Fallen Stars: Paths of Decathexis stages a dialogue between a psychoanalytic scholar of Sufi practice, Dr. Ali Altaf Mian (Assistant Professor and Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Florida), and Dr. Fadi Abou-Rihan, a Toronto-based psychoanalyst who draws on his Philosophy PhD in his writings. Dr. Abou-Rihan’s latest book touches on the Sufi tradition for conceptual inspiration. The event will take place in person with Dr. Abou-Rihan participating remotely.
Psychoanalysis puzzles over how to help us shed painful attachments, a concern that is wider than that of mourning for losses. The difficulty of disinvestment affects everyday experiences of addiction, mania, socially induced suffering, and wanted and unwanted feelings of urgency. Psychoanalysis offers relief from the moral and voluntaristic approaches of U.S. culture, instead nurturing passive and indirect change through attention to language.
Psychoanalytic notions that address this question include decathexis, a general term for disinvestment, and the “fall of the object,” Jacques Lacan’s term for the fading of attachment to one’s analyst. In Fadi Abou-Rihan’s book Finding Winnicott (Routledge, 2023), “everything is over and nothing has yet begun” at the end of an analysis; then, “power and its attendant struggles feel the least relevant” (34). In Ali Altaf Mian’s psychoanalytic tracing of the remainders of desire of Sufi mentorship in his forthcoming book, Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia (U of Notre Dame Press, 2026), scholar and poet Azīz-ul-Ḥasan Ghaurī’s changing relationship with his Sufi teacher Maulānā Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī suggests that “sublimating practices are incomplete, generating a remainder that continues to inform life.” For Ghaurī’ and Thānavī, attachment “cannot be opposed to proper form (adab)” even as the direction of mentorship seeks to loosen it. More generally, Mian asks whether the juxtaposition between Sufi practice and psychoanalysis might provide “breathing space away from the constrictions of both tradition and modernity."
“Fallen Stars: Paths of Decathexis” presents these scholars' two prepared papers, response to one another, and dialogue with the audience to consider distinctions between disinvestment processes. Are there different paths to decathexis within psychoanalysis, truly distinct itineraries and methods open to various individuals, and/or only different names and vertices? Do varying experiences index genuinely different processes or structural variations of the same process? Does this question index conflicts or strategies in theory or practice? If so, how might traditions under-attended by contemporary psychoanalysis, yet present within its roots, help us think creatively about the painful versions of urgency that torment so many?
For questions, please message Dylan Taylor (taylord4@uci.edu).