EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

WORK / WRITING / ARTICLES RELATED - ARTICLE
TEACHING/DEPRESSION
In The Scholar and Feminist Online (Spring, 2006)

From a conference in honor of Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Columbia University, 2005.

This is a wide-ranging exploration of teacher, student, activist, and psychotherapy identities, using Silvan Tomkins’ ideas on “depressiveness” and Melanie Klein’s concept of a “depressive position,” along with consideration of several scenes from Sedgwick’s book, A Dialogue on Love. She notes that “sometimes I feel like my students’ analyst; other times, floundering all too visibly in my helplessness to evoke language from my seminar, I feel like a patient being held out on by 20 psychoanalysts at once.”

You can read the article here.

Transcripts of two additional comments are here and here. (The video recordings of these comments are not currently available.)