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.