Knot of the Soul - Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Broché)

Through a dual engagement with the unconscious in psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, Stefania Pandolfo's unsettling book reflects on the maladies oldie soul at a time of tremendous global upheaval. Drawing on in-depth historical research and testimonies of patients and therapists in Morocco, Knot of the Soul is at once a haunting ethnographic journey through madness and contemporary formations of despair, and a philosophical and theological exploration of the life of the psyche and the soul (al-nafs).
A patient asks the ethnographer, "Do you know what madness is ? " The question resonates throughout the book, from the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital, to the torments of the soul n a poor urban neighborhood, to the melancholy of undocumented migration, culminating on the liturgical stage of the Qur'anic cure, and what Pandolfo presents as a "jurisprudence of the soul" Showing how contemporary Islamic cures at once address and displace core preoccupations of the psychoanalytic approach, she ponders how a religious and ethical relation to the "ordeal" of madness might enable the search for spiritual transformation.
A sophisticated and evocative work,Knot of the Soul points to new possibilities of psychic life in the encounter with the Islamic ethical imagination.