Teaching Psychoanalysis at University and Making it Matter

I began teaching a lecture course on psychoanalysis and philosophy when I went to Yale in 1985, the same year I began training as a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. I stayed at Yale for a decade, teaching a course on psychoanalysis there just about every year. By the time I left, about 900 Yale undergraduates had taken that course. I mention this because of an experience I have had subsequently.

When I go to a psychiatry department to give Grand Rounds, or talk to a group of mental health professionals, it is not unusual for someone from the audience to come up to me and say, “You won't remember me, but I was in your class on psychoanalysis and philosophy.” (In fact, I often can remember them; not by name, but by face and by where they sat in the classroom.) I assume that these students were already interested in some aspect of psychology, and it is likely they would have gone into one of the mental health professions anyway; but I do think the course opened them up to psychoanalytic ideas. Often they will continue, “I haven't actually become a psychoanalyst, but I use psychodynamic ideas all the time in my work.” It is from this experience that I have become convinced that teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates can play a crucial role in keeping psychoanalysis alive.

In this context, the following anecdote might be of interest: My first article defending Freud, which appeared in The New Republic, was commissioned by a former student from that class whom I did not know. He called out of the blue, told me he was now on the editorial board, and that he had convinced the other editors they needed an article on Freud. I would not have thought of it on my own.

My original training is in philosophy; and philosophy is what I teach. In general, I tend to start with a central philosophical question which will be the focus of the course. Here are some examples: What is it for human beings to flourish? What is the nature of human freedom? How could any conversation—Socratic or psychoanalytic—make a difference to how one lives? Is there a difference between appearance and reality when it comes to human life? What is an ethical life? Having chosen a question, I select readings from Freud—and sometimes a few other analysts like Winnicott, Klein, Lacan, Loewald, and Gray. I then formulate a further question for the class: What difference does psychoanalysis make to traditional ways of thinking about these problems? To help students think about this, I might also include readings from Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Kierkegaard.

I do not presume any background knowledge, so I also use the course as an introduction to psychoanalytic ideas. The reading list changes, but over the past years it has included Studies on Hysteria, selections from The interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the Rat Man and Dora cases, “Remembering, repeating and working through,” Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Ego and the Id, Civilization and Its Discontents, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, and The future of an Illusion. Freud is a beautiful writer, and he is writing about issues that matter to late adolescents and young adults—so it is no surprise that students love reading him. It is not unusual for students to report that they are sure they are hysterical when they are reading the Studies, and that they are sure they are obsessional when they read about the Rat Man. I assure them they can be right both times.

Here are a few thoughts I have about teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates based on—yikes!—20 years of experience. First, it helps to teach psychoanalysis in conjunction with a humanities course, like philosophy, literature, or history. Students can be introduced to psychoanalytic ideas, but at the same time they can glimpse how these ideas might matter to the great concerns of the humanistic tradition.

Second, it helps to teach psychoanalysis with a genuine question in mind. Psychoanalysts are regularly experienced as people who take themselves to have esoteric knowledge. Thus, whatever the transference distortions in all directions, humanists often experience analysts as talking down to them. If the analyst/teacher, himself, has a genuine question and is trying to think it through on his feet, that goes a long way towards ameliorating the problem.

Finally, psychoanalytic institutes ought to devise better ways to take advantage of this youthful enthusiasm. I regularly have undergraduates and graduate students come to talk to me about becoming a psychoanalyst. When I tell them they first have to get a clinical degree—either an M.D. or a Ph.D. in clinical psychology or an M.S.W and then apply to an institute—they often feel discouraged. Obviously they need a good clinical training, and they need to satisfy various professional standards. But it is also true that if they enter an M.D. or Ph.D. program, they will, by and large, enter a professional atmosphere that discourages interest in psychoanalysis. It would help if psychoanalytic institutes could find ways to be more welcoming to students at earlier stages of their careers.