180123 VO Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1) (2012W)

The body, due to a tendency in contemporary psychoanalysis to strive for a neuro-scientific foundation, has become a pivotal point of psychoanalytical theory and practice. The body on the couch, however, has many more facets than neuroscience can attribute to it. This lecture, therefore, will center on the body as a junction and starting point and introduce psychoanalytical theories (in conceptual, historic, epistemological and clinical terms) and make them accessible as reflected by diverse contemporary debates. In this course, the body will be examined in relation to the development of the subject, along a familial paradigm: we will look at the bodies of children, men, women, animals and dolls. The seductiveness of the childish body has shaped psychoanalysis from the very beginning, even though this aspect has, only in the past few decades, been increasingly focused on. Castration marks a fantasized limit of the body, which places the subject at a fictional line of gender distinction. Fantasies about male bodies also lead into the symbolically determined field as do fantasies about women's bodies, which for decades explicitly or implicitly affected the discussion on gender norms. While the male body is characterized by a phallic structuring, the female body is also linked to fantasies which arouse fear such as those of the vagina dentata (toothed vagina). The crocodile jaw, which often pops up in associations here, is far from being the only animal body in psychoanalysis: spiders, frogs, bees, dogs, rats, horses or wolves, as well as composite beings made up of different (animal) bodies also have hefty economic significance for the patient. And last but not least, in the winter semester, we will look at the bodies of dolls in their function as doppelganger as well as transitional objects.