Rayyan Dabbous

Psychoanalysis of a Teenage Novelist Rayyan Dabbous

Between 2011 and 2015, a teenager typed some two hundred thousand words on his personal laptop. From his private bedroom in Beirut, Lebanon, he transported himself to urban hubs as crowded as Manhattan, New York and as small as Charlotte, North Carolina. In three separate novels, he pitted against each other a mixed set of imagined characters: wizards and demons, lawyers and prosecutors, police investigators and secret societies. What drives an adolescent to ditch, on three occasions, the real world for a fictional alternative? How do children negotiate their dreams and desires with their forming superego, the newly-elected policeman of their thoughts? In this book, the same author revisits his literary odyssey to locate the psychical mechanisms underpinning his teenage behavior. While his theoretical framework rests primarily on the works of Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud, his findings connect to a range of disciplines: geography and architecture, citizenship and political science, gender and sexuality, theology and sociology.