A Mind That Flows: روان
Untranslating the Psyche: Exploring the Linguistic Scaffolding of Consciousness Across Cultures and Moving Toward a Decolonial Reading of the Mind
You've surely heard the word psyche in a thousand different contexts. Psychology, psychiatry, “psycho”; the word has invaded our collective consciousness, and we have just accepted it as our repurposed way of referring to the confusing, unspeakable expanse that is the human mind.
But where did it come from? You probably know that it is Greek, ψυχή, and that it referred to something rather nebulous. Sometimes, it’s translated as breath, sometimes as soul. In the old times, psyche referred to the immaterial substance of a person within a living body, or outside it after death, quite like the concept of a Soul in most Abrahamic religions. Today, we don’t use the word in this context. A psychiatrist will not tell you they’re treating your immaterial essence, they will do their best to treat conditions of your mind; your perception, cognition or affective regulation.
In today’s parlance, the psyche is fixed. It is almost immaterial, but also almost material. It can be broken and therefore it can be fixed. It “lives” in the brain, and the biological model of disease keeps telling us that our very vague and difficult-to-explain problems can, potentially, be solved by altering the balance of our neurotransmitters. The psyche is no longer that which is beyond the living body. It is integrated into a materialistic perception of the human.
Many languages have chosen to adopt this Greek loanword, and have therefore subscribed to its new, Western and psychologized meaning. Some haven’t. One of those is Persian.
The Persian Mind
In the Persosphere, what is equivalent to “psyche” in the West is called ravān (روان). It is the root of psychiatry (روان پزشکی), psychology (روانشناسی) and even “psycho” (روانی). The scope of the word is nearly identical in its modern usage, but its origins are very, very different. Ravān is, first of all, an adjective that underwent nominalization, i.e. became a noun. Ravān is a property, “flowing”, “fluent”, and Ravān, as a noun, is “that which is flowing or fluent”. There is neither a material nor a spiritual undertone; if anything, it strikes me as Hippocratic.
In the humoral theory of disease, so widespread in the ancient world, disease could be caused by the imbalance of humors, but also their blockage. To this day, a Farsi speaker conceptualizes disorders of the psyche, of “that which flows”, as obstructions in flow, not essential flaws.
If we accept that the way we conceptualize our minds affects our relations not only to our internal worlds, but our external ones too, we will see that this peculiarity of language has far-reaching consequences, both for the well and for the ill. Still, Westernized psychology has its own theories of mind and body, and allows for very little nuance in handling natives whose cognitive infrastructure is wired by concepts that are strikingly different from theirs. The Western ideas of the scaffolding of mind aren’t universal truths, but are often presented as such. And the word, or subsequent concept of “psyche” isn’t the only such case, and neither is the Persian language. But since that is what we are examining today, we can look at the mismatch between Westernized, seemingly “universal” terms, and their Persian counterparts.
Intelligence, Consciousness or Awareness?
A central part of the language of the mind is occupied by the concept of consciousness itself. What is the quality of being conscious? The English word “consciousness” derives from the Latin “conscientia”, an amalgam of two words “con” – or “with”, a prefix denoting a joining or merging of something, and “scientia” or “knowledge” – the root of the modern word science. Therefore, consciousness in its original meaning would be “knowledge within” or “joined knowledge”.
Persian conceptualizes consciousness in vastly different ways. The most common way of referring to consciousness in Farsi is hūsh (هوش), a term used both in psychological and medical contexts. To lose consciousness in the medical sense is to be bi-hūsh (بیهوش) or “without hūsh”. But what is to be “with hūsh”, or ba-hūsh (باهوش)? If you guessed it’d mean being conscious or aware, you’d be mistaken. To be “with hūsh” means something roughly approximating being clever, aware, sly and cognitively brisk. The scope of the word hūsh is so different to the Western concept of consciousness as a fixed category, that it almost can’t be used as a direct translation. In some contexts, hūsh is used as a translation for none other than intelligence (AI is called “artificial hūsh” in Farsi).
You can immediately see the problem: the terms don’t map onto each other with any regularity. And that is because the conceptual architecture of the mind is entirely incongruent with the supposedly universal western categories. When thinking of the Persian idea of consciousness it is best to abandon the binary, on-off switch and think of it as a continuum from oblivion (i.e. total lack of awareness) to full, cognitively brisk awareness. To be truly conscious to the Persian speaker requires a degree of intelligence and agility.
If there is a conscious mind, then there must be a subconscious, right? Not so quick.
Sometimes, the subconscious can be translated as “nā-khod-āgāh” (ناخوداگاه) – which is always a poor translation because in native contexts it denotes an action that is unintentional and unintended. It literally means “unaware of itself”. This is not subconsciousness in the Freudian or Jungian sense, merely an action performed with little care, although it is used as a translation in psychoanalytic literature. Without a real subconscious the Western psychological architecture of mind falls apart. In the Persosphere, the architecture is not hierarchical or necessarily always layered, it is in flux, in flow. Nafs (نفس), commonly translated as ego (and erroneously so) can coexist with jān (جان), or “soul” and with ruh (روح) or spirit. And since the mind is that which flows, all its essential attributes are always in flux, together, on different spectra.
Within this semantic field, the Freudian split between conscious/unconscious did not map easily. Hūsh in particular reveals a different phenomenology: it names not just cognition but wakeful presence, clarity, sobriety; its absence can mean fainting, intoxication, or being carried away in love. Thus, to render “the unconscious” as bi-hūsh inadvertently equates it with intoxication or unawareness, pulling it into Sufi and poetic registers alien to Freud’s clinical schema. What emerges is a kind of semantic resistance: the Persian lexicon insists on continuity between cognition, presence, love, and loss of self, whereas the Freudian unconscious presupposes repression, compartmentalization, and internalized conflict. The very difficulty of translation demonstrates that the “unconscious” is not a universal stratum of the psyche but a culturally mediated category that collides with different linguistic ontologies.
The mistranslation of Freud’s vocabulary into Persian was not simply a semantic glitch but a vector that redirected psychoanalysis itself. Renderings of the unconscious as bi-hūshi or nā-āgāhi framed it less as a buried structure of repression and more as a state of absence, intoxication, or amorous oblivion. In turn, psychoanalysis in Iran never fully settled into the clinic but instead migrated into the domains of literature, criticism, and intellectual discourse. Writers and poets could recognize in Freud’s “unconscious” a mirror of the rapturous states of love that Persian poetics had long explored, whereas physicians found the category less operational than the imported somatic and neurological models. This explains why, throughout the twentieth century, psychoanalysis in Iran thrived as a hermeneutic tool for novels, modernist poetry, and even political allegory, rather than as a dominant therapeutic practice. The language itself had filtered Freud out, bending his categories to older Persian grammars of the self.
The Cognitive Facet
If we look at the way the mind itself is conceptualized, we have to confront the fact that except ravān, which we established as a tenuous counterpart of “psyche”, Farsi doesn’t really have a native descriptor. Here, it reaches for an Arabic loanword, zehn (ذهن). The scope of zehn and ravān is wildly different, though: while ravān is the totality of the cognitive, perceptive and affective faculties that are always fluently changing position and shape, zehn itself is merely the cognitive facet of ravān. It is concerned with logic and regulation. It has very little affective qualities. Therefore, it can’t represent the totality of a mind. But what happened to the overarching term, ravān?
The twentieth century imposed a new semantic order. In Persian, ravān was retooled into ravān-shenāsi (روانشناسی, psychology) and ravān-pezeshki (روانپزشکی, psychiatry), calques on European scientific models. The older resonances of ravān as life-force and Zoroastrian-Islamic “soul-in-motion” were muted, if not erased, under the pressure of translation from German and French clinical vocabularies
When we add all these things together, we get to a fundamental problem: the untranslatability of the language of the mind. If the Western hierarchical architecture of consciousness is considered the universal truth, then the Persian one that is spectral and fluent becomes anomalous. And yet, people are mentally healthy and mentally ill regardless of language. Can it be said that the language we speak, the words and concepts that make the scaffoldings of our thoughts have no bearing on our internal, innermost lives? Not so quick.
The Decolonial Reading
Here we must approach the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with extreme caution. For one, it is almost self-evident that our languages affect the ways in which we are capable of thinking. But the effect is not total or quite as apparent as the hypothesis itself would imply. It is not that untranslatability of a certain term absolutely precludes its understanding. You can explain. You can find alternative ways of making the transfer of meaning. And cognitive frameworks adapt, even when the lexical and grammatical infrastructure lags. Taken in extremis, a decontextualized (and frankly nonsensical, but sadly common) reading of the hypothesis would imply that a person whose language doesn’t have a term for something can’t conceptualize it. This is obviously silly, since we all conceptualize things we don’t have fully adequate words for daily. There are factual limits to linguistic determinism.
There is also the issue of… well, scientific racism. Sapir and Whorf are now widely criticized for Orientalistic, racist attitudes, and exoticization of certain Native American languages. They supposedly studied languages as far removed from the Indo-European family (and particularly the Germanic branch) as possible in order to prove that the Germanic “structure” has properties that are especially conducive to abstract thinking, modernity, progress etc. What does this remind you of? When looking at a language, we must abandon hierarchical models. The IE family or the Germanic branch within it (including English) aren’t the universal linguistic etalon that all others should be compared to. Every language is a living organism in its own right. Further than that, every language is an exercise in building internal and external schemata of the world.
In relation to the architecture of thought through language, we have to take a step back from the criticism and take what works from Sapir and Whorf. Linguistic determinism definitely has its place in the study of the language of the mind. How we think of our own selves, and the scaffolding we use to mount those thoughts, directly affect our cognitive processes. Further than that, they affect our relations with discomfort and disturbance.
Transplanting Westernized hierarchical models of the mind into regions where they are linguistically untenable is a difficult and ultimately futile endeavor. And yet, modern imported Western psychology and psychiatry are trying to do exactly that. Perhaps, in a more decolonial spirit we should ask ourselves: when my mind thinks in its own native tongue, how does it see itself? Is it immovable or fluent? Can it break or merely have disruptions and turbulences in flow? How does my consciousness speak of itself? Is it something that can be turned on and off? Or is it like hūsh – a spectrum of possibilities that always includes the internal light of clever awareness? Is my subconscious mind a vast, unknown darkness that remains forever out of reach, or a layered, spiritual and religious concept?
For the informed clinician, this means working with your client’s implicit scaffolding, and not against it. Untranslatability is not a defect; it is surplus of meaning. If we abandon the position of Western ideas about the mind as etalons, we have the beautiful possibility of developing new psychological, philosophical and therapeutic approaches that work with the client’s internal schemata, not against them. In order to do that, we have to ask ourselves deep and uncomfortable questions about internalized eurocentrism, scientific racism and the painful Imperial histories that pathologized everything that isn’t congruent with the Imperial normative.
Language is alive, and we are alive within it. It is very difficult to judge how your native language sounds – the awareness of the meaning practically inhibits aesthetic appreciation of its sound. (Try it!) In the very same way, the fact that we live within and through our minds inhibits our insight into them. Language can be the decisive clue, and a powerful tool of reclaiming one’s own native architectures and modes of being. Just because the terms don’t neatly map onto each other doesn’t mean that there is deficit on either side – merely asymmetry and surplus.
Khatoun is a Linguist and Translator/Interpreter. Subscribe to her Newsletter, ‘The Khatoun Journal’ above!
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In Urdu, ravani means flow, and in pushto, ravan means, to go, or to set off!
this is literally my favorite subject ever.