HIST 484
Victorian Psychology from the Phrenologists to Freud Fall 2016
Division II Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Although the Victorian era has traditionally been considered a psycho-social model of emotional inhibition and sexual prudery, recent studies, by scholars in various disciplines, have demonstrated that this characterization grossly oversimplifies the attitudes toward emotional and sexual life held by Europeans and Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century. This research seminar will investigate professional and popular ideas about human psychology during the Victorian era. We will attempt to define and understand what people thought and felt about insanity, the unconscious, dreams, sexuality, the relationship between natural impulses and civilized society, child psychology and development, the psychological differences between men and women, the relationship between the physical and the psychical. The course has two principal aims. First, students will concentrate on the close reading and analysis of primary documents, including: professional literature in what we would today call psychiatry; philosophical texts, manuals on child rearing, education, sexual practice, and living the wholesome life; and cultural documents. Second, students will produce a substantial research paper investigating one of the topics considered in the course or on one or more of the authors whom we will be reading in the seminar. This project starts from the premise that Victorian ideas about the psyche reveal much about the psyches of Victorians, their hopes and fears, their preoccupations, their attitudes about themselves and the world in which they lived. Setting the work of Sigmund Freud in the context of Victorian psychology is central to this seminar, for many of the ideas associated with Freud derived from assumptions about the psyche characteristic of the Victorian era.