In Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning, Gohar Homayounpour plays a theme and variations on loss, love, and family against the backdrop of Iran’s chaotic recent past.
Homayounpour is simultaneously Shahrzad, the fearless storyteller, and Shahrzad’s analyst: subjecting fairy tales to fierce new insights, while weaving an indigo thread through her own devastation on the death of her father and the wonders and horrors of motherhood. A blue thread, or melody, runs though the separations and emigrations of her family and patients driven or broken apart by war, and likewise through the fraught world inhabited by Persian women. This book breaks new psychoanalytic ground, offering a radical rejection of traditional clichés about Iran, and Iranian women, but its unsparing elegance transcends any political agenda, bridging the ocean of a shared and tragic humanity.
Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed readers, as well as those interested in grief, Iran, and women’s experiences.
1. My Father and I, 2. Psoriasis, 3. Mississippi Blues, 4. If They Go Away, 5. The Forgotten War, 6. Tell Me a Story: Shahrzad "in Analysis" in Contemporary Persia, 7. Un-Translation, 8. Caliban, 9. One Should Build a Boat, 10. The Freudian Group of Tehran; Triumphs and Laments, 11. In Praise of the Reality Principle, or, In Praise of Disturbance, 12. Against Empath"ism", 13. Forough, 14. L, 15. Beyond "Locality": The Voyage of the Shitty Pebble, 16. Narcissism Becomes a Hazard to our "Building a Boat", 17. Inflation / Inflated Blues, 18. Paris Blues, or, Are You Going Home?, 19. In Niz Bogzared, This Too Shall Pass, 20. Elle, 21. Superego, 22. Clean Your Eyeglasses, 23. Grandfather Blues, 24. An Airport Taxi Driver in Tehran, 25. A Reliable, Silent Nanny, 26. In Praise of Hopelessness, 27. Blues Shuffle / Swing or Off-Beats, 28. Galway Girl, 29. Borges' Animals and Cemeteries, 30. Beyond Persian Blues...
Biography
Gohar Homayounpour is a psychoanalyst and Gradiva award-winning author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association, a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, and a scientific board member of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.
"Persian Blues will be known as one of the great experimental and poetic discourses on the subversive character of psychoanalysis in our times. A practicing analyst in Tehran, but also a writer and theorist, Homayounpour poses the question of what one may expect from psychoanalysis. The answers she gives are drawn from the world of dreams, sessions, screen-memories, poems, stories, theories, as well as reports on historical and political events to make the answer at once enigmatic and urgent.A brilliant foray into both memory and imagination, eclectic and pointed, this work underscores the ethics that psychoanalysis yields, the difficult work of mourning within the time of one's life, and the historical and geopolitical realities and cultural debates within which psychoanalysis must renew itself. Navigating debates on the veil, Eurocentrism, and super-egoic discourses of the everyday, Homayounpour proves to be a shrewd cultural critic of our times.
In the face of devastating losses, Homayounpour cautions against the wish to have all our wounds healed. She insists that life is lived well not in spite of our wounds, but because of them. Indeed, the ethical potential yielded by a curtailed narcissism is found in the distance, the difference, between self and other, need and object – vital disjunctures within relations of love. This text reads not only reads across theoretical, clinical, and poetic genres to interrogate love and ambivalence, but is itself a loving text, a gift of love, that is, a petition to encounter the difficulty that makes us into subjects who can love."
Judith Butler
"Gohar Homayounpour's new book takes us on a musical, unpredictable, and lively journey, through psychoanalysis, autobiography, social commentary, and culture. Avoiding the usual formats of both analytic prose and memoir, she forges a unique and deeply personal text which will appeal not only to analysts and students of psychoanalysis, but to a much wider readership."
Darian Leader, psychoanalyst and member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, UK
"Dr Gohar Homayounpour, an Iranian psychoanalyst who started the Freudian Group of Tehran, has written a brilliant meditation on a psychoanalyst’s life. The book is an integration of personal, cultural, philosophical, political, and clinical ideas, always within the context of a deeply reflective psychoanalytic mind. In Persian Blues you will meet a unique psychoanalyst and be glad for the experience."
Fred Busch, member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association, USA
"The equation is a simple one: Gohar Homayounpour's Persian Blues is to psychoanalysis what Bob Dylan's lyrics and music are to Mozart's Symphony Nº 41. Persian Blues essentially shows that psychoanalysis was, is, and will be the gay science of subjectivity. I envy the reader who can discover the exceptional beauty of psychoanalysis as an interweaving of the teachings of their great ancestors, history lived through personal experience, erudition, and the sublimity of the very best of music and poetry played on the stage of the dreamer."
Néstor Braunstein, Professor, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Doctor Honoris Causa, Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico
