PSY 7355 Embodiment & Sexuality
The Cartesian framework of Modern thought is presented through the writings of Sigmund Freud, who considered himself a "pioneer on the frontier between the psychic and the somatic." Sartre’s dialectical phenomenology is then utilized to provide an alternative to the dualism of mind and body inherent in Western psychological traditions. Merleau-Ponty’s "ontology of the flesh," informed by the later Husserl, provides a foundation for a reformulation of the problem of the body in Modern thought. Supplementary readings are drawn from Lacan, Beauvoir, Lingis, as well as feminist and post-feminist writers.