At the end of this course, you will:
- be familiar with some of the key concepts of trauma in present-day continental philosophy;
- be familiar with the importance of trauma for psychoanalytic theory;
- be able to write a paper in which a particular question is raised concerning the notion of trauma;
- be able to present and interpret some of the primary sources in which the notion of trauma is debated
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Trauma plays a crucial role in contemporary continental philosophy. We will first discuss some of the origins of the concept of (psychic, subjective) trauma and study some of the consequences of its introduction for the ways in which we experience the world and ourselves. Indeed, before being a philosophical concept, trauma is concept that structures our experience of ourself and of the world we live in. The work of Ian Hacking (historical epistemology) will be our guide for the elaboration of this problematic. We will then discuss the role and the place of trauma in Freudian theory (and psychoanalytic theory in general: especially the work of Jean Laplanche). We will study Freud’s early work on trauma first and then we will pay special attention to the first edition of Freuds seminal text on Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the Fragment of the Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’). We will question in detail the traditional claim that Freud abandoned his original (traumatic) theory of the neuroses in 1897 and replaced this theory by an oedipal one.
But the concept of trauma has also been discussed outside of psychoanalysis. Time will be too short to discuss all authors for whom trauma is a central category. We will limit ourselves to the work of Levinas, Derrid and Malabou and compare their thinking on trauma to Freud’s.
This seminar includes two or three masterclasses that still have to be determined and organised. You will be informed about these masterclasses at the beginning of the course. |
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