Teaching Freud

Freud can be considered one of the grandparents of the field of religious studies, yet students often assume that Freud is sexist, dangerous, passe, and irrelevent to the study of religion. The contributors to this volume describe how they address Freud's contested legacy.

As one of the first theorists to explore the unconscious fantasies, fears, and desires underlying religious ideas and practices, Freud con be considered one of the grandparents of the field of Religious Studies. Yet his legacy is deeply contested. How can Freud be taught in a climate of critique and controversy? The fourteen contributors to this volume, all recognized scholars of religion and psychoanalysis, describe how they address Freud's contested legacy; they "teach the debates." They go on to describe their courses on Freud and religion, their innovative pedagogical practices, and the creative ways they work with resistance.

As one of the first theorists to explore the unconscious fantasies, fears, and desires underlying religious ideas and practices, Freud con be considered one of the grandparents of the field of Religious Studies. Yet his legacy is deeply contested. How can Freud be taught in a climate of critique and controversy? The fourteen contributors to this volume, all recognized scholars of religion and psychoanalysis, describe how they address Freud's contested legacy; they "teach the debates." They go on to describe their courses on Freud and religion, their innovative pedagogical practices, and the creative ways they work with resistance.

Originally published in 1924, this biography of Freud looks at his early life as well as the development of his theories and his relationships with other well-known physicians of the time.

The concept of education—its dangers and promises and its illusions and revelations—threads throughout Sigmund Freud’s body of work. This introductory volume by psychoanalytic authority, Deborah P. Britzman, explores key controversies of education through a Freudian approach. It defines how fundamental Freudian concepts such as the psychical apparatus, the drives, the unconscious, the development of morality, and transference have changed throughout Freud’s oeuvre. An ideal text for courses in education studies, human development, and curriculum studies, Freud and Education concludes with new Freudian-influenced approaches to the old dilemmas of educational research, theory, and practice.

In this book the author presents his reading of psychoanalysis in the spirit of its founder Sigmund Freud, and explores the transformations of Freud's work by his followers. The author notes that some of these followers trimmed it down even to exclude the death drive, which was one of Freud's fundamental principles. Freud's theory has also been transformed by Lacan, who, in the mid-1950s embarked on a lifelong enterprise to recast it in a fruitful debate with the sciences and the humanities. Such a transformation brought by Lacan was (somewhat paradoxically) necessary to show the importance of Freud's findings for the understanding of subjectivity.

Both melancholia and mourning are triggered by the same thing, that is, by loss. The distinction often made is that mourning occurs after the death of a loved one while in melancholia the object of love does not qualify as irretrievably lost.