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.
Table of 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
About the Author :
Spiro Jabbour (Author)
Spiro Jabbour was a scholar and hierodeacon in the Rūm Antiochian Orthodox Church. He was born in the Syrian town of Muzayraa in 1923 and died in 2018 at the Monastery of St. George in Deir al-Harf.
Aaron Frederick Eldridge (Translator)
Aaron F. Eldridge is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
Review :
"Confession and Psychoanalysis is a much-needed tonic for our world-weary souls. In this profound book, Spiro Jabbour speaks to multiple traditions of thought and practice--Orthodox Christian, Islamic, and psychoanalytic. Magnificently introduced, translated, and annotated by Aaron Eldridge, Jabbour approaches postcolonial destitution and the political devastation of our uncanny present through mystical ethics. A must read for all interested in theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and askesis." - Omnia El Shakry, author of The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt
