OSH 2021: Introduction to Psychoanalytic Structures
20 October 2003 — 24 October 2003
Old Main 403 Canisius College from 5pm — 8pm Daily
| Instructor: | Tim Dean Associate Professor Department of English University at Buffalo (SUNY) |
This course examines ideas of structure in psychoanalysis, taking off from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s rethinking of Freud in terms of structural linguistics. We will attempt to distinguish the French psychoanalytic tradition from both psychiatry (as a branch of medicine) and psychology (as a science of the individual), thereby aiming to clarify the specificity of psychoanalysis as a distinct mode of thinking. In other words, forget everything you thought you knew about Freud before registering for this course.
By considering how Lacan conceptualizes the unconscious as an effect of language (rather than as the property of individual persons), we will explore his appropriation of structural concepts — including some drawn from topology — to formalize a theory of human subjectivity and desire. As time allows, we will focus on the following psychoanalytic structures: the structure of transference (the asymmetrical intersubjective relation between analyst and patient); the structure of the ego (characterized by imaginary misrecognition and idealization); the structure of desire (in which sexuality is understood as determined neither by anatomy nor social conditioning but by the unconscious); the structure of drive (understood in terms of death); the structure of subjective temporality (characterized by a dialectic between anticipation and retroaction or “afterwardsness”).
The required reading for OSH 202 is as follows:
Monday 20 October 2003
Sigmund Freud, “The Handling of Dream-Interpretation in Psychoanalysis”; “The Dynamics of Transference”; “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis,” from Papers on Technique, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols., London: Hogarth, 1953-74. Vol. 12. 91-120.
Tuesday 21 October 2003
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: Norton, 2001. 3-9.
Wednesday 22 October 2003
Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Aberations,” from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition, vol. 7. 135-172.
Thursday 23 October 2003
Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 17. 219-252.
Friday 24 October 2003
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, Society, ed. Mark Bracher, et al, New York: New York UP, 1994. 74-87.
Biographical Information: Tim Dean teaches psychoanalysis, queer theory, and poetics at the University of Buffalo (SUNY), having taught previously at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), the University of Washington (Seattle), and Johns Hopkins University (where he earned a Ph.D. in English, in 1994).
Dean’s undergraduate thesis on American poetry, Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious, was published by Macmillan in 1991; more recently he is the author of Beyond Sexuality, a work of psychoanalytic queer theory (published by the University of Chicago Press in 2000), and coeditor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001).
Dean is currently completing a book on aesthetic theory, The Otherness of Art.
1 Available (Cross-listed) for Graduate Credit as OSH 502 if Appropriate.