Unnatural Love: The Pathology of Desire during the late Ottoman Period At the turn of the twentieth century, the questions of healthy marriage and conjugal love were at the center of public debates in the Ottoman society as reflected in mainstream newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. Many works on the issue of love were penned by physicians and psychiatrists who sought to promote a particular understandings of love and desire. In this medicalized context, love and desire were considered significant emotional elements of the conjugal equation in a healthy, heteronormative marriage. They cast love and desire as components of procreation, which was seen as the natural and necessary function of marriage. As such, love and desire that did not further procreation fell into the category of “unnatural (gayrıtabii),” leading to disorders such as kara sevda (melancholia), same-sex desire, masturbation, masochism, and so forth. By putting Western European medical and psychiatric trends in dialogue with the existing sex culture, Ottoman physicians and psychiatrists played an important role in the making of new medical semantics, propagating their diagnosis of unnatural love among a middle class readership. This paper examines of the emergence of pathologies of unnatural love by drawing on fundamental Ottoman medical and psychiatric writings as well as everyday life cases of “unnatural love,” such as same-sex desire and kara sevda (melancholia) as reflected in the archival record. In doing so, this paper will explore the circulation of these medical/psychiatric concepts in a broader sociological context and how they came to bare on the emotional experience of Ottoman citizens.

A number of historical studies have recently been added to the literature on translation across cultures. Relying on earlier considerations of the problematics of translation by philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Alasdair MacIntyre and others, these studies focus on translation not simply as a word-for-word rendition between different languages, but rather as a process of interpretation/transformation between different cultures and historical conditions. Such studies consequently draw our attention to a multilayered formation of translation—a process, in other words, that unfolds historically, and involves converging and dispersing meanings, structures, intentions, and predicaments between languages—while at the same time tracing the effects of power relations, including those produced and resisted under colonialism. Drawing on this literature, this paper will examine the work of Izzettin Sadan, the first, albeit self-trained, psychoanalyst in Turkey. Trained as a neuropsychiatrist in Turkey and France, Sadan later turned into psychoanalysis, a novel Western discourse, which he wanted to disseminate in Turkey. Through his translations of the works and arguments of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, and others, he attempted to produce a psychoanalytic canon in Turkish—a canon that was bound to be different in form and practice as it filtered through the cultural and socio-political structures of the early Turkish republic. As I will argue in this paper, Sadanian psychoanalysis through this process of translation emerged to symbolically represent a resistance to, if not a break from, some features of European (Freudian) psychoanalytic discourse, including those that relate to society and civilization as well as some of the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis such as the sex drive (Eros). In sum, through a close reading of Sadan’s writings, this paper will demonstrate how the translation of psychoanalysis into Turkish involved in the process its reconfiguration to accommodate not only the Turkish “space of experience” but also the early Turkish Republic’s “horizon of expectations.”

Humanities in the Turkish University is splitting up into two: Theology departments, besides the classical Islamic sciences, now include each and every humanities department. In every university there are two, for example, sociology departments, one 'secular' and one 'religious'. By supplementing traditional disciplines with the title 'religion', a new image of Man whose existence, it is argued, was suppressed, unfolds: Homo Islamicus (Davutoğlu 1994). In this paper, I will assemble a genealogy of the recently proliferating field of 'religious psychology' in Turkey with an eye to the larger shifts in power-knowledge nexus that underline it. It is only in 90s that we see the emergence an autonomous field of knowledge about the Islamic self that rapidly became almost omnipresent during the Justice and Development Party decade as manifested in the record breaker popular self help books inspired by religious teachings. This new discourse about the Muslim self, I argue, is a buffer zone between a neoliberalized market and insulated selves (Njoto-Feillard 2012, Rudnyckyj 2011). Rather than another spiel in the neoliberal blame game, we need to historicize and localize the problem-spaces (David Scott, 2004) out of which 'answers' such as religious psychology are produced. In this regard I will discuss two such histories out of which this new domain of inquiry emerges: First, since 60s, the task of decolonizing the Muslim Self from 'westoxification' (Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, 1962) and a return to the true 'self' produced the debate around Islamization of knowledge (Sardar 1985, Abaza 2002). The problematic of producing a knowledge that refused to comply with the normative structures of Western thought started to build its Subject from inside out. And secondly, German Ordoliberals who fled the Nazi Germany introduced 'social policy' to the Turkish economy departments, and their students later on brought up the Islamic Man against the ego-driven Western subject. Influenced by Roethlisberger's work on human relations, late Istanbul University Professor and the 'Great Mentor' of conservative intelligentsia Sabahattin Zaim (1978) argued that finite resources and infinite desires-needs must be rethought. Needs and desires can be reconfigured to elicit a harmonious society. It is out of these two problematics, I argue, a new discourse about the 'Muslim' self emerged. Following this double genealogy, the paper will touch briefly on how this new field circulates from university to social services and hospitals, and how through its iterations is being reified.

This paper is concerned with how, in contemporary Middle Eastern societies, psychiatric categories circulate in the wider society and are appropriated, challenged, and reconfigured through interactions with other conceptualizations of mental wellbeing, particularly religious-based ones. In Egypt, the last three decades have seen increasing debates around the relationship between mental disorders and religion. Carried out among psychiatrists, religious scholars, and Qur’anic healers (the practitioners of a revivalist form of exorcism who sometimes claim expertise in treating mental disorders), these debates embody a contemporary rethinking of human psychological constitution, of what counts as mental disorder, and of the role of religion in one’s life and, more generally, in modern societies. They have emerged in a historical conjecture characterized by both the Islamic revival and by shifts and tension inside psychiatry between biological and psycho-social explanatory frameworks. Spanning and overlapping psychiatric and religious domains, these debates point to the salience of and the anxieties around the question of proper boundaries between science and Islam in postcolonial Egypt. Drawing on ethnographic research among psychiatrists, Qur’anic healers, and their patients, in this presentation I focus on one aspect of these debates, concerning the relationship between depression (ikti’āb) and weak faith (īmān ḍa‘īf). While few Egyptians claim that a weak faith in God directly causes depression, the idea that strong faith is the best prophylactic against this mental disorder is widely spread in Egyptian society and especially among Qur’anic healers who persistently disseminate it among their patients. To counteract psychiatrists’ criticism based on defining depression as a neurochemical brain imbalance, many Qur’anic healers, as other Egyptians, re-classify depression into two types: psychological depression, influenced by a person’s religiosity and pathological depression, caused by brain imbalances. Unwittingly employing older psychiatric conceptualization of depression, they articulate them with Islamic-based conceptions of faith, religious activity, and the human soul. At the same time, a number of psychiatrists concerned with forging an Islamic psychiatry, have attempted to integrate religious practices in their therapies, proposing their own understandings of the links between depression and faith. These debates around the relationship between depression and faith, I argue in this paper, reveal not a clear-cut relation between the psychiatric and the religious fields, but a dynamic process of rethinking and redefining what is physically versus what is morally treatable and of questioning the boundaries between what counts as religious and what as scientific in contemporary Egypt