Students can recognize the historical determination of body and experience, to identify the relevant determinants of changes in representations of the body and bodily practices and to communicate such aspects of the construction in material terms. Furtermore, they acquire reflective knowledge, which enables an evaluation of the current body and bio-policies and to identify the contribution of human sciences (medicine, psychiatry, special education) and their institutions to the process of norm establishment, maintenance and erosion in a historical or present-day context.

"The weariness of the self" is what Alain Ehrenberg (2004) called the condition or the form of subjectivity which characterises the current age and current humanity. His work describes not only the cultural modelling of illnesses (such as the transformation from melancholia to depression and today's burn-out); it also explains a current position of subjectivation: the self-obsessed individual who is never satisfied and who comes to grief trying to meet the manifold demands of self-optimising activity. Depression (including its associated forms and sub-categories considered to be illnesses) and dependence (including dependence disorders) thus appear as the two sides of one and the same coin, the "pathology of failure".

Taking the text of Alain Ehrenberg in "Endstation. Sehnsucht: Kapitalismus und Depression I" (A Streetcar Named Desire: Capitalism and Depression I), published by Carl Hegemann, as a prompt and a starting point, the seminar will focus both on the change of the illness depression (and its related historical forms) in the sense of a "Framing Disease" (Charles E. Rosenberg, 1997) and on the time-specific modelling of other Transient Mental Illnesses (Ian Hacking, 2000), such as the historical hysteria or neurasthenia and gender identity disorders from the turn of the 20^th century until now (Michaela Ralser, 2010). The seminar traces the social aspect of this change and discusses, for example with Elisabeth Summers, "Does society make us depressed?" (2008), the plausibility of social theory-based explanatory models of illness and health, including their socially diagnostic explanatory power and effect on the field of education and training.

input by the lecturer; reading; group work; case studies; written and/or oral contribution by participants;

Continuous assessment (based on written and/or oral contribution by participants).

 *Will be provided  in the course of the lesson

*As a start: Alain Ehrenberg: Die Müdigkeit, man selbst zu sein, in: Carl Hegemann (Hg.): endstation.Sehnsucht - Kapitalismus udn Depression I; Alexanderverlag-Berlin, 2000, S. 103-138.