Between Tradition and Change: Teaching Psychoanalysis Within Psychology and Psychiatry

Psychoanalysis is a difficult topic to teach within the present intellectual landscape of psychology and medicine. My own point of departure is teaching psychoanalytic psychology and psychoanalytic therapy within the departments of clinical psychology, personality psychology, and developmental psychology, and also within the context of postgraduate clinical training for psychologists and physicians in psychoanalytic child psychotherapy.

The first three of these fields are to a large extent dominated by a quantitative empiricist attitude. The “soft” data of clinical experience are regarded with mistrust, and theoretical research is often regarded as mere speculation. Psychoanalysis is seen at best as unscientific, at worst as scientific fraud. In the present climate of evidence-based medicine and clinical psychology, psychoanalysis has also got a tough match. It is mostly regarded as ineffective, time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the psychoanalytic movement is often seen as a kind of religious cult, as a group uncritically worshipping Freud and his scriptures, isolating itself from the knowledge and ideas within rest of psychology and medicine.

Does teaching psychoanalysis, then, sound like a fun job? Surprisingly, it can be very gratifying. It is a topic that stimulates a lot of interest also because of all its negative publicity. And psychoanalysis is a topic that feels different to the students; it is filling an empty space within fields that often neglect the complexity and ambiguity of our major themes of life.

One of the first great surprises for an audience unfamiliar with psychoanalysis is the fact that psychoanalysis today is such a pluralistic field. It consists of classical Freudian theory, ego psychology, Kleinian psychoanalysis, object relations theory, self-psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, and the latest new-comer-mentalization theory. And even within these schools, there are manifold viewpoints and