From time to time, TAP will be drawing from its archives to resurface articles on themes of enduring interest. Here we present an article from issue 38.2 (Spring/Summer 2004) on building bridges between clinical psychoanalysis and humanistic scholarship.
Although Freud was a medical doctor, psychoanalysis, which is often considered his invention, first emerged not in the field of medicine, but in the grove of the academy—Plato's Academy. For it was Plato's teacher, Socrates, who first advocated the curious practice of “caring for one's psyche,” and it was Plato himself who first developed a tripartite metapsychology to explain inner conflict.
Freud recognized the provenance of psychoanalysis in philosophy and the humanities, and he accordingly defended the training of non-medical analysts in The Question of Lay Analysis. Yet, the American Psychoanalytic Association did not accept non-medical analysts until 1988, and then only under legal pressure. The current president of APsaA, Newell Fischer, recently wrote of the great benefits of that change: “Without it, we would have been impoverished, and today our organization would be far more vulnerable.” But Fischer believes the potential of this reconciliation has not been fully realized. There still exists a lamentable divide between clinical psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed theoreticians in the humanities, a divide that impoverishes each side.
The flexibility of psychoanalysis is its greatest gift: it offers simultaneously an effective therapy, a comprehensive philosophy of the mind, and a method for understanding literature, art, and, indeed, the culture at large.
Psychoanalysis has always come to life in the friction between theory and practice: without theory, the analyst sits before a formless mass of associations; without practice, the theoretician's ideas become empty speculations.
While psychoanalysis has enjoyed popularity in some of the humanities, such as literary theory and film studies, it has often been detached from clinical wisdom. Much of this detachment has been intentional. Alice Kuzniar, professor of comparative literature at the University of North Carolina (UNC), observes that even psychoanalytically informed writers in her field criticize clinical psychoanalysis as “ahistorical and tied to late Western bourgeois civilization.” But they base this judgment on the early case histories of Freud and his students, or crude conceptions of the consulting room, where the doctor's goal is to expose the patient as yet another cast of the Freudian mold. These critics have limited exposure to the wealth of subsequent clinical material and recent developments in psychoanalytic technique.
Kuzniar is currently working on a book [Melancholia's Dog, University of Chicago Press, 2006] that draws from psychoanalytic insights into the silences of the consulting room in order to explore the mute transferences between literary characters and their pets. By her own admission, however, the heyday of such interpretations has passed. Except for a few figures, such as Slovenian Slavoj Zizek, who mix psychoanalysis with other modes of literary criticism, she sees a growing neglect of psychoanalysis in textual studies. As a result, the “close reading and attentiveness to subtexts that … link psychoanalysis to literary, textual investigation” may be abandoned altogether. Conversely, she believes, the reading of “the rich cultural material that is studied in the arts and humanities cannot help but expose analysts to a broader range of human expression.” The hermeneutic disciplines of the academy—whether literary, historical, or philosophical—can both teach and learn from psychoanalysts, who help interpret another sort of text, a life.
David Reeve, a professor of philosophy at UNC, sees a different relation between
psychoanalysis and his own field. “After a long period of uninformed hostility stemming from an impulse toward scientific positivism,” he says, “a variety of esteemed American philosophers, such as Martha Nussbaum, are now drawing on the writings of Freud, Winnicott, and other psychoanalysts.” He distinguishes this growing group of sympathizers, however, from a few philosophers who are trained analysts. Jonathan Lear, for example, who began as a scholar of ancient philosophy, has practiced as a clinical analyst in addition to writing and teaching at the University of Chicago.
Reeve finds himself midway between these two groups. His forthcoming book, Love's Confusions [Harvard University Press, 2007], examines a series of philosophical ideas about love, but draws most heavily upon the writings of psychoanalysts, from Freud to Bion. He has also seriously considered pursuing analytic training here in North Carolina. Asked what keeps him from enrolling, he cited both theoretical and institutional problems within clinical analysis. “Psychoanalysis should be clinically weighted,” he wanted to make clear, yet “the medicalization of analysis has been a disaster.”
Analysts trained in medical schools or professional mental health schools, and moving mostly in mental health circles, have likely not followed the theoretical advances in philosophical psychology. Ironically, these very advances offer some solutions to the theoretical Babel of current metapsychology, or at least some new methods with which to evaluate it. Along with these theoretical blind spots, Reeve sees in the legacy of strictly medical analysis an institutional rigidity that has not adapted to several important cultural shifts. Among them, medicine has largely rejected analysis, so that few medical students wish to train analytically. If clinical psychoanalysis is to survive, this shortage of trainees must be supplemented by new candidates from other fields. The humanities—the sciences of interpretation—are fertile ground for this harvest. President Fischer has said as much, and more.
Recognizing this problem, he exhorts analysts generally: “We must widen the doors for potential candidates who seek psychoanalytic training.” Specifically, he urges targeting graduate programs for outreach. More practically, Fischer writes that “career opportunities and economics have changed, and we must find ways to allow young people to afford training—while they are still young.” He has recommended that institutes seek outside funds, suggest reduced analytic fees, and provide loans to address this reality.
With a deeper pool of younger and more flexible training analysts, clinical training would become more affordable for younger candidates from more diverse backgrounds. An influx of such candidates would revitalize the relationship between the academy and psychoanalysis, benefiting both.
The flexibility of psychoanalysis is its greatest gift: it offers simultaneously an effective therapy, a comprehensive philosophy of the mind, and a method for understanding literature, art, and, indeed, the culture at large. This flexibility can only be enhanced by its reintegration into the academy. If so, the current crisis in psychoanalysis could precipitate its renaissance.
At time of writing, Sarah Miller and Patrick Miller were doctoral candidates at the University of North Carolina. Today, they are associate professors of classics and philosophy, respectively, at Duquesne University.