Course Description:
Where did we get the notion that “love hurts?” The swooning swain, Dido impaling herself on Aeneas’s sword, the delirious madness of Sappho’s inflamed imagination, Plato’s connection of love with the world of eternal forms, the highly refined posturing of the medieval knights being “tried” before the bench in Eleanor of Aquitane’s “court of love,” Snow White’s long sleep, the short incandescence of Romeo and Juliet: these and other texts will carry us through an examination of the torture and bliss of love and other extreme mental states. This course will develop the capacity to use psychoanalysis as a way of interpreting works of the literary imagination. We will use insights from psychoanalytic theory and practice to deepen our understanding of the works themselves, and as an aid to discovering why we like what we like.
Also, because of the small number of people any one analyst or psychoanalytic psychotherapist can treat, group clinical discussion is a foundational learning modality and necessary form of extending one’s own clinical experience. This course features required readings and clinical case discussion, which gives students a chance to get input on challenging cases, continue with their didactic education, thereby developing a deeper psychoanalytic identity.
Session One: June 23, 2017
Introduction
Review of Course Outline
Sappho. Sappho: A New Translation
Session Two: July 21, 2017
Plato. The Symposium and the Phaedrus
Session Three: September 22, 2017
The Romance of Tristan and Isolt
Session Four: October 20, 2017
Malory. Le Morte D’Arthur
Session Five: November 17, 2016
Dante. The Inferno
Session Six: December 8, 2017
Snow White
Session Seven: January 26, 2018
Shakespeare. “Romeo and Juliet”
Session Eight: February 23, 2018
Freud. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Session Nine: March 23, 2018
Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby
Session Ten: April 20, 2018
Márquez. Love in the Time of Cholera
Closing Remarks
Distribution of Certificates of Completion and CME Certificates