AMIR ALI MOHAMMADI
PSYCHTHERAPIST | RESEARCHER
AMIR ALI MOHAMMADI
PSYCHTHERAPIST | RESEARCHER
PROFESSIONAL PATH
Background and Main Interests
AmirAli Alimohamadi is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a researcher in the humanities. His research interests and publications span the fields of psychoanalysis, discourse analysis, psychopolitics, media studies, qualitative research, and gender studies. In his therapeutic work, he is particularly drawn to the approaches of Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, and Sigmund Freud, the German psychoanalyst. In addition to his studies in clinical psychology, he has been working—both in person and online—as a psychoanalytic therapist over the past ten years.
Publications and Translations
His recent book, “Instagram: An Apparatus of Late Capitalism” (2021), is a psychoanalytic treatise on the subjectivity of high-profile Iranian users on Instagram. He is also the translator of the book “The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment” (2023) by Todd McGowan, which explores psychoanalysis, politics, literature, and popular culture.
Research Fields and Academic Work
Studying the experiences of minority groups and facilitating access to services for vulnerable communities are among his key interests and goals. In addition, he adopts an interdisciplinary approach to explore the clinical, sociological, political, and ideological dimensions of subjectivity through the lens of psychoanalysis and discourse analysis. His PhD dissertation at the University of Essex is focused on these areas.
Further Information
To read more about AmirAli’s writings, you can visit the Publications section. For information on his psychoanalytic practice and how to arrange therapy sessions, please visit the Psychoanalysis section.
Words are all we have
Words are all we have
MY FIGURED WORLD
Reality as a Human-Made World: Constructing Ourselves Through Language
To understand and analyze something, we must first grasp how it is constructed. This foundational principle shaped my thinking through Peter Berger’s book The Social Construction of Reality. Berger notes that humans lack a given relationship to the world; we must continually establish a relationship with it. In essence, we produce not only our world but also ourselves within that world. Language plays a pivotal role in this process, mediating our engagement with reality and enabling understanding. As Berger underscores, we often forget our authorship of this constructed world, and the dialectic between humans (as producers) and their products fades from consciousness. This insight marked a critical synthesis for me: where the sociology of knowledge converges with the philosophy of mind.
The Double-Edged Gift of Speech and the Turn to Psychoanalysis
Though we possess the gift of speech as humans, ironically, we are “monkeys with a gift of speech, a gift which brings us suffering, we are its minions.” When we deconstruct this formative process, psychology and psychoanalysis reveal themselves as indispensable interpretive lenses. Initially, these disciplines present abstract theories that structure experience into generalized models. Theoretical depth is often sought by juxtaposing phylogenetic (evolutionary) and ontogenetic (individual-developmental) perspectives. Freud’s pioneering shift from neurology to the unconscious remains groundbreaking, yet psychoanalysis—in both Freudian and post-Freudian traditions—faces ongoing criticism for its reliance on abstraction and speculative imagination.
Lacan’s Intervention: Language as the Meeting Point of Psyche, Politics, and History
Here, Lacan’s thoughts proved transformative: He grounded Freud’s ideas in structural linguistics and social theory, thereby “bringing psychoanalysis down to earth.” For me personally, Lacan’s emphasis on language addressed critical gaps in the field. Language became the dynamic intersection of psyche, unconscious, culture, politics, and history. By centering clinical work on language, the singularity of each individual is preserved; their personal and cultural narratives foregrounded, their struggles contextualized historically. Consequently, the imposition of abstract theoretical templates onto lived experience diminishes. Language thus functions as the living site where symbolic abstraction and embodied reality converge.