A Psychoanalytic Approach to a work by Abbas Maroufi : The Body of Farhad

Published in 2009 at Ghoghnous, in Tehran, Abbas Maroufi's The Body of Farhad appears as a sort of retrospective monologue, a strange, apparently autobiographical confession that tells the night and day dreams as well as the dreams caused by alcohol and by drugs, reported by an anonymous narrator, a patient, a victim of wine and opium. This distracting and dreamlike story is nourished by a fantastical or rather psychoanalytical material, which this article proposes to study by resorting to the psychoanalytical approach of Freud and Jung. The character, in his attempts to descend into the self, into his inner self, is projected, unconsciously and through dreams and memories, into an obscure and indeterminate place, in his own unconscious. While analyzing this novel, we have noticed that both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic key concepts such as the notion of "repetition compulsion", "the problem of duplication" and finally "process of individuation" arise under the guise of visible and fiction. For this purpose, by inviting us to consider Maroufi's work from a psychoanalytical point of view, we try to identify and make the invisible, those hidden forces of man, visible .