Philosophy of Psychoanalysis

Freud famously said that the aim of psychoanalysis was to enable us to work, love and play with minimum conflict. So what gets in the way of us doing that? Philosophy of Psychoanalysis is an educational course presented at a third-year tertiary education level by A/Prof. Doris McIlwain. The course aims to ground you in the basics: the nature of unconscious processes, repression, sexuality, dreams, morality, grief, gender identity, drives and affects and their implications for perception, memory and creative processes, as well as for certain forms of psychopathology. Then, it considers the wider societal relevance of psychoanalysis to issues of the internet, femininity, charisma, cults, spin doctors, hypocrisy and political power. For the more clinically minded, the course covers an array of post-Freudian perspectives, including Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Object Relations theory, Kohut’s self-psychology, Winnicott, and relational psychoanalysis. You should leave the course with a grasp of the kinds of psychoanalysis that are used currently in clinical contexts. Sadly A/Prof. Doris McIlwain, the course creator, died of cancer in 2015. This podcast is created by her family and friends, with hopes that her curiosity, joy and intellectual playfulness will keep inspiring and informing those who listen.