Psychoanalysis and Law (LAW286H1F)

The seminar is a study of the relation between psychoanalysis and law.  Following an introductory survey of selected works of Sigmund Freud addressing the formation of personality, the intertwining of person and society, and the conditions for the possibility of both individual and social change, the seminar will examine extant and ongoing efforts to formulate the psychoanalysis/law relation. Topics to be worked through may include the distinction between property rights and personal rights; the concept of the body as the seat of personality in both psychoanalysis and the law of assault and battery; psychic pain in psychoanalysis and actionable mental injury in tort law; informed consent and the nature of the legal contract between analyst and analysand in the psychoanalytic process; defamation; discrimination; the role of the state in the practice of involuntary commitment under mental health law; the role of the state in the law of medical assistance in dying; free association in psychoanalysis and freedom of expression in constitutional law; children’s rights and the psychoanalytic concept of the helplessness of the human infant.

In our study of particular areas of law, we would aspire throughout (a) to identify junctures at which legal propositions or presuppositions about the person call for psychological elaboration; (b) to investigate on that basis the psychoanalytic contribution to the analysis of those particular areas of law and of the function and meaning of law in structuring relations both between and within persons; and (c) to emphasize not only the autonomy but also the dependence and vulnerability of the person on and in the sphere of social relations. The central question to be addressed is whether and how a psychoanalytic understanding of the formation of personality can contribute to the elucidation and critique of the idea of the juridical person and the nature of the wrong(s) that the person might suffer.