End of Semester (Blues)

Michelle and Albert here. We just finished a semester of teaching, phew! I taught two courses this semester, one on creative expression, at a women’s juvenile detention center in Taipei and the other, on storytelling and the law, at National Chengchi University, where I teach at the International College of Innovation. (I hope to write about the former, but I need to sort out my thoughts about it.) Albert taught a course called “Radical European Thought,” which was basically a modern intellectual history class. (“It was a mistake to end on Freud,” he told me, shaking his head sadly, when he came home from the last day of the semester. “Freud’s too pessimistic.”) We have been thinking a lot about Freud and how his insights take on a new resonance in middle …