ENGL 74.01 Reading Freud
Why read Freud? Many of his most famous ideas (the Oedipus Complex, for example) have been discredited, disparaged, devalued, decried. So why read Freud? Using that question — a question that, in its very persistence, already crystalizes all that is most troubling, provocative, and intriguing about the Freudian text — students in this class will read Freud for his enduring value as the inventor, in psychoanalysis, of one of modernity’s most disturbing art forms, as an influential theorist of figuration and representation, as a fearless inquirer into the mysteries of gender and sexuality, and as a speculative thinker who continues to have a hold on our imagination precisely because he could never quite come to grips with all that had a hold on his imagination. Above all, we shall read Freud for what he has to teach us about the importance of risking failure and embarrassment, of remaining restless and uncertain in respect to one’s own thinking, of finding oneself in over one’s head. The texts we shall use to pursue this line of inquiry may or may not include any of the following: Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on Sexuality, the case histories of Dora and the Wolf Man, Papers on Metapsychology and on Technique, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Civilization and Its Discontents, and essays such as “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” “Screen Memories,” “The Uncanny,” “The Moses of Michelangelo,” “On Narcissism,” “Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” “A Child Is Being Beaten,” “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” “Constructions in Analysis,” “Analysis Terminal and Interminable,” and “Humor.”
Department-Specific Course Categories
Senior Seminar: Course Group IV