02282 - History of Psychology

Learning outcomes

The aim of this course is to give students the skills in reading critically and contextualising  texts and sources from different viewpoints, making them able to use the acquired historical competencies to examine several issues theoretically. Students will be able to express their well-founded point of view, thinking critically on the acquired competencies and confronting dialectically with other people.

 

Course contents

 100 years of history of sexuality (1870-1970).

The history of the sexuality is the history of our ideas about sexuality and history of the more or less repressive institutions that control it. At the end of the nineteenth-century, human sciences threw light upon the part of sexuality in the development of our personality and our psychic life, examining it scientifically. the history of our sexuality starts from there: among science, pedagogy, sociology and politics.

 

The first part of the course will reconstruct the emergence of sexuality in the history of science, starting from the analysis of some medical essays about "sexual perversions" written at the end of the nineteenth-century, until the Tre saggi sulla sessualità (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) published by Sigmund Freud in 1905. The second part of the course will take into consideration the second part of the twentieth-century, to the debate on sexuality-culture relations (starting from psychoanalysis: Freud, Reich, Marcuse), until the so-called "sexual liberation" occured in the sixties and the seventies.

Readings/Bibliography

Final Bibliography:

Students have to know all the texts indicated at the points 1. , 2. and one of the subjects indicated at the point 4. (the exam will start from that chosen subject). Moreover the texts indicated at the point 3. are suggested for students who have attended the course and compulsory for students who have not attended the course. 

1. Sources:  Alfred Binet, Il feticismo in amore, Edizioni Ets, 2011; S. Freud, Tre saggi sulla teoria della sessualità, in S. Freud, La vita sessuale, Bollati Boringhieri, 2012, pp. 17-157

2. Critical essays: A. Davidson, L'emergenza della sessualità. Epistemologia e formazione dei concetti, Quodlibet, 2010, pp. 59-132; M. Foucault, Gli anormali, Feltrinelli, 2000, pp. 200-234; Frank Sulloway, Freud e i sessuologi, in Frank Sulloway, Freud biologo della psiche umana, Feltrinelli, 1982, pp. 306-353 (copies by the copying office "Burchiellaro" situated in via Zamboni 66); S. Finzi Vegetti, Marina Cattenazzi, "Introduzione" in Psicoanalisi ed educazione sessuale, Laterza, 1994

3. Suggested reading: V.Babini, "La psichiatria", in Storia delle scienze, vol. IV, Natura e vita. L'età moderna, Einaudi, Torino, 1994, pp. 402-437; V. Babini,"Malattia, esperimento e psicologia nella Francia del primo Ottocento", Physis. Rivista internazionale di Storia della scienza, XXXIX, 1, 2002:41-62. (Both the texts are at students' disposal by the copying office "Burchiellaro" in Via Zamboni 66).

4. One (compulsory) subject to choose among the following texts:

1. M. Foucault, La volontà di sapere, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1978; 2. W. Reich, some texts from La funzione dell'orgasmo, Genitalità e La rivoluzione sessuale in copy by "Burchiellaro" in Via Zamboni 66 (where you can also find the teaching material to help the reading); 3. H. Marcuse, Eros e civiltà, Einaudi, Torino, 1964 (the teaching material to help the reading is in copy by "Burchiellaro", in Via Zamboni 66); 4. C. Bonomi, Sulla soglia della psicoanalisi. Freud e la follia infantile, Boringhieri, Torino, 2007.

 

 

M. Foucault, La volontà di sapere, Feltrinelli, 1978; W. Reich, La rivoluzione sessuale, Feltrinelli 1963; H. Marcuse, Eros e civiltà, Einaudi 1964; C. Bonomi, Sulla soglia della psicoanalisi. Freud e la follia infantile, Boringhieri 2007.

 

Teaching methods

The course will be based on lectures and critical reading of the texts. Students will be encouraged to participate actively to the discussion.  

Students who attend the ¾ of the lessons will be able to examine closely some arguments tackled in the course with original researches and to stand the exam on their own works.

Assessment methods

 The exam will consist of a discussion starting from a topic chosen by the student: historical knowledge, critical approach and personal analysis will be held.

Only the achievement of a complete knowledge, mastery of expression, and clear reasoning and explanation will be assessed with a score of excellence.

Teaching tools

Overhead projector; computer; dvd.

Office hours

See the website of Valeria Paola Babini