Inspired by the special section on teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates in the last issue of TAP, I thought readers might like to hear also from a professor based in the arts. My work, for many years, has been with students who seek to understand psychoanalytic ideas in order to grasp more subtly the objects of their inquiry, both for purposes of creation and for critical interpretation. These objects include performance and installation art, art of emerging media, and the more traditional arts of drama, music, dance, and, of course, both literary and visual works. I find my task endlessly fascinating and challenging, and I have not solved many of the problems it raises for me as a teacher nor the problems it raises for my students.
My goals may be somewhat different from those of other professors who bring psychoanalysis into their teaching. Whereas others may explain psychoanalytic ideas as they would other bodies of theory, it is my conviction that enabling students to grasp these particular concepts in a strictly cerebral way does not do them justice. Students may think they have mastered ideas which have, in fact, in their profoundest aspects, eluded them. Verbally gifted students in particular can manipulate psychoanalytic ideas quite skillfully and produce clever writing that may miss what is deepest, truest, and indeed most troublesome in the material. When it comes to working with psychoanalysis, cleverness can, as we know, work against one and be an obstacle. This is a grave problem in academia where cleverness and rapid comprehension are highly prized.
To understand psychoanalysis in more than a shallow way, important emotional and introspective work must be done. This takes a gradual letting go of previously held habits of thought and a receptivity to disturbing feelings that may need to be repressed. Psychoanalytic texts, consequently, can be notoriously difficult to remember. I tell my students that if they are not a bit unsettled by the material during the course of the term, they are probably not getting it. But this sort of counsel bucks the tide of our cool, slick, externalizing culture.
How can I enable students to feel for themselves—suddenly—sometimes quite dramatically—the immense power of psychoanalytic ideas? That power cannot be experienced except in a personal way. Some students have a unique moment during the course of the term when some element strikes home. One gifted graduate student read every assigned text and sat in my class with a serious face for over a month rarely asking a question or contributing to the discussion; I could tell she was struggling to find something but that so far nothing had quite fit. Suddenly, we arrived at the oeuvre of Winnicott, and this young woman came alive with energy and excitement. The look on her face changed to one of intense fascination.
Ellen Handler Spitz, Ph.D., is Honors College Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland (UMBC). She studied at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Her new book, The Brightening Glance, will appear in 2006.
Winnicott's notions of intermediate space, the capacity to be alone, and the anti-social tendency as a cry for help all moved and inspired her. These notions made sense to her in ways that other ideas we had worked with had not. Thus, Winnicott served for her as a point d'entrée.
To foster such moments in a room full of students who come for a term, I have learned to move very slowly. My students bring their texts to class, and we read together, idea by idea. When I detect doubt, disbelief, embarrassment, or derision, I try to valorize these responses. Students start out as strangers to one another and to me, and they need to learn they can take risks. The process cannot be rushed.
When feasible, I invite a practicing psychoanalyst to come in to tell the students about clinical work and answer questions—which are often not the same as those they ask of me—and this allows them to envision psychoanalysis as more than words on a page. I sometimes ask my students to do a spontaneous writing exercise (I write also). Other unplanned experiences prove helpful, too. Occasionally, they choose partners, dream up scenarios and characters and act out a concept; sometimes I have them take parts and play roles with the text itself as script, and we manage to bring it to life.
Unprepared experiences serve many rich educational purposes. They help to concretize abstract concepts; they enliven the classroom; they work to undercut academic stodginess, which I consider detrimental to the open, improvisational milieu that is conducive to the apprehension of psychoanalytic ideas and methods. Unprepared exercises propel passive students into action and expand the realm of communication and expression beyond the boundaries of the typical seminar discussion format. They simulate a kind of free association. I have been known to read poetry aloud to my students when I feel that poetry alone can reveal what a theoretical text is toiling lamely to convey.
As I look forward to my teaching next term, I am not sure exactly what I will do creatively to address the issues I have mentioned. Of course, a key factor is that, just as in a good psychoanalysis, it is not only the patient who learns, likewise, in a good classroom, it is both teacher and students who grow. The late Darius Ornston described Strachey's influence on the original German of Freud's texts by pointing out that Strachey, perhaps in order to conform with prevailing conventions of British medical parlance, emphasized a hierarchical factor in his translation that exceeds what inheres in the German: The Standard Edition treats the analyst as knower and the analysand as seeker, a tilted relation that in Freud's original manuscripts is more fluid. This resonates with me, for I cherish my classroom as a scene of interchange and even of a kind of intellectual improv drama. Who the students are and what they bring with them matters. With the texts before us, we reflect and play and laugh and sometimes feel moved to tears. We might consider Melanie Klein's ideas in the light of global racial prejudices, or the other way round, or Freud's notion of the uncanny vis-à-vis contemporary experiments with virtual space.
Young, wide-eyed, not easily duped or intimidated, these eager faces will turn to me and try to push me towards the outside and into the future, but all the while I will be looking back at them and, while following them to some extent, be at the same time gently directing their gaze toward the past and inward, and together we will work to bring psychoanalysis into the 21st century and the 21st century into psychoanalysis.