Courses > 2016 Spring

Electives

CINE 202 - CULTURE & PSYCHOANALYSIS

ENGL 292
402 | SEM | Jean-Michel Rabaté | TR 9-10:30pm | FBH 244

This class will introduce students to the links between psychoanalysis, literature and film. We will take Sigmund Freud’s works on the arts and literature as a point of departure, studying Freud’s integration of literature in the training of psychoanalysts. Literature and film offer crucial examples with which one can test, verify or question the points of insertion of psychoanalytical concepts such as hysteria, transference, paranoia and the Oedipus complex. Using several novels and films across different genres, we will also consider deferred action, fantasy, sublimation, the uncanny, trauma, and perversion. We will see that, despite recent controversies, psychoanalytic approaches to literature and film provide a dynamic method of interpretation.