Getting Our Ideas Across: Three Very Different Views

Freud never said it would be easy getting our ideas across. Quite the contrary: the obstacles to being usefully heard, either in the consulting room or in the larger world, stand as the essential challenge in our psychoanalytic enterprise. We are consumed with finding out what is actually heard when we speak. However, we have also inherited the illusion that we are the profession of expert communicators—If we can't do it, no one can. In truth, we need all the help we can get, as analysts, as educators, and as purveyors of psychoanalytic knowledge in the marketplace of ideas. As purveyors of psychoanalytic knowledge, we can find our voices ignored, the value of our wares dismissed. Interest in psychoanalysis these days is quite paradoxical: in some ways we are a robust part of the culture's deep understanding of the life of the mind and its problems and treatments, while in other ways we are “old hat”—irrelevant, naive, unproven. Students at every level—from undergraduates to the candidates in our institutes—are no longer content to simply absorb received wisdom. They have become a challenging audience.

This issue's Education Section offers three very different explorations of the problems we face, as analysts and analytic educators, in getting our ideas across, of who our audiences are, and of the purposes to which psychoanalytic ideas may be applied.

In “Access to Psychoanalytic Ideas in American Undergraduate Institutions,” Jonathan Redmond and Michael Shulman present a survey undertaken to determine the availability of psychoanalytic knowledge in the course curricula of major U.S. colleges and universities. With financial support from the American Psychoanalytic Association's Task Force on Undergraduate Education and the International Psychoanalytical Association, the authors conducted a research project designed to answer the following questions: What knowledge of psychoanalysis is offered to undergraduates at 150 of the best institutions in the country? Where, in