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Many of the articles in this issue come from the APCS conference on “Education and the Unconscious” held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in November 2000. Throughout the conference, many of the participants continued to return to the question of what psychoanalysis can tell us about the fundamental relations between teachers and students. This special issue on Psychoanalysis and Education helps to address this question by examining such topics as the role of death, mourning, and anxiety in the learning process; the problems of student resistances and teacher burn-out; the conflict between the personal and the social in psychoanalysis and education; the unconscious aspects of the teaching relationship; and the effect of new technologies on the teaching of writing and other academic subjects.
Instead of outlining and paraphrasing these important essays, I want to focus on the psychopathology of everyday academic life. While my examination will be centered on the field of English Studies, I believe that my analysis and conclusions are valid for most areas of higher education.
My central hypothesis is that most English departments are dominated by a group structure shaped by many of the main features of a narcissistic personality disorder: a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a strong need for admiration, and lack of empathy (DSM-IV). My goal here is not to label people or to call people names, especially since I am a member of this group; rather, I want to explore a shared psychology and offer some possible advice for intervention strategies.
The narcissistic personality structure is one of the most difficult to change because of an intense underlying sense of vulnerability and an equally intense system of defenses. In order to fully grasp this structure, one must realize that the paradoxical nature of narcissism is defined by a simultaneous coupling of grandiosity with an unconscious sense of su