English 556B: Psychoanalytics
Professor Gillian Harkins
Class Meeting T/TH 1:30-3:20 pm SAV 141
Office Hours: T/TH 12-1 PM in 506-A Padelford Hall or zoom by appointment
Psychoanalytics:
Psyche, Soma, Power
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 continues to be a topic of some debate, with historians and theorists asking what social, economic, and geopolitical 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, 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?
Please feel free to reach out to the instructor if you have any questions about this class.