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Abstract
Whilst key Freudian texts have long been translated into Arabic and explicitly psychoanalytic themes have circulated in Arab literary, medical and journalistic discourse at least since the 1940s, there seems to have been very little expansion of psychoanalysis as a practice in the Middle East. This article discusses the question of psychoanalysis’s extensibility beyond its western roots and its potentiality as a discourse addressing human suffering in non-Eurocentric ways. The question of literature’s hospitality to psychoanalysis is raised in parallel, via a discussion of two recent Egyptian novels: Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abbas el Abd and Bahaa Taher’s Love in Exile. The analysis turns on the themes of authority and freedom, which for psychoanalysis are deeply bound up with the constraining power of the superego.