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What we have tried to present in this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry is an experiment in how psychoanalysis can flourish in undergraduate education. Although psychoanalysis is taught in many venues at colleges and universities, the experiment of a college course being taught at a psychoanalytic institute is, we believe, unique both in the world and the history of psychoanalysis. We hope that the presentation of student responses to the Chicago analysts and some of their papers will provide strong evidence for how meaningful such a course can be for undergraduate students.
However, the teaching of psychoanalysis at the undergraduate level is also vital for the discipline of psychoanalysis itself, for it not only gives an added dimension to the scope and importance of the discipline but provides it with a connection to youth, a connection that, if fostered, could supply vibrant energy and novel ideas to the discipline. However, the main reason to try to foster interconnections between psychoanalytic institutions and undergraduate colleges and universities is that it grants psychoanalysis a profound legitimation, one that it sorely needs, given how it has been attacked and dismissed over the past half century, especially by psychology departments in American universities and colleges. As a counter to this dismissive attack, we have hoped to show how and why the concepts and ideas of psychoanalysis can be and are deeply meaningful for undergraduate students.
The program at Colorado College is exceptional in having psychoanalysis as an organized field of study (the minor) and in exposing students to the living discipline as it is practiced today by contemporary psychoanalysts; however, it is hardly the only place where psychoanalysis is being taught at the undergraduate level. In a recent study conducted by Colorado College psychology major Alexandra Appel (the results of which were published in The American Psychoanalyst, vol. 52, n. 3, fall 2018), we found that a number