Psychoanalysis and The Visual

Catalog description

At least since Freud's "Dream Book," psychoanalysis has taught us that psychic life is thoroughly steeped in images. This course will pursue the implications of Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject, which elaborates and complicates Freud's thinking with respect to the ways in which psychic experience and visuality are intertwined. By examining a range of psychoanalytic texts alongside several films and photographs, we will begin with Lacan"s proposition that the "I" comes into being though the subject"s identification with his or her mirror image. This is ultimately a problem for sociality itself, for we learn to relate to others by way of how we relate to ourselves, our primordial other. Course materials MAY include the writings of Borch-Jacobsen, Butler, Descartes, Fanon, Freud, Heidegger, Klein, Lacan, Laplanche, Winnicot as well as several films, including Capturing the Friedmans , American Psycho , I Am Not Your Negro , and The Thin Red Line .