Psychoanalysis & Feminism

Instructor: Dr. Kathleen Merrow

Course Content

This course will examine the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism. We will first read basic texts of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan on the topic of feminine sexuality. We then spend time reading key texts in the history of the feminist reception of Freud’s (and Lacan’s) work in order to develop the basis for a comprehensive understanding of  the basic issues involved in a feminist appropriation or rejection of  a psychoanalytic understanding of gender and sexual difference. We also read Foucault’s work on the modern discourse of sexuality as a way to think about the institutional function of psychoanalysis in its historical context.

Possible course readings include:

Sigmund Freud:  Three Essays on Sexuality, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Selections from Freud’s collected works

Michel Foucault:  The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1

Judith Butler:  Gender Trouble

Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts

Selections from the work of: Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Helen Deutsche, Joan Rivere, Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, Joan Wallach Scott, Simone de Beauvoir