CSCL 3412W is also offered in Fall 2024
CSCL 3412W is also offered in Spring 2024
CSCL 3412W is also offered in Fall 2022
CSCL 3412W is also offered in Fall 2021
Fall 2020 | CSCL 3412W Section 001: Psychoanalysis (17784)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- Completely Online
- Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
Online Course
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Tue,
Thu 01:00PM - 02:15PM
Off Campus
UMN REMOTE
- Enrollment Status:
Closed (30 of 30 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- The work of Sigmund Freud has withstood years of controversy to install itself as foundational to the way we understand the relationship between individual desires, social structures, and cultural practices. This is in part because Freud's writings were not restricted to the domain of psychology. His writings also renewed grand philosophical questions in ways that dramatically transformed them. He asked: What is a human subject? What are the causes of her actions? What are the nature and motivations of her engagement with others? In the many decades since his early publications, Freud's key concepts like the ego, the superego, the id, the unconscious, and the significance of dreams and jokes have had an enduring influence in Western culture. This course introduces students to a range of psychoanalytic writings from Freud's early theories of mental structure and human development to contemporary applications, re-workings, and critiques of psychoanalysis. We will discuss concepts like the unconscious, sexuality, disavowal, repression, neurosis, melancholia, the pleasure principle and the death drive. By the end of the course, we will have developed a sense of the uses and limitations of psychoanalysis for understanding pressing global issues such as sexual identification and its formation, racism, neo-fascism, extreme political division, war and nationalism, climate change, and the destruction of democratic ideals. Authors read may include Melanie Klein, Franz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, David Eng, Slavoj Zizek, Henry Stack Sullivan, Kalpana Sheshadri- Crooks and Margaret Mahler. Readings will be complemented with short stories, literary excerpts, film clips, as well as discussion of current political issues.
- Class Notes:
- This course is completely online in a synchronous format. The course will meet online at the scheduled times.
- Class Description:
- What critical tools does psycholanalysis make available to us as students of culture? What are the promises and limitations of psychoanalytical method? To begin to answer such questions, this course engages in close readings of selected writings of Sigmund Freud, including, e.g., "On Narcissism," "The Uncanny," "The Future of an Illusion," "The Ego and the Id," and "Civilization and its Discontents." In addition to reconstructing Freud's often deceptively uncomplicated, yet demanding thinking, the course will focus on the relationship between his theory of the subject and his (variously implicit and explicit) theory of culture, and on how both theories converge in questions concerning the construction of individual and collective identity, i.e., "Who are we?"
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/17784/1209
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 4 September 2007
ClassInfo Links - Fall 2020 Cultural Stdy/Comparative Lit Classes