Full Description
Spiro Jabbour's enigmatic exploration of the resonances between the Eastern Christian science of the soul and psychoanalysis, now in annotated English translation
Confession and Psychoanalysis, written by Spiro Jabbour - the prolific Syrian monastic, scholar, and translator - offers a speculative formulation of mystical ethics in the aftermath of the postcolonial loss of tradition. Jabbour reads Freud's theories of the drive, transference, and the unconscious through Orthodox Christian writings on the purification of the heart and transfiguration the soul in the works of, among others, John Climacus, Maximos the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas.
Composed in 1983 in Homs, Confession and Psychoanalysis is the written account of the spiritual guidance Jabbour offered to a seeker who queried him concerning the practice of confession. Taking the question of spiritual interlocution and the encounter between Freudian psychoanalysis and Orthodox asceticism as its launching point, Jabbour's text moves across a staggering breadth of topics - Islamic Sufism, psychotherapy and psycho-somatic medicine, Arabic poetics and linguistics, hesychasm, counterfeit cultural life in the aftermath of war and dispossession, and the destructive ambivalence of civilization. As such, Confession and Psychoanalysis is a window into a dynamic Middle Eastern Christian tradition that speaks with and beyond a devastated present.
Contents
A Note on the Translation ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
Translator's Introduction xv
The Eulogy of Metropolitan Ephraim Kyriakos for the Funeral of Spiro Jabbour xliii
Author's Preface to the First Edition xlv
Author's Preface to the Second Edition liii
1 The Remembrance of Death 1
2 The Child Is a Person 8
3 Confession in the New Testament 10
•Confession in church usage, 18 4 Confession in Psychoanalysis 21
5 The Sense of Guilt 29
• 1. Ambivalence, 33
• 2. Ambivalence of the spirit and the body, 55
• 3. The sense of guilt, 58
• 4. The sense of guilt and the spiritual life, 62 6 The Confession of Transgressions 65
• How do we confess? 71
• How does the spiritual elder guide the monastic? 75
• Of what kind is this war? 83 7 The Essence of Monastic Confession 94
• The Hesychasts, 119 8 The Question of Psychosomatic Medicine, Philosophically Considered 121
9 Reiteration 130
• Confession for churches in the world, 135
• Confession and repentance, 137
• Confession and communion, 137
• The prayer of absolution, 138
• Objection, 140
• Confession at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, 142 10 Repentance and Joy 147
• Excursus, 149
• Supplication, 150 11 A Historical-Geographical Fragment 152
• 1. The Current of Pseudo-Dionysius, 154
• 2. The Current of Makarios, 156
Glossary 159
Works Cited 163
Index 177
