Teaching Psychoanalytic Studies in the UK: The MA in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Tavistock Clinic and the BA (Hons) in Psychosocial Studies at the University of East London

At the “Psychoanalysis across the Disciplines” Conference in November 2001, several academics and psychoanalytic practitioners from the United Kingdom and from across the United States spoke at the plenary sessions about teaching psychoanalysis in their institutions. This short paper about teaching psychoanalysis in Higher Education is based on my contribution in one of the sessions, and reflects my own experiences of teaching in two very different settings in the UK. I teach on an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Tavistock Clinic, and on the Psychosocial Studies undergraduate degree program at the University of East London, which contains a great deal of psychoanalysis. In what follows, I describe the two programs and look at how each involves consideration of some key questions concerning the teaching of psychoanalysis: what kind of a body of knowledge is psychoanalysis? How should we best teach it? What is psychoanalysis for, in the University?1

The MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, housed in the Tavistock Clinic in Hampstead, is a stone's throw from Freud's English home in Maresfield Gardens. It is an affluent, literary, liberal neighborhood full of well-preserved Georgian and Edwardian houses. Something of this sense of privilege and of a secure heritage finds its way into the Tavistock Clinic itself, with photographs in the main corridors of British psychoanalytic luminaries involved with the Clinic, including Wilfred Bion, John Bowlby, and Enid Balint. The Clinic itself, though, is a National Health Service Trust, and is located in a nondescript 1950s utilitarian building that is unusually well-cared for, but smells and feels like a hospital. People coming and going through the doors are a mix of doctors, patients (who might be children, families, adolescents or adults), psychotherapists, and students (the categories are not mutually exclusive). The Trust is the leading public sector mental health training institution in the country and is trying to uphold its