Skip to main content
Browse by:
GROUP

The Arabic Freud and the Invention of the Psychosexual Subject

Event Image
Monday, October 27, 2014
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Omnia El Shakry, Associate Professor, University of California, Davis
Women's Studies Psychoanalysis Series

In stark contrast to the so-called "tale of mutual ignorance" between Islam and psychoanalysis asserted by Fethi Benslama, El Shakry demonstrates that psychoanalysis was a tradition with deep and varied roots in the Egyptian postwar setting. This talk outlines one locally specific episode of the intersection of psychoanalysis and what I term the invention of the psychosexual subject in postwar Egypt, by exploring the linguistic terminology used for sex/gender, as well as discourses surrounding infantile and adolescent sexuality. The invention of the psychosexual subject, El Shakry argues, did not necessarily entail a simple shift of pleasure and desire away from the theological pastoral towards secular science and medicine as many have asserted.Professor El Shakry received her B.A. from the American University in Cairo, with a focus on the social sciences. She received her M.A. in Middle East Studies from New York University and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. She is the author of "The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt" (Stanford University Press, 2007), and articles on the history of the human sciences, gender politics, and urbanism in Egypt.

Contact: Kelly Schwehm