Psychology: Madness

Course Details

Preferred majors for this course: Psychology, Intelligence, Cyber Security, Sociology, Pre Med, Nursing, Health Sciences Administration, History The discipline of Psychology has followed many paths through modern history. In our class, you will explore most of them. We will begin where Sigmund Freud built his highly influential practice in the heart of Vienna. As we meet Freudian theory where it was developed, we will study how this city became the world's center of medical science around 1900. Our course will go on to assess how psychology and neurology were mobilized during the First World War, as the first cases of "shell shock" were met by Austrian pioneers in wartime medicine. Then we will broaden our focus to interrogate the rise of mass movements in the 20th century and explore psychological factors were developed into powerful systems of mass propaganda and terror. As we use museums, old clinics, prisons, memorials and even a concentration camp as our "classrooms," we will explore together the rise of Psychology as a major discipline of medical science in 20th century Vienna and Berlin. Along the way we will assess how professionals in the field joined the Nazi movement and helped to advance its mass-murder agenda. As we will see, too, how the Cold War-era work by Psychologists gave an equally brutal set of prison and surveillance protocols during the Communist era. The cast of characters we will meet--from great Psychologists to an infamous serial killer who preyed on married women in the night--will bring our course's cities and material alive in ways that students will never forget. 3 credits in Psychology.