Beyond the Treatment Room: The Psyche-Body-Society Care Politics of Cairo’s El-Nadeem

Abstract

This article examines the care politics of El-Nadeem Center for the Psychological Treatment and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture, an organization established in Cairo in 1993 by leftist politically active psychiatrists, largely women. It shows what it looks like to provide care when violence, especially torture, is immanent. El-Nadeem’s practitioners quickly learned from their clients that healing often required public interventions on a client’s behalf and not simply individual psychological treatment. Radical care politics is central to El-Nadeem’s work and developed dialectically over decades in response to client needs and sociopolitical conditions in the Egyptian, African, and Arab contexts in which it works. The article discusses El-Nadeem’s establishment and evolution, including its expansive understanding of violence and trauma; its nonabstract orientation to embodiment in its therapeutic practices and understanding of psychic, somatic, and social health as closely connected; how its treatment protocols approach the temporalities of trauma; and its public activism, which challenges the paradoxical coexistence of social normalization and disavowal of violence. The article is based on analysis of interviews I conducted in 2014 with El-Nadeem psychiatrists, organizational publications, and a 2003 Arabic-language feminist psychological handbook, The Psyche Ails and the Body Suffers, authored by one of El-Nadeem’s founders. It shows that historical context and material conditions shape the forms of suffering and care politics, although context and conditions are often either evacuated or superficially addressed in feminist concepts produced in the Anglophone imperialist core. The article invites more consideration of how vulnerabilities and suffering that require care are created by extractive and repressive systems at multiple scales, including capitalism and imperialism, and more critical focus on these systems.