Preface

We would have preferred to read some source material rather than to write this, to have bought a few leading books from Amazon on the topic, and see what the blogosphere and academic debates said about them. That is our preferred approach to a new topic. Then we would have been better prepared to write. Perhaps it is our poor research skills, but we couldn’t find much about Frued, Jung or psycholoanalysis and Islam. So at the moment we are principally asking questions, of which a few follow.

Discussion

We recently wrote about the horror of Islam’s criminalizing apostasy, in part because criminalizing inquiry and doubt enslaves the mind. This led us to many thoughts: (a) what perverted concept of the self promotes suppressing and denying the most personal of doubts; (b) what does Islam think about Freud and psychoanalysis, which involves letting thoughts go where they will to reveal unconscious motivations; (c) is the fact that Arab culture is considered a ‘shame society’ (see Dr. Sanity) a related concept; (d) what pyschological costs are imposed by blaming negative or doubting or troubling thoughts on external forces — sin? Jews? money? modern life? media culture? oppression by others? uppity women? the Great Satan or the Little Satan? — instead of locating such thoughts and neuroses internally? (e) how do the severe punishments and executions for homosexuality, and the oppression of women fit into this picture? (e) is this twisted concept of the human psyche related in some significant sense to the penchant of Islamic boys to be attracted to the suicide aspect of suicide-bombing, perhaps as a way out of un-discussable problems?

Right now we are just asking questions. Certainly we can’t find any answers on the internet. If you Google Psychoanalysis – Islam, you get not much of interest, which is perhaps telling in itself. We did find a disturbing piece of writing at Islam Online from an Islamic therapist, Malik Babikir Badri:

When Freud developed his psycho-analytic school as theory for human behavior and a method of psycho-therapy he was greatly influenced by the anti religious secular movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Christianity was demoted and the human soul was thrown over board a new kind of secular philosophy was very much needed to fill the vacuum created by the demotion of religion. From this point of view psychoanalysis was actually a philosophy and to some extremists a new religion. Young doctors who graduate as psychoanalysts will have to be psychoanalyzed themselves. This is a way of brainwashing them into a new worldview of a Freudian nature.

Since religion teaches that humans have souls and that they are responsible for what ever they do before God and that there is a here-after in which their actions will be judged, then they must have freedom of choice to either act in a good way or in an evil way. Freud demolished this conception and denied the existence of God, the soul, the here-after and human free will. In preaching his new secular conception of man he had to invent a new power which motivates humans to act in their environment. This new “god” is the unconscious. If man is motivated in what ever he does by unconscious forces then he does not have the freedom to choose. Since Freud postulated that the unconscious is propelled by sexual and aggressive impulses, the whole conception of sinful behavior and evil that religion teaches became challenged. One of the reasons why Freud was hailed by the western world at the time was because he gave Western societies a good justification for their emancipation from rigidity of Catholicism. However, psychoanalysis has deprived man from his rational conscious motivation….

I have always found that using this Islamically oriented cognitive therapy effective to bring about dramatic improvement in patients who failed to respond to psychiatric treatment with drugs or to psychoanalytic oriented therapy. In fact, many of my patients who had been psychoanalyzed deteriorated after psychoanalytic therapy or they were made to remember very painful incidence which increased their anxiety and feelings of worthlessness. It would have been better for them not to remember that unconscious material.

We find this writing, which seems to us to be rife with dishonesty, to be profoundly disturbing, since it seems to us that honesty is a sine qua non for being a good therapist. For example, his assertion that unconscious motivation deprives man of choice is ludicrous on its face. People choose to act in ways contrary to their wishes and desires, conscious and unconscious, every day. Why is this man lying? we ask. What is he trying to hide?

Moreover, this sounds to us like a man who is capable of doing great harm to his patients. He believes that patients would have been better served “not to remember that unconscious material,” those “incidence” [sic], that made them uncomfortable. Instead of letting his patients work through their conflicts, he apparently thinks Islam and his patients are better served by finding some way to avoid and paper over some serious issues. Perhaps Islam is indeed better served by doing so, but those troubled individual men and women most certainly are not.

Postscript

Though there is little written on Freud, pychoanalysis and Islam, there is plenty to read on the subject of Islam, human nature, and original sin. In one sense, Islam takes the position that it provides all the knowledge necessary for one to understand the self, and it does so through revelation:

The point of revelation is not to enforce a ‘system’, but to complement the human personality. Revelation was sent to remind men of their ultimate destiny and to regulate all those components (i.e. emotions, passions, hedonism and reason according to Moiz Amjad), that make up a human being so that he can achieve harmony in life. Without revelation, men tend to fall into extreme, whether it is through his own reason or heart. History is a testimony to this.

In this sense, asking about Freud and Islam is to get things backwards. Freud has little to add to the concept of the self and human nature, other than if he said to focus on the overall truth of man’s nature as revealed in Islam. Knowledge, including self-knowledge, is a comprehrensive concept in Islam, and depends first on accepting the truth of the religion in submission to the revelation of Allah:

In Islam ‘ilm [knowledge] is not confined to the acquisition of knowledge only, but also embraces socio-political and moral aspects. Knowledge is not mere information; it requires the believers to act upon their beliefs and commit themselves to the goals which Islam aims at attaining. In brief, I would like to say that the theory of knowledge in the Islamic perspective is not just a theory of epistemology. It combines knowledge, insight, and social action as its ingredients….not only the Qur’an and hadith encouraged Muslims or rather made it obligatory for them to pursue truth freely from all possible sources, but also contained certain guiding principles that could provide a secure foundation for the development of religious and secular sciences.

So what Freud was doing could only be ‘science’ if it assisted in shedding some light on what religion had already revealed to be true. So in Islam, mental illness is either something genetic or biological, or possession by an evil spirit, or a result of a defect — of straying from the true path given to man:

we can look at how different cultures understand mental illness, and certainly in Islamic culture there is way to understand this by explaning it as the result of sin, or some other supernatural phenomenon, like the sihr, hasad and the presence of jinn. In fact, the Arabic word for insane or crazy is “majnoon” which is related to the world “jinn.” So does being crazy in the Islamic perspective mean that one is possessed by the jinn? Yes, in some cases, you will find people making a traditional diagnosis like that, and usually these people are not locked up or medicated, as they would be in the West, but they are treated with the Qur’an. In another view, our own deeds come back to haunt us, so having committed a major sin can certainly make one feel out of touch, and even seek help, which in most cases would also be the Quran, and salat and dua.

For the last word in this rather depresing section, we will turn to Pakistan’s official views of mental health:

Mental health in Pakistan is an important issue and needs to be attended to with help from civil society, Punjab Special Education Minister Qudsia Lodhi told a conference on ‘Islam and Mental Health’ organised by the International Conference of Pakistan Association of Clinical Psychologists (PACP) in Lahore on Saturday.

“Solution to our problems lies in the teachings of Islam. We can achieve success and peace by following universal principles of our religion,” Ms Lodhi said.

The minister said Islamic laws stressed human relationships and urged Muslims to treat parents with kindness and love. Parents, she added, had similar responsibilities towards their children. “Rights of the relatives, orphans and neighbours are defined clearly in Islam. There is guidance also on how to treat your teachers, strangers or travellers. In fact, it all adds up to a charter of human rights. Even animal rights have been spelled,” she said.

Ms Lodhi said that since the parameters were already drawn, it made the job of a clinical psychologist relatively easier. She said the conference should focus on Islamic teachings…

We no longer wonder why there is not a lot of literature on Freud, psychoanalysis and Islam. All science must begin with free inquiry, which is based on observation and which certainly includes questioning all assumptions about ‘revealed’ knowledge or any other a priori assumption. Islam rejects such inquiry out of hand as a possible path to truth. Thus the explanation is in a way quite similar to the reason there are so few patents in the Islamic world. The entire process is suspect. Free association, like the passion to tinker and invent, can lead one away from the true nature of man, as laid out 1400 years ago, and such an outcome is unacceptable in Islam.

We have said that the results of the practices of sharia societies regarding science and innovation have been tragic from an economic standpoint; the results of similar thinking on matters of mental health seem even more profoudly tragic on a human level.

UPDATE

We recommend Shrinkwrapped’s Sex and Islam.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 4:07 am and is filed under General, Religion, War, art, culture, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.