Writing as a Psychological Endeavor

3 credits

This course introduces students to the long history of interdependence between literature and psychology from antiquity to the present. Through the careful study of works by, inter alia, Plato, Freud, and Shakespeare, students will discover how literature and psychology are mutually enriching, and sometimes competing, ways of reading and writing the human soul. By the conclusion of the course, students should have an incipient sense of how they can employ their psychological training and interests to ground their creative endeavors and how they can leverage art to clarify and deepen their psychological and philosophical work.