This article addresses both the rewards and the daunting complexities of teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates in the USA, where the idea of a university as a site for the cultivation of the life of the mind is under siege. The essay recommends a close critical reading of key Freudian texts, the establishment of a classroom atmosphere of trust, genuine respect for expectable student skepticism, and the capacity to wait as dystonic ideas gradually take hold and reveal their worth. Speed, a ubiquitous feature and a questionable desideratum of twenty-first century US culture, as well as facile cleverness, a desideratum within academia, tell against the psychoanalytic process, which is long, slow, halting, laborious, and painful, but a process that can, at best, open what has heretofore been sealed.