Week 3 (26 Oct): Sigmund Freud – The Unconscious pp.2989ff (in Standard Edition vol 14 / Penguin Freud Library vol 11)
Week 4 (2 Nov): Christopher Bollas – Articulations of the Unconscious (ch 2 of Bollas’s The Freudian Moment)
Week 5 (9 Nov): Jonathan Lear – Interpreting the Unconscious (ch 1 of Lear’s Freud.) [in Rm 4]
Week 6 (16 Nov): Thomas Fuchs – Body Memory and the Unconscious
Week 7 (23 Nov): David Finkelstein – On the Distinction Between Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind
Trinity Term 2018
These seminars focused on madness and psychotic experience (1-5) although ended by looking at one of the more psychotic features of everyday life: dreams (6).
Questions to be considered include: In what sense, if any, are delusions and dreams meaningful? In what sense are they not? What does it mean to 'live in a world of your own?' When do psychologists overstep the bounds of sense in their ambitions to make sense of psychosis? Are delusions attempts to make sense of unusual experiences? What does talk of 'mental illness' amount to? Is the idea of 'mental illness' a metaphor, literal illness, or something else? What does it mean to talk of the 'symbolism' of dreams and delusions? And what, actually, is transference? Further details and suggested reading can be found in the following pages:
