Department of English

Psychoanalysis remains the most powerful, relentlessly tested and continuously revised and refined account of human selfhood, motivation, behavior, and intersubjectivity. Despite various attempts to dismiss or domesticate its most radical insights, its conceptions of the person and the interpersonal have continued to be woven into the very fabric of critical theory, from the Frankfurt School to postmodern and contemporary critical schools and their derivatives (e.g., affect studies, critical race theory, disability studies, animal studies, etc.). Yet within the humanities and social sciences, psychoanalysis is commonly taught and applied as little more than a fixed canon of works from the early-to-mid-twentieth century—chiefly, works by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan. Essential though their ideas remain, they can hardly be understood, much less applied in the present without an understanding of the ways in which they’ve been profoundly changed: worked through and beyond by subsequent generations of psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners. This course offers graduate students (and, by permission, advanced undergraduates in the Psychoanalytic Studies Minor) an opportunity to “rebegin” (in Laura Riding Jackson’s sense) their study of psychoanalytic history, theory, and practice, from Freud to the present—and, from the vantage of the present, to rediscover psychoanalysis as a dynamic contemporary discipline and model for critical thinking. In addition to regular participation in class discussion, requirements will include some response papers, an in-class presentation, and an argument-driven essay.