School Of PsychologyMadness and CultureWestern Sydney University Unit Code: 101201.1
Discipline: PSYCHOLOGY
Student Contribution Band: 1
Level: 4
Credit Points: 10
Equivalent Units
100548 - Notions of Madness
Unit Enrolment Restrictions
This unit is restricted to students enrolled in courses 1500 Bachelor of Psychology and 1502 Postgraduate Diploma of Psychology, 1554 Graduate Certificate in Analytical Psychology and 1555 Master of Analytical Psychology.
About this Unit
This academic unit is designed to provide an opportunity for students to ask provocative questions about madness, health and therapy in familiar cultural contexts and discover some imaginative ways of addressing them. The tradition of Analytical Psychology sees the recovery of the imagination as part of its therapeutic task. It is a way of taking seriously the place and function of dreams and ideals as a source of social inspiration. The focus of the unit is thoroughly psychological, but our purposes are less about the goal of 'sanity' via the clinic than the struggle to consider the health of diverse aspects of Australian culture. The domains of this work may include contemporary politics, the environment, public policy, intercultural communication, religion, workplaces, arts, law, media and the academy. Distinctions are made between psychotic madness and the madness of borderline states, individual madness and cultural madness, normal madness and the madness of the normal. The mutually shaping relationship of culture and madness will be emphasized.