Five years ago, the New School for Social Research in New York City established a psychoanalytic studies program. It offered students a rigorous and non-doctrinaire grounding in psychoanalytic thinking.
While psychoanalysis has always been a major force in twentieth-century thought, developments in intellectual, cultural, and political life have given analysis increasing prominence in recent years. New trends in literature and philosophy, the emergence of gender studies and cultural theory, and especially the rise of feminism and the gay movement have contributed to a lively new interest in psychoanalysis within the university. The paradigm crisis within organized psychoanalysis itself has also stimulated discussion of psychoanalysis in the academy. It has prompted many analysts to actively engage other fields — hermeneutic as well as scientific — in an attempt to think through the daunting but fertile questions facing our discipline.
It is fitting that the New School should be one of the first universities to establish a psychoanalytic studies program in this country. Like American psychoanalysis itself, the New School is largely the product of the intellectual and cultural diaspora that resulted from Hitler's rise to power.
The New School was originally established in 1919 by Charles Beard and John Dewey. Frustrated with the intellectual life at Columbia University, they came downtown to form a non-degree-granting adult education program. In the 1930s, a graduate faculty in the social and political sciences was formed. Under the leadership of Alvin Johnson and with the title of “The University in Exile,” its mission was to provide a haven for European scholars and intellectuals who were fleeing the Nazis. Johnson's heroic efforts were successful: Some of Europe's most renowned intellectuals — Rudolf Arnheim, Georges Gurvitch, Alexander Koyré, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Loewith, Alfred Schütz, Leo Strauss, and Max Wertheimer, to name a few — were associated with the New School.
Johnson was an enthusiastic supporter of psychoanalysis and energetically promoted its place in the curriculum. As he later recalled in his memoirs, “the explosive figure of Freud was [at the time] emitting healing rays and death rays from the heights of Vienna.” Indeed, no less a figure than Sándor Ferenczi was the first psychoanalyst to offer a systematic course on the subject at the New School. Over the years, such well-known figures in psychoanalysis as Peter Blos, A. A. Brill, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Ernst Kris, Sandor Rado, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Reik, Ernest Schachtel, Clara Thomson, Robert Waelder, William Alanson White, Franz Wittels, and Gregory Zilborg have taught at the New School.
Because it has not been aligned with any particular psychoanalytic school, and because it is committed to the academic principle of the free exchange of ideas, the New School has been able to host analysts from a broad range of theoretical and sometimes conflicting approaches. Johnson wrote that though Freudians and Adlerians on the faculty “detested one another” while outside the New School, there was “no strife among them within our walls. … Our warring friends stacked their arms outside the New School.”
Like its forebears, the Psychoanalytic Studies Program remains committed to a non-sectarian stance where ideas can be openly and vigorously debated. In addition to the core seminars on the major figures and schools, from Freud to Lacan, students in the program can choose from a broad list of classes to design a program suited to their interests and needs. Subjects range from the British School to Heinz Kohut, and include what might be called the “psychoanalysis and x” courses: psychoanalysis and feminism, psychoanalysis and film, psychoanalysis and literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy. While this is a specifically cultural and non-clinical program, students are required to take at least one clinically oriented course — for example, assessment or development — to give them at least some exposure to the nature of clinical practice. Many of those who have graduated from the program with masters' degrees in psychoanalytic studies have pursued advanced academic degrees in other fields or entered clinical training with the aim of becoming practicing analysts. The pattern is likely to continue.
A distinguishing feature of the program at the New School is that the core faculty members — Alan Bass, Jessica Benjamin, Elisabeth Young-Breuhl, and Joel Whitebook — are all well-recognized academics as well as practicing clinicians. In addition to being experienced teachers, each has an impressive list of scholarly and professional publications. This grounding in both the academy and the consulting room is a distinct asset in integrating theory and practice and in building bridges between the psychoanalytic community and the university.
Drawing on the vast intellectual and psychoanalytic resources of the broader New York metropolitan community, the Psychoanalytic Studies Program has sponsored conferences on important contemporary theoretical and social issues — recent topics include “The History of Psychoanalysis in Germany,” “Psychoanalysis and Physics,” “Trauma,” “Homophobia,” and “Moses and Monotheism” — and has drawn such internationally known figures as Richard Bernstein, Martin Bergmann, Werner Bohleber, Harold Blum, Cornelius Castoriadis, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Yosef Hyam Yerushalmi, and Slavoj Zizek. The conferences will continue to be a central part of the intellectual life of the New School's program. On March 26–27, 1999, the program will sponsor a conference on the work of Hans Loewald. The participants will be Alan Bass, Nancy Chodorow, Jonathan Lear, Stephen Mitchell, and Joel Whitebook.
This conference, which promises to be a stimulating event, is further proof that with the New School's unique history as an innovative interdisciplinary institution and with the unique intellectual and psychoanalytic resources of New York City, the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at the New School is fast becoming a vibrant American center for this burgeoning field. For further information, contact The Psychoanalytic Studies Program/The Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003.
Joel Whitebook, Ph.D., is a practicing analyst in New York City who teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Psychoanalytic Studies Program of the Graduate Faculty of the New School. He is also on the faculty of the Training Institute of the New York Freudian Society.