Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

history as a must-read for clinicians who are working with Muslim patients or
anyone interested in a psychoanalytically-informed perspective of these ‘people of
the book’ (Brenner 2009: 231).
Akhtar’s work in the USA finds a parallel in Europe through the work of Fethi Benslama.
He is a psychoanalyst and a Professor of Psychopathology at the University of Jussieu, Paris
VII who engages psychoanalysis with religion, culture, and ethnicity both as an academic
and clinician. Benslama was also founding editor of Cahiers Intersignes, a French-language
review on psychoanalysis and culture, especially Islam and Europe (1990-2003), and whose
ideas have been made more accessible in a book recently translated into English,
Psychoanalysis and the challenge of Islam (Benslama 2009). As a secular thinker who
identifies with Muslim culture, Benslama subjects Islamic history and religious beliefs to a
psychoanalytic hermeneutic interpretation drawing on insights from Lacan. He adopts a
‘critical subjectivity’ drawn from psychoanalysis to negotiate the polarities of ‘differentialist
essentialism’ and ‘abstract universalism’. He wishes to dissolve such structures held in
Islamic thought in order to examine ‘the architecture of mythotheologic structures … used
to comprehend the workings of their invisible foundations and to discover … the kernel of
the impossible around which language forms an imaginary shell, a projection of the psyche
towards the external world’ (Benslama 2009: ix). His work establishes important areas for
future scholars, Muslim and otherwise, to debate and future psychoanalysts to examine.
There is in Islam a prohibition against approaching God from the perspective of
paternity. It leaves man to confront a genealogical desert between himself and god -
a desert that is impossible to cross, not because it cannot be crossed but because
beyond it lies the impossible. However, this objection, whose provenance I have
examined with respect to Judaism and Christianity, is transported de facto into
psychoanalysis, where the god-father relationship lies at the heart of constructions
relative to the fields of symbolism, ideality, and spirituality through their hold on the
subject. How can we integrate the Islamic objection into the theoretical complexity
of psychoanalysis, which is already considerable? Perhaps we should consider the
theory of god-the-father by examining the genealogical desert. Life in the desert
exposes men to wandering; it forces them to remain united and to take care of the
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