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Psychoanalysis is often understood as a medical field with set of practitioners using a therapeutic method to access and transform unconscious psychological propensities and structures in patients. As a medical practice, it really has no place in undergraduate education; however, psychoanalysis is also a rich set of ideas about who we are as human beings, how we function, how we fall ill, what we most need, and what kind of psychological dynamics allows us to live most fully. We feel it is crucial for undergraduate students to be able to learn about these ideas, the most important and powerful set of ideas ever conceived to probe the depths of individual psyches.
The undergraduate college years are, for many students, the time when they will think most deeply and critically about who they are, what direction they want to take in life, and what values are most important to them. They are thinking intensely about profession, sex, gender, sexuality, personal identity, how to be an individual, and what makes life worth living. To do this kind of thinking well, they have to have some notion of what it means to be a human being, what we need to function well, what causes us to malfunction, and what, in fact, gives a depth of happiness to the kind of creatures that we are.
Alas, they often have no resources for thinking about these crucial questions other than the concepts and values of the regnant culture, and, to us, these are, at best, devastatingly shallow and, at worst, offer values that can lead to a profound sense of emptiness, quiet desperation, and dismay that characterizes so many of the adults in today’s culture. It seems to us that we all, but especially the young, need deeper, more complex, more truthful ways of grasping our human souls to construct better lives and a better society, one not so prone to the ravages of mental illness, such as is found in mass shootings, domestic violence, homelessness, and the unchecked narcissism of some of our highest social an