Psychoanalysis, Islam, and the other of Liberalism.

This paper examines the terms and methods used by psychoanalytic authors to explain and understand something they other as "Islam." The paper engages critically and psycho-analytically with these authors' attempts to read "Islam" psychoanalytically, and finds that more often than not they subject it to liberal principles that are not defined in psychoanalytic terms. Focusing on the work of Tunisian author Fethi Benslama, the paper analyses and deconstructs certain key semantic and conceptual confusions of "Islam" and "Islamism" that are manifest in the general psychoanalytic literature on "Islam".