Psychoanalysis as Theory and Practice
©️ Omnia El Shakry
Description
This course will serve as an introduction to the psychoanalytic tradition through a reading of its foundational Freudian as well as post-Freudian texts. Centered on the “so-called Copernican revolution to which Freud himself compared his discovery,” we will attend primarily to the lineaments of the unconscious. Remaining attentive to ‘what is in Freud more than Freud,’ we will explore the contours of the unconscious; the status of the subject and reality; desire and sexuality; mourning and melancholia; the destructive drive; the relationship between the self and the other, and the self and the object; repetition and the unconscious; racial psychodramas; the clinic and the world; postcolonial maladies of the soul; experience and unknowability; and mysticism and the analytic tradition.
Our readings will focus on Sigmund Freud himself and the Anglophone tradition (Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Bollas). In addition, there will be special emphasis on questions of race (through Frantz Fanon and Afro-pessimism) and religion (through new work on psychoanalysis and Islam). Throughout the seminar we will remain attuned to elements of the psychoanalytic tradition that enable us to engage the most pressing ethical questions of our times of war and death.
General Resources
PEP – Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. A vast and comprehensive Psychoanalytic Library.
Please note that we will be reading the Standard Edition for all Freud texts (James Strachey translation). Yale provides access to PEP-web, an amazing resource that enables you to access the entire wealth of psychoanalytic publications and especially The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, in which each page is available in both English and the original German.
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1973).
Schedule of Readings
Week I
Introductions and Free Association
Week II: Freud and the Dream Book
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey (1900), in vol. 4–5 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1981; cited hereafter as SE), Ch. II-VII; with special attention to Ch. III, VI, VII.
Week III: Freud and the Sexual: Trieb and Instinkt
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), SE 7: 123–245.
Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), SE 14: 109–140.
Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), SE 14: 159–215.
Week IV: Mourning and Melancholia
Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), SE 12: 145–156.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” ([1915] 1917), SE 14: 237–258.
Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times of War and Death” (1915), SE 14: 273–302.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), SE 17: 217–252.
Melanie Klein, “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” (1928), “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1935), “Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states,” (1940), “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946) in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. by Juliet Mitchell (London: Hogarth Press, 1986).
Recommended Reading
Maria Torok, “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse.” In Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 107–124.
Wilfred Bion, “Attacks on Linking,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol. 40 (1959), 308–315.
Week V: The Destructive Drive
Sabina Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being.” The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39, no2 ([1912]1994)., 155–186. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1994.00155.x
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE 18: 1–64.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), SE 19:1–66.
Recommended Reading
Sigmund Freud, “Negation” (1925), SE 19: 233–239.
Week VI: The Use of an Object
D.W. Winnicott, “Primitive Emotional Development,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 26 (1945)137–143.
D.W. Winnicott, “Hate in the Counter-Transference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 30 (1949), 69-74.
D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1953) “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications” (1969), “The Location of Cultural Experience” (1967) in Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, [1971] 2005), Ch. 1, 6, 7.
D.W. Winnicott, The Capacity to be Alone. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 39 (1958), 416–420.
D.W. Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 41 (1960), 585–595.
D. W. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: The Hogarth Press, 1965), Ch. 17.
D. W. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis (1974) 1:103-107.
Week VII: The Return to Freud: The Unconscious and Repetition
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (1949), “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” (1948), “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis” (1955) in Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), Ch. 1–2, 4.
Jacques Lacan, “Excommunication,” “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours,” “Of the Subject of Certainty,” “Of the Network of Signifiers,” “Tuché and Automaton,” “Presence of the Analyst,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan and edited by Jacques Alain-Miller (New York: WW Norton, [1964] 1998), Ch. 1–5, 10.
Recommended Reading
Jacques Lacan, “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire,” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 722–725.
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1–48.
Week VIII: The Mirror Stage and the Other
G.W.F. Hegel, “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness,” in Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, 1977).
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, [1952]1967), pp. 109–209, read ch. 5, “The Fact of Blackness,” especially carefully.
Week IX: The Clinic and the World
Fanon, Frantz. 2018. Alienation and freedom. Edited and compiled by Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 311–447.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 1963), 7–106; 249–316.
Week X: Postcolonial Maladies of the Soul
Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1–137, 192–218.
Joan Copjec, “Cloud, Precinct of the Theological-Historical,” Psychoanalysis and History 20, no. 3 (2018): 277–291.
Week XI: Psychodramas
David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), pp. ix-xix (Foreword) and pp. 41–160.
Hortense Spillers, “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race.” Critical Inquiry, 22, no.4 (1996): 710–734.
Recommended Reading
Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be “Black”.” In National identities and socio-political changes in Latin America, pp. 30-66. Routledge, 2013.
Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency, and the Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition.” Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology. Eds Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2015. 184–252.
Week XII: The Mystic and the Group
Wilfred Bion, Attention and Interpretation (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, [1970]1983).
Week XIII: Psychic Genera and the Receptive Unconscious
Christopher Bollas, “At the Other’s Play: To Dream,” in The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 64-81.
Christopher Bollas, “Psychic Genera,” in Being a Character (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), 66-100.
Christopher Bollas, The Freudian Moment, with an introduction by André Green (London: Karnac Books, 2007).