This course provides students with a secure knowledge of different psychosocial and psychoanalytic schools of thought, as well as the means to apply them critically and creatively to a wide variety of cultural phenomena.
Students examine the pioneering works of Freud, Jung, Lacan, Klein, and Object Relations theorists bringing them into dialogue with key works and concepts from across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Early emphasis is given to securing a solid basis in psychodynamic thinking, child, adolescent and adult development, and the dynamics of therapeutic interventions in organisations. We go on to consider topics such as violence, loss, care, bodies, trauma, race, class, gender, sexuality, and social institutions (the family, the asylum, the University) from a psychosocial perspective. In addition to developing subject-specific skills that focus on awareness and analysis of unconscious dynamics, students are exposed to a range of critical methods and reading skills. Our critical practice engages works from history, politics, sociology, literary texts, and films.
Students are empowered to extend their critical and analytic skills and deepen their self-awareness in ways that strengthen an understanding of the relationship between theoretical ideas and lived experience. The course provides a robust foundation for a diversity of career paths in sectors pertaining to the humanities and social sciences (e.g. positions within charity sectors & NGOs, health and social care, marketing, media work, public relations, research, and social policy). Many of our students go on to further academic study, or further training in a career in psychotherapy or counselling.
More particularly, this programme aims:
- To provide a solid psychosocial and psychoanalytic vocabulary and understanding of unconscious dimensions of human experience, relationships, communication and culture
- To provide students with a good understanding of the history of the disciplines, and the different schools of psychoanalysis and psychosocial thinking
- To enhance students’ capacity to observe and interpret the social and political world through psychosocial and psychoanalytic perspectives
- To provide psychosocial perspectives on child, adolescent and adult development and difficulties
- To understand how society and social structures affect the ways we feel and think
- To explore critically, and imaginatively, various phenomena of our emotional lives (love, hate, rage, envy), as well as the various meanings of 'madness' and mental illness
- To critically interrogate the meaning of 'violence' in its various psychosocial dimensions
- To understand and interrogate the role of care and intimacy in contemporary societies.
- To understand the psychodynamics of groups and institutions
- To provide a space and process by which students can explore and reflect upon the intersection between their academic, personal and professional selves