by Mark Beitel
As an undergraduate, I didn’t know how rare and special it was to attend a university with a psychology department in which psychoanalysis was embraced by faculty members and encouraged as a topic of study. Luckily for me, one of the few exceptions was the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan in the 1980s and early 1990s—and I soaked it all in. Indeed, the experience changed the entire course of my life, and this can still happen to other undergraduates fortunate enough to be exposed to psychoanalytic ideas, whatever their major might be.
Yet those golden undergraduate years at Michigan belong largely to a bygone era—and to a felicitous combination of Midwestern pragmatism, progressiveness, and Jewishness that allowed psychoanalysis to flourish. Among other things, Menninger-trained, empirically minded psychologist-psychoanalysts like Howard Shevrin and Martin Mayman were recruited to Michigan in the 1960s and 1970s, and they helped make the Michigan Psychology Department one of the best in the country.
Michigan’s clinical psychology program didn’t accept their own undergraduates, for fear of academic inbreeding. So I ended up going to graduate school in New York and did my postdoctoral training at Yale, where I’ve been on the faculty ever since. I came to Yale at a time when psychoanalysis was in rapid decline in U.S. universities. When I announced to a well-known psychologist-psychoanalyst that I would be devoting my career to the study of psychoanalysis, he said: “You will be very lonely.” But he was wrong: I’ve not been lonely at all. On the contrary, my journey has been rich with colleagues and students of like mind, though it didn’t turn out to be exactly the journey I’d imagined.
Adapting to changing departmental and funding priorities has required creativity and grit. Even in a shifting academic climate, I’ve consistently infused psychoanalysis into my teaching and research. In the classroom, my strategy has been to weave psychoanalytic ideas into more general courses. For example, I’ve offered a psychiatry elective for many years in which I introduce psychotherapy process- and outcome-instruments that illuminate psychoanalytic process in research, and I’ve taught a more basic version of this course to undergraduates. One of the tools that I teach is Luborsky’s Core Conflictual Relationship Theme method (CCRT), which is an empirical way to formulate aspects of transference. The basic idea is that trained raters, who are usually undergraduate research assistants, can be taught to code psychotherapy transcripts to identify core transference themes in the patients’ stories and dreams. It has been shown that core themes change over the course of successful psychoanalytic psychotherapy. None of the residents I’ve taught had previous knowledge of CCRT or were aware that it could be so useful in general clinical practice—or that learning about it could stimulate further interest in psychoanalysis.
At the undergraduate level, I co-teach an advanced seminar on Native American mental health with a Native American colleague who happens to be a non-analytic clinician. Its primary focus is on Native American patients in psychotherapy—a vastly understudied subject. This course is offered in a humanities department that regularly attracts ethno-racially minoritized students who’ve had little, if any, exposure to psychoanalysis. Course readings include a mix of clinical case studies describing a single Native American patient in psychotherapy (sometimes containing transcribed session material that we read aloud) and large, scientific studies of psychopathology, personality, and clinical process/outcome. These give students the opportunity to learn about psychoanalysis, to question its assumptions and practices, and to appreciate its power and promise—particularly for minoritized groups with little access to psychodynamic psychotherapies.
Our students are fascinated to learn that psychoanalysis was conceived by a member of a persecuted minority group; that it is at once a theory of mind, a method of research, and a form of treatment with empirically demonstrated efficacy; that, while it is principally concerned with freeing people from intrapsychic repression, its methods have also been extended to the larger world in the form of social critique and advocacy for change; that a progressive and humanistic psychoanalysis has much to offer our modern, multicultural world; and that Freud always dreamed of creating a universally available “psychotherapy for the people” (1955, 168).
Students in our seminar are particularly intrigued by phenomena including transference and countertransference as they come to life in the pages of case studies. They’re also very interested in analytic techniques—especially dream interpretation, which I practice in a very classical, Freudian way. Many students are also eager to know more about diagnosis and case formulation, and about both the helpful and hindering aspects of these practices for ethno-racially minoritized populations. Following this course, some students choose to do a more specialized independent study or senior thesis under my supervision.
Each year, a few students decide to pursue psychiatry or clinical psychology because of their experience in our course. They tell me that they’d not been able to see themselves pursuing such a career but that the course had helped them glimpse something in themselves they hadn’t seen before. Students who put in extra effort (including more math and science courses) and request extra mentoring from me often matriculate into top graduate programs, which is one of my ways of paying forward the gift of psychoanalysis that I myself was given as an undergraduate.
Psychoanalysis can be promoted beyond the classroom as well. My research strategy has been to study measurable psychoanalytic constructs quantitatively. That is, I use methods and statistical tools from mainstream academic psychology to generate knowledge that is useful to psychoanalysis as well. One example of this approach is my work on psychological mindedness, which is the ability to observe and reflect on the interconnections among thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in oneself and in others. Originating as a mid-century, Midwestern psychoanalytic construct at Topeka’s Menninger Clinic, psychological mindedness is a personality variable that impacts the process and outcome of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapies. Psychological mindedness is a core feature of the Profile of Mental Functioning in the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual or PDM-2 (Lingiardi and Williams 2017). My work has involved a series of foundational studies designed to relate psychological mindedness to more established psychological constructs such as attachment, cognitive style, mindfulness, and empathy—thereby placing it on firmer empirical ground.
Beyond personality research, psychotherapy process/outcome research is another area that provides ample opportunities for psychoanalytic exploration. For example, I’ve investigated the use of psychodynamic techniques, the working alliance, and session depth in real-world psychotherapy settings. If one is not in a position to conduct a study designed to measure psychoanalytic variables exclusively, one can still include psychoanalytic variables in studies that are not primarily psychoanalytic in nature. This typically involves partnering with researchers in adjacent fields and provides an opportunity to gather relevant psychoanalytic data and connect it to variables from other disciplines.
Undergraduate participation is invaluable to such research, and it helps students themselves get excited about the application of psychoanalytic ideas as well as giving them opportunities for co-authorship and mentoring that help them on their path to graduate school. Crucially, such research helps weave psychoanalysis back into academic psychology, from which it has been exiled for too long.
Works cited
Freud, Sigmund. 1955. “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. Tr. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 157-68.
Lingiardi, Vittorio, and Nancy McWilliams, ed. 2017. Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. 2d ed. New York: Guilford Press.
