The Will before Psychoanalysis
The Will before Psychoanalysis
Co-organizers: Andrea Gadberry and Gerard Passannante
Long before the emergence of a conceptual vocabulary that named the unconscious and its wishes—that adumbrated a modern subject’s desires, repetitions, and obsessions—there was a robust conversation about the faculty of the will: its powers, its vulnerabilities, their sources, and their bearing on experience. This seminar investigates willed and unwilled experiences across habits of feeling, vicissitudes in thought, and activities of the soul in literary and philosophical works prior to the advent of psychoanalysis.