ENGL 407 B: Special Topics in Cultural Studies

English 556B/407B: Psychoanalytics

Professor Gillian Harkins  

Class Meeting T/TH 1:30-3:20 pm CMU 230 

Office Hours: T/TH 12-1 PM in 506-A Padelford Hall or zoom by appointment

Psychoanalytics:

Psyche, Soma, Power

The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.

-- Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

Psychoanalytic theory is not everyone's cup of tea. Its foundational assumptions are not universally embraced, and it deploys a specialist vocabulary that some don't have the patience or the inclination to learn. But psychoanalysis nevertheless remains one of the most powerful heuristics available for interpreting, understanding, and living with the affective dimensions of our individual and collective lives, and of the creative and artistic works that impart such meaning to those lives.

--Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, Special Issue: “Transpsychoanalytics” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4. 3-4 (2017)

What are the implications of conceptualizations of the coloniality of gender for psychoanalysis, and what are decolonizing possibilities for sexual desire in our historical moment? How may we bring nonnormative psychoanalysis into conversation with decolonial and liberatory enactments of community psychology on questions of race, gender, and sexuality? How may the conceptual resources of nonnormative psychoanalysis dialogue with Fanonian thought and Southern theory to support resistance to persistent patterns in the racialization, gendering, and sexualizing of space and the spatialization of race, gender, and sexuality?

 -- Kopano Ratele, Shahnaaz Suffla, Mohamed Seedat, Mireille Fanon Mendès France and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Special Issue: “Fanon, Southern Theory, And Psychoanalysis” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 22:4 (2021).

Short Summary: This course provides a limited introduction to psychoanalysis and its impact on twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural studies.  No ten-week course could possibly synthesize the diverse origins and trends attributed to psychoanalytic thought, so we will use our class time to touch on some basic tenets and key disputes while opening up lines of inquiry for independent projects.  Our Winter seminar will enroll both graduate and undergraduate students; we will take an introductory approach to the assigned readings collectively before providing opportunities for smaller group discussions supporting specific learning goals.  Students will complete individual or group projects based on their undergraduate or graduate goals.    

Longer Explanation: What is psychoanalysis?  There is no single answer to that question, although origin stories often focus on Sigmund Freud’s clinical and theoretical work across the turn of the twentieth century.  Works such as Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer, 1895), The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) or Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) certainly introduce key psychoanalytic concepts, even as Freud continued to revise these central concepts across later works such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) or Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).  Even those unfamiliar with Freud’s works are familiar with some of his major concepts: ego, unconscious, repression, fantasy, libido, trauma, death drive … the list could go on.  Many concepts from Freud’s writings and practice continue to shape twenty-first century ideas about mind (psyche), body (soma), and society (power), even or perhaps especially as Freud is relegated to a distant past and some of his more discomfiting claims are repudiated.  Even Freud’s idea of the “talking cure,” or the therapeutic significance of sharing language with another, continues to haunt protocols of literary and cultural analysis while remaining disputed as empirical science.

Yet this origin story is a topic of some debate, with historians and theorists asking what social, economic, and geo-political conditions shaped Freud’s practices and ideas, why and how Freud’s work is centered amongst diverse iterations of psychoanalytic thought and practice, and what happens when we encounter psychoanalytics more broadly, as a mode of inquiry and analysis oriented to various origins, sources, and goals.  Rather than ask what psychoanalysis is, we might ask instead: what does it do?  Who identifies with it, who instrumentalizes it, what happens when it is picked up and put down somewhere unexpected, its origins redescribed, its archives and objectives remapped?  In this course we will explore diverse approaches to psychoanalytics unfolding across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, navigating various calls to “return to Freud” (famously associated with Jacques Lacan’s mid-twentieth-century work) or to repudiate him (just search “Freud seduction theory”), dwelling most significantly with the many, many works reframing its civilizational hierarchies of sex/gender/sexuality as racial, imperial and colonial formations, contesting its implications for Queer and Trans studies, and exploring its relevance for Marxist theories of ideology and history.

There are so many responses to and reiterations of psychoanalytics across so many fields, we cannot cover them all in a single ten week class. The goal will be to introduce a few specific works and clarify some pathways to individual or group projects about historical or contemporary debates.  As orienting questions for the course, we will ask: why do so many people turn to psychoanalytics to pose questions about psyche, soma and power, even in our seemingly very different contemporary moment?  What is centered or clarified, and what is minimized or excluded, in these approaches? How or why might you engage these thinkers in your own critical inquiry? The professor will provide short lectures to orient everyone to the reading and its contexts.

Course Format:  The Course is planned as an in-person course to be held on UW Seattle Campus.  If we need to move the course on-line, I will adapt our course for delivery through the UW Canvas course platform.

Course Readings:  All readings for this course can be accessed through the Canvas website. Please let me know if you have problems accessing course materials. 

These full books are available on-line and/or as .pdf files on the Canvas website:

• Peter Gay, Ed., The Freud Reader, New York: Norton, 1989. [downloaded .pdf] All assigned Freud readings can be found in this volume.
• Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1966), Trans. Alan Sheridan (1977), New York: Routledge, 1989. The UW Library has a print edition of the updated translation and expanded edition Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Trans. Bruce Fink, New York: Norton, 2007.
• Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, Taylor & Francis Group, 1988. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Course Objectives

• Grapple with “Psychoanalysis”
• Define and discuss some keywords
• Read some primary sources
• Encounter some contemporary debates
• Produce a final project

Course Requirements

• Class Discussion: You will be expected to participate actively in your own learning process by contributing to in-class discussion activities.  This means you will come to class with the assigned reading completed and prepared to ask a question or make a comment about that reading.  We will come up with strategies for class discussion together at the start of the course, using these guidelines as our starting point.  Course Grade: 20%
• Freewriting Portfolios: You will engage in weekly freewriting assignments focused on a prompt from the week’s readings and discussion. This writing is deliberately unstructured, a chance for you to experience the surprise of writing through your responses to specific ideas or questions.  We will come up with agreements for the portfolios together.  Course Grade: 30%

• Final Project: You will produce a final project at the end of the course. These projects will be assessed for their ability to demonstrate learning goals from the class.  Expectations for the final project will be outlined clearly in the Assignment link.  Once again, you will hand in your project as well as an assessment of your project as part of the final assignment.  Course Grade: 50%

Course Policies

• Academic Conduct:  We all share responsibility for creating a positive shared learning community.  Everyone is invited to raise questions and offer additional perspectives about any materials discussed in class. Everyone is also expected to contribute their ideas in a manner that is thoughtful and respectful of the ideas expressed by others.  
• Academic Integrity: The University takes academic integrity very seriously. Behaving with integrity is part of our responsibility to our shared learning community.  Please review this University of Washington website for a definition and explanation of academic misconduct. All work submitted for this course must be your own. Use of generative AI will be considered academic misconduct. The assignments in this class have been designed to challenge you to develop creativity, critical-thinking, and problem-solving skills. Using AI technology will limit your capacity to develop these skills and to meet the learning goals of this course.  If you are confused or have any questions about a specific instance, please feel free to see me in advance of the due date.
• Academic Accommodations: It is the policy and practice of the University of Washington to create inclusive and accessible learning environments consistent with federal and state law. If you have already established accommodations with Disability Resources for Students (DRS), please activate your accommodations via myDRS so we can discuss how they will be implemented in this course. If you have not yet established services through DRS, but have a temporary health condition or permanent disability that requires accommodations (conditions include but not limited to; mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical or health impacts), contact DRS directly to set up an Access Plan. DRS facilitates the interactive process that establishes reasonable accommodations. Contact DRS at disability.uw.edu.
• Religious Accommodations: Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy, Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks sof this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form.

Additional Resources

• Additional support for technology access, writing and research support, financial and health needs, food, parenting, and legal resources and have been gathered at this link: https://english.washington.edu/resources-times-need
• Advising appointments with the Humanities Advising Center can be scheduled here: https://hasc.washington.edu/schedule-appointment