SHUM 4642 - Energetic Expression, Manic Defense, Psychotic Foreclosure: Psychoanalytic and Literary Portraits

(crosslisted) COML 4642, ENGL 4962

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Co-meets with SHUM 6642.

E. Soros.

This course addresses psychoanalytic understandings of psychic energy, its sources and functions, and its manifestations as mania or psychosis. Students will be introduced to foundational psychoanalysts: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Frantz Fanon, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, Hortense Spillers, Christopher Bollas. We will also study literary portraits of madness, considering how these portraits correspond or diverge from psychoanalytic frameworks. We will discuss how to apply psychoanalytic theory to literature, but also how to challenge the theory with a literary lens. Through collective dialogue and private reading, we will think about the energy of own minds, our constitutions and possibilities and breaking points. These investigations will be both intellectual and intimate, both troubling and reparative. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses