Every Sufi master is, in a sense, a Freudian psychotherapist

Every Sufi master is, in a sense, a Freudian psychotherapist

Omnia El Shakry

University of California, Davis. 

Her latest book is 

The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt

Even in the most revolutionary thinkers, you will find the uncannily familiar. Sigmund Freud was no exception. Arabs recognised in Freud’s body of thought ideas from classical Islamic thinkers. In the 1940s and ’50s, when intellectuals translated Freud’s work into Arabic, they reached out to Ibn Arabi, the great 12th-13th-century Sufi mystic philosopher. The Egyptian playwright and novelist Tawfiq al-Hakim dates the impulse to blend traditions as far back as Alexander’s conquest of Syria and the eventual translation of philosophical works from Greek to Syriac. 

Under Roman rule, Egypt was a centre of learning and part of a shared classical intellectual world, which included Alexandria as much as it did Athens and Rome. Subsequently, Greek philosophy, and particularly the works of Plato and Aristotle, had been energetically translated into Arabic throughout the early Islamic period, contributing to the vitality of Hellenic philosophy. For al-Hakim, Greek ideas were poured into the mould of Islamic philosophy. This process was also evident in al-Hakim’s own work combining Greek tragedy and Islamic legends, in order to effect what he called an ‘intermarriage between two literatures and two mentalities’. It is not at all surprising, then, given this tendency to draw on shared traditions, that Arab intellectuals turned to a mystical Islamic vocabulary when translating Freud in the middle of the 20th century.

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This includes the nice detail that Lacan knew of Ibn 'Arabi through reading Corbin.