Courses
PSP 789-1 / CPLT 751R-1/FREN 775-1 - Primal Scenes: Literature & Psychoanalysis, and Political Passions
Elissa Marder
Monday 4:00-6:45 pm, Candler Library 125
In this course, we shall examine how the two fundamental insights of psychoanalysis (sexuality and the unconscious) put psychoanalysis into a primal relation to literature and the political. Beginning with a close reading The Interpretation of Dreams, we will explore how Freud derives his model of the human psyche through dreams by appealing to literary language, literary figures, theatrical spaces, and events as he explains the complex operations of the dream-work. After looking at the place that Freud accords to hysteria, (and feminine sexuality) as the bedrock of the human psyche, we will consider how Freud’s writings challenge the notion of the human and open up ways of rethinking the political dimension of psychic life. Throughout the course, we will focus on how the Freudian notion of the ‘primal scene’ challenges traditional conceptions of temporality, repetition, and the status of the historical event. Throughout, we will remain attentive to the psycho-political dimension of mourning, anxiety, secrets, fantasy, magical thinking, and denial. Texts may include: Major works by Freud including The Interpretation of Dreams and the Case Histories; selected works by Lacan, Theban Plays (Sophocles), Phèdre (Racine); The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein) (Duras); Beloved(Morrison); Muriel (dir. Alain Resnais) Additional readings may include works by: Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Wilfred Bion, André Green, Shoshana Felman, Sarah Kofman, Anne Dufourmantelle, and Leo Bersani.
This course will be taught in English. Works originally written in French can be read in translation.
PSP 789-1 / PHIL 789 - The Political Unconcious
Noelle McAfee
Thursday 1:00-4:00 pm, Bowden 216
Taking up the “political unconscious,” this seminar focuses first on Freud’s most relevant texts and concepts and then moves into trajectories of psychoanalysis since Freud and the various ways that psychoanalytic theory has been expanded and deployed in 20th century and contemporary social and political thought. We will explore a number of current debates in psychoanalytic political theory, along with questions that current political events give rise to: Is there a place for the death drive – including the idea that human beings are naturally disposed to aggression, or is aggression a deformation due to trauma? How if at all can communities deal with transgenerational transmissions of trauma? What kinds of means are effective for working through trauma, including memorials and testimonies? What is at the root of the authoritarian personality that seems disposed to fascistic tendencies? What is giving rise today to right-wing nationalist movements that can be understood psychoanalytically? What impedes people’s and peoples’ ability to deal with strangers in their midst?
PSP 789 -Irigaray & Kristeva
Noëlle McAfee
Mondays 1:00-3:45 pm, Vico Library (Bowden 202)
This graduate seminar will focus on the psychoanalytic writings of two of the leading “French Feminists” of our time: the Belgian feminist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray and the Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva.
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AAS 385 - 3 / Critical Philosophies of Race, Law, and Violence
Undergraduate course
Linette Park
Mondays & Wednesdays 2:30-3:45pm
This course examines the idea of race and the way in which its development as a social and scientific construction persists in debates not only on its so-called biological validity to preserve power and racial hierarchies (notions of racial superiority and inferiority), but also how its elision functions in discourses of law and, more broadly, in a paradigm of violence. To that extent, the course begins with two primary concerns: how the law has instrumentalized the idea of race into institutional practices and ideologies of racism while also considering how racial theories in pre-modern and modern contexts give rise to material apparati and the psychic life of power including the state and nation-state, empire, and white supremacy.
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AAS 385 - 6 / Fanon, An Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Image, and Poetics
Undergraduate course
Linette Park
Mondays & Wednesdays 1:00-2:15pm
The course serves as an introductory seminar on the work and influence of FrantzFanon. It will consider a range of viewpoints including aesthetic, existential, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and politics. Engaging with artworks that take cue from the philosophies ofFanonwill be our primary way of pursuing analysis of his texts. Likewise, the course will screen films that engage with some of the thematics that run throughout his oeuvre such as (but not limited to): questions of language and representation, anti-blackness and sexism, poetics, alienation, and the psychic life of power and colonial violence.
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WGS 312 - 1 /A User’s Guide to Freud
Undergraduate course
Elizabeth Wilson
Mondays & Wednesdays 10:00-11:15am
Penis envy? Castration? Narcissism? Super-Ego? Repression? What do all these Freudian terms mean, and what is their relevance for everyday life? The aim of this course is two-fold: (i) to introduce students to the core concepts of psychoanalysis, and (ii) to relate these to feminist theories of gender and sexuality. The course will introduce students to the central theoretical concepts in Freud's metapsychology: instincts, repression, the ego, the unconscious, dream interpretation, the symptom. In the final weeks of the course, we will survey some contemporary feminist, cultural, global responses to psychoanalysis. It is expected that this course will be of value to students in a wide variety of humanities and social science majors where psychological issues, gender, and sexuality are discussed.
PSP 761R-1 - Clinical Methods in Psychoanalysis: Freud I
R. Paul
Thursday 6:15-7:45 pm, EUPI in Executive Park #6
This course will cover the writings of Sigmund Freud.
CPLT 751R - 2 / PSP 789 - The Work of Memory
Angelika Bammer
Wednesdays 2:30-5:30pm
This course will review some of the key texts and concepts in the emerging field of Memory Studies, with particular emphasis on the connections (and tensions) between history (what happened) and memory (what is remembered and how). In this context, we will explore some of the terms in which memory is talked about, including the distinctions between public, collective, social or cultural, memory, on the one hand, and private, personal, or autobiographical, memory, on the other hand. We will consider the political, ethical, social, aesthetic, and psychological dimensions of remembering – and its counterpart, forgetting – and consider some of the ways in which perspectives and approaches from the field of Memory Studies might offer useful analytical and hermeneutic tools for our work. Along the way, we will attend to some of the ways that the humanities and the natural sciences approach the study of memory differently to ask if and how dialogue across these fields can be generative.
Course materials:
Readings include selections from Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Halbwachs, Paul Connerton, Richard Terdiman, Nicole Loraux, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Daniel Schacter, Walter Benjamin, Nadine Fresco, Marianne Hirsch, Frances Yates, and David Rieff. All materials are available through Course Reserves in Memorial Library.
CPLT 751R - 1 / PSP 789 - 2 Film Theory
Timothy Holland
Wednesdays 4:00-6:45pm
Optional screenings on Mondays 8:00-10:00pm
This course surveys the film theory canon that spans from the emergence of cinema in the late 1800s to the present. Proceeding more or less chronologically, we will touch on a variety of topics, such as: medium specificity and the debate between formalist and realist camps; the semiotic, textual, and psychoanalytic "turns" that marked the field during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; issues of representation and counter cinemas; philosophical approaches to film; and the impact of digital technologies relative to photographic indexicality as well as the futures of cinema and its academic study.
Designed for those both with and without a background in film studies, the seminar offers students the opportunity to engage some of the key themes/figures populating film theory, while setting the stage for further research in the field.
Course materials:
Authors we'll encounter include: Béla Balázs, Germaine Dulac, Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, André Bazin, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Jean-Louis Comolli, Julio García Espinosa, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, D.N. Rodowick, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among numerous others. Class sessions will be supplemented by opitional weekly film screenings in a traditional, theatrical setting.
CPLT 3891 - 3 / Re-presenting the Past: Literature, History, Memory
Undergraduate course
Angelika Bammer
Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:30am-12:45pm
One of the functions of literature is to tell us about the past: how we became who we are as people and as persons: what we suffered, how we triumphed, and what shaped our view of the world and our sense of self. In so doing, it fosters self-understanding. But it doesn’t tell us only about “our” past. It also tells us about others: the events and forces that shaped “their” lives and sense of identity. In so doing, it fosters empathy. How does literature render the past in ways that distinguishes it from history? Through its materials? Its approach? Its concept of truth? We will consider these issues as we put history and memory side by side, taking American slavery, the Nazi Holocaust, and the modern history of Israel/Palestine as our historical touchstones. Conceptually and methodologically, we will be guided by both foundational and recent work in the growing interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies. Drawing on work in this field from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, we will consider how and why people remember and/or forget aspects of the past and what the effects of remembering and/or forgetting can be.
Course materials:
To explore the myriad possibilities through which memory can summon history and history can be invoked by memory, we will read materials from a wide variety of genres: fiction, poetry, drama, essay, literary journalism, documentary literature. Required texts will include:
- Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
- Alice Oswald, Memorial
- Joe Sacco, Palestine
- Peter Weiss, The Investigation
These literary texts will be supplemented by scholarly material from the field of Memory Studies on such matters as the neuroscience of memory, forgiveness vs. vengeance, the memory of trauma, the transgenerational transmission of memory, remembering the not-known, postmemory.
Robert A. Paul and Stefanie Speanburg
Thursdays 6:15-8:45pm
This seminar will introduce students and candidates to basic concepts in Freudian theory; the various schools of thought and techniques that have proliferated in the 100-plus years since, including ego psychology, object relations theory, contemporary relational theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic feminism; and clinical technique associated with each school of thought. For most sessions, we will devote the first half of each class to the close reading and interrogation of psychoanalytic theory. The last half of each class will be an opportunity to observe the ways in which clinical material demonstrates the theories discussed. Most sessions will feature guest speakers, about half of whom are practicing analysts and the other half being scholars of the various psychoanalytic schools. Some are both. The goals of the seminar are (1) to introduce students to basic psychoanalytic concepts, (2) to familiarize them with the plurality of approaches that have been developed and employed since Freud, (3) to help them peer into the clinic of each of the various approaches, and (4) to help students find and develop their own psychoanalytic point of view. While this is a required course for the certificate in the Psychoanalytic Studies Program and for first year candidates in the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, all PhD students in the Laney Graduate School, including those not pursuing the certificate, are welcome.
WGS756 - 1 / PSP789 - 1Feminist and Queer Freud
Elizabeth Wilson
Mondays 1:00-3:45pm
Penis envy? Castration? Narcissism? Perversion? Repression? Disavowal? What do all these Freudian terms mean, and what is their relevance for contemporary life? The aim of this course is two-fold: (i) to introduce students to the core concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, and (ii) to track these concepts in feminist and queer theory. The course presumes no prior knowledge of psychoanalysis and will provide the foundations for students who have interests in post-Freudian thinkers like Lacan, Klein, Winnicott etc. The course will begin with the central theoretical concepts in Freud’s metapsychology: drives, repression, the unconscious, dream interpretation, the symptom. We will be particularly interested in how psychoanalysis challenges the notion of a unified, conscious subject. In the second half of semester, the course will focus on the perverse and corporeal nature of infantile sexuality, and use this to investigate psychoanalytic accounts of adult sexuality and gender. In the final weeks of the course, we will survey some influential feminist and queer uses of Freud.
ENG789 - 3 / CPLT751 - 2 / PSP 789 - 2Surrealism and Psychoanalysis
Walter Kalaidjian
Wednesdays 1:00-4:00pm
This interdisciplinary seminar will explore literary and pictorialsurrealismwith particular attention tosurrealism's ongoing dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in transnational contexts. In addition, the seminar will consider the affinities between the surrealist "found object" (l'objet trouvé) and the object relations theory of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott in discerning fantasies of race and gender difference in the surrealist imaginary. Readings and discussions will begin with surrealist manifestoes of the modern interwar period, Salvador Dalí’s early dialogue with Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille’s writings for the journal and secret society Acéphale, and particular attention will be devoted to the gender and sexual politics of women’s place within and beyondsurrealismby examining the feminist writing, visual art, and occult practices of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mina Loy, and Ithell Colquhoun. In addition, the seminar will study postcolonial surrealist aesthetics in figures such as Frida Kahlo, Suzanne Cesaire, Alejo Carpentier, and Wifredo Lam as well as contemporary Afrosurrealism.
We will explore the archive of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and investigatesurrealism’s migration at mid-century from Europe to London and finally New York City in little magazines such asMinotaure,,VVV, andView, Charles Henri Ford’s avant-garde journal of the 1940s.
CPLT751 - 1 / PSP789 - 3 Primal Scenes: Literature & Psychoanalysis
Elissa Marder
Tuesdays 1:00-3:45pm
Content: In this course, we shall examine how psychoanalysis both establishes and challenges the boundaries of the human. Beginning with a close reading of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, we shall explore how Freud’s derives the specificity of the human unconscious (via the complex operations of the dream-work) by turning to literary language, theatrical spaces and events, and technological operations. Throughout the course, we will focus on the Freudian conception of the ‘primal scene’ as a way of examining how psychoanalytic theory challenges traditional conceptions of temporality, repetition, sexuality and desire, writing, mourning, cruelty, and the status of the historical event.
Texts: The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud); Freud’s case histories (including ‘Dora,’ ‘The Wolf-Man’, ‘The Rat-Man,’ ‘Little Hans’, and ‘Schreber’) Phèdre (Racine); Le Ravissment de Lol V. Stein (Duras); Moderato cantabile (Duras); La Chambre claire (Barthes); Selections from: Combray and A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Proust); La Bête humaine (Zola); To the Lighthouse (Woolf) Muriel (dir. Alain Resnais). Additional readings may include works by: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Avital Ronell, Samuel Weber, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Hélène Cixous, & Sarah Kofman.
PHIL 554 - 1 / PSP789 - 4 Critical Theory
Noëlle McAfee
Tuesdays 1:00-4:00pm
- From its inception, critical theory has been entwined with psychoanalytic thought, first as a tool in understandingthe failures of reason to live up to its enlightenment promise and later as a way to attempt to continue the project of enlightenment. More recently, critical theorists have returned to the sting of the negative in psychoanalytic thought as a way to make sense of sociopolitical maladies. This seminar will trace critical theory’s use of psychoanalysis, first through the first three generations of the Frankfurt School and then in contemporary critical theory, including both social theory and literary theory. We will begin by reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenmentalongside Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. We will then read Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle alongside early Frankfurt School’s reception—and disavowals—of the death drive. Turning to the second generation, we will read Jürgen Habermas’s seeming embrace of psychoanalysis in Knowledge and Human Interests alongside Freud’s essay on The Unconscious, and then we will see how Habermas turned away from Freud toward Kohlberg’s cognitive theory of moral development. Taking up the third generation, we will read Axel Honneth and Jessica Benjamin’s appropriation of DW Winnicott alongside works by Winnicott and Joel Whitebook. In the final weeks of the seminar, we will take up how contemporary critical theorists beyond the Frankfurt School use Lacan as well as Klein as resources for unpacking the anxieties of our current time.
Books
- Allen and Ruti, Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan
- Fong, Death and Mastery
- Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Norton Library) Paperback – April 17, 1990
- Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition
- Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Available electronically: Freud’s Standard Edition and essays by Winnicott on the PEP web, shorter pieces by Habermas, Whitebook, Benjamin, Zizek, Deleuze, and others via Canvas.
Particulars: One in-depth presentation, one literature review, final seminar paper.