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The Number of University Professors deeply invested in psychoanalytic thought has not changed much, it seems. But their affiliations have. A few decades ago, they belonged mostly to departments of psychiatry and psychology. No longer. Now they reside mostly in departments of literature.
In a way, this change is an irony of intellectual history. Freud was aware of this potential, but ambivalent about it (Berman, 1993, pp. 5-6). He wrote:
I have not always been a psychotherapist' it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own
Clearly, in Freud's time “the serious stamp of science” was crucial for public acceptance, hence his wish to define psychoanalysis as a natural science. Our generation is more skeptical about the scientific claims for objectivity and rationality, and the option of aligning psychoanalysis with the arts and humanities is more acceptable to us. Moreover, the distancing between psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and the pressure in the mental health system toward shorter and more symptom-oriented psychotherapies, leave the academic domains of literature, arts, and philosophy as a freer haven where a patient search for unconscious communications and meanings is legitimized and cherished.
Some psychoanalytically minded academicians eventually became clinicians themselves, aided by analytic training centers open to people from a variety of scholarly backgrounds. Among the notable examples are Christopher Bollas in London and Julia Kristeva in Paris. Others do not practice analysis clinically, but their vast knowledge and sophistication help in promoting and enlivening analytic thought. A notable contributor in recent years is Peter L. Rudnytsky, who taught in