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An exploration of the 'Persian psyche' challenges Western preconceptions, finds Shahidha Bari.
Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran
By Gohar Homayounpour
MIT Press, 176pp, Pounds 13.95
ISBN 9780262017923
Published 26 October 2012
Elegantly sleek and severe, the analyst's couch in Gohar Homayounpour's office backs on to a three-paned window from which is afforded a view of a remotely dilapidated Tehran, its craggy mountainous inclines and the stark, unlovely, ramshackle blocks that cluster at its foothills. The office is a neat and spartan affair in which one imagines the analyst carefully containing and ordering the complexities of the unruly city and its inhabitants. The day-to-day business of "doing" psychoanalysis in Tehran, though (as the faintly clunky title of this book indicates), is rarely such a graceful activity. The cover image of the austere office and the sprawling city emphasises the discrepancy between a seemingly controlled and serene authority and the more rebellious impulses and assertions it might seek to restrain and conceal. The officious marshalling of desire might itself be taken as a concise diagnosis of the trouble with contemporary Iran (or at least the forbiddingly religious political state we suspect it to be from the outside), but what's curious about Homayounpour's memoir is its recognition that the rift between authority and impulse might also lie at the heart of the analytical situation itself and of psychoanalysis more broadly.
Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran is a candid account of an analytical practice: it is part memoir and part clinical case study but also an unabashed riposte to the preconceptions of a traditionally Western psychoanalytical community. It is a slight, pocket-sized volume, confessional in style, accessible in prose, perhaps even a little undemanding in its argumentation. It is at different moments self-absorbed and startlingly naive but also remarkable in so far as that very self- absorption and naivety enables Homayounpour to turn an unforgiving lens on the complacencies and contradictions of psychoanalysis itself. The book confronts this most ambitious of therapeutic practices with an enormous challenge - that of probing the psyche of a nation that is burdened equally by its tumultuous history and volatile future. Within this context, the stakes of Homayounpour's analysis are high, and the book seems less addressed to any domestic Iranian audience seeking to...