Sadeq Chubak and Existential Anxieties: An Existential Psychoanalytic Reading of Sang-e Sabour (The Patience Stone)

Existential psychotherapy theory, founded by Irvin Yalom, is one of the most recent post-Freudian approaches in psychoanalysis. This theory detects the root of all human conflicts in four final anxieties, namely, facing death as an inevitable fact, recognizing the loneliness of human beings, free will and its responsibilities, and noting the absurdity of life. Existential psychotherapy adopts Freud’s theory connecting the origin of all human thoughts and activities to their inner tensions but provides a different perspective on these inner tensions. In this paper, we, first, briefly introduce existential psychotherapy theory and describe its differences from Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. Then, using the existential psychotherapy theory, and addressing relevant research questions, we read Sang-e Sabour (The Patience Stone), a novel by Sadeq Chubak that has primary philosophical and psychological topics. Further, we propose existential psychotherapy as the primary literary school relevant to this novel instead of naturalism that other critics have so far associated with this work. In our reading of Sang-e Sabour, we show that the novel’s story is formed around these basic human conflicts and anxieties. Moreover, we argue that ascribing naturalism to this novel is wrong since the novel’s content is in conflict with naturalistic determinism and describes the anxieties of free will and its responsibilities.
 
Extended Abstract
 
1. Introduction
As one of the most recent post-Freudian approaches, existential psychotherapy, while relying on Freud’s emphasis on the role of inner tensions in human ideas and practices, takes a different look at these tensions. Freud believes that an individual’s thoughts and actions result from their inner contradictory forces, which exist at different levels of consciousness, some of which being completely unconscious. In existential psychotherapy, understanding the nature of the inner contradictions of human beings is never easy. Human concerns are not readily available to the psychoanalyst but are rather concealed by defense mechanisms such as repression, denial and displacement. Existential psychoanalysis assumes these contradictions to be the result of the struggle between repressed desires and forgotten traumatic memories and our encounter with four ultimate concerns of human beings, namely death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. In the present article, Chubak’s Sang-e Sabour is studied in the light of this new approach.
 
2. Theoretical Framework
In existential psychoanalysis four main human concerns, i.e., death, freedom, existential isolation and meaninglessness, which, unlike in the Freudian approach, are not related to the childhood of the individual, are the focus of attention. In the present article, the underlying concepts of existential psychoanalysis are adopted to analyze the main themes in Chubak’s Sang-e Sabour.
 
3. Methodology
The present study conducts textual analysis. The recurrent themes of death, freedom, solitude and the search for the meaning of life were identified in the novel and existential psychoanalysis was applied to analyze them. 
 
   
4. Findings
In this novel death and solitude are among the common features associated with the main characters. The characters’ solitude is highlighted by the monologues used in the novel, and, by the end the novel, most characters are either dead or expecting death. Freedom of choice and meaninglessness of life are also recurrent themes in the internal monologues of the main characters of the novel.
 
5. Conclusion
Libido and natural instincts are not the main psychological tensions and motivations in this novel; however, what Yalom calls the ultimate human concerns have been recurrently alluded to throughout the novel. The main features of naturalism, such as determinism and positivist philosophical viewpoints, cannot be found in this novel. Several components of the schools of thought developing after modernism, such as postmodernist elements, which are absent in naturalism, can be found in Chubak’s Sang-e Sabur.