Chapter 5. 1974 São Paulo. Brazilian Lectures

Q: What is your opinion with regard to the teaching of psychoanalysis in universities or medical schools? If psychoanalysis is confined to the experience between two people, how can this experience be made use of in large groups?

Bion: The difficulty is to know what it is that the university, or the institution which is not psychoanalytic, expects from the analyst. The accounts that I have had in the past from people who have responded to the invitation to make some contribution to the university curriculum appear to be somewhat unhappy. The analyst often seems to find that something is expected of him which is based on a misunderstanding of psychoanalysis. This may be because we have made much more progress than we realize and are, therefore, familiar with a way of thinking and a way of teaching which is considerably separated from the ordinary conventional methods. My experiences of psychoanalytic training were, in fact, very depressing. Like the first railway coaches which were made to look as much like horse-drawn vehicles as possible, I found the whole apparatus of training was just a copy of the methods suitable for conventional training in conventional experience. But as I became more and more acquainted with psychoanalysis, the more utterly unsuitable this seemed. Some of it was due to the fact that we were all tired people, listening to people who were even more tired at the end of a day's hard work, who then fell back on doing what everybody else did. As I sat in small, overcrowded, uncomfortable rooms I thought that this was more suitable as a penitential exercise than anything connected with a cultural activity. And the more I became acquainted with psychoanalysis, the

more frightful this experience seemed to be. I do not feel optimistic about these requests which are made to our institutions, or about the effect it would have on our members. I would not discourage anybody from going to a university, or joining such a course, but on the other hand, I w