 2014 - 2015 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0680-4099-01 | The Interpretation of Dreams | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 2.0
Course description
Course Description: One third of your life is spent asleep, and the life of sleep is dreams. And yet the images, sounds, and language of waking life almost totally dominates discussions of human goals, motivations, and meaningfulness. The last century began with a different dream: that dreams, rightly understood, would give us an unprecedented view of the hidden objectives of human behavior. “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” Freud wrote in 1900. This seminar will be a discussion about dreams and an inquiry into what they may still mean, more than one hundred years later. We will take our departure from a careful reading of Freud’s 1899 Interpretation of Dreams, which makes huge claims for the importance and meaning of dreams and proposes methods for their interpretation. Critiques and extensions of Freud’s theory will point up its strengths and limitations. Throughout the seminar we will read literature and watch films in which dreams play a central role. Students are expected to keep a dream journal to record and analyze their own dreams.