On February 27, 2014, Division 39 president-elect Marilyn Charles spoke at Hampshire College, a small liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. The occasion was the formal launch of Hampshire's undergraduate psychoanalytic studies program.
There has been much conversation in recent years about the lack of access to psychoanalytic ideas among young people (i.e., early career professionals, graduate students and at the undergraduate level). In 2005 APsaA launched an outreach task force, the 10,000 Minds Project, in the belief that the future of psychoanalytic thought depends on engaging undergraduate students in psychoanalytic ideas. Ten years later, Hampshire College emerged as an important psychoanalytic vista for interested undergraduates.
Although Hampshire officially launched its psychoanalytic studies program last year, Hampshire students have engaged with psychoanalytic theory for a number of years prior through classes as well as independent, faculty-sponsored study.
Many universities offer psychoanalytic theory in the humanities, through gender studies, literature and film theory courses, according to a 10,000 Minds Project study. At Hampshire, however, interest in psychoanalysis is not limited to humanities-based applications of psychoanalysis; students can study Freud, Lacan, Klein and Winnicott in clinical psychology and early childhood education courses.
Hampshire is also part of a local five-college consortium, comprising Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, UMass and Amherst, offering students additional access to psychoanalytic thought, most notably in courses taught by Alicia Christoff and Gail Hornstein, who's best known to the psychoanalytic world for her brilliant biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann at the Chestnut Lodge.
The psychoanalytic studies program sits within Hampshire's unique pedagogic model, providing an academic environment that stands in contrast to that of more traditional schools.
Hampshire has no required general education classes and no formal majors. There are, however, a number of optional “concentrations” of study (a category that includes psychoanalytic studies). This allows students to develop their own interdisciplinary paths of study, with the support of faculty mentorship.
During their senior year, Hampshire students generally take only one class per semester, and spend the remainder of their time working on an individualized project, colloquially referred to as a “Div III.” This project is akin to an extended senior honors thesis. Typical Division IIIs include students writing theses, but might also involve filming a movie, orchestrating a large-scale musical performance, or coding a new computer program.
Given the individualized nature of Hampshire education, it is impossible to say what the “average” student's course of study will look like within the psychoanalytic studies program.
Dorothy Cashore was one of Hampshire's motivated students, focusing her Division III writing on Lacanian conceptions of the symptom and the sinthome, and the implications of each for clinical psychoanalytic theory. I spoke with Dorothy in the spring of 2014 about her studies at Hampshire.
From an early age, Dorothy wanted to be a psychologist. She began her undergraduate studies at Hampshire by taking a typical psychology major course load, studying abnormal and experimental psychology. As Dorothy explained, “I found out I didn't actually love psychology. The way it was being taught, the way that research was being done… it turned out I loved something else, and I didn't really know what that was or what category it fell into, if any.”
When Dorothy encountered the theories of Jacques Lacan in her second year at Hampshire, she was struck by Lacan's descriptions of the unconscious, as a way to explain the enigmas of human behavior. “There was no looking back for me after that… I skipped all the other psychoanalysts. I was just Lacan, Lacan, Lacan 24/7 for the next few years.”
She was particularly struck by a course taught by Annie Rogers called Meeting Lacan. Utilizing Hampshire's campus farm as a part of the course curriculum, students in Meeting Lacan sit outside at the barn in silence, multiple times a week during the wee hours of morning, to watch over pregnant sheep. “Lamb watch” has a practical function, should the sheep begin labor and need human support, but the larger purpose is to disrupt the student's ordinary routine, as a way of evoking enigmatic experiences that may give way to new ways of thinking and dreaming.
Dorothy's experiences on lamb watch were quite powerful, bringing her face-to-face with unconscious material. She recounts “emailing Annie [at 4 a.m.] and getting excited because I thought maybe I had found a signifier in my dream.”
Derek Pyle, recently completed his undergraduate education at Hampshire College. He is the producer and director of Waywords and Meansigns, an international project setting James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to music unabridged. He lives in Boston.
After graduating from Hampshire, Dorothy was accepted into Duquesne's clinical psychology doctoral program, with full funding from the school, where she has begun to study the larger world of psychology. Recalling her single-minded focus on Lacan at Hampshire, she says, “One view of it is at the expense of ‘practicality,‘ [but] magically, having pursued only exactly what I loved… it ended up opening exactly the doors I needed open.”
I spoke with another recent graduate of Hampshire's program, Milo Muise, in the spring of 2014. Milo also began at Hampshire with a general interest in psychology, first encountering psychodynamic theory in a course taught by Peter Gilford, What is Psychotherapy? While “pretty consistently attracted to psychoanalysis, and pretty hesitant about the other options [in psychology],” Milo remained skeptical about the patriarchal baggage of Freud and psychoanalysis.
Milo started exploring sexual orientation in early adolescence. In college, Milo began understanding how queer identity was not just a matter of sexual orientation but one of gender as well. While surrounded by supportive peers in Hampshire's large queer community, Milo started identifying as transgender (transmasculine) and using the preferred pronouns of “they/them,” denoting that their experience of embodiment simply does not fit into the gender binary typically proscribed by contemporary society.
It is not surprising Milo has struggled at times to integrate queer perspective with classical psychoanalytic thinking. As Milo remarks, “What does a trans-Oedipus look like… or even a queer one?”
Yet Milo also says, “I come across so much psychoanalysis in queer theory.” Clearly this intersection is exciting for Milo, who lights up with excitement when talking about a course at Amherst College taught by Alicia Christoff on post-Freudian psychoanalysis, where Milo first encountered a number of psychoanalytic applications of queer theory.
Milo also took a class at Smith College called Unruly Bodies, taught by Professor Anna Ward. Through Elizabeth Wilson's writing, in this course Milo learned about Ferenczi's conception of the “biological unconscious.” Milo explains this as “the idea that the matter and the substance of the body can under certain traumatic instances [including hysteria] begin to think, begin to have urges and wants and desires in the way the unconscious mind would.”
For someone who knows intimately about the complex relationship between biological bodies, and one's personal sense of embodiment and identity, it is no wonder Milo is fascinated by the implications of Ferenczi's theory.
Milo's Division III consisted of a series of prose poems about a young person whose body is infested with termites, and also an essay about the politics of embodiment. The merits of Milo's poetic ability are impressive; during Milo's senior year, they were one of five contestants selected to compete in the national Glascock Poetry Competition. A prestigious intercollegiate event hosted at Mount Holyoke College, the 2014 competition was judged by Charles Simic, Mark Doty and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. Milo took second place.
Unlike students who encounter psychoanalysis for the first time through the Hampshire's courses, I transferred to the school from another university for the specific purpose of studying psychoanalytic theory. I briefly outline my studies here as an example of the potential psychoanalytic breadth available to motivated students at Hampshire.
During my first semester at Hampshire, I undertook an independent study with Professor Lourdes Mattei, reading and writing about Freud's original theories of narcissism, and the later conceptualizations of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg.
In my second semester, I continued working with Mattei in another independent study focused on psychoanalytic conceptions of love. In addition to reading Michael Balint and again Kernberg, I learned about the post-Oedipal theories of Jody Messler Davies as well as Andrea Celenza and Glen Gabbard's work related to sexual boundary violations. During this same semester, I took a class co-taught by Annie Rogers and Brown Kennedy, where we alternated each week between reading the works of Jacques Lacan and James Joyce.
During my second and final year, while working on my Div III, I took Literature and Psychoanalysis taught by Mary Russo, and a class on Lacan, taught by Annie Rogers. Russo, who has since retired from teaching, encouraged reading lots and lots of Freud alongside a number of great literary texts.
My Division III work spanned some 230 pages in two parts. One half was a series of essays, many exploring Wilfred Bion's Learning from Experience. To understand how Bion's conceptions of dreaming and not being able to dream deviated from classical psychoanalytic theory, I revisited Freud in depth. I became interested in psychosis, and the question of whether there is a “psychotic part” of a person that exists in all healthy people. I studied the work of Melanie Klein and Thomas Ogden, as well as Michael Robbins. I also read some Hans Loewald, and lots of James Joyce. The other half of my Division III was a semi-autobiographical prose-poetry hybrid, inspired by my own experiences in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
It is unlikely other schools will easily replicate Hampshire's psychoanalytic studies, because the program is embedded within the school's unique pedagogical model of faculty mentored, student-led independent study. Yet while Hampshire continues to engage students with psychoanalysis, hopefully American psychoanalysts will take notice, and more dialogue as well as collaboration can emerge between the two groups.
For more information about Hampshire's program visit or contact Annie Rogers .