Islam and Mental health (2) The story of Adam (PBUH) and the theory of object relation

When Freud the father of psychoanalysis tried to unpick the human psyche he suggested that people are motivated by drives that need to be satisfied. Mainly the death drive (Thanatos) represents all the drives that lead to self-destruction and the survival drive (Eros) is responsible for the life-producing drives. Melanie Klein took the theory further in maintaining that the true motivation is building relationships with others and the primary relationship with mother is the template on which a person’s life is going to be built. If we internalize mother as a good object, then we will always draw from the goodness of this experience in difficult times.

When looking at the story of Adam and Eve from this perspective, we realize that their short experience in heaven was necessary for them to carry the mission that God had entrusted them with.

And [mention, O Muhammad], when your Lord said to the angels, “Indeed, I will make upon the earth a successive authority.” (Al-Baqarah, 2:30)

There is a great symbolic meaning to the experience of Adam and Eve, away from the idea of a persecutory original sin that does not exist in the Islamic narrative.  It was a necessary experience to internalize God as the good object before facing life on earth. They needed to reach that maturational state and experience the death instinct and conflicting drives to be able to understand love, guilt and reparation. Once the healing dyad is formed a person is ready to face life.

There are great parallels here between this experience and the experience of motherhood and how a mother builds her child’s internal world; it may be why Islam reveres motherhood and parenthood in general and gives it this high position.

4 responses to “Islam and Mental health (2) The story of Adam (PBUH) and the theory of object relation”

  1. Bara Baker Avatar
    Bara Baker

    In my view, the Fredudian model has its limitations, including the social and cultural lens of the epoch in which Freud worked. I do not dismiss his work at all, in fact in many ways he was the founder of modern psychology and I agree the the mother child relationship is the most formative in the pre-conscious state.

    There are two matters that come to mind from your commentary. The first is that the human path is one in which we begin our life with complete integration with the mother figure. The mother figure and care giver are one. This is effectively Tawhid. There is no conscious separation (but it is preconscious i.e. We are born that way). Then during a healthy relationship and childhood we “individuate” (as Jung called it). We establish ourselves separately and begin to recognise our own consciousness. For me, this represents the “fall” of Adam and Eve. It was not a fall. It was the necessary separation in order to return. In individuation/separation we experience duality. One become two. But we are incomplete. And that is our driving force. To search for completion or in Sufi term ‘return to the one’. That then, becomes our objective, and if achieved may lead to a post conscious state (called by the gnostics ‘transcendence’).

    To live on this earth which is is an existence of duality but to be in conscious awareness of the Oneness of our reality is transcending that limitation. In Psychological terms we would call this synthesis. When the individual fractured elements of consciousness are synthesised into a complete whole again. Thus for me, the Adamic story is in fact an analogy, a parable, for the journey and infinite possibility available to human consciousness from a place of oneness (preconscious) to separation/duality (conscious) to return to oneness (post conscious). I would really really recommend the work of Ken Wilber. He is a leader in this field and his modality is the closest to the Islamic one that I have ever known.

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    1. Laila Al-Attar Avatar
      Laila Al-Attar

      Thank you Bara’ for this extensive feedback, insight and reading suggestions. Certainly Freud as well as his predecessors all offer theories with their own limitations as our human psyche is constantly evolving. The necessity of duality to understand unity is one of the most paradoxical yet interesting constants that keep appearing in many of these theories. I wonder if the denial of this duality is at the heart of man’s heart disease, that fuels his sense of omnipotence, and the denial of The One, and I just realized now while typing this, that it can be defined psycho-dynamically as being in a paranoid schizoid position :)))

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  2. Mohamad Abd-El-Badeea Avatar
    Mohamad Abd-El-Badeea

    The points you raise here, especially in the discussion in the comments, are very deep.
    I am not a student of psychology so my knowledge in this field is very limited.
    However, based on the concept you are presenting, I have a question.
    If a person is raised by a single abusive parent, or both abusive parents, they will have no goodness to draw from?
    OR isn’t goodness and badness mostly inherent from within, with some influence from external or environmental factors? ونفس وما سواها* فألهمها فجورها وتقواها

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  3. Laila Al-Attar Avatar
    Laila Al-Attar

    Thank you Mohamad for reading and taking the time to comment. You ask a very difficult question. The idea of goodness and badness suggested in the verse, or my understanding of it is that God puts into us the potential for goodness and badness, then our life experience, the first attachments, the internal and external interaction build the child’s perceptions sometimes the parents can be bad but the child still finds goodness by forming attachments to other figures, it could be a grand mother, a friend, or any other transitional object. Most fairy tales tell of such stories of basically dysfunctional families where the child manages to survive and reach a happy ending thanks to a figure that represents hope, sometimes a fairy god-mother, the dwarfs etc..

    For me the lesson was that even if the person is damaged, I now understand why only God can judge people because he alone knows what made them become the way they are.

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