HIST 334
Victorian Psychology from the Phrenologists to Freud
Last Offered Fall 2018
Division II
This course is not offered in the current 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 course 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 will concentrate on the close reading and analysis of primary documents, including: professional literature in psychiatry, from the phrenologists to Freud; manuals on child rearing, education, sexual practice, and living the wholesome life; and cultural documents.