HOW CAN WE UNDERSTAND THE “Muslim mind,” a hot topic of academic conferences and proceedings? Motivations, impulses, wishes, dreams, and psychological defenses supply the raw materials to understand the psyche (a Greek word meaning “soul, mind, spirit”) in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic thought. Studies on Hysteria, written by Josef Breuer (1842–1925) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and published in 1895, is generally regarded as the first psychoanalytic text, after which Freud published copiously between 1895 and 1905 to elaborate on his creative theories (Person, Cooper, and Gabbard 1995). While it would be impossible to summarize more than a century of thought that has given birth to different theoretical orientations, psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard (2005) writes that all psychodynamic schools affirm key foundational principles: mental phenomena are manifestations of irrational conflicts; faulty development in childhood leads to adult pathology, and people internalize views about themselves and others that influence how they think, feel, and act. Psychodynamic practice draws deeply from the well of psychoanalytic thought, whereas psychoanalysis is additionally concerned with issues of technique; henceforth, I will refer to their theories as “psychodynamic” throughout the chapter.1
Many psychiatrists believe that psychodynamic psychiatry addresses the “mind,” whereas biological psychiatry addresses the “brain.”2 Psychodynamic concepts pervade American culture: the reserved therapist sitting across from the eager patient, the interminable anxieties in Woody Allen films, the gritty gangster Tony Soprano’s panic attacks during family conflicts, the phallic cigar jokes, the overbearing mother, the Freudian slip—these all come from psychodynamic theories. The images clash with biological psychiatry, whose research paradigms seek to uncover the genetics of mental illness, the faulty neural circuits that produce disorders, and the cellular receptors that stimulate drug discovery. This professional split—a tolerant pluralism or a mutually suspicious armistice, depending on academic department—has long characterized psychiatry. Over the past fifty years, the status of psychodynamic psychiatry as a science has come under attack as other psychotherapies have proven more effective in experimental trials and psychodynamic experiments bothered little with controlled conditions (Davies 2009). The success of medications in treating mental illnesses has also led to diagnoses based upon symptoms, instead of psychodynamic doctrines, with pharmacological treatments readily funded by insurance companies given that such an approach requires less time and less expense (Luhrmann 2000).
Over time, we have learned of the social, historical, and cultural origins of psychodynamic thought and the inextricable links between personal biography and professional theory. A long-standing debate has coalesced around the extent to which Sigmund Freud mined nineteenth-century Viennese Jewish intellectual culture for psychodynamic concepts. It has been argued that Freud’s goals for psychoanalysis mirrored contemporary Jewish ethics: service to others, self-knowledge, acceptance of difference, and recognition of humanity’s creative and destructive potentials (Frosh 2008). Disputes have gathered around whether Freud’s strategy of encouraging patients to speak freely without inhibitions mimicked rabbinical strategies of Talmudic textual analysis (Bergmann 1995). Some contend that Freud’s technique of mining the mind to the unconscious for the true nature of the self draws from the archaeological model of mining Jerusalem for the first and second Jewish temples (Enckell 1988). Quarrels over whether psychoanalysis is a Jewish science (Ostow 1982; Yerushalmi 1991) or a science from a man with Jewish origins (Brunner 1991; Gay 1987) continue to preoccupy scholars.
As a cultural psychiatrist, I am interested in the application of psychodynamic theories across cultures. Questioning the degree to which psychoanalysis mobilizes European themes, whether Jewish (dream interpretation) or Greek (the Oedipal complex), is not intended to denigrate it. The objective is to trace the history of ideas to catalog the development of human thought. Postmodern theories in the social sciences and humanities propose that all knowledge is local and constructed (Latour and Woolgar 1986) and the dissemination of knowledge requires its application beyond the local conditions of its production (Appadurai 1996). Critics have countered that psychodynamic theories rely upon a Euro-American cultural model of individualism that may not be shared elsewhere (Kirmayer 2007b). Therefore, this question arises: How does psychodynamic theory disseminate for use with those outside of the United States or Europe, the traditional centers of psychodynamic theory and practice?
This chapter analyzes psychodynamic writings on Arabs and Muslims since the War on Terror. In a review of the medical literature from 1966 to 2005, Laird, Marrais, and Barnes (2007) have shown that certain biases persist about Muslims: being an observant Muslim poses health risks; Muslims remain confined to tradition rather than accepting of modernity; and Islam creates “problems” for service delivery. I have also performed a review elsewhere on a random sample of psychodynamic texts with similar findings (Aggarwal 2011), though not in a coordinated, systematic fashion that I seek to promote through medical discourse analysis. The depictions of Arabs and Muslims in the psychodynamic literature may help us understand the second forensic function of medical systems: the establishment of medical and legal standards that support and evaluate a medicolegal issue. I have suggested that medical professionals may use certain clinical conditions, disorders, or technologies as grounds to provide a professional opinion. In this chapter, we can empirically test how mental health authors portray Arabs and Muslims through “knowledge” in scientific articles. In this sense, patient-clinician differences in interpretation may emerge around identity as mental health professionals create cultural meanings on how one’s background relates to political violence.
ORIENTALISM, MEDICINE, AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POWER AND KNOWLEDGE
My analysis of psychodynamic texts relies upon two opposing trends in mental health. A prominent research agenda in cultural psychiatry has been the extent to which psychiatric knowledge and practice must be adapted to the realities of ethnic and racial groups outside of North America and Europe in order to provide culturally sensitive care (Kirmayer 2007a). I understand this to be the healing function of cultural psychiatry. In contrast, psychiatrists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries buttressed the interests of European imperialists by erecting classifications of race based on biological differences (Littlewood 1996). I understand this to be the forensic function of cultural psychiatry. To delve into this second trend, I apply Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism” to promote dialogue among scholars of mental health and cultural studies. Said sought to reveal how previous generations of American and European scholars produced knowledge about the Middle East for overtly political purposes (Said 1994).3 Said only briefly mentions the role of Orientalism in the production of medical knowledge,4 and this chapter introduces a method to extend this investigation to unveil medical Orientalism.
Said highlights the construction of the European “Occident” against the Asian “Orient”:
I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and riches and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.
(Said 1994, 1–2)
The British-French-American presence in the Middle East from the late eighteenth century onward produced volumes of scholarship that reinforced select images of the Middle East, Islam, and Arabs. Orientalism rests in the power disparity between the Occident and the Orient:
My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism.
(Said 1994, 3)
The Occident produces the Orient through science and ideology. The weight of history and politics determines collective trends that bind individual writers. Orientalism is the Occident’s attempt to comprehend and control the Oriental Other:
It [Orientalism] is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographic distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do.
Said cautions us from assuming that science on the Orient exists without geopolitical shadows. Recently, Orientalism has provoked critical inquiries into the relationship of power and knowledge within the medical humanities. As practice, medicine is Orientalist when clinicians and researchers fashion disease categories and interpret experiences without patient input (Aull and Lewis 2004). Here, Orientalism conjures the gulf in power among patients and clinicians rather than forms of knowledge based on racial or ethnic difference. As content, Orientalism spread with nineteenth-century British physicians in India writing voluminously on the relationship of pathology to race, teaching this information to medical students as science (Harrison 2009). This chapter analyzes psychodynamic texts to inquire whether we can observe medical Orientalism since the War on Terror. By doubting rather than accepting the claims of mental health authors, we can question how Western (that is, Occidental) academics treat violence as an essentially Oriental practice.
PSYCHODYNAMIC KNOWLEDGE ON ARABS AND MUSLIMS
This sample of psychodynamic texts comes from a search for all years since 2001 for the terms “Islam,” “Muslim,” and “Arab” in Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) Web.6 PEP Web is the largest psychoanalytic database in English, with more than 1,500 volumes and 65,000 articles from 1871 to 2006. I have included all English-language articles published in peer-reviewed journals, since original articles, whether theoretical articles or case studies, constitute original scholarship in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic mental health. I have excluded books, book reviews, editorials, commentaries, and other formats not typically peer-reviewed, the process by which journals guarantee scientific standards. Two criteria guided this search: (1) articles had to explicitly address violence or the War on Terror and (2) articles had to treat the representation of difference, by which I drew upon Norman Fairclough’s definition of “constituting particular ways of being, particular social or personal identities” (2003, 26). I reviewed all relevant titles and abstracts of articles for eligibility. I also reviewed articles that did not have abstracts and those whose abstracts did not seem to clearly address violence or the War on Terror. I retrieved all articles that passed this stage and read them for representations of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam.
My goal here is not to vilify psychodynamic theories. As a psychiatrist, I utilize psychodynamic theories regularly with patients. Rather, I ask who wields psychodynamic theories, for what purposes, and with what conclusions in a political manner. In practicing psychotherapy, we offer interpretations to patients based on our knowledge of their conscious and unconscious processes, and patients can elect to accept or reject these interpretations (Samberg and Marcus 2005). The act of interpretation in the social sciences is also intersubjective, as the observer and the observed analyze meanings together (Rabinow and Sullivan 1987). My concern is that many psychodynamic authors offer cultural interpretations that the interpreted, Arabs and Muslims, cannot accept or reject. I group the text excerpts by theme, having iteratively compared each article to the others in examining themes that emerge from the texts rather than imposing a coding framework a priori (Glaser 1965). As with all other analyses of discourse in this book, I am less interested in what individual authors write and more interested in themes that are common among authors.
Cultural Differences Between the Geographically Unspecified “West” and “East”
Many psychodynamic authors attribute religious terrorism to a fundamentalist “East” in contrast to a secular “West.” Jessica Benjamin traces violence to the lack of an Enlightenment period in the “Muslim world”: “It would be naïve to dispute the dominance that fundamentalism is now enjoying in the Arab world or … that the Muslim world never went through the lengthy process of Reformation and religious wars that, in Europe, culminated in the Enlightenment” (2002, 476). Maria Miliora also paints the “Muslim world” as devoid of modernity: “In the face of the tremendous disparity between the modernity of the West and the state of the Muslim world, it appears that the latter has been standing still during the past 200 years while the West has vastly surpassed it, at least from a secular perspective” (2004, 122). Leon Wurmser compares the “Islamic world” with a secular West: “They [the attacks] have opened a deep rift of understanding, separating the United States not only from much of the Islamic world, but from much of Europe as well: large segments of the population believe that the CIA or the Mossad engineered the attacks” (2004, 911). Marco Bacciagaluppi regards violence as endemic to “Muslim societies”:
We may still have a long way to go in the West, but we no longer subject women to the horrid punishments and the abject condition which are found in Muslim societies. It is possible that, together with other contributing factors, the present violence of the Muslims against the West is basically the reaction of the new despotic hierarchy against the liberation of women and against the reestablishment of our innate striving for a cooperative society.
(2004, 477)
Authors who strive to move beyond condemnation to comprehend terrorist motives still assume the inherent religiosity of “the East.” Emmanuel Cassimatis believes that the “Muslim world” has reacted definitively to American foreign policy and cultural authority: “We have allied ourselves with Israel, invaded the Muslim Holy Lands, stationed troops there and, I paraphrase, are on the way to poisoning the Muslim world and way-of-life with our materialism, decadent ways, fast food restaurants, pornographic magazines, and vile music and videos, as we have done in so many other countries and other lands” (2002, 535).
Elisha Davar persuades us to avoid stereotyping Islam, but slips into the East-West dichotomy: “It [Islam] has been misrepresented by a particular ideological group from within its own culture, which also polarises attitudes in the West. We should not add further misrepresentation through reacting with hysteria” (2002, 243). In writing on a roundtable directed at psychoanalytical responses to terrorism, George Hough reports that some participants invested “Muslim” leaders with the responsibility to counter “radical Islamic violence”: “Bin Laden significantly distorts verses from the Koran, using them to justify terrorist violence as a sacred obligation. Moderate Muslim political and religious leaders can counter these distortions where Americans and other Westerners cannot. Moderate Muslims, he said, must reclaim their hijacked religion” (2004, 820).
Ironically, in a passage immediately following a quote from Said’s Orientalism, Jo Nash reproduces the dichotomies of the “Western” and “the Arab”: “This kind of representation of the Arab is deeply ingrained in the Western psyche. The reporting of the Arabs’ furious ‘attacks,’ rather than responses to IDF hostilities, enables the West to acquiesce in the muffled confusion characteristic of those in receipt of contradictory sources of information” (2004, 535).
Stuart Twemlow holds that terrorism is the reaction of “Muslim countries” to past traumas, drawing on the work of Vamik Volkan and “chosen traumas”:
Large-group functioning is based on a complex synthesis of personal identity and the gradual adoption of family, region, clan, profession, country and national identities, where a variety of issues can define that identity, like socio-economic status (USA) and religion (Muslim countries). Large-group identity emerges partly through “chosen” traumas and glories that are ritualized and even used politically to manipulate the populace.
(2005, 959)
Seth Moglen blames the Bush administration for a self-destructive foreign policy pitting the United States against the “Arab world”:
More than 2000 US soldiers have already died and many thousands more have been maimed, physically and psychologically; more than 100000 Iraqis may now have died; and as the United States military kills (and tortures) more people in the Arab world, it produce [sic] more homicidal—and terrorist—rage against America itself. However self-destructive it may be, the catastrophic displacement of American aggression serves deep psychological needs for a population seeking to evade the ambivalent recognition of its partial responsibility for the terrorist violence to which it is now subject.
(2006, 122)
M. Fakhry Davids exposes the racist underpinnings of certain segments in “Western” society, but reproduces the division: “Pervasive, primitive anxiety in the West, triggered by the bombings on that day [9/11], was managed by the deployment of a paranoid organisation in which the world of Islam is viewed as the enemy—the source of the threat to the West. The unfolding chain of attacks on Islam and Muslims speaks to the extraordinary power of this construction as an organised strategy of defence” (2006, 63).
Elsewhere, Davids presents case formulations of two Muslim patients settled in the West, accentuating the East-West split:
In their adolescence, both Husain and Ahmed took ownership of this problem [racism] by explicitly taking on a particular, magnified version of their unconsciously denigrated Muslim identities. At this stage, a deep split was in operation and aspects of the self associated with being Western were projected into the Westerner/unbeliever, allowing the process of engagement between the two to begin.
(2009, 187)
Ahmed Fayek describes the “impasse” between “Islam” and the “Western world”: “The political situation between Islam and the Western world is at an impasse, and we could use what we learned from the practice of analysis in analyzing that impasse” (2007, 282).
Neil Altman searches for a way to foster reconciliation between the United States and the “Muslim world” in asking: “What are some of the implications for how we might understand the current discourse about Arab-Israeli conflict and the wider relationship between the USA and the Muslim world?” (2008, 63).
Arab and Muslim authors have appropriated these geographical categories. Yasser Ad-Dab’bagh reflects on the formation of his identity within the “Arab world”: “Growing up in the Arab World meant that one would be constantly bombarded with these scenes. It also meant that one would witness the impact of the defeat of Arabs in their wars with Israel. No one felt Arabs were capable of anything of significance” (2009, 199).
Adib Jarrar muses on Palestinian suffering and calls on the psychoanalytic community to act, offering reasons for the failure of a political solution:
Another obstacle preventing the Palestinians from working through the conflict is that hostility continues to be directed at them by different Israeli governments as well as by many Israeli political and ideological groups. The Israelis are supported in their stance by (i) the American administrations, (ii) the lack of tangible impact of the international community and, (iii) the passivity and collusion of the Arab world. In spite of strong public sentiment for solidarity and identification with Palestinians, most Arab governments have been using and abusing the Palestinian issue for their own interest.
(2010, 200)
Galit Atlas contemplates “the perception of sexuality in the Arab and Persian worlds” (2012, 221) and relates this anecdote:
One of the things I am most aware of is the effects of emigration from East to West on women’s perception of sexuality. This shift is traumatic, and I am a witness to it in analysis within the minds of first- and second-generation immigrants. It is a shift from certain sexual norms to other ones that are almost entirely different. This entails coping with a different conception of what is allowed and what is forbidden, of what is considered inferior and shameful and what is considered superior; and it includes a different conception of the body, of courting patterns, and of nonverbal communication.
(2012, 222)
Arabs and Muslims in “Western” Societies
Whereas some authors cleanly disentangle “the East” from “the West,” others warn of Muslim population growth in “Western” societies. Robert Young disabuses us of thinking that we have the ability to counter “Muslim fundamentalist” thought in the United States:
I think we have to ask why so many are willing to volunteer to be suicide bombers or to go to certain death as hijackers, having, as apparently some did, waited as sleepers in America for some years to be called to action. In addition to the 19 on the planes, there were another 25 or so abetting them, and the mind boggles to think who is waiting for their chance to serve in this or related ways. A warning for those who think they can “root out” Muslim fundamentalist terrorism: Wahhabi imams control over 80% of mosques in the US, where Islam is the fastest-growing religion.
(2001, 40)
Mikhail Reshetnikov deems the integration of Muslims to be a significant problem for European integration:
All too often integration is seen in terms of granting equal opportunities to those who accept our values while marginalizing those who do not, as we can see from the problem of racial integration in America or from the attitude to Muslim minorities in Europe. As long as Muslims are a minority we can continue to avoid this problem and to insist that they integrate our values but what will happen if they become a majority?
(2008, 658)
In contrast, others have looked beyond religious identity to speculate on the causes of minority disenfranchisement in multicultural societies. Kambiz Ghaneabassiri situates Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s shooting at Ford Hood against American foreign policy:
Attempts to configure the place of Muslim selves in American body politic have focused primarily on the nature of Islam and its relation to American interests rather than on an analysis of the political policies that have shaped our times. A major consequence of this emphasis on religiocultural rather than political analysis of our times has been the division of the world’s Muslim population into “good” and “bad” Muslims depending on their stances on US policies.
(2010, 229)
The Pathological Nature of Arab and Muslim Families
Some authors view Arab and Muslim families as responsible for consistently transmitting pathology across generations. Nancy Kobrin paints the Muslim family as a cauldron of aggression, with Osama bin Laden’s animosity toward America as a natural outgrowth:
The firstborn male in Islam is the most important child for the mother. His birth automatically enhances her status within the community. The firstborn son receives the most of everything—love, attention, material goods, and so on. The only person who has more status than the son is his father, although the brother has the most power over honor killings. The firstborn son is the mother’s only source of power albeit by vicarious proxy. Hamida, bin Laden’s mom, could only identify her power, aggression, and rage through her son with regard to Muhammad bin Awda bin Laden, her husband, and his huge harem/family. Bin Laden exemplifies these psychodynamics and identifications. He projects his rage outward against “bad mother” Amrika as he fights against his derisive nickname, son of the slave (ibn al abeda), given to him by his fifty-one or so half-siblings, the other children of his father
(2003, 213–214)
Helen Silverman and Jeffrey Parger understand suicide bombers as the result of unresolved Oedipus dynamics:7
In many Arab families, the father is seen as an object of repressed hatred and becomes the source of violence, both in fantasy and in reality. A complicating socio-economic factor in Palestine is that the father is often seen as not being able to live up to his role as provider, and as a disappointing and humiliated object who brings shame upon the family. The son remains obedient to the father outwardly but secretly despises him, torn between feelings of rebellion and dependency. Since the younger men have to repress their anger out of fear, they ultimately direct their anger on to themselves. Killing oneself is also killing the hated internalized object. If this act of hatred is also sanctioned by the community and can be projected on to another authority figure—the “other”—it is even more likely that the suicide can be executed without guilt feelings.
(2004, 1266)
Uday Khalid and Peter Olsson treat childhood as a pathological condition in “Muslim cultures”: “It is in fact possible that there may be increased possibilities of narcissistic injuries for children in Muslim cultures. In Muslim cultures rigid rules are often obeyed without independent-minded questioning by children or adults. Marriage is experienced by most Muslims as a contract rather than an emotional attraction and subsequent attachment” (2006, 532).
Jeffrey Stern characterizes Arab leaders as hedonistic fathers unconcerned about educating their populace children, who then turn to terrorism:
Many Arab fathers used their fabulous wealth in the manner of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn [sic] to build themselves great pleasure domes with glittering fountains, legions of servants, and stables of race horses, as well as to purchase villas in Monaco, private jets, yachts and casinos. But, they built very few schools and among these few almost none that [sic] taught their children marketable skills, offering instead curricula based on the Quran and that institutionalized anti-semitism [sic]. Such fathers denied their wives and daughters basic rights of self determination [sic], did nothing to build their nations’ economies and supported every sort of political corruption.
(2009, 192)
Authors who urge a more sensitive psychodynamic scholarship continue the inquiry into Muslim families. Nancy Hollander’s call for a more “socially responsible psychoanalysis” ends with this agenda:
So, for example, alongside the emerging interest among American psychoanalysts in the mind of the terrorist or family violence in pre-modern Islam, we would do well to also focus on an exploration of the meaning and impact of our own group’s unconscious perpetuation of hegemonic ideology and uninformed support of US policy in the Israeli/Palestinian catastrophe.
(2009, 176)
Certain texts seek greater explanations of the reasons for violence, beyond religious identities. James Jones clarifies that martyrdom mobilizes a new theological understanding of violence: “It must be noted that this understanding of martyrdom and self-sacrifice is not traditional in Islam, and it has been condemned by many leading Muslim clerics and scholars around the world … Rather, it represents a major theological innovation on the part of the radical Islamicists [sic] like bin Laden” (2006, 174).
J. S. Pivens emphasizes dissimilarities among Muslims and Islamists: “The fact that there are innumerable Muslim communities not comprised of terrorists demonstrates that we are dealing with a different mode of fanatic theology, not the ineluctable consequence of indoctrination into Muslim society” (2006, 239).
Diane Casoni and Louis Brunet also differentiate Islamists from Islam in discussing religion and political violence:
Religion also offers criteria of a sometimes intolerable differentiation between individuals: the Middle Ages were the theatre of the Roman Catholic inquisition, a large-scale enterprise aiming at the conversion or elimination of adepts of all other religions, be they Cathares, Jews, Muslims, or Protestants. In a similar fashion, the actual Islamist jihad aims at the installation of a world ruled by Islam, some resorting to suicidal terrorist acts with that aim in view.
(2007, 52)
Ira Brenner counsels that individuals cannot be reduced to demographic traits:
Under the current conditions of ongoing trauma and violence, such regressed societies revert to black-and-white thinking, resulting in stereotyping the other and virulent xenophobic prejudice. In this situation, all Palestinians then become Muslims and all Muslims become suicide bomber terrorists whereas all Israelis become Jews and all Jews become the purveyors of evil who conspire to take over the world.
(2009, 70)
Carlo Strenger also advises Israelis against demonizing the entire Arab world for the actions of a few:
Israeli public discourse has not yet been able to integrate the history of the 1948 war and the mass expulsion of Palestinians into its identity narrative. Hence, it is very difficult for most Israelis, whether ordinary citizens or decision-makers, to differentiate between the wide variety of attitudes within the Arab world specifically, and the Islamic world at large towards Israel. When a group like Hamas or a country like Iran voices strongly anti-Semitic views and vows to destroy Israel, Israel’s collective psyche is incapable of seeing that this does not imply that the whole of the Arab world or all of Islam shares these views.
(2009, 192)
Finally, Joseph Massad unpacks the difficulties of defining the terms “Islam,” “Muslim,” and “Arab.” As a rare voice in this literature, his passage merits full quotation:
One of the difficulties in analyzing what Islam has come to mean and to refer to since the 19th century is the absence of agreement on what Islam actually is. Does Islam name a religion, a geographical site, a communal identity; is it a concept, a technical term, a sign, or a taxonomy? The lack of clarity on whether it could be all these things at the same time is compounded by the fact that Islam has acquired referents and significations it did not formerly possess. European Orientalists and Muslim and Arab thinkers begin to use “Islam” in numerous ways while seemingly convinced that it possesses an immediate intelligibility that requires no specification or definition. “Islam”, for these thinkers, is not only the name the Qur’an attributes to the din (often (mis)translated as religion, though there is some disagreement about this) that entails a faith [iman] in God disseminated by the Prophet Muhammad, but can also refer to the history of Muslim states and empires, the different bodies of philosophical, theological, jurisprudential, medical, literary, and scientific works, as well as to culinary, sexual, social, economic, religious, ritualistic, scholarly, agricultural, and urban practices engaged in by Muslims from the 7th to the 19th century and beyond, and much, much more.
(2009, 193)
A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF PSYCHODYNAMIC TEXTS ON ARABS AND MUSLIMS
Psychodynamic texts on Arabs and Muslims display Said’s division of powers political, intellectual, cultural, and moral. The first theme groups authors who have marked the “East” from the “West.” No author qualifies these two halves of the world with exact frontiers or countries, and yet they assume that readers will verify these geographical entities as legitimate units of comparison. Does “Middle East” include countries such as Israel, Turkey, and Iran, whose ethnicities are traditionally seen as non-Arab? Does “Arab” also include Christians, Druze, Sephardic Jews, and other religious groups? Does “Muslim” refer to Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Khariji, and all other sects? In a variation on this theme, the “Muslim world” is juxtaposed against the “West,” implying geographical impermeability or mutual exclusivity. It is unimaginable for “Muslim worlds” to exist in the “West,” or vice versa, effectively denying the existence of immigrant and expatriate communities. Orientalism imposes a distribution of geopolitical awareness within scholarly texts that can then elaborate a series of interests such as psychological analysis.
Psychological analysis then proceeds to link violence and aggression to meanings constructed around cultural differences. Let us revisit the authors quoted earlier. For example, Benjamin (2002) links “fundamentalism” in the “Arab world” to the fact that the “Muslim world” never experienced a Reformation or religious wars that “culminated” in the Enlightenment. No clear definition of “fundamentalism” is offered—is she talking about doctrines or practices?—though she assumes that readers will apprehend her meaning. She uses the terms “Arab world” and “Muslim world” interchangeably, despite religious variability among Arabs (i.e. Christians, Jews, and Druze, among others) and ethnic variability among Muslims who can be found on virtually every continent. Reformation and religious wars “culminate” in the Enlightenment for Europe, underscoring the rhetoric of progress and modernity.
Miliora (2004) retains this concept of civilizational progress in noting the “tremendous disparity” between “the modernity of the West and the state of the Muslim world.” The term “tremendous” summons a magnitude later specified as two hundred years. By representing the “Muslim world” as “standing still” and the “West” as having “surpassed” it, Miliora continues the same rhetoric as Benjamin (2002) used. No definition of “secular” or “secularism” is provided; does it refer to a population’s religiosity or a state’s recognition of an official denomination? Were it the latter, then how does a secular Europe reconcile that Christianity is recognized as a state religion in Andora, Argentina, Costa Rica, Denmark, England, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Vatican City? According to the cultural logic of psychodynamic texts, these countries could lie within the West. Bacciagaluppi (2004) distinguishes the West from Muslim societies that subject women to horrid punishments and abject conditions. The violence of Muslims comes, in part, from “the reaction of the new despotic hierarchy against the liberation of women.” A sociological link is tenuously drawn from violence against women to “present violence of the Muslims against the West,” through an apparent “new despotic hierarchy” (Bacciagaluppi 2004), but this phrase is not defined. The underlying assumption is that women in the West fare better from their liberation. These authors exert power intellectual through psychological analysis whose evidence comes not from clinical observation but from broad historical and sociological claims. Additionally, these authors wield power cultural in passing judgment on values and power moral in dismissing what they cannot do and understand.
Even sympathetic authors who wish to convey sensitivity and understanding in rationalizing terrorist motives utilize terms such as the “East,” the “West,” and the “Muslim world” without specificity. Cassimatis (2002) ominously presents a scenario of “poisoning the Muslim world and way-of-life with our materialism, decadent ways, fast food restaurants, pornographic magazines, and vile music and videos.” As before, the “Muslim world” is not defined and the “way-of-life” of all Muslims is ostensibly the same everywhere. However, Cassimatis inverts moral judgments of previous authors by taking responsibility through the noun “we.” Here, “we” refers not just to Cassimatis himself but also to his readers, who apparently share in the culpability of “poisoning” through a string of negative images such as “materialism, decadent ways, fast food restaurants, pornographic magazines, and vile music and videos.” The placement of this sentence immediately after the phrase “invaded the Muslim Holy Lands” paints the “West” as impure and the “Muslim world” as chaste, with the “Muslim world” conceived of as a passive recipient rather than an active agent. Davar (2002) continues this terminological vagueness by referring to “Islam” as having its own culture. The diversity of Islamic societies with a multiplicity of cultures is reduced to a single personified entity. Davar also uses “we” to enlist those of us in the West to avoid “reacting with hysteria.”
Moglen (2006) implicates “the United States military” for killing people in the Arab world, leading to homicidal rage against America, writing this sentence immediately after stating that more than a hundred thousand Iraqis may have died. This possibility (posed by the word “may”) of such destruction in Iraq is then decisively extended to the entire Arab world that reacts with revenge. In contrast, Hough (2004) reports on psychodynamic authors who call on “moderate Muslim political and religious leaders” to “counter” “terrorist violence” through “distort[ed] verses from the Koran” and to “reclaim their hijacked religion.” No definition of “moderate” is offered, but Hough seems to imply “non-violent.” Leaders who are foremost “political and religious” must counter violence, not criminologists or law enforcement officials in these societies. Terrorist violence arises from a “hijacked religion,” not from the criminal impulses of stray individuals. The term “hijacked” is not random, resonating with the imagery of hijacked 9/11 planes. Twemlow (2005) assumes that “identity” can be defined through “socio-economic status” in the United States and “religion” in “Muslim countries.” The “Muslim countries” are not named, even though “large-group identity” forms from “chosen traumas and glories.” These authors exercise power political to diagnose social problems, power intellectual to formulate psychological processes, power cultural with differentiations of values, and power moral in apportioning the responsibility of terrorism to either the “West” or the “East.”
Ironically, authors who endeavor to transcend the East-West dichotomy find themselves writing in this manner. Nash (2004) quotes Said’s Orientalism at length, but falls into the trap of comparing the “representation of the Arab” in the “Western psyche.” The terms “Arab” and “Western” personify distinct entities that possess singular ways of being and thinking. Davids (2006) criticizes the “unfolding chain of attacks on Islam and Muslims” and “the extraordinary power of this construction” but precedes this phrase by stating that the “pervasive, primitive anxiety in the West” that was triggered on 9/11 has manufactured a view in which “the world of Islam is viewed as the enemy.” Elsewhere, Davids (2009) dichotomizes “Muslim identities” from “being Western,” just as Fayek (2007) regrets that “the political situation between Islam and the Western is at an impasse.” Altman (2008) wishes to improve “the wider relationship between the USA and the Muslim world.”
Even Arab and Muslim authors who ponder their formations of identity cannot escape this tendency. Ad-Dab’bagh (2009) writes of the “Arab world” and its “self-deprecating discourse.” Jarrar (2010) blames the lack of success with Palestine on “the passivity and collusion of the Arab world,” which is immediately qualified by “most Arab governments” given the “strong public sentiment for solidarity and identification with Palestinians.” Atlas (2012) discovers sexuality in “the Arab and Persian worlds” from the “effects of migration from East to West.” The persistence of East-West conceptualization—of geographical and therefore cultural difference—afflicts even those who wish to sponsor intercultural understanding.
The effort to cleanly demarcate the geographic “West” from the “Arab”/“Muslim”/“East” draws some authors to posit the consequences of the latter settling within the former. Young (2001) warns of the “Muslim fundamentalist” who lurks as a “sleeper” in America, introducing suspicion and mistrust. Those who wish to “root out” this terrorism must confront “Wahhabi imams who control over 80% of the mosques in the US.” Young frames “Muslim fundamentalist terrorism” around the “Wahhabi” sect, not around the criminality of stray individuals. Wahhabi Islam is treated as a single unit with no granular examination of doctrines, practices, or internal disagreements. Moreover, Young assumes that imams transmit “fundamentalist” ideologies in mosques, public spaces of worship, rather than in private spaces such as homes. This logical move brands the entire community with blame. Xenophobia underscores the ominous warning that “Islam is the fastest growing religion” in the United States. Likewise, Reshentikov (2008) predicts grave consequences for Muslim migration to Europe, treated similarly to “the problem of racial integration in America.” Reshetnikov uses collective terms like “we” and “our” to enlist us so that we can “avoid this problem and to insist that they integrate our values.” Examples of successful Muslim migration and integration are unmentioned. Ghaneabassiri (2010) departs from this tendency by questioning whether focus “on the nature of Islam and its relation to American interests” occludes perspectives on “the political policies that have shaped our times.” This “religiocultural” emphasis over “political analysis” cleaves the Muslim population into “good” and “bad.” These texts exhibit power political by questioning the roles of Muslims in the “West,” power intellectual wrought in psychological analysis, and power moral with certain authors denouncing the “Muslim” Other.
Having instituted the “Arab” and the “East” in opposition to the “West,” some authors locate violence in the inherent pathologies of Muslim families. Kobrin (2003) collapses the differences of family life based on ethnicity and locality to claim that “the firstborn male in Islam is the most important child for the mother.” Kobrin institutionalizes violence in the family by remarking that “the brother has the most power over honor killings.” From this telescoping sociological analysis, she microscopically concentrates on the bin Laden family: “Hamida, bin Laden’s mom, could only identify her power, aggression, and rage through her son.” Bin Laden then “projects his rage outward against ‘bad mother’ Amrika,” though Kobrin does not explain why “Amrika” has become bin Laden’s mother, as opposed to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other countries whose implementations of Islam he opposed. The term “Amrika” itself mocks pronunciations of “America” that are other than English. Silverman and Parger (2004) view the father “as an object of repressed hatred” and “the source of violence.” The situation in Palestine exacerbates the father’s “shame upon the family” because he cannot “live up to his role as provider.” The political economy of Palestine remains unaddressed and the apparent loss of economic function stems from the family. In response, the son who is “obedient to the father but secretly despises him” balances “rebellion and dependency.” The logical response is suicide bombing “without guilt feeling” because this is “sanctioned by the community.” All of Palestine and “many Arab families” become complicit in the acts of a few. Similarly, Khalid and Olsson (2006) assert that “there may be increased possibilities of narcissistic injuries for children in Muslim cultures.” No “independent-minded questioning by children or adults” in “Muslim cultures” evokes a lack of curiosity and critical thinking. Marriage becomes “a contract rather than an emotional attraction,” implying a cold and calculated transaction. Stern (2009) generalizes the dynamics of “Arab” families to symbolize deficiencies of Arab leaders. Their debauchery manifests through “great pleasure domes,” “legions of servants,” “race horses,” and “private jets, yachts, and casinos.” These images of opulence and excess contrast with “very few schools” and very few “marketable skills.” The little extant education rests on the Quran and “institutionalized anti-semitism [sic].” The implication is that education must serve capitalist ends for the market that the Quran cannot provide. “Anti-Semitism” ostensibly refers to discrimination against Jews, though Arabs have often identified as Semites. Even Hollander’s (2009) encouragement for a “socially responsible psychoanalysis” acknowledges the interest in “family violence in pre-modern Islam.” Hollander does not identify what types of family violence elicit interest nor detail the components of practice and doctrine in “pre-modern Islam.” These texts expose power political in explaining terrorism, power intellectual in using psychodynamic theories, and power moral in making explicit value judgments about family structure.
Against these texts come authors who seek to distinguish Muslims from Islamists. Jones (2006) asserts that “martyrdom and self-sacrifice is not traditional in Islam” but belongs to “radical Islamicists [sic].” Pivens (2006) discusses “Muslim communities” (in the plural) that marginalize “fanatic theology.” Casoni and Brunet (2007) also distinguish Muslims from the “Islamist” who seeks “a world ruled by Islam.” Brenner (2009) admonishes readers to avoid “black-and-white thinking” and “stereotyping” with the undesired consequences that “all Palestinians then become Muslims and all Muslims become suicide bomber terrorists.” Strenger (2009) also calls Israelis to recognize “the wide variety of attitudes within the Arab world,” though he treats the “Islamic world” singularly. Finally, Massad (2009) is the sole author to question “the difficulties in analyzing what Islam has come to mean and to refer to since the 19th century.”
Psychodynamic texts constitute a veritable discourse on Arabs and Muslims.
The sayable in this discourse: Terrorism connects political violence to Arab, Muslim, and “Eastern” identity.
The domain: The audience is versed in psychodynamic vocabularies and concepts. It is possible, though unlikely, that many authors have written these texts without considering the possibility that Arabs, Muslims, and other minority populations may access their publications.
The conservation: Utterances treat “Arab” and “Muslim” as collective terms that signify commonalities rather than exploring differences. These terms effectively serve as “empty signifiers” that authors manipulate for political intentions without designating clear definitions (Aggarwal 2008).
The memory: The assumption is that terrorism and political violence belong to ethnic and religious identities rather than that they are behaviors demonstrating forms of criminology. This recalls the memory of European psychiatrists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries erecting biological classifications based on perceived racial differences.
The reactivation: Previous discourses of progress and modernity differentiate the “West” from the more primitive and less evolved “East.” Geopolitical interests find their way into mental health scholarship.
The appropriation: Psychodynamic tenets of aggression and the Oedipal complex root political violence within the family. The three preoccupations of tribalism, the treatment of women, and Islam that Abu-Lughod (1989) found in her review of the anthropological literature on the Middle East also pervade psychodynamic texts. Rather than a classification of races by biology that prevailed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mental health professionals have fabricated a hierarchy based on psychology.
This psychodynamic discourse deviates from recent movements in cultural mental health. If cultural psychiatry is to remain vigilant about the bases and biases of mental health knowledge (Bibeau 1997; Kirmayer 2006, 2007a, 2007b; Kirmayer and Minas 2000), then we can subject psychodynamic texts to cultural critique. The above psychodynamic writers show little hesitation in diagnosing whole societies as uniform collections of “Arabs” or “Muslims.”
In contrast, the methodology of psychoanalyzing societies has long been debunked in anthropology and cultural psychiatry. In the 1930s, researchers from the “culture and personality” school, such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, attempted to relate individual behavior and social structure to studies of national character (Kirmayer 2007a). Even then, Edward Sapir (1938) argued that culture consists of the actions and behaviors of individuals who possess the agency to act differently. By the late 1950s, the influence of the culture and personality school waned because studies could not progress beyond typecasting entire civilizations (Levine 2001). This methodology made faulty assumptions—it treated nation-states as culturally uniform despite the presence of ethnic, racial, and cultural minorities in most societies, and it held that a uniform culture could be gleaned through interviews without considering that different interviewees may construct different ideas of culture (Kirmayer 2006). Aside from inheriting the faulty premise that generalizes psychology to group-level identities, the psychodynamic texts reviewed here evidence no interviews with individuals; the “data” mined are the authors’ personal speculations.
In response, social scientists have interrogated the cultural origins of psychodynamic concepts and contested their application to populations outside of Europe or North America. Biomedicine can be charged with the “colonization” of other cultures, since psychodynamic thought has not been rigorously validated elsewhere (Sadler 2005). Psychodynamic theories also enshrine moral assumptions about rationality and individual autonomy in the guise of advancing “health” and “adaptation” (Littlewood 1993, 1996). In fact, psychodynamic models depend on psychological and biological concepts without accounting for social and cultural factors relevant for populations outside of Europe and North America (Bhugra and Bhui 1999). In this manner, the use of theories such as the Oedipal complex to depict Arab and Muslim populations continues a form of cultural imperialism that enshrines moral assumptions about the roles of parents and children based on speculation instead of on case studies.
Nonetheless, psychological anthropologists have attempted to rescue aspects of psychodynamic thought as pertinent for cultural analysis. To dismiss psychodynamic theories because of their European provenance would be akin to dismissing economics, history, anthropology, and other disciplines instead of shifting the emphasis to testing and reformulating such theories in other societies (Obeyesekere 1990). Psychodynamic principles can be reconfigured productively to show how all people experience conflicts while pursuing goals that are culturally determined (Ewing 1992). The social configurations people belong to, such as family structure, are also culturally determined and produce conflicting intents and desires (Cohler 1992). Groups within social configurations must work through familial roles in ways that are “multiple, articulated, quasi-articulated, unarticulated, and inarticulable” (Crapanzano 1992, 302–303). In this way, a model that views the self as a process of becoming—rather than as a permanent being—whereby individuals provide ongoing meanings to themselves, can enhance cultural analysis (Molino 2004). Future psychodynamic authors could apply these insights in order to achieve greater analytical rigor.
Furthermore, over the past twenty years cultural psychiatrists have fundamentally rethought the concept of culture as a marker of identity and difference. Psychiatry in Europe and North America has suffered from a theoretical weakness in which people are reduced to demographics, like “Arab” or “Muslim,” without acknowledging the immense diversity within these groups (Aggarwal 2010a, 2010c; Kleinman and Benson 2006). Psychiatrists have discarded outdated notions of culture as coherent, static systems of meaning in favor of a dynamic interaction through which people create meanings from multiple sources (Bibeau 1997). Since the 1990s, information technology and globalization have facilitated travel across geographic and Internet spaces, enabling people to construct new values, beliefs, and commitments throughout life from distant sources (Kirmayer and Minas 2000). From this perspective, the use of terms such as “Arab,” “Muslim,” “East,” and “West” demands greater clarity, since these categories group diverse populations together.
In addition, we are not sure what being “Arab” or “Muslim” means for people with these backgrounds without interviewing them, especially since they may prioritize other ways of identification. For example, the theory of hybridity stresses that each of us possesses a range of identities (Bhabha 2006). Discursive psychology emphasizes that narratives of identity and lived experience are constructed in relation to the social world such as setting and audience (Kirmayer 2006). For me, my identities as husband, father, psychiatrist, Hindi speaker, or Punjabi speaker surface differently depending on my relationships with those around me. New work in cultural psychiatry traces how these hybrid identities shape an individual’s responses to questions on the self, social relationships, health, and mental illness in relation to others (Aggarwal 2012b). To engage this work, however, requires psychodynamic authors to suspend medical Orientalist views of ethnicity, religion, and geography and create alternate meanings for explanations of political violence.