Undergraduate Course: Anthropology & Psychoanalysis (SCAN10099)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will introduce students to the synergies and challenges across anthropological and psychoanalytic theory. It encourages students to think across methodologies and conceptual toolkits in their analysis of subjectivity, the psyche, and human experience. |
| Course description |
At first glance, psychoanalytic and ethnographic methods and concerns have much in common. Both fields are interested in subjectivity as the interplay between internal and social worlds. Both rely on listening as part of their core methodologies. Both profess humanistic concerns about the people with whom practitioners work (their interlocutors, research participants, informants, clients, patients, or analysands). Both fields have as their central preoccupation the question, What can social theory learn from human experience? And yet, despite these similarities, social anthropology and psychoanalysis respond dramatically differently to the question posed, partly due to differences in how the field conceptualise human experience itself. For ethnographers, experience is at the crux of practitioners methodology. For analysts, it is always only ever symptom.
This course takes up the synergies and discrepancies across social anthropology and psychoanalysis as a comparative project: what can we learn about the commitments, opportunities, and foreclosures of each field by working with the two in tandem? We will work with psychoanalysis as a field of inquiry that takes seriously the unconscious, unreason, and the repressed as socially inflected psychic phenomena that bear on human behaviour and relations. We will use this comparative project as the basis for approaching questions about subjectivity, representation, method, and ethics. For example, how might ethnographers engage with the psychoanalytic premise that some human experience is beyond representation? And how might psychoanalysts engage with an anthropological commitment to cultural difference? We will build out a comparative approach to ask wide reaching questions about the nature of representation, knowledge, and the psyche in both fields, to consider the implications for politics and ethics.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 36 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 30,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
166 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
85 %,
Practical Exam
15 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Class Presentation 5%
Written Participation 10 %
Seminar Participation 10%
Essay 75% |
| Feedback |
Students will receive individualised feedback midterm regarding written and seminar participation. They will also receive feedback on their essay formulation at question development and essay outline stages.
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| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of overlaps and departures in method and theory across ethnography and psychoanalysis
- Creatively mobilise psychoanalytic and anthropological concepts in service of their own argumentation
- Exercise intellectual autonomy and initiative by devising and responding to their own critical questions
- Communicate in a critical and informed way their own analyses based on close readings of assigned texts
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Reading List
1. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 2001. Sex and Repression in Savage Society, 2nd edition. London: Rouledge.
2. Eng, David L. and Shinhee Han. 2019. Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Durham: Duke University Press.
3. Lacan, Jacques. 1997. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Psychoses, Book III. New York: Norton
4. Freud, Sigmund. 2010. The Interpretation of Dreams. James Strachey, trans and ed. New York: Basic Books.
5. Pandolfo, Stefania. 2018. Knot of the Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Students will develop skillsets in critical thinking, close reading, analytical writing, communication, autonomy, communication, and collaboration. |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Jessica Cooper
Tel: (0131 6)51 1732
Email: Jessica.Cooper@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Dani Langdridge
Tel:
Email: dani.langdridge@ed.ac.uk |
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