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Freud and earlier generations of analysts were skeptical about teaching psychoanalysis in the university. They didn't view the university as an institution which embodied the values of objectivity and open inquiry, but saw it as a source of possible distortion and resistance to the findings of their controversial and fledgling discipline. While this sort of defensiveness may have made sense at one time, it also helped create the hermetic and dogmatic culture that has characterized many psychoanalytic institutes. And its continuation only serves to prolong the current crisis of professional psychoanalysis. For its own rejuvenation, our discipline must open itself to a broad interchange with the larger intellectual and scientific community.
At the same time as the profession of psychoanalysis has been experiencing a profound crisis, analysis as a non-clinical, academic subject has been growing in the university—flourishing in the newer cross-disciplinary fields such as Cultural Studies, Women's' Studies, Gender Studies, and Literary Theory. And here and there, it is even making its way into philosophy departments. Indeed, a new field of psychoanalytic studies—in which the members of this panel are involved—has even emerged over the last decade.
All of these developments are to be applauded. They can only help to move psychoanalysis away from the narrow pragmatic orientation of a professional guild, which characterized it for many years, back toward its original calling as a broadly based cultural movement. Nevertheless, there are still many vexing questions about the role of psychoanalysis in the university, and I would like to address two of them today. The first concerns the problem of transference, and the second, the problem of professional cultures.
(1) If we take education in its broadest sense—as character formation—then University learning and clinical psychoanalysis are both educational enterprises. Yet, they each seek to accomplish their educational goals in a