Chapter 4 On Teaching Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic teaching at its best opens a space for thinking and dreaming in situations in which the (understandable) impulse is to close that space. To fill that space as a teacher is to preach, to proselytize, to perpetuate dogma; not to fill it is to create conditions in which one may become open to previously inconceivable possibilities. With regard to teaching clinical psychoanalysis, a central goal of analytic teaching is the enhancement of the analyst’s capacity to dream those aspects of his experience in the clinical situation that he has not previously been able to dream.

The observations concerning analytic teaching that I offer in this chapter are drawn primarily from my experiences in teaching two weekly seminars, each currently in its twenty-seventh year. I will begin by describing the setting in which I have taught and then will discuss the following four aspects of analytic teaching that I have found to be of particular importance in conveying what I view as essential qualities of psychoanalysis: (1) a way of reading analytic writing; (2) clinical teaching as a form of collective dreaming; (3) reading poetry and fiction as experiences in “ear training”; and (4) the art of learning to forget what one has learned.

In 1982, I began to teach two weekly hour-and-a-half seminars at my home. I co-led one of these with my colleague and friend, Bryce Boyer, until his death in 2001. Both seminars are open-ended and continue year-round. The format of the seminars has changed minimally over the decades. Three or four consecutive seminar meetings in which a paper is discussed alternate with three or four meetings in

which a seminar member presents current analytic work with one of his or her patients. During the clinical meetings, the presenter reads process notes from the most recent session or two, and includes as much reverie and other countertransference experience as he or she is comfortable in providing.

The membership of the seminars has become