LFU:online

• appropriation of and argumentation with primary texts
• overview of the history of ideas about the relationship between psychoanalysis and critical theory
• understanding of basic problems of psychoanalytic theorizing
• 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 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 individual or collective 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

• seven assignments on the seminar texts (ungraded)
• oral grades (if beneficial for your overall grade)
• paper with reference to the seminar (graded)

• Christine Kirchhoff: Das psychoanalytische Konzept der »Nachträglichkeit«. Zeit, Bedeutung und die Anfänge des Psychischen
• Hanna Gekle: Wunsch und Wirklichkeit. Blochs Philosophie des Noch-Nicht-Bewußten und Freuds Theorie des Unbewußten
• Theodor W. Adorno: Philosophische Terminologie
• Sigmund Freud: Die Traumdeutung / Ferenczi: Die Psychoanalyse der Träume
• Passett: Von der „Wirklichkeit" der psychischen Realität, in Rothschild: Selbstmystifizierung der Psychoanalyse
• Gerhard Vinnai: Wunschwelten und Opferzusammenhänge

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