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Psychoanalysis and education are two of Freud's “impossible professions” (the third is government), impossible because, as he ruefully noted in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937/1964), “one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfactory results” (p. 248). The impossibility becomes greater, if possible, when the two professions are combined, each serving to complement and illuminate the other. Max Cavitch's important new book, Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present, explores the vicissitudes of this fraught relationship, highlighting how each attempt to fuse the two has ended in failure but also showing how, as the subtitle implies, the future may be more promising.
Max Cavitch is uniquely qualified to write about psychoanalysis and the university. An associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), he is the founding editor of the blog Psyche on Campus, which has more than 17,000 international readers. The blog earned the 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is the author of several books, including American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Cavitch, 2007).
As Cavitch notes in the Introduction, the time is right for a book on this subject. “The precariousness of both psychoanalysis and the university makes this an auspicious moment for overcoming mutual resistances” (p. 4). We can infer from this sentence that Cavitch uses psychoanalytic
Jeffrey Berman. English Department, University at Albany, Albany, NY 12222
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concepts to explain the tension between psychoanalysts and educators. Freud himself, as Cavitch documents in Chapter 1, “Psychoanalysis and Education,” was both interested in and wary of psychoanalysis being taught at the university. If one had to found a college of psychoanalysis, Freud (1926/1959) wrote in “The Question of Lay Analysis,” much would have to be taught by th