Cultural Marxism, Institutional Alliances, and Teaching Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic and Psycho-Social Studies in the United Kingdom

What follows is a transcript of the plenary panel on Psychoanalytic and Psycho-Social Studies in the United Kingdom held at the eighth annual APCS conference at Rutgers last November. I think it felt quite strange for us to be invited over in some sense because we spent several hours talking about ourselves, our institutions, our projects, and sometimes our anecdotal experiences of teaching psychoanalysis in higher education, rather than delivering academic papers. In other words, we were not quite sure what we were going to do and say. What transpired, we feel, was a very constructive dialogue between ourselves and colleagues in APCS and from around the world. Some very important issues were raised about the relationship between practitioners and academics, between the vocational and the purely theoretical. It was also noted that there were quite distinctive differences between projects and departments in Britain and those in North America—not least, the long tradition in the United Kingdom of cultural Marxism, social administration, and social history which forms a backdrop to the teaching of psychoanalysis in many sociology departments. I think that probably the most important aspect or theme that emerged from the evening was to see difference and differences between institutions as a positive thing which we can learn from, and help each other develop programs and links. This panel, for example, is entirely Kleinian in its psychoanalytic persuasion, but there was a noticeable lack of disagreement between psychoanalytic schools of thought and more of an emphasis on the interpenetration of psychoanalysis and the social and political. This, for me, has been one of the major themes (and attractions) of JPCS over the last few years, and in some sense this gelled on that evening at Rutgers last year.

This paper is set out in the discursive style of the panel presentation. I start by giving an overview of the institutions and people involved in the panel. Kar