230089 Wishful Thinking: Psychoanalysis in Literature and Culture (S) (WiSe 2012/2013)

Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) inaugurated the 20th century and psychoanalysis, with dream analysis, free association, and its interest in the human unconscious, influenced many artists and inspired artistic experiments. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce wrote in the stream-of-consciousness technique, others like D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad or E.M. Forster directed their interest to sexuality, man’s primitive nature and the instincts, while the Surrealists were preoccupied with dream and the unconscious. But writers and artists were not only influenced by psychoanalysis and translated the new science into their works but also reflected critically on Freud’s theory and analysed Freud in return, as for example the American born poet H.D. Even though psychoanalysis boomed in the early 20th century and is often closely related to Modernism, this course will also look at some later works, for example Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

The course will first start with excerpts from Freud’s Interpretation and other selected theoretical works and then move on to works from literature and the visual arts, maybe a few examples of psychoanalytic literary criticism will also be included.

Bibliography

first texts are available in the electronic "Semesterapparat" (StudIP>Dateien), more will follow over the next weeks.

For the first block (16./17.11.) please read the texts by Freud (Interpretation of Dreams, On Narcissism, etc.) and Sachs (Community of Daydreams). The excerpts from Freud's Interpretation include numerous case studies, which help to understand his theory and are quite amusing to read but you may skip them. What you need to understand is Freud's theory of dreams, what dreams do, how they work.