What is the human ‘self’? How does it differ from other animate beings and inanimate objects? Why and how does the human self become and fragment and become again? According to what structural and historical pressures?

In this module, students will read Freud’s analysis of the peculiarities of human ‘ego’ formation across time and space, alongside Jacques Lacan’s ‘early’ readings of the father of psychoanalysis’s account of the human self’s ‘conscious’, what Lacan calls the ‘Imaginary’ in his famous essay on ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’.

Coupled with additional readings of continental philosophy, analyses of visual modern art, and discussion of current ethical and political topics, the course will teach students to understand the uniqueness of the human self as fundamentally split between conscious and unconscious.