Psychoanalysis in Iran

In Jonathan Lear’s significant book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Lear tells us that shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story, up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened” (Lear, 2006). It is precisely at this point, in the face of complete devastation, unimaginable losses, and cultural collapse, of the kind we’ve become so brutally familiar with these days, that it becomes seductive to fall into the abyss of catastrophism.

Gohar Homayounpour attempts to elaborate the problematics of catastrophism in the face of excruciating social and political realities in Iran. The author’s wish is to illustrate, via psychoanalytic clinical vignettes, that the antidote to the catastrophism of our times could be witnessed in the resurrection of the social/erotic thinking subject, towards an ethics of life and its conditions. Dreaming a dream of Radical Hope, which is inherently unlike hope, and is symbolized in the objectalizing function of the life drive and in that of the capacity to mourn, while declining the invitation to the entrapment and concreteness of the melancholic discourse and that of the superego. Attempting to gaze towards a beyond, towards the ethics of the social.