What is the actual effect of “Freudianism” on life in this century? How are Freud’s ideas widely misunderstood and misappropriated, and which ideas have been correctly assimilated in our culture? Is Freud really anti-woman, anti-homosexuality, and obsessed with sex to the exclusion of all other cultural experience, as is often charged? In this course, we will read some of the most fascinating of Freud’s essays on culture and human being, in order to assess the currency and relevance of Freud today, and the way his theory diverges from other psychical paradigms, such as the Jungian archetype or the ‘object theory’ of the Kleinian school. This will entail looking at Freud’s understanding of myth and fairy tale, child’s play, adult love, sacrificial ritual, and above all, his exploration of the motivations of the creative processes, in his work on jokes and dreams.
Much of the course content will be devoted to ‘surrealism’, which was deeply influenced by Freud and which continues to exert an enormous influence in millennial culture today. The readings will include short works on dream, myth, the unconscious, and some motifs in folklore (collected in the anthology Creativity and the Unconscious). We will also read works and excerpts about Freud as character(The White Hotel, The Cocaine Solution, In Dora’s Case). In another register, we will look at ‘surrealist’ cinema and its aftermath, so deeply indebted to Freud’s work on dream (films such as Un chien andalou, Lost Highway, Birdman, and Mood Indigo, and the films of Cocteau, Fellini and Bunuel). The course will conclude with a look at Freudian theory as anticipating cutting edge theories of non-Euclidean topological geometry and emergence, far ahead of its time, as I have elaborated in my own book on the subject of Freud’s relevance today (Is Oedipus Online? MIT Press, 2007).
About Professor Flieger
For the past several years, I have been lecturing and teaching worldwide, as part of my research on globalism and millennial theory. In 1995 and 1996 I was keynote speaker at the University of Nanjing and the University of Beijing in the People's Republic of China and at Cyberconf 96, the international conference on new media sponsored by Telefonica. In 1997 I taught seminars at the University of Cape Town and Rhodes University in South Africa and at the Janos Pannonius and Svegad Universities in Hungary, and lectured in Rio de Janiero, Brazil (Sociedad Psychanlica Internacional). In 2000, I spent a semester at the University of Melbourne (Australia) as Distinguished Visitor; gave a series of public lectures at the India Institute of Technology in New Delhi; lectured in Japan at Kyoto University and the University of Yokahama as well as at the Institute for Media Arts and Sciences; and at the Harvard Center for Cultural Studies, Lacan faculty and analyst seminar. This year, I am participating in an ongoing seminar at Cornell Medical School, New York City, History of Psychiatry Division. I have just completed a term as Chair of the MLA National Division of Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature.