Profile

Charles Elder joined the Basic Program staff in 2000 after almost ten years of undergraduate teaching at the University of Chicago and Valparaiso University. Though trained as a scholar of religion and psychology—and the author of a critical re-examination of Freud and psychoanalytic thought, The Grammar of the Unconscious: The Conceptual Foundations of Psychoanalysis—his interests have shifted in recent years toward philosophy, social and cultural theory, and issues of modernity, especially the relationship between philosophical, literary, and scientific modes of discourse as integral moments in the abiding search for human wisdom. Prior to his return to graduate school in the mid-eighties, he spent a number of years working odd jobs in Alaska and trying (with mixed success) to comprehend directly what philosophers and poets have historically understood by “nature.” In addition to the Basic Program, he continues to teach in the Social Science Core at the University of Chicago and in the Chicago Odyssey Project, a program that provides college-level humanities education to lower-income adults.