What is the Future of Psychoanalysis in the Academy?

Recently I was teaching Freud's essay ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, and its words, though addressing the violence of World War I, seemed to be uncannily relevant to our contemporary moment: the befuddling confusion of living through a historical upheaval, the triumph of libidinal impulses over economic self-interest, the unconscionable results of a social contract in which states visit extreme violence on populations around the world, the preponderance of suffering, and the increase in global death tolls in spite of historical promises of the good life, promises made by the ‘world-dominating nations of white race’ now engaged in mass destruction. Disillusionment reigns, but Freud cautions against thinking of one's own historical period as exceptional, and such caution is salutary for us now.

Does psychoanalysis have a future in the academy? One hesitates to imagine a future at all in these disillusioned days. The only effectual oracular domain has long been taken over by the soothsayers of high finance, and even they seem reticent. While it is no surprise that globalization did not deliver the brave new world it had promised, it does come as a shock that the revolutionary demands of decolonization and civil rights movements, even in their modulated and anodyne forms such as the neoliberal rhetoric of ‘diversity and inclusion’ are being so decisively repudiated across the globe by populist right-wing movements. Resentment and discontent seem the order of the day, no matter what your political commitments. Everyone feels objectively vulnerable even as the distribution of vulnerability becomes more acutely differential than ever, not only due to the usual business of making war but also due to the intensification of ecological disasters. If psychoanalysis has a future in the academy, it will be due to its ongoing and incomplete project of understanding how people, individually but also collectively, live in the face of finitude. It is death i