Narrative Reflections: Philosophy in Literature & Film

Reading: Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud

Goodreads Link:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97744.Five_Lectures_on_Psycho_Analysis

This is a short text, just 63 pages. Originally it was a series of lectures delivered by Freud in 1909 at Clark University in Massachusetts to introduce American academics to his ideas. It still provides a concise general introduction to his thought.

Freud was a great writer, and he wrote on a wide variety of topics. If you want to dive deeper, the Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay is a great resource. The Goodreads link is here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80453.The_Freud_Reader

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace.

In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times)

Please join us February in reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.