<p>i have an AP english teacher who's obsessed with freudian psychology. no matter what text we're dealing with, she tries to psychoanalyze it to find something that alludes to sex. i have a hard time swallowing freud's theories, but i have a harder time dealing with a teacher who seems to require her students to interpret everything as having to do with sex. </p>
<p>oh what to do what to do?</p>
<p>*suppresses dirty thoughts.</p>
<p>Well, just sit down, study, and focus of the boob- I mean book!</p>
<p>Sounds like my kind of teacher, actually. If you know what I mean.</p>
<p>haha nice freudian slip rszanto</p>
<p>My teacher does that, too, but I think it's kind of interesting. I had the same teacher for Honors English in 9th grade and she was like this and I mean... the first thing she taught us was Oedipus Rex (in the most explicit and un-euphemistic terms) and we were all like O.o?? But seriously--seeing things Freudian-ly really does make a difference. Take D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers, for example... I mean, the author REWROTE it to fit with Freud. You can't read that if you don't understand Freud. And whether or not you like it... a lot of things in literature ARE meant to be sexual, and you'll miss a lot if you don't see it. So while you may not like it now (I know I probably wouldn't if my teacher wasn't so funny about it... she makes it interesting), your teacher making you pinpoint those things (and trust me--after having this teacher you will never open the front door of your house using a key or eat cherries or put your foot in a shoe while having clean thoughts again), in the long run, using what she's teaching you now might impress some professor you have down the road. :)</p>
<p>I have a feeling you are attracted to your mother.</p>
<p>I'm a girl, and I'm straight. My father? How about not.</p>
<p>Welcome to literary analysis! No one likes what anyone else does.</p>
<p>Freud isn't all about sex, by the way. And Freud as an interpretive theorist is incredibly powerful. Too much of anything gets tiresome, but there's a lot to learn from Freud about interpreting texts.</p>
<p>Deep in the last century, I had the opposite problem with my English Literature teacher, an older gentleman who sinply refused to acknowledge that there was a sexual component to anything (except, perhaps, things with explicit sex scenes, which of course he wouldn't teach). I had a huge argument with him about Coleridge's "Kublai Khan" ("In Xanadu did Kublai Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree . . . "). He finally concluded that I thought there was a sexual element to the poem because I was Jewish. (Like Freud. I'm not kidding or exaggerating, by the way, except he never said "Jewish", he said, in the old-school way, "your Oriental cast of mind".)</p>
<p>verivorous, this can go either way. How old is your teacher? :P</p>
<p>
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My father? How about not.
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</p>
<p>Not consciously...</p>
<p>My son would probably have loved that! He's a big ol' Freud geek. (He has a t-shirt with a picture of Freud on it that just says "REPRESENT" across the top, because 'Freud has a posse!")</p>
<p>To tie this to Chicago, one of the foremost Freud scholars these days is Dr. Jonathan Lear, who is a professor in the Philosophy department at UChicago. He was one of the reasons the school was one of son's top choices! </p>
<p>My son's English papers were really influenced by Lear's work and frequently referenced Freudian scholarship. He did some amazing work with analysis of some Dickenson poems about love that way, that resulted in probably the best paper he'd written to that point in his life.</p>
<p>Your son should also try to take a class with psychoanalyst Bertram Cohler, TrinSF. He's quite popular (though some students are intimidated by him) and teaches a sosc section of Self, Culture, and Society as well as some sexuality courses. He's a very nice man and a great professor. He has a lot of interest in students and gets a lot out of teaching himself, I think. Your son may be interested in Mind as a sosc, but he should also consider Self. It's a more traditional sosc but a lot of the third quarter is devoted to Freud. </p>
<p>/plug</p>
<p>Awww, corranged, you know he's at Reed now. Chicago was being too difficult about financial aid, and it was so easy to take that nice full ride. <em>grin</em> Besides, there's always Chicago for grad school...</p>
<p>Since corranged put in a plug...</p>
<p>I will put one in for Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst in the Philosophy Department and the Committee on Social Thought. He taught a course on the "Republic" last quarter, which was greatly attended. He is a brilliant lecturer, and his lectures made me interested in pursuing further study of Plato and his tripartite division of the soul. I'll give this guy an A+; his course has been my best one yet.</p>
<p>I was pretty sure I just said that. <em>cough</em></p>
<p>Oh, Veeder...</p>
<p>Oh, I did know that. My brain just isn't turned on today. I've had three posts today that have just been wrong. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I'm sure there are great teachers of freud out there, my teacher's just not one of them. Maybe my complaints aren't even about Freudian interpretive theory. I loved learning about the unconscious and the archetypal hero my first quarter.
But then it got really strange. Things that AREN'T meant to be sexual she construes as sexual, for example Wordsworth's Prelude ("unloosed [the little boat's] chain") and Heart of Darkness (Africa is apparently female genitalia)... She'd also play us Wagner's Prelude of 'Tristan and Isolde' (mimics an orgasm) and make us watch a nature special on monkeys that have sex with each other whenever they feel negative tension. males with females, mothers with children, sisters with brothers.</p>
<p>"Heart of Darkness (Africa is apparently female genitalia)"</p>
<p>Hahahaha...>_<...that's one of the most bizarre interpretations ever.</p>
<p>Now I feel your pain.</p>