Performing the Imaginative Variation: Using Buffy to Teach Sartre

I’ve been teaching psychology for over 20 years. Like most psychology undergraduates, I was attracted to the discipline because it seemed likely to offer me some answers to the questions I had about why people do the things they do and how their experiences affect them. And like most psyachology undergraduates I was somewhat dismayed to find that much of the psychology I was taught seemed to have little to say about what it was like to be a human being, to be a person. So in my own teaching I have tried, wherever possible, literally to ‘bring psychology to life’, to show how the subject matter is indeed exciting and directly relevant to the lives of my students.This also helps when the subject matter is difficult. Psychology often involves explaining complex theories that, on the surface of it, seem and to have little connection with the business of life, so that illustrating them with examples from experiences that we all share and can recognise is a good way of making them accessible