Freud and Beyond This course introduces you to psychoanalysis, one of the theories that has most influenced twentieth century thought. Each of these goals embeds an assumption. In the second, I assume that psychoanalysis, as many other complex and wideranging theories, will be useful to your own listening, observing, interviewing, understanding life history, autobiography, or biography, reading of literature, thinking about cultural patterns, or analyzing social forms.
Psychoanalysis begins from the discovery and investigation of the dynamic unconscious.
All social and cultural forms are invested with unconscious meaning and created because of unconscious wishes and fears. No social fact, no cultural meaning, nothing that an interviewee says to you, is transparent or readable as what it says. Please look at the extended bibliography at the end of this syllabus and feel free to consult me about a reading. Because I am assuming that people will be taking this class for a variety of reasons, I am offering a number of writing options. An applied paper may investigate a series of works that draw upon psychoanalysis or apply psychoanalytic theory to your own work.