PHIL 476/WMST 280
Capstone:  The Self
Dr. Deborah Achtenberg
 Fall 2008
Mon., Wed.
1:00-2:15 p.m.

THE SELF:  PHILOSOPHIC AND PSYCHOANALYTIC EXPLORATIONS

In this course, we will consider the relation between self and other as described by some philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists.  What does the other hold out for me?  Will he or she help me, hold me, hurt me, harm me?  Can I be myself and be in relation to an other?  Can I be alone and be myself?  Does the other matter to me intrinsically?  Or is another person merely a tool I can use for my own ends, an obstacle in my way, or a threat to my very being?  Do I become who I am by myself?  Or, do I only get access to my self through an other?  Does society help me or harm me?  Does society enable me to become and be what I want to be, or is it a hindrance to these goals?  Will others welcome me for what I am?  Or encapsulate me in a constraining concept--for example, as other, as woman, as black, as Jew?  Is it possible to welcome another person?  Or is hospitality tied up with violence and terror?  We will consider these and other questions during the course of the semester.

We will read and discuss works by Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Jean Amery, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mahler, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.

 TEXTS:   Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Norton), The Ego and the Id (Norton), General Psychological Theory (Touchstone), Three Case Studies (Collier/MacMillan).  Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press), Améry, At the Mind's Limits (Indiana), Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student (handout), Second Sex (Vintage).  Mahler, Klein, Winnicott (handouts).  Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Washington Square Press), Search for a Method  (handout), Levinas, "Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity" (handout), Totality and Infinity (Duquesne), Derrida, Adieu (Stanford).  (A number of these texts can be purchased used on the internet at moderate cost.)
   
REQUIREMENTS:  to be announced.

Revised 6/13/08 by Deborah Achtenberg.