusions: beliefs in which “a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor.” This didn’t necessarily make them false. God offered protection against helplessness, a moral order promised justice, and an afterlife cancelled death. “It is a very striking fact,” Freud wrote, “that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.” Religious doctrines could not be proved, he conceded, but neither could they be refuted. He wasn’t always this careful, and elsewhere wrote as though the matter had been settled.
Psychoanalysis also began with a fight over who could practice it. When Vienna prosecuted an analyst who didn’t have a medical degree, Freud rose to his defense. A medical diploma, he argued, settled nothing by itself. “Doctors have no historical claim to the sole possession of analysis.” He expected an analyst to undergo an analysis process of themselves, study the psychology of the unconscious, learn interpretation and transference, and treat patients under supervision. Anyone who completed that training, Freud wrote, “is no longer a layman in the field of psycho-analysis.” The theory would change. The fight over who had the authority to interpret the mind would last much longer.
Islamic writing had long described an inward life that a person did not fully choose or understand. The eleventh-century philosopher Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī wrote of promptings that arrive in the heart before a person chooses them. They might come from God, an angel, the self, or a demon. His concern was how a person could tell them apart and decide which to follow. The Qur’an describes the self (nafs) in three conditions: commanding evil, reproaching itself, and finally at peace. The spirit (rūḥ) was harder to describe. Asked about it, the Qur’an answers that it belongs “to the command of my Lord” and that human beings have been given little knowledge of it. The verse placed a limit on what anyone could claim to know. Freud offered a different account of what people didn’t know about themselves, and gave the analyst the job of uncovering it.
Dreams also already had interpreters and manuals of their own. The tradition divided them among true visions, satanic disturbances, and thoughts carried over from waking life. Physicians had their own accounts of sleep, imagination, and the body. A jurist could accept that a dream mattered without allowing it to establish a rule of law. The analyst joined them, reading dreams for unconscious wishes.
Freud’s theory of religion rested on a resemblance that the Islamic tradition didn’t conform to. God is never addressed as Father. The Qur’an says that he “begets not and is not begotten,” but Ziywar’s foreword shows that the human father could still serve as a child’s first picture of perfection. Arabic readers encountered fatherhood as a psychological analogy, never as a divine name they heard in prayer.
Freud’s first Muslim readers in Cairo treated him as someone to argue with. They translated him, disputed him, and put him to work inside a field that still held clinicians, philosophers, lawyers, and Sufi shaykhs. They disagreed about what the unconscious contained. The harder fight was over who had the authority to say.
In 1928 Salama Musa had no Arabic word for the unconscious. Introducing the new psychology to a general Egyptian readership, he called it “the inner mind” (al-ʿaql al-bāṭin), and then spent paragraphs explaining to his readers what such a thing could be. Seventeen years later Yusuf Murad supplied the word that stuck. He called it “the non-awareness” (al-lā-shuʿūr), a term he took from Ibn ʿArabī, the thirteenth-century Andalusian Sufi whose esoteric writing was still read across the Muslim world. Nobody at the time appears to have found this strange.
Murad, whose career Omnia El Shakry has reconstructed in detail, came from a Greek Orthodox family and later converted to Catholicism. He earned his PhD in Paris with an annotated translation of a treatise on physiognomy (firāsa) by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, the twelfth-century scholar. The art was about reading a person’s character from the outside: from the face and how they carried themselves. Back in Cairo he ran a weekly seminar, sat on the committee that fixed psychological terms in Arabic, and in 1945, with Ziywar, founded the Journal of Psychology (Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs), the first of its kind in the Arab world.
An issue might contain an installment of its dictionary of psychological terms, an experimental study, a translation, and a long argument over whether psychoanalysis could establish criminal intent. The field went under the name “the science of the soul” and still included philosophy and religion. No one had to explain what a Sufi shaykh was doing in a psychology journal.
Murad read Freud closely and disagreed with him in print. What he refused was the pessimism. Freud had argued that aggression is fundamental, that real integration between people is impossible, and that civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction. Murad answered by citing and agreeing with other analysts. Ian Suttie thought the baby desired its mother from the start, and not only for milk. The need for another person was there as soon as the baby recognized there was another person. Murad thought Suttie described infancy better, and he rejected Freud’s death drive. Karen Horney’s work supported him on the same point. He was reading her in Cairo while she was making the argument in New York. Nobody in either city thought this made them something other than a psychologist. Disagreeing with Freud was most of what the field did.
The journal's influence traveled beyond psychologists. Before his turn to Islamist writing, Sayyid Qutb published a 1947 piece of literary criticism that drew on Freud's study of Leonardo. His terms for the unconscious and homosexuality were the ones the journal had coined. At that point, using standard psychology didn't yet mark a person as belonging to one side of a civilizational argument.
One of the people Murad published was Abū al-Wafā al-Taftazānī, a Sufi shaykh who taught Islamic philosophy at Cairo University. Using categories familiar from al-Ghazālī, he described the lower self (nafs) as the part of a person pulled by appetite and desire, and compared it with Freud’s id. He then compared the Sufi shaykh’s work with his disciple to the analyst’s work with a patient. El Shakry describes the argument:
“They did not engage with the manifest content of the nafs but with its latent content—content often marked by sexual desires, a domain referred to by psychoanalysts as the unconscious. The Sufi shaykh, much like the analyst, must ascertain from his novice that which they know not.”
In his footnotes he cited Murad’s textbook on general psychology.
Cairo’s intellectual boundaries were wide. The legal boundaries around practice were harder, and the fight over them began even before there was a journal.
Muhammad Fathi, a lawyer and professor of criminal psychology, thought psychoanalysis could help courts determine intent. In 1941 he echoed Freud and asked: “Is Psychoanalysis a Branch of Medicine or Its Own Art?” When Sabri Jirjis, an analyst, was prosecuted for treating patients without medical qualifications, Fathi answered with a full-length defense. Medicine, he argued, dealt with the body and material laws. Analysis dealt with the soul and the laws of meaning. The court accepted the distinction but closed Jirjis’s clinic anyway. He had treated an illness and presented himself as a doctor without the required degrees. Fathi took the soul away from medicine without handing it to a shaykh.
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s totalitarian regime came to power in 1952 and found Murad’s psychology useful. It hired him to build testing programs and clinics for the military. Murad had argued that a person has to be understood as a whole, mind and body and social life together, and that psychology goes wrong when it treats people as material to be sorted and put to use. The state took the first half and left the second. In 1953, the Journal of Psychology stopped appearing.
Two years after the journal closed, Ziywar wrote the foreword with which this essay began. The book was The Development of Religious Feeling in the Child and Adolescent, by his former student and colleague ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Malījī.
Al-Malījī accepted the limit Ziywar had drawn. Psychology had no right to decide whether God existed or whether one religion was true. “We may investigate only what falls within the domain of psychological phenomena,” he wrote. Within that boundary, he gave psychology considerable room.
His simplest case involved a three-year-old who was afraid to sleep alone. Her mother told her that God was present and would protect her. The girl answered that she was afraid of God. The mother meant reassurance. The child heard that another powerful being was in the room. For al-Malījī, the case showed that a religious word takes its meaning from the emotional life of the child who hears it. “God” didn’t mean the same thing at age three, ten, and seventeen.
Al-Malījī was more cautious with the questionnaire. Among the 170 students who answered, he classified ninety-three as traditional believers, forty-three as religious enthusiasts, thirty-three as doubters, and one as an atheist. He warned that the sample was too small and unrepresentative to establish differences between Muslims and Christians or between boys and girls. These were hypotheses for later research, he wrote, not general laws.
Across the cases, al-Malījī traced a longer development. The small child’s God was magical and useful, a power who could grant a wish or prevent harm. As the child learned that events have causes, God became connected to a universe governed by laws. As conscience developed, God became a judge and eventually something closer to an inward moral presence. In adolescence, religion also changed the scale on which a person belonged. Al-Malījī summarized the movement this way:
“Religion develops from narcissistic individualism in early childhood, to the collective spirit that effaces individuality and makes the individual forget himself in society in later childhood, and then to a conscious individuality that seeks liberation from the constraints of the existing society and looks toward wider horizons in adolescence. If a person continued along the path of emotional maturity, he would attain a further advance: harmony with humanity as a whole. Yet few people reach this level while retaining their religious faith.”
This was a hierarchy rather than a neutral sequence. Its final sentence leaves open the possibility that emotional maturity might carry a person beyond the form of religion they inherited.
Some of his interpretations went further. Al-Malījī described a young man whose guilt over sexual impulses was followed by intense prayer and fasting. He read the devotion partly as a permitted outlet for something the young man could not otherwise express. Sexuality was only one force in his account, alongside fear, family attachment, guilt, intellectual change, and the need to belong. Even so, he was claiming that a psychologist could identify a religious motive the believer himself had not named. Badri would later object to precisely this claim.
The book appeared while the licensing question Fathi had raised was still open. A 1956 law imposed strict requirements on psychotherapy, and few psychologists without medical training ever practiced under it.
Among the analysts seeing patients in Cairo was Moustapha Safouan. He had studied Ibn ʿArabī in Alexandria before going to Paris in 1949 and entering Jacques Lacan’s circle.
Ibn ʿArabī was present at the other end of the journey as well. Lacan, who would rebuild psychoanalysis around language, had encountered him through the French scholar Henry Corbin and referred to him more than once. He aligned himself with Ibn ʿArabī on the value of symbolic knowledge over the rationalism of Averroës, and once called mystical writing “the best thing you can read.” Safouan had moved between two intellectual circles in which Ibn ʿArabī was being read for different reasons.
Safouan returned to Egypt, and from 1953 visa restrictions kept him there. He taught at Heliopolis and saw patients. In 1958 he published his Arabic translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. That same year Ziywar launched a successor to Murad’s journal, but it only managed three issues. By then, Egypt’s group of practicing psychoanalysts was as large as it would become.
On New Year’s Eve, police swept through Cairo and arrested most of Safouan’s circle as Marxists. Safouan left Egypt on 1 January 1959 and reached France within days. He never lived in Egypt again. A generation of Muslim psychoanalysts was ruptured and scattered.
In France, Safouan became one of the leading interpreters of Lacan. Lacan’s most famous formula was that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Safouan explained what this changed. Analysts had treated a patient’s words as evidence of a reality hidden behind them. Lacan located the subject “within the very act of talking.” Speech was one of the places where the inner life took form. Safouan later extended his thinking to politics, arguing that the difference between formal and colloquial Arabic kept ordinary speakers dependent on a hierarchy of interpreters.
Murad died in 1966. Egyptian psychology stumbled along. Departments kept teaching, clinicians kept practicing, and some of the people trained in the 1940s worked for another thirty years. But no comparable journal replaced the one Murad had built. No institution took over the particular arrangement in which a Sufi shaykh, a criminal lawyer, and an experimental psychologist could be in dialogue between the same covers. Nobody had refuted the work. The people and institutions that sustained it were simply no longer in the same room.
The defeat of 1967 shook the Nasserist order that had absorbed Murad’s science. Islamist explanations of the failure became more persuasive during the years that followed.
Before Cairo, psychoanalysis reached British India under different management.
In March 1921, eighteen years before Freud published his famous book on Moses, Lieutenant Colonel Owen Berkeley-Hill published a psychoanalysis of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. The masthead read, “Directed by Professor Sigm. Freud.” Berkeley-Hill ran the European Mental Hospital at Ranchi.
He found what he called a “prodigious parental complex.” Since the Prophet’s ﷺ father had died before his birth, Berkeley-Hill made it more precisely a “grandfather-complex.” He argued that the conflict found its solution in “waging a life-long war on the traditions, religious, political and social” of his people. Even the refusal to call God Father became “another expression” of the complex.
The closing turned to governance. Berkeley-Hill described Muslims as unusually prone to “sudden outbursts of frenzy against the very authority they are adjured to revere and obey.” He then explained who might benefit from his analysis:
“Were such facts realised there must result the adoption of a more rational and scientific attitude towards all Muslim [sic], which would again result in saving those responsible for the maintenance of law and order in countries inhabited by Mohammedans from that condition of petrified embarrassment into which such persons invariably fall whenever they are called upon to face any widespread expression of Mohammedan feeling.”
The imagined reader was the colonial official putting down unrest. The article appears to have drawn no recorded response in India. The Indian Psychoanalytical Society had no Muslim members in the 1920s. The injury existed before anyone organized an answer to it.
Lahore produced two answers within a decade. Muhammad Iqbal, lecturing in 1928 and 1929, was considering how to distinguish religious experience from impulses that only appeared divine. Psychoanalysis had helped, he thought, although its theory of the unconscious remained unproved:
“And it is in the elimination of the satanic from the Divine that the followers of Freud have done inestimable service to religion; though I cannot help saying that the main theory of this newer psychology does not appear to me to be supported by any adequate evidence. If our vagrant impulses assert themselves in our dreams, or at other times we are not strictly ourselves, it does not follow that they remain imprisoned in a kind of lumber room behind the normal self.”
Iqbal accepted psychoanalysis as a way of testing religious experience. He rejected Freud’s account of where the impulses it uncovered came from.
Abul Aʿla Maududi began somewhere else. In Purdah in 1939, he called the uncritical acceptance of Western thought “mental slavery.” Western theories, he wrote, had been received “like a Divine Revelation, which has to be believed and obeyed.” He later named Freud directly in his Qur’an commentary: “After Communism, the second great pillar of modern error is Freud’s philosophy. And the irony is that Freud too was a Jew.” Freud’s Jewishness had become part of the case against his ideas. Iqbal disputed the interpretation. Maududi disputed the interpreter.
Maududi‘s thought was translated into Arabic and read by Egyptian Islamists. Writing in 1951, Muhammad Qutb, Sayyid Qutb’s younger brother, made Freud evidence against the civilization that embraced him: Europeans, Qutb wrote, “found in Freud a powerful support for their raging bodily impulses,” until “the bonds of the family” became “fetters from which one must break free.” Twelve years later, he conceded Freud’s recognition of sexuality but insisted: “Sex is not the human being; it is only a part of the human being.” Freud had reduced the person to one dimension.
The same case circulated in Egyptian religious print. In 1957 Majallat al-Azhar published “The Mixed Society,” by Muhammad Muhammad Husayn, a professor of modern Arabic literature at Alexandria University. Husayn began with a claim he associated especially with Freudian writers: that mixing men and women would relieve sexual repression. He followed it toward nudism, homosexuality, and the Westernization of Muslim life. Near the end, he quoted the forged and antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion claiming responsibility for the success of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. Then he continued: “Freud, head of modern psychological pretensions based on what he called the subconscious, was a Jew, known for extreme partisanship toward Jews.” Freud, sexual disorder, Westernization, and Jewish conspiracy now occupied the same frame.
However, antisemitism wasn’t just an Islamist thing. In 1968 Ziywar himself argued that “the Jew in Palestine” had been transformed “into a tyrant after humiliation and a killer after submission, through identification with the aggressor.” He denied that Israelis were “a band of psychiatric patients,” but still extended a mechanism drawn from Holocaust survivors to turn Jews into a collective psychological type.
In 1975 Malik Badri read a paper to the fourth annual convention of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists in Indianapolis. He called it “Muslim Psychologists in the Lizard’s Hole.” Its title comes from a prophetic tradition:
“‘You will follow the ways of those who came before you, hand-span by hand-span and forearm by forearm, so that even if they entered the hole of a lizard, you would follow them in.’ We said: ‘Messenger of God, do you mean the Jews and the Christians?’ He said: ‘Who else?’”
Four years later the paper became The Dilemma of Muslim Psychologists, the book this essay began with. Its dedication identifies the tradition Badri believed he was continuing. He named Maududi, Sayyid and Muhammad Qutb, and Maryam Jameelah as pioneers who had “broken the chains of mental slavery” and cleared the way for “a new generation of emancipated Islamic social scientists.”
Badri’s objection came out of a clinic. He had trained in Britain as a behavior therapist and watched Muslim students learn a language in which Islamic practice could become obsession, sexual restraint repression, and an obligation a symptom. He believed clinicians were being trained to misread their patients, and Muslim clinicians to misread their own communities.
The book was part of an “Islamization” movement. The First World Conference on Muslim Education met in Mecca in 1977 and the International Institute of Islamic Thought was founded in 1981. Symposia, translations, discipline groups, and departments followed.
Badri nevertheless built much of his case from arguments made within Western psychology. He used Henri Ellenberger to challenge Freud’s claim to the unconscious and repeated the objection that psychoanalysis couldn’t be falsified. His arguments against Freud’s sexual theory and pessimism had already been made by Horney and Suttie, whom Murad had used in Arabic thirty years earlier. Badri also kept the therapies he found useful. Borrowing arguments was ordinary intellectual work. The irony was his claim that Muslims had to stand outside Western psychology in order to criticize it, when the criticisms he needed had already arisen within the field.
Muslim analysts who remained inside the discipline therefore appeared in Badri’s account as divided people, their faith and professional lives sealed into “two water-tight compartments.” Criticism from within had become evidence of inner conflict. When he described parts of psychoanalysis as coming from “traditional ‘Jewish lizards’ holes,’” he was bringing Maududi and Husayn’s antisemitic argument into professional psychology.
Muhammad ʿUthmān Najātī complicates the anti-Western genealogy. In 1942 he wrote his master’s thesis on perception in the work of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). Murad arrived while the thesis was underway, advised him informally, and later invited him to write for his journal. Najātī lectured on the Qur’an and psychology in Cairo during the 1950s and again in Kuwait in 1966. When he published The Qur’an and Psychology in 1982, he described it as the completion of a much older project: “My interest in ‘the Qur’an and psychology’ goes back about forty years.”
The book used modern psychological categories to read the Qur’an. Najātī took the verse saying that concealed hostility could be recognized in a person’s “tone of speech” as an example of unconscious motives leaking into language. He read the Qur’anic hypocrites’ accusations as projection, their excuses as rationalization, and their exaggerated professions of loyalty as reaction formation. The Qur’an, he concluded, had described this side of human behavior “fourteen centuries before Freud.”
Najātī criticized modern psychology for reducing mental life to physiology and neglecting the spirit. His answer was to “combine the precision of sound scientific research” with the Qur’anic account of the human being. He cited Erich Fromm while making that criticism and continued to use Freud, Adler, and other Western psychologists throughout the book. Their origin didn’t affect whether their ideas were useful.
Najātī’s project shows that a theory grounded directly in the Qur’an had grown within Cairo’s general psychology, without requiring a separate discipline or a break with Western thought.
Taftazānī makes the chronology harder still, because he lived through all of it. In 1950 he published Sufi psychology in a general psychology journal. In 1979 he proposed an Islamic institute with divisions for philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Its work, he wrote, should “go beyond this to establish the human sciences generally on Islamic foundations and principles drawn from the Qur’an and the authentic Sunna.” His account of the psyche had changed little. What changed was where he thought the work belonged.
Badri’s argument eventually became a clinical system. Applying Islamic Principles to Clinical Mental Health Care, published in 2021, tells the history as a passage from medieval Muslim thinkers, through colonialism and secular psychology, to an Islamic revival in the 1970s. Murad’s journal, al-Malījī’s study, Najātī, and Taftazānī disappear. In his preface, Badri calls the earliest attempts to harmonize Islam and psychology “artificial efforts” and describes such efforts as Islamic “paint” applied to a Western structure. After both came what he called “the final development of ‘Islamic psychology’”: Traditional Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy, or TIIP.
TIIP begins with a Sunni account of the person and then admits empirical findings and clinical methods from elsewhere. It sets out what an Islamic therapist should know, how a patient should be assessed, and where therapy ends and spiritual guidance begins, placing the practitioner in “the integrated space between a Sufi shaykh and a clinician.” Freud’s early Muslim readers hadn’t thought it necessary to build a separate system for training Islamic therapists or deciding where their authority ended.
Abdallah Rothman had helped write the chapter defining the Islamic therapist. In 2022 he supplied the field with a fuller theory. He called Badri “the father of Islamic Psychology and my mentor” and placed himself within the generation carrying Badri’s project forward.
Rothman acknowledged the diversity within Western psychology and used the term for its dominant secular institutions rather than every theory produced in Europe or America. His model continued to borrow their terminology and clinical methods. Even so, he wrote that previous publications had offered comparisons and adaptations but that “none have attempted to construct a legitimate theory in any systematic way.” His answer was a model built from interviews with Muslim religious scholars and clinicians through an established method of qualitative research.
At its center was a claim already familiar from Cairo:
“Unique to the model presented in this research is the Islamic conception of the centre of the conscious self being located in the heart rather than the mind.… In this model the human soul contains within it an access point to God directly (the rūḥ [spirit]).”
Therapy works inward through the layers of the person toward the heart and spirit. Symptoms point toward a deeper identity connected to God.
Taftazānī had drawn much the same map in 1950. Rothman, like his colleagues, doesn’t cite anyone from the Cairo school. The newer field gained a clinical system, but its history became narrower.
Badri’s distinction spread well past London. His book appeared in Indonesian and Malay. He taught for years in Kuala Lumpur, and Islamic psychology now has associations, degree programs, and clinics on several continents.
Freud’s own followers had meanwhile been taking his system apart. When Stephen Mitchell and Margaret Black wrote their history of the field, they opened by warning readers who assumed that knowing Freud was the same as knowing psychoanalysis.
“The startling reality is that very little of the way Freud understood and practiced psychoanalysis has remained simply intact. The major pillars of his theorizing—instinctual drives, the centrality of the Oedipus complex, the motivational primacy of sex and aggression—have all been challenged and fundamentally transformed in contemporary psychoanalytic thought. And Freud’s basic technical principles—analytic neutrality, the systematic frustration of the patient’s wishes, a regression to an infantile neurosis—have likewise been reconceptualized, revised, and transformed by current clinicians.”
Disagreeing with Freud was ordinary professional business, carried on in Vienna, Edinburgh, New York, and Cairo. What was new with “Islamization” was the wall attached to them. The same criticism could remain ordinary psychology when Horney made it and become a duty of intellectual emancipation when Badri made it. After that, the argument ran in two rooms, and the people in each stopped having to read the other.
As the Cairo circle scattered, Fann Hospital in Dakar, Senegal tried a looser arrangement. Under Henri Collomb, families became part of treatment, and the hospital treated the healers its patients already consulted as interlocutors rather than competitors. “If modern psychiatry shuts itself within its walls,” Collomb warned, it loses contact among “the clinician, the patient, and the patient’s surroundings.”
That openness reached the theory itself. Working at Fann from 1962 to 1966, Marie-Cécile and Edmond Ortigues found that Freud’s family drama appeared differently in their Senegalese cases. The father was still there, but rivalry often moved sideways toward brothers and age-mates. Analysts, they concluded, had to use “the signifiers proper to the patient’s own civilization” rather than proceed only from European models. Psychoanalysis remained psychoanalysis, but the people of Dakar had changed what it could say about human nature.
Decades later, Stefania Pandolfo found the boundary being crossed in Morocco by patients themselves. At Hôpital ar-Razi in Salé, a psychiatrist she calls Dr. A realized that most of his patients also sought care from religious healers. He accepted that, in some cases, their improvement had as much to do with Qur’anic healing as with medication, though he didn’t believe the two systems could formally cooperate. Pandolfo called the arrangement “a de facto cohabitation between psychiatry and religious cures.”
Dr. A and a Qur’anic healer whom Pandolfo calls “the Imam” nevertheless had several patients in common. One woman appeared frozen or paralyzed. Dr. A diagnosed catatonia. The Imam attributed her condition to possession by a jinn, an invisible being. Medication might get her moving, he said, while leaving the jinn in place and her capacity for reason unrestored. Qur’anic treatment might help, but he didn’t expect a complete recovery. The patient’s treatment passed between systems that disagreed about what had actually happened to her and how to cure it.
Senegal and Morocco left the argument open. Patients could see a psychiatrist and a healer, carry two explanations home, and go on living their lives.
Freud’s wound was that people might not know why they do what they do. Power lay with the analyst trained to tell them. A believer could describe a prayer and hear it returned as a symptom. Badri recentered that authority in an Islamic profession, with religious scholars setting the limits of psychology. The resulting wall extended beyond psychology. It made Islam and the West look like rival worlds and a recent division look ancient. That was the deeper wound.
Now the center is moving again. Artificial intelligence may displace the interpreter as well. For the first time, the voice explaining human beings doesn’t need to be human. It sits in a phone, fluent in clinical manuals and Qur’anic commentary alike, waiting for you to ask what you fear, what you desire, and who you are.
