Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran

"Is psychoanalysis possible in the Islamic Republic of Iran?" This is the question that Dr. Gohar Homayounpour poses to herself, and to us, at the beginning of her memoir of displacement, nostalgia, love, and pain. Twenty years after leaving her country, Homayounpour, an Iranian, Western-trained psychoanalyst, returns to Tehran to establish a psychoanalytic practice. When an American colleague exclaims, ¿I do not think that Iranians can free-associate!¿ Homayounpour responds that in her opinion Iranians do nothing but. Iranian culture, she says, revolves around stories.Gohar Homayounpour is a practicing psychoanalyst in Tehran. She trains and supervises the psychoanalysts of the Freudian Group of Tehran and is Professor of Psychology at Shahid Besheti University Tehran. After completing her Master¿s degree at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in 2002 and her doctoral degree from VGSP, a branch of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in 2006, she returned to her native Iran. Her book, "Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran", the MIT Press August 2012, won the 2013 NAAP Gradiva Award. She has also published articles in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Canadian Journal of psychoanalysis, and an article in a journal coming out of the Freud Museum in Vienna.