God and the Unconscious

Joan Copjec’s new book charts the conceptual affinities and historical convergences between psychoanalysis and Islamic philosophy.

By Henry ClementsFebruary 17, 2026

• Philosophy & Religion

• Film

CONSIDER THE GREAT Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi’s account of creation:

When God created Adam, there remained a surplus of the leaven of the clay from which He created the palm tree, Adam’s sister; yet this creation, too, left behind a remainder the size of a sesame seed, from which […] God created an immense Earth, the whole of our universe, in which was hidden so many marvels that their number cannot be counted.

The first surprise in Ibn Arabi’s narrative lies in its temporal inversion: the inaugural act—the creation of “the whole of our universe”—arrives belatedly, as the final consequence of a series of leftovers. And the disorientation deepens: this cosmos, so vast as to harbor innumerable hidden marvels, emerges not from an overflowing plenitude but from a diminishing remainder—a bit of clay the size of a sesame seed, left over from what was left over of the clay from which God made Adam.

In Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran (2025), Joan Copjec seizes on this creation myth for the way it foregrounds repetition. Creation, for Ibn Arabi, does not occur in a singular moment, neatly cleaving “before” from “after” as in the standard account of the Uncreated summoning existence ex nihilo. Rather, it insists and reiterates: being emerges through repetition, each event leaving behind a remainder. The creative act, paradoxically, does not advance along the arrow of linear time but curls back upon itself; it yields a surplus, a bit of clay, that retroactively returns to the origin—to creation itself.

Here, then, is the first startling parallel that Copjec discerns between Islamic mysticism and psychoanalysis in her dazzling new book. For what is this notion—that events do not unfold obediently in chronological time but instead return to and reconstruct what has already occurred—if not the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit? “Afterwardness,” as it is sometimes translated, gestures not merely toward the openness of the past to endless reinterpretation but to something more radical as well: that the past itself comes into being belatedly, retroactively constituted by later events. In Ibn Arabi’s myth of creation, Copjec suggests, we glimpse an uncanny resonance of this Freudian insight.

What Copjec seeks to prove in her book—a spectacular finale to two decades of work on the subject—are the fundamental commonalities between Islamic philosophy and psychoanalysis, commonalities that derive from the inclusion of what Copjec calls a “permanently subtracted element” within each—“God, in one case, and the unconscious in the other.” The resemblances, as Copjec relates them, are striking. They are so striking, in fact, that Copjec flirts with a conclusion she cannot, for conceptual reasons developed over the course of the book, bring herself to assert directly: that Freudian psychoanalysis is the heir of Islamic philosophy itself.

Copjec—a pioneering psychoanalytic and feminist theorist best known for her engagements with the work of Jacques Lacan—traces the genesis of this project to her admiration for Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian filmmaker whose luminous cinema guides Copjec’s conceptual work. Kiarostami’s images are properly understood only through attention to their subterranean relation to the tradition of Islamic philosophy that Copjec is not the first to detect in his work. If there remained any doubt, Copjec dispatches it early on: the recurring motif in several Kiarostami films—a zigzagging path etched into a hillside, ascending toward a lone, leafy tree—turns out to reproduce a 14th-century Persian miniature illustrating the Avicennan notion of “visionary geography.”

Yet the insights of psychoanalysis, Copjec insists, are equally apposite to Kiarostami’s films, though she cautions against invoking the tired language of “influence.” In Kiarostami’s films, as equally in the Islamic philosophical corpus Copjec engages, one finds less a case for the application of psychoanalytic theory than a theater for new theorizations of psychoanalytic concepts themselves.

Kiarostami’s films have often attracted the labels “neorealist” and “cinema verité” for the documentary mode they deploy. Close-Up (1990), famously, folds the events and footage from a real court case in postrevolutionary Iran into its narrative, while the films of the “Koker trilogy” (1987–94), so named for the village in Northern Iran in which they are set, feature predominantly local, nonprofessional actors. Kiarostami’s narrative structures are minimalist; long takes and sparse editing yield a sense of unmediated observation.

But the realism of Kiarostami’s films is distinct from the modernist project to reduce art to the bare minimum through the subtraction of extraneous elements. What Kiarostami is after, Copjec insists, is something more plentiful, expansive. More so than a realistic representation, Kiarostami’s films pursue an image that “refuses to […] make itself subservient to reality”—an image that declines to serve as reality’s faithful emissary. Kiarostami’s is instead a cinema of “illumination,” in alliance with Persian philosopher Suhrawardi (1154–91) in attempting to produce “an image capable of capturing the reflection of what has no image,” to represent that which constitutively eludes representation.

If reality is at stake here, it is a reality of a particular kind—neither the brute positivity of nature nor the transcendent truth of some supernatural realm but the nonbeing that shadows being itself: the irreducible remainder, the internal limit. In the Gnostic tradition of Islamic philosophy, this unpassable threshold is nothing less than God. But psychoanalysis, too, has a word for the very same limit: the unconscious.

Copjec’s guide to Islamic philosophy is the late Iranologist Henry Corbin, her main influence and key interlocutor in the book. Within the field of Islamic philosophy, Corbin’s work is controversial for its singular focus on the concept of the “imaginal world” (“alam-al-mithal”), an intermediary realm between mind and body, abstraction and sensation, that Corbin claimed was the central insight and contribution of Islamic philosophy. For Copjec, however, it is precisely Corbin’s theorization of this concept that renders his work essential to understanding how Islamic philosophy forwards a theory of the image that illuminates reality in its hiddenness.

It is an unfortunate translation, the imaginal world (“monde imaginal”), inasmuch as it risks trivializing the concept as a mere fantasy realm, a supernatural beyond of spiritual being and transcendence. But as Corbin—and, following him, Copjec—insists, the imaginal world is not some transcendent elsewhere. What it names for Corbin, Copjec, and the Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Ibn Arabi who are their guides is something more proximate: the “other world” that exists within this world—a third realm between the intelligible and the sensible, where “being is suspended.” It marks a site of situatedness in relation to being that cannot be located within the “‘situated world’ of actual being.”

Kiarostami’s cinema, Copjec argues, seeks to activate precisely this third realm. One principal way it does so is by piercing the realism for which Kiarostami is renowned with regular reminders of the artifice of cinematic production: camera and crew are often laid bare, exhibited in plain sight. Any illusion that the audience of Kiarostami’s films is accessing reality itself is quickly interrupted by the intrusion of the cinematic apparatus—an exposure of the masquerade in which the film is clearly engaged. Yet the point of such “overt meddling,” Copjec clarifies, is not to debunk or unmask the lie of cinema in the manner of an ironic postmodern critique. Kiarostami himself has described his style of filmmaking as the “art of subtraction,” but this should not be taken to mean that his films operate in the mode of exposure, reducing aesthetic adornment to the bare bones of narrative action. To the extent that Kiarostami’s films seek to unveil anything at all, Copjec contends, it is “hiddenness itself”—truths that resist revelation, that cannot be brought to light. A “bait of falsehood,” Copjec suggests, is necessary in order to “snag a carp of truth.”

Like the truth Kiarostami’s films are after, it would be a mistake to conceive of the imaginal world as either a positive substance or a transcendent plane. As Copjec abruptly clarifies, 30 pages into the book, the imaginal world “does not exist.” It may appear within the world, but it is not of it. Not another of the actually existing things of the world, the imaginal world is instead that which “inexists between them.” At stake is the very status of “inexistence” itself, which here emerges as not merely the “nothing that is not there,” as Wallace Stevens has it, but also “the nothing that is.”

For Copjec’s mystics, God, too, is nothing—He does not exist. Yet this apophatic theology, in which God is neither father nor progenitor but devoid of attributes by which He might be known, culminates in neither atheism nor nihilism. Instead, it generates an attunement to the “power[s] of constraint and separation,” a capacity to individuate, to render being more than a plain, simple continuum.

Islamic philosophy has a name for this power of separation: barzakh. Copjec again directs us to Ibn Arabi:

A barzakh is something that separates … two things while never going to one side …, as for example, the line that separates shadow from sunlight. […] Any two adjacent things are in need of a barzakh, which is neither the one nor the other but possesses the power of both. The barzakh … separates a known from an unknown, an existent from a nonexistent, a negated from an affirmed, an intelligible from a nonintelligible.

What matters most about the barzakh, for Copjec, is not only its function as a limit and “membrane of division” but also the fact that, strictly speaking, the barzakh does not exist—it is completely imperceptible to the senses, empirically unverifiable. As Ibn Arabi warns, if one is able to sense the limit between two things, then “it is one of the two things, not the barzakh.” The barzakh, or “interstice,” is a purely speculative concept, assumed by the rational intellect rather than perceived by the senses. Yet far from a sterile dead end or insuperable limit, this interstice functions as a threshold, a passage: the necessary point of access to the imaginal world.

In this respect, barzakh should be analogized to “drive” (Trieb), Freud’s own speculative, mythological concept that, as Copjec put it in an earlier book, “substitutes for an ontology” in his work. Distinct from the biological “instinct,” drive, for Freud, named the repetition compulsion that endlessly circles around the idea of a lost object. A concept “on the frontier between the mental and the somatic” (note the affinity with barzakh, a zone of limit and linkage), the drive evokes those limit points where the subject is “inserted” into the world. It marks, Copjec writes, an infinite threshold “through which the light of another, suspended, dimension shines.” Just as access to the imaginal world requires the purely rational postulate of a barzakh—a speculative limit that does not exist—so drive is where subjectivity brushes against the psychoanalytic Real: the traumatic void that resists integration into the symbolic order. Neither the Real nor the imaginal world exist “out there,” in the sense of a tangible reality susceptible to sense perception. But both—or are they perhaps one?—can be touched by way of a certain trans-sensory capacity.

How, then, to account for these structural similarities between psychoanalysis and Islamic philosophy? Copjec does more than trace conceptual parallels: she offers several tantalizing suggestions that the relations between the two traditions may run deeper—beyond conceptual resemblance to something more direct, more historical.

Following Christian Jambet, another French scholar of Islam and a student of Corbin’s, Copjec reminds us that Islamic philosophy had already made its dramatic entrance onto the scene of Western thought two centuries ago. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, German idealism enthusiastically took up “Oriental” and esoteric thought, including several of the mystics with whom Copjec is engaged—a moment associated in particular with the names of Goethe and Hegel. Corbin himself had drawn on the work of F. W. J. Schelling to illuminate the thought of the medieval Islamic philosophers, a move that some have suggested represented a problematic imposition of Western epistemologies on a non-Western tradition. Yet Copjec points out that German idealism was itself formed through an engagement with the esoteric thought of figures like 17th-century mystic Jacob Boehme—“the first German philosopher,” in Hegel’s estimation—whose ideas bore remarkable similarities, Corbin pointed out, to those found in Shia Islam. What should be classified as an import as opposed to an export is hence difficult to determine.

Yet Copjec is nevertheless sufficiently tempted by the question of historical relation to note that Corbin met Jacques Lacan at Alexandre Kojève’s lectures in Paris in the 1930s, and that it is partly thanks to Corbin that Lacan became familiar with the writings of Ibn Arabi. What might the foremost interpreter of Freud have gleaned from the greatest Sufi master? The principal interests of Cloud are the conceptual rather than the historical relations between Islamic mysticism and psychoanalysis, inclusive of its German idealist antecedents. But these “elementary facts,” as Copjec terms them—that Schelling built upon an esoteric foundation, that Lacan was thinking through Ibn Arabi—point toward a dramatic possibility: that psychoanalysis is not merely conceptually parallel to but also, in a sense, the historical successor of the Gnostic tradition of Islamic mysticism.

This would be an astonishing conclusion, one that would upend not only traditional histories of psychoanalysis but also prevailing approaches to religion within the field of psychoanalytic theory. Slavoj Žižek, the most well-known psychoanalytic theorist today and an interlocutor of Copjec’s, has repeatedly argued for Christianity’s singularity among world religions in the way it transposes the gap separating man from God back into God himself—a transposition effected by the historically unique event of Christ’s crucifixion. What dies on the cross, Žižek argues in a Hegelian key, is the “god of the beyond itself,” leaving behind “nothing more than the egalitarian community of believers” with no transcendental authority to guarantee it. It is for this reason that Žižek has described himself as a “Christian atheist” and suggested that, among world religions, it is the “Christian legacy” that is “worth fighting for.”

Might the historical and conceptual relations between Islamic philosophy and psychoanalysis invert this claim? On this reading, it would be the “Islamic legacy” that stands in need of defending—a reversal that upends not only Žižek’s polemic but also the broader supposition, repeated by Western triumphalists and postcolonial critics alike, that Christianity holds an exceptional place in the historical development of modernity’s secular modes of thought.

As it happens, it was precisely the historical claim that Christ was the divine incarnated in the flesh that the falasifa—the Islamic philosophers writing in the tradition of Avicenna—objected to. What they rejected, Copjec explains, was less the divinity of Christ than the idea that God’s manifestation as Christ was “a unique historical occurrence located at a precise and irreversible moment of chronological time.” Where the church affirmed the incarnation as a singular event available to apprehension by all, the Islamic philosophers contended that God manifests Himself in a plurality of forms, none of which could claim to be His sole image. God may be one in essence, as one of Ibn Arabi’s expositors explains, but “as soon as this is said, someone has said it, so in effect the reality of the other has to be affirmed”—a neat summary of the Lacanian distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement. Just as the subject of enunciation is never fully reducible to what is said, so the divine essence is never exhausted by any single historical manifestation of it.

Yet this affirmation of plurality should not be taken to mean that each distinct manifestation captures the divine itself. As with Kiarostami’s unveiling of hiddenness, what is captured in images of God, in the “icon-image,” is exactly God’s withdrawal: not a presence but an absence—a retreat that, however, does not foreclose but precisely insists on God’s relation to us.

Copjec, in sum, believes that Islamic mysticism and the concept of the imaginal world get something deeply right about reality, contingency, relationality, and the nature of the image. And yet I think it would be wrong to conclude that her aim is to suggest, contra Žižek, that it is the Islamic legacy that is, in fact, worth fighting for. Strong though the temptation might be, Copjec does not, in the end, pursue the historical claim that Islamic philosophy is at the root of the forms of modern art and thought she finds so worthy. Hers is a different kind of claim.

We return, finally, to Ibn Arabi’s myth of creation and the Freudian concept of “afterwardness,” in which the origin comes at the end of a series of events rather than at the beginning. What is crucial to grasp is not merely the important point that temporality is open, indeterminate, shaped by the ever-changing conditions of the now, but also that, for both psychoanalysis and the Sufi mystics, the past is open to the present, its meaning retroactively determined as opposed to fixed by a closed chain of empirical events. This does not mean that “anything goes” in interpretation: causality remains, chains of cause and effect can be traced, and both psychoanalysis and Sufism pay due deference to the ultimate cause, the unmoved mover, the origin of any causal series. Yet—and here lies the paradox—both traditions nevertheless maintain that the absolute cause, ultimately, does not exist. Which is not to say that it is not real; rather, it is to clarify that, precisely because of the absence of any ultimate ground, being itself—even in the primordial moment, the universe’s first emergence in Ibn Arabi’s cosmology—requires repetition.

Freud, let us recall, distinguished between two kinds of repetition: the one unconscious and neurotic, the product of repression; the other a working-through that confronts and integrates what had been repressed, a genuine encounter with the Other. Copjec’s effort to link psychoanalysis to Islamic philosophy may invite suspicion, even ridicule, from those committed to upholding, repeating, a certain vision of history, a particular way of accounting for the relations between psychoanalysis and the traditions out of which it emerged. But what Copjec argues alongside Kiarostami, Corbin, and Freud (and what Islamic philosophy teaches us) is that repetition repeats not what came before but rather noncoincidence itself—not a second iteration in sequence but a “jamming of the causal chain.” In such moments, another world, so close to the eye as to be completely out of sight, shines through.