Chapter 1: Stirring the Pot

Allen Siegel’s startling quotation about the Kabbalah, which prefaces this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, brings to sharp focus what appears to be a long-held belief among psychoanalysts that it is neither recommended nor even wise to teach psychoanalysis to the young. Why is this? Is there a prejudice that our students are too naïve or too tender to foist the vagaries of classical drive theory upon them? Or is that they cannot really understand such erudite and shocking material as the workings of unconscious process because they are not yet mature? Is it perhaps that they simply are unprepared to receive and work with psychoanalytic material in a wise and transformational way? What is the problem anyway? And what does it mean, really, to teach this erudite, theoretical material to eighteen to twenty-two year olds? How does one teach it? Are there pitfalls? And what are the benefits?

For me, and I admittedly had a rather peculiar upbringing, psychoanalytic thinking and discourse was dinner-table conversation. My mother, Helen Flanders Dunbar, M.D., was a well-known psychoanalyst who specialized in psychosomatic medicine and was in her full fame as a writer and clinician when I was born. I grew up hearing words like ego, superego, id, and homeostatic equilibrium, as well as listening, at a developmental stage described by Freud as latency, to sometimes quite bizarre conversations at her cocktail parties with other analysts, while I served them hors d’oeuvres. My mother questioned me frequently about the state of my psyche for her own scholarly edification, which sometimes made me feel like a prize guinea pig, but often also proud to be part of the experiment. At any event, my upbringing gave me an early capacity and curiosity for understanding the mysterious theoretical language of psychoanalysis. Later on, as an adolescent, I helped my mother with her research by accompanying her to international conferences and taking notes at sessions she could not attend, in ad