81563 - Pshychoanalysis and Culture |
Período da turma: | 01/02/2018 a 06/02/2018
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Descrição: | This English-language module looks at applications and implications of
psychoanalysis in the study of culture, politics and history. The aim is to consider the issues that have surrounded the uses of psychoanalysis in understandings of history and culture, and to examine existing debates about psychoanalysis as a form of historical and cultural understanding. The underlying assumption of the series is that psychoanalytic ideas have had their primary grounding in the evidence of the clinical consulting room, and have mainly evolved in response to clinical experience. However, psychoanalysis has been used extensively outside the clinic to deepen understanding of a very wide range of artistic, cultural and political phenomena. These seminars will explore how concepts which have rich meaning in their primary context can throw light on the social and cultural sphere, and in turn how such applications can have an impact on the development of psychoanalytic theory. The methodological issues involved in making these broader applications and grounding them in evidence, will be explored as we proceed. The module will examine how psychoanalysis has contributed to debates in areas that draw together politics, social theory and the study of culture. The key question is whether (and how) the psychoanalytic articulation of unconscious processes facilitates understanding in the social and cultural world. Seminars (4): Seminar 1: The Uncanny Set Text: Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917- 1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217-256 This seminar explores a turning point in Freud’s thinking, when he is on the verge of proposing the existence of a ‘death drive’, by examining how traces, spectres and doubles appear in his work. The key text here is The Uncanny, published just after the First World War and just before the reformulation of Freud’s drive theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The trope of ghostliness was rife at the time – in the wake of pervasive experiences of loss throughout Europe – and a kind of melancholic longing was prevalent. Psychoanalysis, which had always had occult associations and influences and which now, bolstered by the idea of the death drive, had a compelling philosophy of destructiveness and return at its core, was one of the sources of cultural understanding of this longing. The question for this seminar is of the cultural resonance of the ideas Freud develops in this text – of where they come from and what they feed into. Seminar 2 Political implications Set Text: Said, E. (2003) Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso. Psychoanalysis is often implicated in politics. To some extent this follows automatically from its adoption of an ethical stance on the conditions necessary for people to lead a good life, something which many writers see as essential to the psychoanalytic outlook. This indirect involvement of psychoanalysis with politics is complemented by a tradition of direct application that has many sources. There is a rich seam of work on the politics of psychoanalysis, which includes infighting between its various schools as well as investigations of the sometimes dark history of psychoanalysis’ collusion with oppressive regimes. There are also many examples of ways in which psychoanalysis has been used as an instrument to advance progressive politics by supplying a theory of the social subject that is compatible with radical critique. The reading that can be done for this is immense. This seminar concentrates on one text that attempts to re-read Freud in a way that has political consequences in the contemporary world. Specifically, Said’s lecture on Moses and Monotheism (and the response by Jacqueline Rose) focuses on one centre of political crisis (Israel/Palestine) but also raises issues for the broadest possible understanding of the relationships between personal and national ‘identity’ and for cultural contestations over political and social reality. Said reads Freud as opening out the prospect of a ‘broken identity’ as a source of political emancipation; the seminar looks at this idea in relation to other psychoanalytic formulations. Seminar 3 Melancholic Culture Set Text: Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Chapter 5: ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’.) Melancholia, in its Freudian formulation, has taken over from narcissism as a key term for comprehending contemporary cultural experience. It is used to theorise loss, but also to problematise gender identities and postcolonial conditions. This seminar traces one genealogy of this melancholic consciousness, particularly considering its psychoanalytic resonance and its emergence as a strand in cultural thinking. Acting against the classic reading of melancholia as depressed self-destructiveness, some theorists (building directly on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia) have latched onto the idea that in ‘preserving’ the lost object as an unconscious trace, melancholia may provide a paradigm for the recovery of colonised histories and hence for a progressive politics of liberation. Others (for instance Butler) have argued that melancholic identification is a key element in the formation of gendered and raced identities. These ideas have demonstrated much leverage, but also promote what is potentially a regressive search for the ‘authentic’ object that has been stolen and needs to be re-found. Against this, politicised notions of lack, ‘contrapuntal’ out-of- timeness, and messianism are drawn upon as aids to thinking through the conditions necessary for resistance and renewal. The question is, should melancholia be rescued in this way or is this an idealising/ romanticising move? Seminar 4 Trauma Set Text: Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Chapter 5: ‘Traumatic Awakenings’) Trauma is a central focus for psychoanalysis and a major figure in social debate. It refers both to the experiences of individuals and to the exposure of entire cultures to histories of abuse, colonisation and violent oppression. It also encapsulates the feeling of something shocking and unexpected that cannot be thought about fully – that cannot be symbolised – and consequently stays ‘alive’ as a repudiated psychosocial entity. Many psychoanalytic ideas are drawn on to make sense of this, from technical concepts such as repression and foreclosure, to the specially invented ‘cryptonomy’ of Abraham and Torok. This has been related especially to Holocaust studies, but also to a wide range of cultural concerns, including the invention of psychoanalysis itself. The idea that trauma blocks symbolisation is a widespread one that reads the history of culture as well as of individuals as a procession of unbearable – and hence defended against – impingements. This seminar questions this claimed relation between trauma and history. It links back to the first seminar of the module, with its interest in ghostly phenomena: is history a matter of traumatic haunting in the psychoanalytic sense? Background texts: Frosh, S. (2010) Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic. London: Palgrave. Frosh, S. (2013) Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions. London: Palgrave. Set readings: Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217-256 Said, E. (2003) Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Chapter 5: ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’.) Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Chapter 5: ‘Traumatic Awakenings’) |
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Carga Horária: |
12 horas |
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Tipo: | Obrigatória | ||||
Vagas oferecidas: | 50 | ||||
Ministrantes: |
Stephen John Frosh |
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