Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Other

Course Description:

From the 1890s to the present, psychoanalysis has existed as a sort of “other” amongst academic disciplines, somewhere between the sciences and the humanities, hovering at the edges of rationality. Similarly, Freud insisted that his own position as a Jew in gentile Viennese society allowed him to “stand outside the compact majority,” to take outlandish or surprising positions without worrying about how the establishment would respond. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, to find that psychoanalysis developed an entire language and structure through which to think about “the other”: that is, that which stands outside our comfort zones, that which hovers at the edges of acceptability, that which threatens our own structures of belief and everyday life. Our discussion will begin with Freud’s texts on the unconscious, the uncanny, and trauma. We will then move on to consider how these texts have been interpreted and extended by theorists of race, feminism, sexuality, trauma, and post-colonialism. Along the way, we will consider questions such as the following: how and why do people “de-humanize” other populations? How do we draw the boundaries between our selves and others? How does Freud’s concept of the unconscious help us understand religious notions such as faith, god and community? How does suffering result in a sort of “othering” of our own selves? How do our memories situate our pasts as an “other” part of our life histories? In addition to texts by Sigmund Freud, readings will include texts by Jessica Benjamin, Daniel Boyarin, Judith Butler, Franz Fanon, Sandor Ferenczi, Luce Irigaray, Carl Gustav Jung, Jacques Lacan, Dominic Lacapra, Jean Laplanche, Emanuel Levinas, Slavoj Zizek.