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CHAPTER FOURTEEN. PATTERNS OF ENGAGEMENT – MUSLIM
PERSPECTIVES
Until the last decade most psychoanalytic engagement with Islam focused on the area of the
mystical and the ideas and practices of Sufism, a spiritual tradition within Islam itself. This
is only one aspect of Islam, as psychoanalysis finds it is easier to engage with religious
experience than religious belief. Yet Islam has historically rejected psychoanalysis on the
basis of: its Jewish origins; its atheism; the equation of God as an idealized father-figure;
and the embrace of Modernity, rejecting past traditions (Keller 2006). Some connections
have been made. Shafii related psychoanalysis to meditation, drawing on Zen, Sufi and
Jewish mystical traditions, and makes a creative theoretical link to Balint. Balint advocated
three areas or levels of psychic development that exist concomitantly, the oedipal three-
person stage, the basic fault two-person stage, and the creation one-person stage where the
person creates something from within the self, analogous to artistic creation (Balint 1958).
Shafii situates meditation in this third creation level (Shafii 1973). 312 Further
psychoanalytic reflections on meditation drawing on Eastern religious traditions have
continued (Kakar 2003), although this area has been most fully developed in reference to
Buddhist thought and practice (see previous chapter).
In one specific sense, a positive outcome of the atrocities and traumas of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks in the USA has been a focus on the nature of Islamic thoughts and practices from a
psychoanalytic perspective. This is very much in an initial phase as the ‘past rigid stances
of psychoanalysis had made it unpopular in the Muslim world as a form of psychological
312 Another early attempt is found in Nurbakhsh’s comparison of Sufism and psychoanalysis that finds
parallels in the unconscious and transference. He draws on two single texts by Freud and Racker and is
essentially a text about Sufism (Nurbakhsh 1978a, 1978b).
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