Browse Hierarchy ESH7029: Psychoanalysis and Modern Culture

How can psychoanalysis help us to think through and make sense of our own time? What are the ways in which we can recognize how both the individual and the collective come into contact with this world, which we are responsible for creating, and yet find ourselves subject to? How do we negotiate public and private life, and both inner and outer reality? To help answer these, and other, questions, the module begins by examining texts by Freud which explore civilization (and famously its discontents) and culture. It then moves on to engage with other psychoanalytic thinkers and works of literature to explore ideas such as the unconscious, desire, love, violence, ethics, and anxiety, and how they might be located and depicted in our modern culture. No previous knowledge of Freud or psychoanalysis is required.