Darya Navidi

Darya Navidi is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in Tehran, where she also hosts a podcast on psychological life in Iran. She spoke to Barry and Mustafa in late July, a few days after a new escalation between Iran and the United States and a night of explosions in the city. Psychoanalysis reached Iran through literature and translation long before anyone practised it there, and Persian had no settled word for the unconscious. The institutes that exist now work in isolation, many of their teachers trained abroad and supervise from outside the country, and Darya notices the ways of the state reappearing inside them, in how teachers can treat their students. What the sanctions leave is a narrow set of open doors, and students take whichever one they can rather than the teacher or school that would suit their work.

Psychoanalysis came to Iran through literature and translation long before anyone practised it there, and it survives now in isolated institutes, under sanctions, taught largely from abroad. Darya asks what a practice built on the true self can do in a society that demands a false one. Her answer is the analyst as witness, and during the war the word stopped being a figure of speech, because she and her clients were sitting in the same danger. From the same ground comes her reading of Iran as a “short-term society” of interrupted lives and unfinished projects, the subject of the book she is now writing on unfinishedness in the Iranian unconscious.

The conversation also hears Rumi in Bion, takes in how Iran is imagined from Britain and from Turkey, and pauses on Parastoo Ahmadi’s concert without hijab and the generation that grew up with Woman, Life, Freedom. Darya ends with a request to listeners abroad: to see Iranians as political subjects, not only victims and not only heroes, and to keep Iran difficult to simplify.