Class Notes

In 2020, as psychoanalytic institutes faced the challenges of a pandemic and anti-racist protest, mass violence and environmental crises, they responded in some cases by reconfiguring the curriculum for training candidates. Courses about the social were designed or if they existed became charged with taking up these challenges. 1 It was at this time I was first invited to teach a course on the social. While I have been practicing as a psychoanalyst for the past 11 years, 7 in private practice, I was, for a much longer time, a Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at CUNY. There, I taught undergraduate and graduate students in courses mostly focused on critical social theories influenced by psychoanalysis, including, feminist theories, queer theories, post-colonial theories, and critical media theories. My psychoanalytic colleagues imagined that this would make my teaching psychoanalytic candidates about the social a good fit. I wasn't as sure.

Approaching teaching tensed between my academic experiences and psychoanalytic thinking and practice, I had questions both personal and institutional. Not only did I wonder what might be pedagogically unique about teaching a course about the social to candidates in psychoanalytic training. I also wondered what I might contribute, given my academic background, to what already was understood to be the social in the field of psychoanalysis. Embarked on this personal and institutional exploration has led me to the reflections I offer here about teaching psychoanalysis in cultural, political, and economic context, as well as about making the relationship of the psyche and the social the sole focus of a course especially in this period of social upheaval. The reflections address the questions raised for me as I began teaching in 2020 as well as draw on my impressions of candidates' experience of my courses taught since then. I have fashioned a composite of experiences that focuses on ambivalence, anxiety, and confusion, as I per