The academic researchers integration of clinical psychodynamics with a university career is an alloy different from the metal of most psychoanalysts. Coming to analysis from the social sciences or the humanities, researchers must integrate elements from two quite disparate worlds. In addition to embracing clinical psychoanalysis, they commit a significant part of their professional life to frames of reference, concepts, and teaching and research agendas defined by their academic field and the culture of the university. Their engagement with psychoanalysis occurs only after a socialization process shaped by a graduate school apprenticeship and a university career marked by frequent peer review in disciplines that set their own rigorous standards for academic promotion and competitive external grants. Psychoanalytic researchers, if they wish to remain active and relevant in their academic discipline, must continue to address worldwide audiences of colleagues and elite networks of peers whose attitudes toward psychoanalysis range from the skeptical to the downright hostile. Each discipline imparts to its initiates its own style of thought, historically conditioned encoded language, research traditions, cognitive assumptions, canons of evidence, and ways of perceiving the world, just as do clinical psychology and psychiatry; Much of the academic's most difficult and most fruitful work is the translation, into the discourse of another discipline, of insights and understandings gained in the clinical setting and formulated in the language and concepts of psychoanalysis. Rendering these insights comprehensible and making them integral to their new context is a job of structural fitting that requires deep conversance with both fields.
Academic research analysts in California function under the state's Research Psychoanalysts Law, the passage of which in 1977 marked the first time in history that psychoanalysis was legitimated by a state (Research Psychoanalysts, California Business and Professions Code, Division 2, Chapter 5.1, sections 2529–2530). The law names The American's four California institutes — Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Southern California — as authorized to train analysts for “teaching, training, or research.” Graduates are entitled to call themselves psychoanalysts and to engage in the practice of psychoanalysis. The regulations of the law set the University of California as the institutional academic standard of teaching and research affiliation.
In 1992 a group of University of California research analysts created the UC Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium (UCIPC) to discuss the work of applying psychoanalytic research in the humanities and social sciences, as well as problems encountered in teaching psychoanalysis in the university setting. The founding Organizing Committee, chaired by Peter Loewenberg, with Nancy Chodorow and Robert Nemiroff as cochairs, gained the support of the Office of the University President and various campus provosts and deans, which amounted to formal recognition of the role of psychoanalysis in the University's curriculum and research agenda. The first meeting of UCIPC took place in May 1993, at UCLA's Lake Arrowhead Conference Center. Thirty participants from the university's ten campuses each contributed a brief “think piece” describing how they use psychoanalysis in their work, in their teaching, and in the culture of academia. Eschewing formal presentations, the UCIPC conferences instead feature informal workshops focused on the interest of the group as expressed in their think pieces. Workshop topics have included “psychoanalysis and…” racism, nationalism, gender and sexuality, trauma, the developmental line, self psychology, Marxism, and classroom teaching. The 1994 consortium was chaired by Robert Nemiroff; in 1995 it was cochaired by Ursula Mahlendorf and E. Victor Wolfenstein; in 1996 by Melissa Nelken and Susan Derwin. The fourth annual meeting will be held April 19–21 at Lake Arrowhead, where fifty faculty members and graduate students from ten UC campuses, representing sixteen fields in the humanities, the social sciences, and the biobehavioral sciences, will participate.
UCIPC is a unique interdisciplinary endeavor. It is the only place in the university, and perhaps in the world, where social scientists, humanists, psychiatrists, and biobehavioral scientists talk with one another in a common psychoanalytic idiom. This is because they share a background of extensive psychoanalytic training and clinical work that makes discourse about theoretical and empirical issues in psychoanalytic language possible. In addition to the annual intercampus conference, scholars in Berkeley hold an Object Relations, Psychoanalysis, and Literature Workshop throughout the year. In Los Angeles the Southern California Academic Research Psychoanalysis Study Group holds monthly interdisciplinary meetings. A product of these meetings is a research and teaching collaboration that has resulted in joint intercampus psychoanalytic teaching. The regional study groups and the annual consortium conference are among the rare forums in the UC system where true interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences, the humanities, and the biobehavioral sciences occurs. The success of the UCIPC, in which many research graduates of institutes affiliated with The American participate, is a tribute to over three decades of commitment to interdisciplinary research training within The American and its California institutes.
The California setting is marked by two inspired efforts outside the university to bring psychoanalysis into contact with fields working the same areas of research. The Robert J. Stoller Foundation (see article, p. 21), created to honor the memory of a mourned colleague who himself worked to foster interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, joined with UCIPC to promote psychoanalytic teaching and research in the university setting. The foundation grants a Stoller Scholarship for a graduate student to attend the consortium meeting, supports the Southern California Academic Research Psychoanalytic Study Group, and sponsors the annual Robert Stoller Memorial Lecture at UCLA, now in its fourth year. In 1993 Nancy Chodorow, the first Stoller Lecturer, spoke on the topic “Gender as a Personal Construction.” In 1994 William McGrath delivered “Demons, Witches, and Saints: Freud's Path to Psychoanalysis,” and in 1995 Peter Gay presented “Sex, Repression, and Blue Shadows: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.” The 1996 Stoller Lecturer will be Dominick LaCapra of Cornell University, whose presentation, “History and Memory: In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” will be made at the UCLA-NPI auditorium on October 18.
The Stoller Foundation also sponsors predoctoral and postdoctoral thousand-dollar essay prizes in psychoanalysis and culture, whose winners are invited to present their papers at a scientific meeting. The 1994 essay prizes were
Mel Mandel, TAP associate editor, served as special section editor for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.
awarded to Jeffrey Prager for “Self Reflections: Racial Subordination and the African-American Writer” and to Leslie Ann Horton for “Humiliation and Triumph in the Analysis of an Anti-Witch Youth Rebellion in Cameroon.” In 1995 the postdoctoral essay prize was awarded to Eli Zaretsky for “From Victorianism to Modernity: Bisexuality and the Ambivalent Legacy of Psychoanalysis” and the predoctoral prize to Sarah Caldwell for “Homosexual Fellatio Fantasy in a South Indian Ritual Tradition.” Jurors for the prizes have been Allen Johnson (chair), Gerald Aronson, and Albert D. Hutter in 1994 and Janet Adelman (chair), Mardi Horowitz, and Jeffrey Prager in 1995. The officers of the Stoller Foundation are Maimon Leavitt, president; Peter Loewenberg, vice president; Melvin Mandel, secretary; Lee Shershow, treasurer; Sybil Stoller, counselor; and Paul Benson, publicity chair.
The Max Hayman Endowment of the UCLA department of psychiatry reaches out to faculty and graduate students on all campuses of the university, and to the many departments that sponsor research, provide jurors, and write letters of reference, to bring a psychoanalytic focus to interdisciplinary research. The Hayman Endowment has also provided generous aid to UCIPC and established two five thousand dollar university-wide graduate fellowships on the dissertation level for research on the Holocaust, genocide, ethnicity, and racism. Recent Hayman fellows and their projects are Leslie Horton, medical anthropology, for “Eating Hearts: Witchcraft as Soul Murder”; Jeffrey Bass, anthropology, for “Anxiety, Identity, and Psychotherapy in Buenos Aires”; and Barbara Frantz, Germanic literature, for “Gertrud Kolmar's Prose: Stories about Inferiority, Violence, Social Impotence, Maternal Bonds, and the Boundaries of the Self.” Members of the Hayman Award juries are Robert Hill (chair), Helene Moglen, and Judith Hughes in 1994; Robert Nemiroff (chair), Jill Kowalik, and Justin Call in 1995; and Fitz John Porter Poole (chair), Ursula Mahlendorf, and Daniel Rancour-Laferriere in 1996. The fellowships have involved faculty and students on all campuses of the university; they have drafted proposals, written letters of reference, and served on juries, thus creating a long-term multiplier effect vis-à-vis psychoanalytic research. Graduate fellowships at the dissertation level are generative of decades of fruitful research and teaching careers. Current and past trustees of the Hayman Endowment are Fawzy I. Fawzy, Martin Hayman, Max Hayman, Peter Loewenberg, Gary Tischler, and Louis J. West.
With psychoanalytic thought well represented on campus, the influence of analytic perspectives in the classroom is steadily growing. Today at UCLA, research graduates with clinical experience teach in ten humanities and social science departments and professional schools. At USC, a minor in psychoanalytic studies has been established through the collaboration of the College of Letters, the Law Center, the Cinema School, and the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCPI). The effort has been pioneered by Mauricio Mazon, chair of American Studies at USC. Psychoanalytic activity on the campuses has also led to programs sponsored jointly by institutes and universities. One such program was a Stanford University conference, “Psychoanalysis and Culture: The Contributions of Sigmund Freud,” chaired by the late Roy A. Ginsburg in January 1991. In the same year UC-Irvine sponsored a symposium on the Freud artifacts entitled “Excavations and Their Objects: Freud/Art/History,” directed by Stephen Barker. Last May Maureen Katz chaired a conference on psychoanalysis and ethnic intolerance, cosponsored by the San Francisco Institute and UC-Berkeley, entitled “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Neofascism and Anti-immigration Politics: Trends in Europe and the United States.” Finally, just this January, an historical symposium, “Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles: A Case of Cultural Transfer,” was put together by Jill Kowalik at UCLA.
The most aggressive and successful of psychoanalytic academic research training programs is that of SCPI. A crucial feature in setting the supportive tone of SCPI training is the material assistance offered candidates by the Eisenstein-Gabe Research Training Fellowship Fund (see the article by Edwin C. Peck in this issue of TAP). Over the past three decades thirty-two academic researchers from UCLA, USC, and Cal Tech have completed or are currently in psychoanalytic training at SCPI. The researchers and their fields are Diana Barkan-Kormos (history of science), Gordon M. Berger (Japanese studies), Louis Breger (psychology), Robert Dallek (history), Esther Dreifuss-Katan (art therapy), Stuart A. Ende (English), Janet R. Hadda (Yiddish), Patrick Healey (education), Robert Hill (history), Douglas Hollan (anthropology), Leslie Horton (anthropology), Albert D. Hutter (English and comparative literature), Allen Johnson (anthropology), Lorraine Kaufman (anthropology), Benjamin Kilborne (anthropology), Peter Loewenberg (history and political psychology), Jay Martin (English), Mauricio Mazon (history), Herbert Morris (philosophy and law), Marina Pianca (Latin American studies), George Pigman (classics), Jeffrey Prager (sociology), Andrew Rolle (history), Janice Rule (theater), Talma Scherson (biology), Bettina Soestwohner (English), Fredelle Spiegel (religious studies), Louise Tyler (education), Marquis Wallace (social welfare), Richard Weiss (history), William J. Winslade (law and philosophy), and E. Victor Wolfenstein (political science).
The Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute has graduated or is currently training, from UCLA and USC, Joseph Aguayo (history and psychology), Peter Berton (political science), Jerome Cohen (social welfare), David J. Fisher (history), Grant Fraser (mathematics), Christoph Heinecke (psychology), Jill Kowalik (German), Martin Levine (law), Ellyn Saks (law), and Estelle Shane (education). Research academics from UC-Berkeley, the Hastings School of Law, and San Francisco State who are training at the San Francisco Institute include Nancy Chodorow (sociology), Linda Donley-Reid (anthropology), Naomi Janowitz (religion), Enrico Jones (psychology), Melissa Nelken (law), Philburn Ratoosh (psychology), Neil Smelser (sociology), and Michael Zimmerman (English). The San Diego Psychoanalytic Institute is training or has graduated, from UC-San Diego and UC-Irvine, Judith Hughes (history), Nadine Levinson (dentistry), and Melford E. Spiro (anthropology).
While the metal poured from the cauldron of psychoanalysis and academia may have a luster different from that of more conventional careers devoted full-time to clinical analysis, this new alloy, tempered by the stress of constant pounding, has strength, flex, and a resilience that reflects back on psychoanalysis a warm glow all its own.