Atividade

81563 - Pshychoanalysis and Culture

Período da turma: 01/02/2018 a 06/02/2018

Selecione um horário para exibir no calendário:
 
 
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’)

Carga Horária:

12 horas
Tipo: Obrigatória
Vagas oferecidas: 50
 
Ministrantes: Stephen John Frosh


 
 voltar

Créditos
© 1999 - 2024 - Superintendência de Tecnologia da Informação/USP