The two books reviewed in this Kitabkhana, Omnia El Shakry's The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and Sarah Pinto's The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis, provide an opportunity to think about the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and colonialism—a relationship our reviewers explore admirably. In this introduction, I want to grapple within this troubled problem-space and the stakes of El Shakry's and Pinto's works in relation to the questions that both form and arise from that space.1
Even though Sigmund Freud's breakthroughs instituted a Copernican revolution, reorienting key understandings of the modern self, these discoveries were tied to colonialism; for example, Freud infamously referred to women's sexuality as a “dark continent,” drawing on Henry Morton Stanley's metaphor for Africa.2 Situating Freud in his historical location, as scholars have done, makes clear how Freud's insights normalized a Eurocentric,...
