HIST/PSYCH/ART: Madness

Course Details

Preferred majors for this course: Psychology, History, Art, English, Sociology, Pre-Med, Criminal Justice. For two unforgettable weeks, London and Paris become your classroom as you investigate how Europeans have tried to understand the human mind—and what happens when the mind, the body, the family, or the world break apart. There are no lecture halls. Instead, you'll time-hop across four centuries, following extraordinary people and unsettling questions through the actual places where their lives unfolded. Every investigation begins with a case—a person, a family, a crime, an artwork, a medical record, a photograph. Then we go to a place: the street where something happened, the hospital where someone was treated, the museum where evidence survives, the neighborhood that shaped a life. The place becomes evidence, and the evidence opens the question. You'll search the streets of Whitechapel for clues to the making of Jack the Ripper as a modern media monster; walk through Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury; investigate shell shock at the Imperial War Museum; stand in Queen Square, where physicians struggled to understand bodies without visible wounds; and enter the Freud Museum, where one of the twentieth century's most influential theories of the mind took shape. In Paris, you'll enter the Musée de l'Histoire de la Médecine and the Salpêtrière, where Charcot transformed suffering into clinical evidence; follow the wild boy of Aveyron from the French countryside into the laboratories of Paris; stand before the Mona Lisa; walk through Montmartre and Montparnasse in the footsteps of artists and writers; and confront the psychological and moral questions of occupation at the Mémorial de la Shoah and in the streets of the Marais. Along the way, you'll encounter Mary Toft, Leonardo da Vinci, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot, soldiers, children, patients, families, criminals, and others whose lives force us to ask: How do we know what we are seeing? Who gets to define normal? Where does suffering live? What makes a human being a person? What happens when your private self becomes public? Guided by a historian and a visual artist, you'll use psychology, history, art, literature, photography, sketching, film, and the city itself as evidence. This isn't psychology from a textbook. It's psychology where it happened. Limited to 20 participants. 3 credit hours.