Tell Me A Story: Shahrazad ‘In Analysis’ In Contemporary Persia

Saturday, April 22, 2017 | 1:00 to 2:30 PM

Details

Where has  Shahrazad gone? A possible precursor of Freud, to borrow Julia Kristeva’s phrase, who discerned the secrets of the mind so well that it enabled her to alter the fate of a nation and set the feminine soul free? Why has she disappeared from the theatres of a large number of young contemporary Iranian women’s minds? Was she repressed and then resurrected in a disfigured manner? What remains of  Shahrazad is no more than a complete exoticisation of her as the ultimate erotic, eastern figure.  Through a psychoanalytic textual analysis of the Nights, this presentation uncovers various archetypes of women that have been completely extinct from a more mainstream Iranian discourse. And this is even more pronounced within a clichéd orientalist discourse, in which Iranian women are portrayed both nationally and internationally as solely the victims of a patriarchal and political trajectory.   In the final analysis, this presentation sets out to tell a story, and within this story wishes to re-find  Shahrazad, a whole and integrated  Shahrazad as a possible object of female identification, hoping to bring a new articulation to the female Oedipus complex, while allowing the emergence of new possibilities of loving.

Presenter:

Gohar Homayounpour was born in Paris to Iranian parents, she was educated in Canada and the United States, she now lives and works in Tehran. She is a graduate of the Masters, Doctorate and certificate program at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.  Dr. Homayounpour is an author and a Psychoanalyst who belongs to the International Psychoanalytic association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, where she is founder and director. Lecturer at Shahid Beheshti University.  She has published various psychoanalytic articles and her book Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, the MIT Press August 2012, won the Gradiva award and it has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Turkish.  She is a member of the scientific board at the Freud museum in Vienna. Member of the IPA group Geographies of Psychoanalysis, and member of the image task force and translation group of the IPA.

Continuing Education Objectives: 

Participants will be able to:

1. Discuss the current thinking of the state of mind of the contemporary Iranian woman?
2. Discuss the various archetypes of the Iranian women over time.
3. Discuss what is meant by the finding of a whole and integrated woman and how this is achieved through treatment.

CE Target audience:  Psychologists (all levels), Social Workers, Counselors

Fee:  Free or $20 per event for 1.5 CE’s/Clock Hours

Registration: