Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran
Was Scheherazade a precursor to Freud? Psychoanalysis is a laboratory made of narratives. It offers the possibility to connect the stories of all those who suffer -- whatever their anxiety, their traumas, their desires -- and to give birth to individual freedoms -- despite the religious, social, and economic obstacles presented by various political regimes. The roads to freedom found on Gohar Homayounpour's analytic couch are unexpected, secret, and ultimately irresistible.(Julia Kristeva, psychoanalyst, philosopher, novelist, and author ofTales of Love and Murder in Byzantium)InDoing Psychoanalysis in TehranGohar Homayounpour puts Iran on the couch: through her eyes and ears the reader will discover an extraordinarily rich, complex, and sophisticated culture, inhabited by famous artists, passionate intellectuals, bored socialites, and even ordinary neurotics. This masterful book -- beautifully written and eloquently narrated -- will even fulfill the ultimate fantasy: to eavesdrop into the analyst's consulting room.(Rubén Gallo, author ofFreud's Mexico)The censors of this fascinating book are not ulamā with long robes and beards, but the egos of the author's analytic patients. Gohar Homayounpour offers our Western gaze a more profound look into the psyches of people living in the Islamic Republic of Iran than we could ever have imagined; she permits us to glimpse their very core, that place where they are no longer graspable, least of all to themselves. In this way the patients she 'reads' -- and she herself as she tries and fails, tries and fails to catch up with her own nostalgia for her native Tehran -- become wonderfully exotic, not in the Orientalist but in the psychoanalytic sense, the one that matters. A rich, multi-layered memoir.(Joan Copjec, Director, Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo; author ofRead My DesireandImagine There's No Woman)In this brilliant work of analysis, memory, and association, the Iranian psychoanalyst Gohar Homayounpour navigates between East and West, conscious and unconscious, English and Farsi, and other poles of subjectivity and objectivity that define the condition of individuals and their interior/exterior worlds. Psychoanalysis is the vehicle, but culture, curiosity, pain, and authenticity are the real protagonists of this unique book.(Dr. Stefano Bolognini, President, International Psychoanalytical Association, and President, Italian Psychoanalytic Society)