LFU:online

• appropriation of and argumentation with primary texts
• overview of the history of ideas about the relationship between psychoanalysis and critical theory
• understanding and using the psychoanalytic concept of the wish
  
• scientific writing

Thinking the Wish: Towards the Relationship between Psychoanalysis and critical theory

The wish contains a conception of reality which does not yet do justice to it. But the more that meets the subjective interest in the wish, the light that shines through the cracks in everything, as Leonard Cohen puts it, holds with the hope also new disappointment.

The wish tells of subjective as well as social constitution, formation and history, and likewise of the difficulty of unraveling them: of identifying and overcoming the pathogenic, the suffering-causing within them. The wish tells of the desire for more as well as of the difficulty of demanding it.

Psychoanalysis and critical social theory come very close to each other in the concept of the wish in one respect: they share the concern to let the hope for emancipation mature, to let the negation of reality become concrete.

Here, however, also their divergence emerges: How can the wish be tranlated from an individual one to a collective one and vice versa? Does its recurrent disappointment imply private or societal action?

• independent reading and written processing of the seminar texts (summary, commentary, reflection, reading Q&A)
• in the seminar: joint discussion of the texts, peer2peer review
• seminar paper or presentation or mind map
  

• six assignments on the seminar texts (graded)
• seminar thesis or presentation on one of the seminar texts or mind map though the semester (graded, double count)
• oral grades (if beneficial for your overall grade)

The overall grade results from the average of seven/eight grades, whereby seminar thesis/presentation/mind map count double.

6.10. Introduction: Psychoanalysis in Critical Theory and the psychoanalytic concept of wish

20.10. Sigmund Freud (1901): Über den Traum

3.11. Christine Kirchhoff (2009): Das psychoanalytische Konzept der »Nachträglichkeit«. Zeit, Bedeutung und die Anfänge des Psychischen

17.11. Gerhard Vinnai (2011): Wunschwelten und Opferzusammenhänge. Zur analytischen Sozialpsychologie der westlichen Kultur

1.12. Caroline Neubaur (1978): Verwünschter Wunsch

19.1. Hanna Gekle (1986): Wunsch und Wirklichkeit. Blochs Philosophie des Noch-Nicht-Bewußten und Freuds Theorie des Unbewußten

2.2.Elisabeth Lenk (1983): Die unbewußte Gesellschaft

Application Requirements: Successful completion of the modules 1 to 7 and 16

Physical seminar.

In case the seminar needs to switch online, you will need webcam and headset/microphone for seminar participation.