Course Description:
This course will begin by looking at Sigmund Freud’s life and work in the context of Jewish history. How did Freud’s Jewish background shape his life and the reception and social formation of psychoanalysis? The second part of the course will focus on the scientific and political questions which shaped Freud’s approach and avoidance of Jewish questions. How did he approach the questions of heredity, race and degeneracy? And how did these topics shape his development of psychoanalysis, a theory founded upon the importance of memory and experience over and above heredity and degeneracy? How do we make sense of his early texts on religion in which he almost entirely avoids the topics of the Jewish religion and Jewish people while in his final book he explicitly confronts the Jewish question? In the last part of the course, we will explore the ways in which psychoanalytic theory has been used to explore Jewish questions since Freud’s death. In particular, we will focus on the subjects of post-Holocaust mourning, memory and commemoration, trauma studies, the uncanny and the mystical, the intersection of race, religion, gender and sexual identities, and the use of psychoanalytic theory in discussions of circumcision, racism and nationalism. Each week will include selections from Freud’s published texts and correspondence, texts by his contemporaries and colleagues (particularly Abraham, Ferenczi, Jung and Reik), as well as critical essays by Daniel Boyarin, Jacques Derrida, Peter Gay, Sander Gilman, Carlos Ginzburg, Dominick LaCapra, Eric Santner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, and Yosef Yerushalmi.