A psychoanalytic understanding of the life of (my hero/heroine)
Paper detailsChoose a well-known public figure (either alive or dead), preferably someone in whom you are interested or hold in high esteem. Using the psychoanalytic concepts made available to you through your study of Dynamic Models of Counselling, including your own independent psychoanalytic reading; develop an understanding of your chosen persons life and work.
A few pointers:
1.The only criterion in choosing your public figure is that she/he must be well known. You could, for example, choose a writer, artist, musician, scientist, politician, intellectual etc.
2.Freud was disparaging of the use of psychoanalysis outside of the consulting or a setting unless there was substantial information against which to test the clinicians hypotheses and conjecture. Superficial understanding based on psychoanalytic principles he called wild analysis. In effect then what you are being asked to do is a wild analysis of a specific person in history. Your task is to develop an understanding of your chosen persons life based on fairly limited information at your disposal.
3.To clarify your thinking and assist the marker of your assignment it may be worthwhile to lay out in a single page the core facts of the persons life history (perhaps a chronology). This one page will not be counted in your word count.
4.In your essay, you will employ psychological theory specifically psychoanalytic ideas to draw the links between the interior life of your chosen person and what they did (their life and their work)
5.A more usual way we may think of the present assignment is as a psychobiographic or personological exercise. Psychobiography and personology, both fall within the bounds of psychohistory, a discipline originally founded in a psychoanalytic model. Psychobiography has as an assumption that legitimately we can seek to understand and analyse a persons life based on indirect or secondary sources. The modern day variant of this practice, employed in a forensic context, in fact derived from the same tradition is called criminal profiling. These disciplines all have in common the employment of psychological theory to understand the life and circumstances of particular individuals.
1. Cover Page
2. Table of Contents (on a separate page)
This is a list of major headings and page numbers
3. Introduction
4. The main body with headings to delineate the sections
5. Conclusion
6. List of references (on a separate page)