Turkey’s Pioneering Psychoanalyst

İzeddin Şadan’s Disquisition on (Homosexual) Love as Sickness

  • Gözde Kılıç Başkent University, Turkey
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2020.1174
Keywords: İzeddin Şadan, Turkey, psychoanalysis, love, sickness, Sufism, homosexuality, nationalism

Abstract

İzeddin Şadan, considered to be among the pioneers of psychoanalysis in Turkey, published a series of essays in 1936 titled “Eros (Aşk) İle Mücadele” [“Strife with Eros (Love)”] in the popular magazine Yeni Adam. He hailed these essays as a landmark in the scientific endeavor to objectively lay out the true nature of love. In them, he described love as “a volatile microbe” constituting sickness with its origins in Christianity; however, by inverted logic, he projected the same sickness onto Islam, in particular Sufism, which he disparaged as homosexual debauchery. This article looks at how Şadan’s pathologizing of Sufi love of beardless boys as sexual perversion is itself a symptom of pathology, pointing towards a fundamental change in the gendered/modernized/Orientalized subject’s relationship with the other and itself.

Author Biography

Gözde Kılıç, Başkent University, Turkey

Gözde Kılıç is a psychoanalytically-oriented scholar of cultural and literary studies. She holds an MA in Popular Culture from Brock University (Canada) and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Trent University (Canada). She is currently teaching in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Başkent University (Turkey). Her current research is concerned with the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Turkey, with a particular focus on the intersections between gender, sexuality, religion, and nationalism.

Published
2020-09-03
Issue
No 9 (2020): Love
Section
_Articles