Connecting Undergraduates with Psychoanalysis

Each of the three articles in this special section on psychoanalysis and undergraduate education has the whiff of a journey theme. Perhaps this is no accident, since the topic under examination involves psychoanalysis connecting with a population, college students, often understood as on a perpetual journey.

All of us invested in this area of outreach seem to agree that psychoanalysis is in danger of disappearing from undergraduate education, at great peril to the future of our field. An interest in psychoanalysis developed during college may later evolve into a career as a psychoanalyst, an ongoing interest and intellectual appreciation, or perhaps a course of analytic treatment. Such an experience during the undergraduate years may not come to fruition for many years, and may do so in unanticipated ways.

Jim Hansell's article describes the journey he took towards an exciting accomplishment, the recent publication of a psychoanalytically informed undergraduate textbook on abnormal psychology. The book is meeting with considerable success in the market, yet in the process, Hansell and his co-author, Lisa Damour, encountered considerable resistance among academic psychologists that is both frightening and instructive.

Jonathan Lear's story describes the profound and lasting impact that positive exposure to psychoanalytic ideas as an undergraduate can produce on students. He also offers a number of specific and practical suggestions for bringing psychoanalytic content to college courses in an effective manner.

Prudy Gourguechon's piece describes the genesis and evolution of a current project of the American Psychoanalytic Association called the 10,000 Minds Project. The aim of this new effort is to increase the chances of undergraduates encountering psychoanalytic theory and treatment possibilities prior to graduating from college.

All of us invested in this area of outreach seem to agree that psychoanalysis is in danger of disappearing from undergraduate education, at great peril to the future of our field.

One of us (Gourguechon) has been obsessing about her own undergraduate experience, and especially the remarkable fact that two of her best friends in college, Jesse Viner and Marie Rudden, who much to her delight continue to be among her closest friends, are also psychoanalysts and members of the Association. This seems quite amazing and would never have been something any of us could have imagined at the time of college graduation. Here's more—from her college class of 1,201 (Yale College, class of 1973) there are at least eight members of APsaA. Thus of the 13 psychiatrists in the class alumni, 62 percent are analysts. Compare this figure to the approximately six percent of U.S. psychiatrists that are psychoanalysts. What happened at that college, at that time, to produce such interest in our field?

Without turning this into a research project, Gourguechon, speaking for herself recalls: In the first semester of my freshman year, my introductory psychology course was taught by Solomon Cytrynbaum, an analytically oriented post-doc at the time (he also taught my residency class about Tavistock group process in another city a couple of lifetimes later). I remember listening to Cytrynbaum. He was serious and a little scary and seemed to have plumbed the mysteries of life. We all listened, riveted. That was it for psychoanalysis in my undergraduate years, but it was enough. During the next three-and-a-half years, I took many courses in social and behavioral psychology. When I was interviewing for medical school admission, an astute pediatrician interviewing me asked what kind of doctor I wanted to be. I immediately gave the politically correct answer of the times, a family practitioner. “Yes,” she said, “but if there were no constraints, what would you really want to be?” Stunningly, an image of a psychoanalyst popped into my mind, a delver into meanings and motives, into the mysteries of human stories. I remember being startled, and feeling like I had been visited by a ghost. Could it have been implanted in that first college psychology course I took?

We hope this special section sparks interest in this area of outreach among our colleagues, and adds momentum to the efforts of the Association to reach and captivate the 10,000 best minds of the next generation with the power of psychoanalytic ideas.