Bridging the Academy and the Clinic

In this issue we inaugurate a new section, the Academic Exchange, whose aim is to foster productive dialogue between the academy and the clinic. Beginning with Freud, and continuing to the present day, there has been a great deal of interest among psychoanalysts in subjects traditionally pursued by academic scholars. The many forays into the humanities and the social sciences in Freud's voluminous oeuvre demonstrate the wide range of his interests. In acknowledging insights from sources outside his practice (for example, from the humanities and social sciences), as well as in applying clinical insight to areas outside the clinic, Freud (1907) provided an example that has been followed by subsequent generations of psychoanalytic writers, as evidenced in JAPA and other publications. Since its inception, JAPA has published papers on “applied psychoanalysis”; recently an entire issue (51/4) was devoted to that pursuit. However, since the pursuit is most often unidirectional (for example, a psychoanalyst writes about a particular artist or work of art), it may create an impression not of a genuine dialogue but of the appropriation of other fields by psychoanalysis (Meltzer 1988).

For their part, academic scholars have been reading Freud and applying his interpretive insights in their own work. In some areas, such as feminist literary criticism, the academic use of Freudian theory has cycled back into its psychoanalytic source, instigating profound changes in how clinicians view female psychological development in their patients (Meltzer 1999). However, when we examine the uses of psychoanalytic theory by academic scholars we find that their focus has overwhelmingly been on Freud's work, with far less use of insights from later clinical theorists. I believe there are several reasons for this academic preference, for which we must accept some responsibility. The academic, nonclinical Ph.D. is a teaching and research degree, the culmination of many years of training in textu