Psychoanalysis and the Pursuit of Happiness

In this course, we focus on the history and theory of psychoanalysis and contemporary psychotherapies in the context of our happy-oriented culture.

In our days happiness is thought to be our organic natural state, while sadness and emotional suffering are stigmatized as a pathology. We believe that at all costs we have to stay positive. Influenced by this prevailing cultural paradigm (or imposing it?) most psychotherapies today aim towards alleviating emotional suffering and towards the supposed goal of greater happiness.

Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, perceived the emergence of today’s positivity-oriented psychotherapy as a distortion of his original model. He openly acknowledged universal suffering as being constituent of being human. Psychoanalysis proper rather has a function of disillusionment that opposes the aims of the overly optimistic psychologies of today.

This course introduces students to Freud’s initial model of psychoanalysis and trace its subsequent evolution up to the present time. We pay particular attention to Michel Foucault's and Catherine Malabou’s criticism of psychoanalysis and psychotherapies. We also consider neo-Freudianism, Freudo-Marxism, existential psychoanalysis, and the Depressive Realism hypothesis in psychology.