Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

1. getting students acquainted with the Freudian revolution, his first interventions into the field of hysteria, interpretation of dreams, his theory of drives, interventions into social theory, theory of religion and art; development of Freud's theory through his life;
2. historical overview of the development of psychoanalysis (Freud's pupils, Melanie Klein, ego-psychology, Winnicot, Bion etc.);
3. Jacques Lacan, his starting point and the development of his theory and his movement through the decades;
4. theoretical edifice of psychoanalysis; fundamental concepts: the unconscious, repetition, drives, transference; desire, the Other, subject, object, identification, fantasy, symptom; the symbolic, the imaginary, the real;
5. philosophical background of psychoanalytic concepts, Lacan's constant use of philofophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine, Aquinus to Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, finally his confrontation with the contemporary philosophy (Heidegger, Sartre, structuralism, modern logic etc.)
6. psychoanalysis as social theory, Freud's starting points, interventions into anthropology, his theory of religion, Moses and monotheism; Freud and the political; Lacan's theory of the discourse as the social bond; the theory of four discourses;
7. psychoanalysis as clinical practice, problems of its technique; transference and its working through; neurosis, psychosis, perversion; hysteria as the birthplace of psychoanalysis; Freud's five cases; Lacan's innovations in relation to practice; controversies around the questions of practice and technique; situation of psychoanalysis as therapy today in relation to other therapeutic practices;
8. psychoanalytic interventions into the field of art and more broadly culture, mass culture, film etc.; psychoanalytic theory of culture;
9. confrontation with the criticisms of psychoanalysis which have been accompanying it from its birth up to the present rise of cognitive sciences; dialogue with neurosciences;
10. psychoanalysis and the theory of science, its inherence in Galilean science; history of science from a psychoanalytic viewpoint; analytical philosophy, Badiou, Meillassoux and the sepculative realism.