Bringing Psychoanalysis to High School Psychology Classes

For many years, the American Psychological Association (APA) has maintained an active educational and outreach program aimed at high school teachers of psychology and their students. This program, Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools (TOPSS) has almost 2,000 teacher members (called Teacher Affiliates of APA), and offers workshops, lesson plans, teaching standards, networking opportunities, and a scholarship grant and award program. It is estimated that half a million high school students take a psychology course each year. While the number of college students studying psychology is far greater, high school is often the first time that young people are formally exposed to the field, making it a critical time for the formation of first impressions.

One of the “signature products” of TOPSS is a series of “unit lesson plans” written by college psychology faculty that enable high school teachers to teach specific areas of psychology; they are provided free of charge to interested teachers via hard copies and the Internet. To date, TOPSS has developed 14 different weeklong lesson plans on topics such as learning, memory, developmental psychology, and cross-cultural psychology. Psychoanalysis, as you might guess, is virtually non-existent in these 14 current TOPSS lesson plans.

Enter Dottie Jeffries, APsaA's public affairs director. Jeffries became aware of the TOPSS program and asked me to take a look at the current lesson plans. She saw this as an opportunity to bring a positive, accurate picture of psychoanalysis to this critical population of teachers and young students before they are turned off to psychoanalysis by the typical negative misrepresentations or omissions. When I confirmed that psychoanalysis was not adequately covered in the existing lesson plans, Jeffries made contact with the staff of TOPSS to ascertain their interest in the development of a new weeklong lesson plan specifically on psychoanalysis. With her usual effectiveness, Jeffries quickly persuaded the TOPSS staff of the usefulness of a unit of psychoanalysis, and they agreed enthusiastically to support its development. (TOPSS's support includes underwriting the eventual production of the lesson plans along with editorial assistance from the TOPSS staff and the high school teachers' network).

With TOPSS sponsorship in place, Jeffries and I began to conceive the project. Most of the existing lesson plans involve five or six separate lessons which can be covered in one week. College faculty write the content outlines, and then high school teachers with an interest in the subject add additional content such as in-class exercises, multimedia supplements, and homework assignments. With the help of the TOPSS staff and the teachers' network, we came up with a plan for a six-lesson unit on psychoanalysis consisting of the following topics:

Lesson 1: Overview of Freud and psychoanalysis

Lesson 2: Psychoanalytic perspectives on mental disorders and treatment

Lesson 3: Psychoanalytic perspectives on development and personality Lesson 4: Psychoanalytic perspectives on dreams

Lesson 5: Psychoanalytic perspectives on motivation and emotion

Lesson 6: Neo-Freudians and contemporary psychoanalysis

I then recruited some respected colleagues to help with writing the lesson outlines. Joshua Ehrlich from the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, wrote Lesson 2. Howard Lerner also from Michigan, drafted Lessons 3 and 5. Wendy Katz from the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute, wrote Lesson 4, and I drafted the others. After several months of e-mails and conference calls to edit, coordinate, and consult, the six outlines are now almost finalized. During the early months of 2007, the high school teachers will add the supplemental content, and we are hopeful that APA will be able to produce the whole package in time for the 2007-2008 school year. It will then be available to high school teachers throughout the U.S. through the TOPSS network. Existing TOPSS lesson plans on other topics will also be cross-referenced to relevant sections of the new psychoanalysis unit. Hopefully, some of next year's 500,000 high school students of psychology will be turned on to psychoanalysis and make their way in our direction as future candidates, patients, or supporters.