WGSS 411
Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents: The Psyche and the Social Spring 2025
Division II D Difference, Power, and Equity
This is not the current course catalog

For many decades, psychoanalysis has been profoundly influential to radical thinkers seeking to overthrow regimes of racism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and ableism. At the same time, psychoanalysis has also been crucial to enforcing those very regimes. Whether mobilized towards liberatory or oppressive ends, it is difficult to overstate psychoanalysis’s influence on intellection, politics, and everyday social existence over the last century–even though we don’t always realize it’s there. If you bristle at the mention of Freud but think microaggressions are real, content warnings are a good idea, or that sharing about your feelings supports your wellbeing and relationships, your beliefs and values are probably indebted to psychoanalysis. This class surveys psychoanalytic perspectives on “the social,” that is, race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, dis/ability, imperialism, and so on. It also provides an introduction to basic foundations of psychoanalytic thought–especially Freud, object relations theory, and a bit of Lacan–with an emphasis on how the psychoanalytic canon underpins contemporary queer, feminist, and postcolonial theory; ethnic studies; disability studies; and religious studies. Building from foundations, we’ll also examine radical psychoanalysis alongside radical critiques of psychoanalysis. Additional topics and bodies of thought include trauma, Afropessimism, sexual difference feminism, antipsychiatry, and schizoanalysis. This class satisfies the WGSS Junior/Senior Seminar major requirement.