This paper considers how psychoanalysis travelled in postwar Egypt, primarily through an exploration of the journal Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs, published in Cairo and co-edited by Yusuf Murad and Mustafa Ziywar between 1945-1953. The journal, illustrative of the emerging disciplinary space of psychology in Egypt in the 1940s, understood psychology as a science of selfhood and the soul, rather than the empirical study of mental processes. In stark contrast to the so-called “tale of mutual ignorance” between Islam and psychoanalysis asserted by Fethi Benslama, the paper traces a tale of historical interactions, hybridizations, and interconnected webs of knowledge production between Egypt and Europe. It explores the points of condensation, divergence, and the epistemological resonances that psychoanalytic writings had in postwar Egypt. Tracing the formation of a modern Arab psychological subject in fields as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law, I demonstrate that psychoanalysis was a tradition with deep and varied roots in the Egyptian postwar setting, not only among psychologists and mental health professionals, but also among Islamic thinkers and legal practitioners. More specifically, I argue that postwar scholars translated and blended key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, thereby putting forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychoanalytic thought, embodied in a rejection of the dissolution of the self and of the death drive. The co-production of psychoanalytic knowledge across Arab and European knowledge formations definitively demonstrates the outmoded nature of historical models that presuppose originals and bad copies of the global modern subject—herself so constitutively defined by the presence of the unconscious. Beyond its contribution to the study of Arab intellectual history, an understanding of the body of work developed in Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs enables us to reconsider that quintessential question of modernity, the question of the self, in a non-European context. Indeed, the story of the historical emergence of modern languages of the self in twentieth century Egypt moves us away from binary models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, and unsettles the assumption of an alleged incommensurability between psychoanalysis and Islam.