Module Descriptions
Core Module: Psychoanalysis and Culture (30 credits)
Stephen Frosh with Noreen Giffney and Reina van der Weil
The module will run on Monday evenings, 6.00-8.30pm in year 1 of full time and part time
study. It is offered as an option on other Psychosocial Studies programmes. The module will
begin in the second week of term and run without a reading week (this is so as not to clash with
essay submission dates).
This module looks at applications and implications of psychoanalysis in the study of culture,
politics and history. The aim is to consider the issues that have surrounded the uses of
psychoanalysis in understandings of history and culture, and to examine existing debates about
psychoanalysis as a form of historical and cultural understanding. The underlying assumption of
the series is that psychoanalytic ideas have had their primary grounding in the evidence of the
clinical consulting room, and have mainly evolved in response to clinical experience. However,
psychoanalysis has been used extensively outside the clinic to deepen understanding of a very
wide range of artistic, cultural and political phenomena. These seminars will explore how
concepts which have rich meaning in their primary context can throw light on the social and
cultural sphere, and in turn how such applications can have an impact on the development of
psychoanalytic theory. The methodological issues involved in making these broader applications
and grounding them in evidence, will be explored as we proceed. The module will examine how
psychoanalysis has contributed to debates in areas that draw together politics, social theory and
the study of culture – including the fundamental social ‘divisions’ of sexual difference and ‘race’,
as well as authoritarian and terroristic states of mind. The key question is whether (and how)
the psychoanalytic articulation of unconscious processes facilitates understanding in the social
and cultural world.
The module is based on reading closely a small number of primary texts, which will form the
core of each seminar. Students will be expected to read the Set Text for each seminar carefully
and be prepared to present their ideas on it. The Background Reading offers some important
contextualising sources for these Set Texts and further references will be given during the
module.
Background Reading
Abel, E. (1989) Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press
Altman, N., Benjamin, J., Jacobs, T. & Wachtel, P. (2006). Is Politics the Last Taboo in
Psychoanalysis? In: L. Layton, N. Hollander and S. Gutwill (Eds.), Psychoanalysis, Class
and Politics. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. (Chapters 2
and 3)
Butler, J. (2012) Parting Ways. New York: Columbia University Press. (Chapter 1)
Derrida, J. (1986) Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Foreword to
Abraham, N. and Torok, M. (1976) The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto.
Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2009) The Empire of Trauma. New Jersey: Princton University Press.
(Chapter 3)
Felman, S. (ed) (1982) Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Freud, S. (1917) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVI (1916-1917): Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis (Part III), 241-463.
Freud, S. (1917) Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic
Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, pp. 237-258.
Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 1-64
Freud, S. (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 65-144.
Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927-1931): The Future of an Illusion,
Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, 57-146.
Freud, S. (1939) Moses and Monotheism. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937-1939): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline
of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 1-138.
Frosh, S. (1999) The Politics of Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan. (Chapter 6)
Frosh, S. (2010) Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic. London: Palgrave.
Frosh, S. (2012) A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory. London: Palgrave.
Frosh, S. (2013) Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions. London: Palgrave.
Gabbard, G. (2001) (ed) Psychoanalysis and Film. London: Karnac
Greedharry, A. (2008) Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis. London: Palgrave.
Hook, D. (2012) A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid. London:
Routledge.
Kaplan, E. (ed) (1990) Psychoanalysis and Cinema. London: Routledge
Khanna, R. (2003) Dark continents: Psychoanalysis and colonialism. Durham: Duke University
Press. (Chapters 2 & 4)
Palacios, M. (2013) Radical Sociality. London: Palgrave. (Chapter 6)
Rose, J. (2003) Apathy and Accountability: The Challenge of South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission to the Intellectual in the Modern World. In J. Rose, On Not
Being Able to Sleep. London: Verso.
Rose, J. (2007) The Last Resistance. London: Verso, Chapters 1 and 3.
Rustin, M.J. (1991) The Good Society and the Inner World. London: Verso. (Chapter 3)
Rustin, M.J. (2002) Give me a Consulting Room: the generation of psychoanalytic knowledge. In
M.J. Rustin, Reason and Unreason: Psychoanalysis, Science and Politics. London:
Continuum Books.
Rustin, M.J. (2010) Looking for the Unexpected: Psychoanalytic Understanding and Politics.
British Journal of Psychotherapy 26, 472-479.
Segal, H. (1995) From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and After: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. In A.
Elliott and S. Frosh (eds) Psychoanalysis in Contexts. London: Routledge
Seshadri-Crooks, K. (2000) Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. New York:
Routledge.
Seminar 1: Monday 12 January 2015
The Uncanny
Set Text: Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217256
This seminar explores a turning point in Freud’s thinking, when he is on the verge of proposing
the existence of a ‘death drive’, by examining how traces, spectres and doubles appear in his
work. The key text here is The Uncanny, published just after the First World War and just before
the reformulation of Freud’s drive theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The trope of
ghostliness was rife at the time – in the wake of pervasive experiences of loss throughout
Europe – and a kind of melancholic longing was prevalent. Psychoanalysis, which had always had
occult associations and influences and which now, bolstered by the idea of the death drive, had
a compelling philosophy of destructiveness and return at its core, was one of the sources of
cultural understanding of this longing. The question for this seminar is of the cultural resonance
of the ideas Freud develops in this text – of where they come from and what they feed into.
Seminar 2 Monday 19 January 2015
Political implications
Set Text: Said, E. (2003) Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso.
Psychoanalysis is often implicated in politics. To some extent this follows automatically from its
adoption of an ethical stance on the conditions necessary for people to lead a good life,
something which many writers see as essential to the psychoanalytic outlook. This indirect
involvement of psychoanalysis with politics is complemented by a tradition of direct application
that has many sources. There is a rich seam of work on the politics of psychoanalysis, which
includes infighting between its various schools as well as investigations of the sometimes dark
history of psychoanalysis’ collusion with oppressive regimes. There are also many examples of
ways in which psychoanalysis has been used as an instrument to advance progressive politics by
supplying a theory of the social subject that is compatible with radical critique. The reading that
can be done for this is immense. This seminar concentrates on one text that attempts to re-read
Freud in a way that has political consequences in the contemporary world. Specifically, Said’s
lecture on Moses and Monotheism (and the response by Jacqueline Rose) focuses on one centre
of political crisis (Israel/Palestine) but also raises issues for the broadest possible understanding
of the relationships between personal and national ‘identity’ and for cultural contestations over
political and social reality. Said reads Freud as opening out the prospect of a ‘broken identity’ as
a source of political emancipation; the seminar looks at this idea in relation to other
psychoanalytic formulations.
Seminar 3 Monday 26 January 2015
Colonialism
Set Text: Bhabha, H. (1983) The Other Question . . . Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype
and Colonial Discourse. Screen, 24 (6), 18-36.
Psychoanalytic theory, despite its own complicated history of involvement in colonialist thought,
has proved one of the most enduring resources within postcolonial studies. This is true in terms
of Fanon’s early critique of colonial racism, Black Skin White Masks, in Homi Bhabha’s later
references to the fetishistic stereotyping of colonial discourse, and in subsequent Lacanian
theorisations of the ‘theft of enjoyment’. This is an especially complex situation, because
psychoanalysis holds a controversial position within postcolonial thought. The debate, launched
perhaps most fully in response to Bhabha’s Lacanian inflected reading of Fanon, is partly to do
with psychoanalysis’ historical immersion in colonial modes of thinking and partly over whether
the use of psychoanalysis results in too strong a focus on affective and subjective issues, to the
detriment of ongoing struggles with decolonisation. This rehearses a ‘politics versus psyche’
debate that has long haunted attempts to apply psychoanalysis in the social field. It has the
added important dissension over whether the abstractions of psychoanalytic theory universalise
its claims in ways that are opposed to the postcolonial requirement of accounts of particular
cultural domains. Whilst some postcolonial consumers of psychoanalysis have adapted
psychoanalysis for use in specific contexts, others (Bhabha and Khanna, for instance) have been
more inclined to treat psychoanalytic concepts as offering leverage on cultural processes in
general, sometimes (it is alleged) drifting into a psychologising discourse that risks losing sight of
the material oppression that forms the backbone of colonialism.
This seminar traces the terrain of how psychoanalysis has both been turned against the
colonising force of psychoanalysis itself and adapted to the purposes of anti-racist and anticolonial critique, and asks how successful this can be.
Seminar 4 Monday 2 February 2015
Gender (Dr Noreen Giffney)
Set Texts: (1) Gyler, L. (2010) Developments in Psychoanalytic Feminist Theories of Gender. In
The Gendered Unconscious: Can Gender Discourses Subvert Psychoanalysis? London and New
York: Routledge , pp. 58-87; (2) Elliot, P. (2014) Psychoanalysis. TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly 1.1-2: 165-168.
This seminar introduces a number of key psychoanalytic reflections on biological sex and
gender, and how they have shifted over time and in different cultural contexts. We will focus
more specifically on some of the intersections and divergences between psychoanalytic
approaches to biological sex and gender, and theoretical discourses arising from feminism,
masculinity studies, and transgender studies. We will examine the ways in which psychoanalytic
clinical practitioners have drawn on gender studies to assist them in thinking about their clinical
work, in addition to how researchers in gender studies have used psychoanalytic concepts to
interrogate societal and psychical assumptions governing biological sex and gender.
Seminar 5 Monday 9 February 2015
Sexuality (Dr Noreen Giffney)
Set Text: Quindeau, I. (2008) Seduction, Desire, and Sexuality. In Seduction and Desire: The
Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexuality since Freud, trans. John Bendix. London: Karnac, pp. 1-72.
This seminar unpicks the term ‘sexuality’ and provides an overview of psychoanalytic
approaches to making meaning of sexual acts, identities, desires and pleasures. We will explore
the tensions and conflicts arising between some of the ideas espoused in clinical psychoanalysis
and those proffered by queer theory. We will attend, in particular, to the ways in which
psychoanalysis can sometimes engage in superegoic acts of pathologisation based on normative
assumptions within a particular cultural and societal context. We will also think about how
psychoanalysis might help us to identify and question the sometimes heady idealism and
grandiosity underpinning particular queer understandings of sexuality.
Seminar 6 Monday 16 February 2015
Melancholia
Set Text: Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Chapter
5: ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’.)
Melancholia, in its Freudian formulation, has taken over from narcissism as a key term for
comprehending contemporary cultural experience. It is used to theorise loss, but also to
problematise gender identities and postcolonial conditions. This seminar traces one genealogy
of this melancholic consciousness, particularly considering its psychoanalytic resonance and its
emergence as a strand in cultural thinking. Acting against the classic reading of melancholia as
depressed self-destructiveness, some theorists (building directly on Freud’s Mourning and
Melancholia) have latched onto the idea that in ‘preserving’ the lost object as an unconscious
trace, melancholia may provide a paradigm for the recovery of colonised histories and hence for
a progressive politics of liberation. Others (for instance Butler) have argued that melancholic
identification is a key element in the formation of gendered and raced identities. These ideas
have demonstrated much leverage, but also promote what is potentially a regressive search for
the ‘authentic’ object that has been stolen and needs to be re-found. Against this, politicised
notions of lack, ‘contrapuntal’ out-of-timeness, and messianism are drawn upon as aids to
thinking through the conditions necessary for resistance and renewal. The question is, should
melancholia be rescued in this way or is this an idealising/romanticising move?
Seminar 7 Monday 23 February 2015
Psychoanalysis and Literature, Literature and Psychoanalysis (Dr Reina van der Wiel)
Psychoanalysis has always been controversial as a method of literary analysis, particularly
amongst writers and critics who regard it as a colonising discipline trying to tell the ‘truth’ of
literature without necessarily appreciating its specificity, including its aesthetic properties. On
the other hand, psychoanalysis has at times wielded considerable influence in literary studies,
where the density of its interpretive framework has enriched ways of thinking about the impact
of literary texts on readers. In addition, there is a reciprocal effect of literary studies on
psychoanalysis: some of the most innovative critics of psychoanalysis have come from literary
studies, or have used literary forms and examples to carry through their arguments. This
seminar examines the debates and in particular the move to explore the ‘implication’ of
literature and psychoanalysis with one another.
Key Reading
Ellmann, M. (1994) Introduction. In M. Ellmann (ed) Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. Harlow:
Longman.
Felman, S. (1982) To Open the Question. In S. Felman (ed) Literature and Psychoanalysis: The
Question of Reading: Otherwise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Freud, S. (1905) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of
Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, 1-122.
Background Reading
Frosh, S. (2010) Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic. London: Palgrave, Chapter 3.
Marcus, S. (1990). Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History. In C. Bernheimer and C Kahane
(eds) In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism. 2nd edn. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Schwartz, M. (1975) Where Is Literature? In P.L Rudnytsky (ed) Transitional Objects and
Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott. New York: Columbia University Press,
1993. 50-62.
Seminar 8 Monday 2 March 2015
Film (Dr Noreen Giffney)
Set Texts: Nitzan Ben-Shaul, ‘Imaginary Signfiers/Voyeuristic Pleasures’ in Film: The Key
Concepts (Oxford and New York: Berg 2007), pp. 103-129.
Mulvey, L. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In L. Mulvey, Visual and Other
Pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989
Required Viewing: Shame, dir. Steve McQueen (2011, c. 101 mins.).
This seminar explores how psychoanalysis might help us to think theoretically about films and,
by extension, how films might assist us in understanding how psychoanalytic concepts work in
visual (on screen) and affective (for us as spectators) terms. We will focus on two psychoanalytic
concepts – the gaze and transference – and undertake a close reading of the film Shame, within
the context of psychoanalysis, as well as in light of our earlier discussions on gender and
sexuality in weeks 4 and 5. In this way, we will discuss how multiple theoretical approaches to
the same text might both elucidate and obscure our relation to the texts and ourselves as
viewers.
Seminar 9 Monday 9 March 2015
Trauma
Set Text: Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. London: Johns
Hopkins University Press. (Chapter 5: ‘Traumatic Awakenings’)
Trauma is a central focus for psychoanalysis and a major figure in social debate. It refers both to
the experiences of individuals and to the exposure of entire cultures to histories of abuse,
colonisation and violent oppression. It also encapsulates the feeling of something shocking and
unexpected that cannot be thought about fully – that cannot be symbolised – and consequently
stays ‘alive’ as a repudiated psychosocial entity. Many psychoanalytic ideas are drawn on to
make sense of this, from technical concepts such as repression and foreclosure, to the specially
invented ‘cryptonomy’ of Abraham and Torok. This has been related especially to Holocaust
studies, but also to a wide range of cultural concerns, including the invention of psychoanalysis
itself.
The idea that trauma blocks symbolisation is a widespread one that reads the history of culture
as well as of individuals as a procession of unbearable – and hence defended against –
impingements. This seminar questions this claimed relation between trauma and history. It links
back to the first seminar of the module, with its interest in ghostly phenomena: is history a
matter of traumatic haunting in the psychoanalytic sense?
Seminar 10 Monday 16 March 2015
Review
This session will offer students the opportunity to review the module, clarify and consolidate the
main theoretical concepts we have covered, and discuss the assignment.
Assessment
One 4000 word essay.