Conceptual and historical issues in psychology (CHIPS)
Course essay

Title

What is the relationship between Freud’s “Project for a scientific psychology” and psychoanalytic theory?

Word limit
1000 words

This includes the title. A reference section is NOT needed. You would not give one in a written exam answer either.
In text referencing like “According to Freud: “ is enough

Deadline
Friday 19 April at 15:00. Hand in via Blackboard

Rationale

In previous years second year students have often told us that, because most of the exams in first and second year are based on multiple choice or short note questions, they feel somewhat unprepared for writing essays under exam conditions. As the CHIPS exam (as well as the exams for many third year course units) is essay based, we have introduced a short course essay for CHIPS to give you some more practice in writing essays.

The CHIPS essay is supposed to reflect at least some aspects of exam essay writing. This is why there is only a short time between the essay title being announced and the subsequent hand-in of the essay. We cannot, of course, replicate exam conditions exactly with a course essay, but the fact that you are under some (small) time pressure to get the essay done is again intended to reflect some aspects of an exam (albeit to a very limited extent).

In order to get the most out of this assignment, we would encourage you to time your essay writing. The essays that you will face in the CHIPS exam (3 essays in 2 hours) should take you about 40 minutes each to write. We therefore would recommend that you spend about this amount of time doing the course essay. You will probably want to spend a bit more time afterwards tidying up your essay, but the initial writing of it should be done against the clock.

I have looked at exam essays from previous years to find out how long they are. Good essays (with first class marks) have tended to be between 750 and 1000 words. The upper word…