Jeffrey Brooks

“Wherever I go I find a poet has been there before me,” admitted the famed father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. I’m inclined to agree, though the priests often got there even before the poets, and by the time the philosophers and psychologists arrived all the shrimp cocktail was usually eaten. Which is why I approach the humanities—whether poetry and the arts, or philosophy, or religion—as a sort of all-you-can-eat buffet where there’s a bit of everything for everybody.

My own interest in what it means to be human, and more specifically, what it means to be a poor college student acquiring a heavy debt, began as a psychology major at Texas Tech University. Once I earned my BA, I wandered Europe for awhile, further contemplating these questions. Among the crooked arches and cracked paintings, I began to realize these artifacts offered a sort of psychoanalysis of the human race. In 2000, I completed my MA in the University of Texas at Dallas’s interdisciplinary humanities program, where the focus of my research was on the intersections between the social sciences and the humanities.

Why, for example, must historians use the techniques of fiction writers when trying to convey the truth of the past? Or, how can psychologists better understand creativity when it, by definition, transcends conventional understanding? Or, what does any of this have to do with the fact that I can’t afford to fill the tank of my car? So, Freud’s observation has spurred me on to consult the poets and painters and composers as well as the psychologists and anthropologists on these matters. I now ask these questions as a humanities professor here, where I’ve taught since the fall of 2005. I also teach a college-level psychology course to high school students, and I play keyboard and guitar in a blues-rock band so that I may sample the buffet for myself.