This professor totally looks and sounds like Jack Nicholson LOL.

This course is easy, the grading is straight scale and is based entirely on three writing assignments; Take home Exam I (40%) Take home Exam II (40%) and a self analysis paper (20%) The take home exams basically ask you to answer 4 questions, each answer is expected to be about a page long, you have 5 questions to choose from. The goal of the self-analysis paper is to apply the various theories learned in this course and use them to analyze yourself.

Overall this is a very interesting and enjoyable class which I would highly recommend taking as one of your psych electives.

Final Grade: A-

wonderful professor in teaching what he knows, and he knows a LOT about psychoanalysis. He is reasonable in grading and assignments. However it is almost impossible to track him as his office hours were right after lecture in the lecture room. You have to hover around the lecture room after class to catch him and there are a lot of people waiting for a chance to talk to him. However if you ask him a question about psychoanalysis, you would see that he knows mostly everything on the subject he teaches. Even if he is not sure, he would try to answer you his best and later inform you more about what he found out on the issue. However his choice of TA was horrible. The TA didn't know anything about psychoanalysis and he even admitted to it. If you ask him a question, he cannot answer anything for sure and he sometimes doesn't even know what the professor covered in class. But the professor was good and it was the most interesting major class I took as psych undergrad in UCLA.

I took his course during the summer and really enjoyed it. Professor Kupper's lectures are ok but the material he talks about are very very interesting. Psychoanalysis is the side of psychology in which many researchers turn their back on because it is only theoretical and many theories have been disproved. HOWEVER, these theories are important to psychology and I believe psychoanalysis and attachment theories are important when it comes to developmental psychology because children are very abstract. I truly wish there were more psychoanalysis classes to take.

The class consists of two exams, one midterm and one final. I believe the final is worth more than the midterm (both are based on your lecture notes and the reading; they are short answer questions). You are required to buy three books. I only bought one book (the Freud one) and made copies out of the other two since we don't have many readings on them. You don't have to do all the readings, just take good notes and use the readings as references for clarification when you don't understand what he is talking about. I recommend going to review sessions before the exams. He also gives you a study guide in which most of the questions on the exam will be on. It's not a hard class and very informational.

Professor Kupper himself is a rather average professor. He becomes incredibly repetitive and covers very little material throughout the course. Hence, the class ends up being very easy.

But the course itself...I am a passionate believer that psychology departments could benefit from offering more psychoanalytic classes. When I first entered UCLA as a psych undergrad, this is the kind of thing I thought I'd be studying: Freud, dream analysis, the deeper reaches of the unconscious. It is amazingly interesting to college students, a welcome change of pace from the rigid scientific methods and theories the psych department here brainwashes us with in hopes that we'll pursue a career in research and academia. Why can't there be more of an integrated learning experience between the two disciplines? Psychoanalysis has largely been subjected to literature right now, while psychology is still fighting to prove itself as a worthy scientific discipline. I say drop the hate, give us more elective options like this class so that we can see the traditions our field comes from. There would be no Franz Hall today without the contributions of Freud, Klein, Jung, etc. I feel a little bitter that psychology as taught in a university setting is not at all how I pictured it coming in, they've done everything possible to steer us away from the phenomenal and towards the scientific. At least provide us some options, at least allow us to see both sides of the story so we can begin to bring peace to the two disciplines.