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In this short paper I want to try to conceptualize how the field of psychoanalysis, both as an intellectual, scholarly practice and as a clinical procedure, could be most effectively incorporated into a contemporary research university. This will necessarily entail discussing some of the reasons why such a move is necessary or at least worth thinking about; addressing some of the problems and obstacles that stand in the way of a smooth integration of psychoanalysis into the university setting; and finally picturing a new sort of relationship between psychoanalysis and the university that might lead to a renascence of our field with something like the excitement, fascination, explanatory power, and sheer pleasure that seem to us, perhaps nostalgically, to have characterized its early days, and perhaps also that accounted for our own initial attraction to it in the first place.
As for the reasons why this project calls to us, I can be brief. Organized psychoanalysis is in a crisis of confidence, in itself and in its relation to the public it serves. It is no longer able to look to the medical profession and to the medical schools to serve as its professional and institutional home and protector, nor does it enjoy the widespread faith in its legitimacy as an explanatory system or its efficacy as a therapy that it once did. The response of organized psychoanalysis in this country, as represented by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), has been to very rapidly repeal the requirement that candidates for psychoanalytic training must, with a few rare exceptions, be MD physicians with a residency in psychiatry, and to open access to training not only to PhD's in Clinical Psychology, but also to a variety of non-MD mental health professionals and practitioners, such as nurses, social workers, family counselors, and so on.
While this represents a liberalization of psychoanalysis and an expansion of its scope in a clinical direction, it does nothing in particular to a