In Harvard Magazine, Alan Stone recently wrote, “As academic psychology becomes more ‘scientific’ and psychiatry becomes more biological, psychoanalysis is being brushed aside.” Critics of psychoanalysis have been proclaiming its demise for years, but Stone's comment, coming as it does from within the psychoanalytic community, indicates that psychoanalysis has become a minority viewpoint. While this trend may shrink the pool of potential candidates, the “demise” of psychoanalytic thinking may be even more evident at the other end of the pipeline: undergraduate education.
Both of us teach psychology at primarily undergraduate institutions. Each academic year we educate several hundred students. It is increasingly evident to us that psychoanalytic ideas are given short shrift in undergraduate education. For example, students arrive with striking misconceptions about psychoanalytic concepts. Our informal observations of students' psychoanalytic ignorance was strikingly corroborated by a questionnaire recently completed by 60 students. Students were asked to describe their conceptions of psychoanalysis — what they thought happened in treatment and its effectiveness.
Many students saw the analyst as an omniscient critic whose main function was to identify patients' defects. Psychoanalysis was frequently confused with psychotherapy in general. A common theme among students' comments was a belief that analysts manipulate patients: “shaping or molding, hypnotizing”; requiring a “regurgitation” of memories and a disinhibition of all emotions. “The word tends to look kind of spooky, conjuring images of Frankenstein.” “I see all kinds of electrodes.” Other comments reflected the familiar image of the cold, withholding, silent analyst, who eschews interest in anything concerning the present. “An individual discusses whatever he chooses with little intervention from the analyst.”
These perceptions are not surprising. Even intellectually sophisticated individuals bring such fantasies into their treatments, but they at least feel sufficiently positive to choose to be analyzed. Many undergraduates have little factual information about psychoanalysis and hold no positive impressions of it.
The main difficulty in educating undergraduates about psychoanalysis is the manner in which academic psychologists often present it. Discussion of psychoanalysis in psychology texts is almost always limited to brief references to Freud, ca. 1915, usually followed by several pages of critiques noting the lack of scientific evidence to support psychoanalysis and a compendium of Freud's alleged personal foibles. In a widely used senior-level psychology text, the section on psychoanalysis ends with a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “[Freud] is so full of fishy thinking, and his charm and the charm of his subject is so great, that you may be easily fooled. … So hang on to your brains.”
Today's undergraduate students will be tomorrow's consumers, advocates, and — occasionally — practitioners of psychotherapy. Who will pursue advanced psychoanalytic education, who will argue for including the psychoanalytic method in graduate and medical training, who will argue for including psychoanalysis among reimbursable psychotherapies if we do not change the manner in which psychoanalytic ideas are presented in universities? Psychoanalytic ideas seem ever more distant from the wellspring of scientific truth as academic psychology rushes to embrace empiricism and its behavioral and cognitive offspring. Those trained to teach psychology are steeped in the empirical tradition. As a result, they are often benignly ignorant of psychoanalytic concepts at best and openly hostile at worst. The failure of psychoanalysis (and psychoanalysts) to make inroads into academic psychology has come home to roost.
A review of psychology curricula at several major universities reveals that their psychology departments rarely include courses with the word “psychoanalysis” in the title. Psychoanalytic thinking has instead become the province of the humanities. If the spread of psychoanalytic ideas into the humanities reveals the degree to which psychoanalysis pervades the broader culture, then the absolute lack of psychology courses on the topic shows that it has been removed from modern thinking about how the mind works and how mental illness should be treated.
How should we respond? Changes will require an increasing willingness to hold psychoanalytic ideas up to empirical scrutiny. They also may require broad changes in our culture. Combating misunderstandings about how the mind works and offering alternatives to the short-sighted “quick-fix” solutions currently in vogue may be a place to start.
We believe that renewed attention to the teaching of psychoanalytic concepts at the undergraduate level is in order. We know from discussions with others in the American Psychoanalytic Association Fellowship Program that there are many like us struggling to teach psychoanalytic concepts to undergraduates. We do our work in isolation, often in departments where others lack knowledge or are actively hostile to psychoanalysis.
Efforts to create a shared dialogue among those involved in undergraduate education are already under way within The American. Through the initiative of current Fellows of The American, an informal discussion on this topic was held at the San Diego meetings this past May. Arnold Cooper described his experiences teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates. He recommended avoiding jargon and introducing students to psychoanalysis as an interesting way to think about people rather than focusing on psychoanalytic treatment. Cooper has found that tapping students' intuitive understanding of psychoanalytic concepts through free-form discussion of literature and clinical material is very effective. Those who attended Cooper's discussion left with a wealth of new ideas and a renewed enthusiasm for teaching.
We are planning additional efforts to enhance undergraduate education. We plan to construct a database of individuals around the country who teach psychoanalytic concepts to undergraduates. Such a list will facilitate exchanges of ideas and reduce the sense of isolation felt by some faculty. An ongoing discussion group on undergraduate education will be on the program at the fall meeting. We will also begin to develop a bibliography of materials helpful in teaching analytic ideas at the undergraduate level. Eventually, some of us may join together to write our own texts or casebooks. Psychoanalytically oriented faculty should also seek to become reviewers for publishers producing books that include material on analysis.
These efforts will help ensure that future generations of students will not be alienated by their exposure to psychoanalysis and will instead be drawn into a broad-based, ever-developing way of thinking about people.
Timothy Hulsey is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Tex. Robert Cohen is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Madonna University in Livonia, Mich. Both are 1996-97 Fellows of The American. Those who teach at the undergraduate level and who would like to be a part of the database, or others interested in this effort, can contact Hulsey via e-mail at ; Cohen can be reached via e-mail at or by telephone at 313-432-5736.