Reading Freud

Catalog description

Psychoanalysis is hard to classify: as a body of knowledge it does not fit smoothly into the criteria of science, social science, philosophy, literature, or art. Freud, who was trained as a doctor, first used the term in 1896, to mean the scientific study of the mind and soul rather than of the brain. Freud was one of the great experimental thinkers: during a career that spanned 60 years he constantly evolved his thought and challenged his own conclusions. But he never departed from the proposition that thoughts can exist in our minds, and guide our actions, of which we are unconscious. He was the architect of a field, psychoanalysis, that now works to understand the procedures by which we distort or shut out intolerable thoughts, only to have them return to trouble us in new guises. He showed how much communication passes below our conscious radar, or entirely outside language, and suggested ways of intercepting and hearing it. In showing that we are always psychically divided, fractured within, and to some extent strangers to ourselves, he also demonstrated how interdependent people are: "In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent." In this seminar we will not be reading about psychoanalysis, and the many things that can be said against it, or in its defense. Rather, we will be reading to understand the logic of psychoanalytic writing, particularly that of Freud and his contemporaries, as this turned the thought of the early twentieth-century on its head. So if you already believe Freud is wrong, or alternatively right on all counts -- or if you are not prepared to devote a semester to reading some difficult, specialized, primary texts -- this is not the seminar for you!