The Committee on Research and Special Training has initiated several programs of outreach in its effort to bring serious psychoanalytic clinical training to American academia and to enrich psychoanalysis by a psychoanalytically informed interface with the humanities and the social sciences. CORST's newest initiative is to recruit and bring into psychoanalytic training our first advanced university graduate students. The idea of starting psychoanalytic training earlier—of taking, as the current Principles and Standards for Education in Psychoanalysis puts it, “post-masters graduate students of unusual potential who have not yet attained the highest degree in their area of specialization” — is an established one, and eminently rational.
In graduate school, the research commitments and tools of a lifetime are forged and an entire career of scholarship is shaped. Many of us have had graduate students in psychoanalysis. We have also had graduate students who were ready for psychoanalytic training but were ineligible for it because they did not yet have their doctorate. We have been laying groundwork with excellent graduate students with an interest in psychoanalysis for the past eight years at the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. There are centers of higher education (the University of Chicago, the Cleveland area, Emory University, the New Orleans area, U.Cal.-Berkeley, UCLA, USC, U.Cal.–San Diego, Wesleyan University, and others) where graduate students who could meet the standards and procedures of the American are being exposed to psychoanalysis under the instruction of members of the American. It would have meant a great deal to many of the present members of CORST and other research psychoanalysts to have had the psychoanalytic training option available in graduate school.
This is a call to research graduates of the American to bring us your best graduate students for psychoanalytic training; they will not be rejected out of hand as ineligible. We also ask our members, directors of institutes, fellows of BOPS, and officers of the American to implement the existing mandate when local institutes send you appropriate, CORST-screened pre-dissertation candidates. By training nascent academics ready to burst forth with their first publications and teaching, we are investing in decades-long psychoanalytic research and teaching careers, which will affect thousands of university students and colleagues — a truly influential multiplier effect for each young academic trained.
This initiative is critical in carrying psychoanalysis to academia and in injecting vigor, vitality, and intellectual excitement to our discourse. Bringing in younger people would also do a bit to counter the prevailing superannuated age profile of the American and the psychoanalytic profession.
There is an optimal time in life to introduce psychoanalysis. If missed, it can often never be recovered. By the time tenure is reached, academics have a decade or more of scholarly training and productivity behind them. They are well embarked on — perhaps even entrenched in — a research model, and the chance to fundamentally influence their thinking in a psychoanalytic direction may come too late.
The graduate years are in many ways the ideal period in which to undergo psychoanalytic training. Although grad students do not realize it, they will never again have so much disposable time for reading, discourse, study, and analysis. Graduate students are adults, often married and with children, who are resident in a university setting for six to ten years; they generally have strong egos; they have already passed rigorous competitive testing and screening processes; they are intellectually keen and have inquiring minds; they are in the throes of regressive transferences to professors, institutions, and ideas on whom their future depends. The criteria for selection would be the same as for the many graduate fellowships and prizes regularly awarded by CORST and by foundations and universities: serious intellectual promise and commitment; quality of mind and work; writings and, if available, publications; and letters from supervising faculty who know the candidate. Of course, candidates also must, as the APsaA standards spell out, “meet the requirements of suitability of all candidates,” meaning the clinical criteria of analyzability, maturity, responsibility, and character.
In terms of future potential contribution to psychoanalysis and the relationship between the humanities, the social sciences, and psychoanalysis, it makes much more sense to support a graduate student with demonstrable potential than to try to recruit a scholar well along a career trajectory dedicated to other research methods. Given the realities of identity formation and academic career ladders, we have lost the opportunity to capture future contributors by waiting until they are already established and accomplished, by which time they have, by definition, developed other kinds of expertise and commitments.
The American is already accepting for training pre-doctorate candidates in the mental health fields. By acting now on the existing CORST mandate to recruit graduate students; by shifting the criteria to excellent potential, rather than demonstrated achievement; by reaching with discrimination and discernment into the pre-dissertation years, we will build new interfaces between the humanities, the social sciences, and psychoanalysis through scholarly work and university teaching.
Although the concept of training graduate students is legitimized in the BOPS standards and affirmed in the current draft Principles and Standards, CORST has never applied this provision because of the difficulties in finding the appropriate individuals and of funding. It is analogous to positive law: “rights” that are not used, that are not instrumentalized, do not exist in the real world.
There are two main difficulties in implementing the mandate to train graduate students:
No appreciable status or advantage for the graduate student. Psychoanalytic method and training is not perceived as a “marketable” asset in the competitive, anxiety-filled struggle for academic placement. Departments are not looking for psychoanalytic method in hiring. One hopes it will at best be a neutral, rather than a negative, valence. There will be no flood of applicants at the door of the American.
Peter Loewenberg, Ph.D., is chairman of CORST, professor of history and political psychology at UCLA, and a training and supervising analyst at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (1996) and Fantasy and Reality in History (1995).
Finances. The average teaching assistant earns $14,000 to $17,000 per year, sometimes supporting a family on this. Psychoanalytic training for young academics requires funding, a tuition waiver, and training analysis at a very low fee.
Funding is always a major problem, which must be tackled both nationally and locally. This month Helen Eisenstein Zukin of Los Angeles gave $20,000 to support academic research training at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, which means the institute can start to train two more university people in psychoanalysis. Helen is the daughter of Samuel Eisenstein, who initiated support for academic research training in Southern California and was for eight years chair of the SCPI Education Committee. He shared Sigmund Freud's vision of psychoanalysis, which includes “the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and the science of literature” — and which lives on in CORST and in the APsaA institutes that train academics.
In 1998 CORST awarded two research training grants of $5,000 from the Uddell-Hymowitz Fund, to be matched by $5,000 from the sponsoring institutes. Each $10,000 training grant will be paid out over three years in the sums of $3,500, $3,500, and $3,000 to help academic candidates further their psychoanalytic training. The symbolic and moral meaning of this support from the American is at least as important as the material support, which only helps to defray a small fragment of the cost of analytic training. The 1998 Training Grant awardees were Donna Kline of the Houston-Galveston Institute, whose project is “The Formal Structure of Psychoanalytic Narratives,” and Bettina Soestwohner of the Southern California Institute, whose research is on “The Function of Literature for the Nomadic Identity Formation.” Paul Schwaber, the Training Grant Committee chair, and the jury, Humphrey Morris and Laurie Wilson, chose well and carefully.
For 1999 we had two $10,000 grants from the American Psychoanalytic Foundation (also to be paid out over three years). The first of these was awarded to Molly Ann Rothenberg of Tulane University's Department of English to study at the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Institute. Tiina Allik of the Department of Religious Studies at Loyola University in New Orleans was awarded a matching research training grant to further her psychoanalytic training in New Orleans. Raquel Ackerman of the Department of Anthropology, California State University-Los Angeles, was awarded a matching research training grant to further her psychoanalytic training at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute.
Thanks to a $500 grant from the American Psychoanalytic Foundation, we now offer mentorships for academics in locations remote from psychoanalytic institutes who wish psychoanalytic consulting and perspectives on their research. Caroline Schaumann, who works on Jewish and German women's accounts of the Holocaust at the Department of Germanic Languages, Middlebury College, Vt., is our first academic awardee. She will travel to Boston to consult on her work with Judith Kantrowitz and Humphrey Morris. Robert Paul directs this program for CORST As in many other things, the experience of the Robert J. Stoller Foundation's mentoring project is an encouraging model.
CORST offers a Psychoanalytical Essay Prize and annual Award Lecture. The 1998 prize jury (Vera Camden, Jonathan Lear, and Robert Paul) selected the winner from an impressive field of forty entries: Norman Doidge, whose paper, “Diagnosing The English Patient: Contributions to Understanding the Schizoid Fantasies of Being Skinless and of Being Buried Alive” was presented at the CORST public lecture during the American meetings in New York. We hope that many of you will attend the 1999 CORST Award Lecture, followed by a reception, on Thursday, December 16, at 9:00 a.m., in the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.