Freud and the Sexual

The goal of the course is to introduce students to Freud’s evolving thinking about sexuality, its internal problems, both those recognized by Freud and those he didn’t. Infantile sexuality, polymorphous perverse sexuality, repression and unconscious mental processes will be at the center. Other themes to be emphasized include the notions of ‘après-coup’, ‘psychic trauma’ and ‘psychic reality’; unconscious fantasy and primal fantasy; and the conceptual tensions between mental energy and fantasy, between drive and instinct, and between the biological and the mental. About one third to one half the reading will be Freud’s texts and the rest secondary sources – mostly commenting directly on Freud’s theorizing but also some which show the power of the development of much that he didn’t explicitly theorize (e.g. après-coup and leaning-on) and some which show how far wrong he could go. After this course, students should have not only a knowledge of some key texts, but also a solid conceptual base to be able to read and critique both Freud’s texts related to sexuality and those of later psychoanalytic thinkers and, to a lesser degree, some non-psychoanalytic sexologists.