Introduction

It is unlikely that it was ever easy to teach college students psychoanalytic material or about the practice of psychoanalysis. Instructors who undertake to do so today, however, face challenges that seldom beset our predecessors or our colleagues in other fields. No doubt psychoanalytic ideas have always made those newly introduced to them uncomfortable, but is there another disciplinary tradition in which the professor must begin the semester rebutting the notion that its premises and founder have been summarily “debunked”? Given the frequency with which students tend to assume that the adjective “Freudian” is a simple synonym of “sexual,” it is hard to avoid teaching from a defensive crouch. How do we counter or circumvent the reflexive rejection or belittlement of Freud that a century of bad jokes and backlash have bred into our popular culture?

And as if that's not bad enough, anyone who wishes to teach psychoanalytic material in an institution of higher learning today must also contend with the academic triumphalism of psychopharmaceutical, neuroscientific, and behavioral approaches to human (un)happiness. Much as contemporary psychoanalytic practitioners, especially those working within an eclectic framework, may welcome insights derived from non-psychodynamic sources, their institutional representatives tend not to return the favor. It is the rare university Psychology Department that makes space for students to learn about the vital and still-evolving intellectual and therapeutic traditions associated with psychoanalysis. Because of this virtual institutional lockout, psychoanalytic thought tends to find its home in the nooks and crannies of university structures, in places like English and Film departments.

Despite the dismissiveness, divisiveness, and sometimes less-than-hospitable institutional conditions, however, many of us continue to teach psychoanalytic texts and principles to undergraduates. We do this because our young students hunger for the kind o