Psyche on Campus

by Vera J. Camden and Valentino L. Zullo

At a recent American literature conference, a creative writing professor told us he was using comics in his classroom. As two English professors who have taught comics for many years, we were intrigued and asked him, how? He explained that his students used generative AI to create images paired with typed text. We demurred and asked what the point was of making AI-comics in the classroom when for us, creating comics has always been about reconstituting the mind/body connection and about using one’s hands (our first tools) as a “way of thinking” (Chute 2019, 629). Our colleague’s response was: “Hey, this isn’t an art class!” It seemed clear that, for him, hand-drawing was for children, maybe for artists, but that for “critical-thinking” adults AI was the way to go.

We beg to differ and hope here to explain why! We contend that writing and drawing by hand is a human privilege and that, akin to psychoanalysis, it can be an invitation to self-reflection. We dread the prospect of a world in which generative AI turns the work of making into something done for us, and not by us. Whatever pedagogical applications AI may eventually have, no technology should alienate students from their embodied creative capacities, beginning with the use of their hands.

Making comics in classrooms has never been about cranking out perfectly finished products. Although comics now might be recognized as a legitimate artistic medium—as the recent special exhibit “La bande dessinée au Musée” (2024), at Paris’s Centre Pompidou attests—comics needn’t aspire to be “high” art. Instead, we take inspiration from cartoonist Lynda Barry, who asks in her book, Making Comics, “How old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?” (Fig. 1). The accompanying drawings—one by a toddler, the other by an older child—are both haunting and needn’t be judged primarily in aesthetic terms.

For us, making comics in the classroom isn’t about good or bad art but about the human capacity for storytelling. Combining writing and drawing—which have little distinction for us as children—helps us connect thoughts and feelings, experiences and reflections, body and mind. Makers of comics ask us to see the world by way of their hands. If we allow generative AI to do the work of making for us, we risk losing certain self-expressive capacities. Generative AI cannot, for instance, replicate the experience of a student who starts to use the long-neglected colored pencils that were given to her by her grandfather but went unused for years until she was ready to hold them and use them as disinhibiting tools of self-discovery and self-expression. We well remember her tearful story of surprise at how making comics helped her reconnect to a feeling buried deep inside her.

Some readers might not know that there are gatherings of comics fans, teachers, scholars, creators, and medical and clinical practitioners of all specialties—including psychoanalysis—where such matters are considered in earnest. This past summer we attended the annual “Graphic Medicine” conference in Athlone, Ireland, where the theme was Draíocht, the Irish word for “magic.” Centering on the magic or “alchemy” of joining image and text, medicine and graphic narratives, we found that in making comics we also remember ourselves.

Our panel presentation highlighted the forthcoming special issue of the journal American Imago, called “Comics on the Couch: Graphic Medicine and Psychoanalysis.” This special issue—the sequel to our 2020 special issue, “Comics on the Couch”—brings together scholars and creators to consider the question: “What are the benefits of bringing together psychoanalysis and graphic medicine?” This project builds on Rita Charon’s efforts, in her edited collection (with Peter Rudnytsky), Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (2008), to launch a new field that owes much to the legacy of psychoanalysis and to its storytelling genre, the case history.

Our fellow panelist, New Yorker cartoonist and best-selling author Suzy Becker, presented her visualization of the companionate relationship between comics and psychoanalysis through original cartoons to be published in the forthcoming issue. One of these (see Fig. 2) shows the true discoverers of the unconscious, Sophocles and Shakespeare, analyzing Herr Doktor Freud himself! With Suzy we “felt the alchemy” of collaboration in focusing on what comics and psychoanalysis can do together, as they facilitate fresh accounts of human experience.

We began our presentation with D. W. Winnicott, who sounds much like a cartoonist when, in Playing and Reality, he says that

what I am referring to is universal and has infinite variety. It is rather similar to the description of the human face when we describe one in terms of shape and eyes and nose and mouth and ears, but the fact remains that no two faces are exactly alike and very few are even similar. Two faces may be similar when at rest, but as soon as there is animation, they become different. (1971, xvii)

Winnicott points here to what comics creator Scott McCloud refers to as “amplification through simplification” (1993, 30). McCloud himself uses drawings of the human face to show that the less detailed an image is the more it represents to us; that is, the less detailed something is the easier it is to find ourselves in it. McCloud reminds us that humans tend to see faces everywhere: in odd shapes and scrawls, in clouds, wall outlets, automobile grills, and all sorts of other non-human features of the world that spur human associations. We’re reminded of Winnicott’s own squiggle game, meant to spur mutual associations for its participants. And in one of the panels from Making Comics (see Fig. 3), Barry tells us that “the exercises in this book take advantage of a basic human inclination to find patterns and meaning in random information” (2019, 10). The apparent “randomness” of Winnicott’s squiggle game and Barry’s exercises finds its meaning first in the unconscious. The hand may tell a story that words can’t yet find. And for those of us who aren’t trained or professional artists, these “random” manipulations of line and shape can help us access what might otherwise remain repressed or dissociated.

Generative AI can make connections and associations, too, of course. But it can’t make them for us—not in a way that fosters self-understanding and healthy development. We should be wary of outsourcing our own spontaneity. Generative AI’s encroachments on human agency are often cloaked in the guise of assistance and even education. But in our classes we seek to facilitate human agency and attendant self-understanding through many types of manipular creativity, such as collage, scrapbooking, woodworking, music-making, and various multimedia formats—including comics. We like Barry’s quite psychoanalytic idea: to consider that which we knew how to do before we were taught how to do it. We tell our students, that will be your (self-)access point, and we’ve witnessed students access themselves through making in all sorts of ways: coming to terms with loss, imagining their futures in new ways, learning to find joy in the everyday.

In making comics, we make ourselves. Barry asks: “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?” (2002, 7). This panel from One! Hundred! Demons! (Fig. 4) has helped frame discussions of comics in our classes for decades, and it seems more pertinent than ever today. As Christopher Bollas (following Winnicott) states: “Illusion is the foundation of belief” (2024, 50). Illusion and fantasy are essential to our psychic well-being. The fantasies that patients share in psychoanalytic treatment are generated by the same sort of image-making freedom that can be expressed in comics. Bollas remarks that “in analysis we get the feeling that the patient is creating us, inventing us, and generally enjoying the invention of this companion that is the analyst” (2024, 51). One might say the same thing about students and teachers, who also make one another up as they go about the work of teaching and learning. Our classroom engagements with the new field of Graphic Medicine help bring comics and psychoanalysis into a fruitful pedagogical partnership.

The field of Graphic Medicine helps us as teachers to tap into the power of comics—a vibrant medium that stands like a wise fool against the increasingly alien and impersonal world of contemporary medicine. Ever since its founding, psychoanalysis has drawn from literature and the arts. Comics are simply the most recent, popular medium for psychosocial development. Art Spiegelman has called comics “one of the last bastions of literacy” (1995, 61). Our sense is that making comics might be one of the last bastions of creative activity in the contemporary classroom (and beyond)—as long as we don’t abandon its potential to the lure of generative AI.

The authors would like to thank the organizers of the 2024 Graphic Medicine Conference for hosting our panel, “Comics on the Couch,” and Jane Hanenberg, editor of American Imago, for giving us the opportunity to edit our forthcoming special issue, “Comics on the Couch: Graphic Medicine and Psychoanalysis.”

 

Works Cited

Barry, Lynda. 2019. Making Comics. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly.

—. 2002. One! Hundred! Demons! Seattle: Sasquatch Books.

Camden, Vera J., and Valentino L. Zullo, ed. “Special Issue: Comics on the Couch: Graphic Medicine and Psychoanalysis.” American Imago (forthcoming 2025).

Bollas, Christopher. 2024. Essential Aloneness: Rome Lectures on D.W. Winnicott. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chiang, Ted. 2024. “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art.” The New Yorker, August 31, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art.

Chute, Hillary. 2019. “Drawing Is a Way of Thinking.” PMLA 134.3: 629-637.

“La bande dessinée au Musée.” Exhibit. Centre Pompidou. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/PqDlAKL

McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press.

Rudnytsky, Peter L., and Rita Charon, ed. 2008. Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Spiegelman, Art. 1995. “Interview with Gary Groth.” Comics Journal 189: 52-106.

Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. New York: Penguin.

 

 

by Brian Connolly

The relationship between history and psychoanalysis has always been a bit vexed. Joan W. Scott has written of the “incommensurability of history and psychoanalysis,” which “provides the ground for continued conversation and debate about the possibilities, and also the limits, of a collaboration between the different temporalities of psychoanalysis and history” (2012, 82). If there is a trajectory of possibilities and limits that might propel critical historical thinking, there are also dangers. Michel de Certeau, himself one of the great practitioners of a psychoanalytic history, put it this way:

Since these Freudian “concepts” are supposed to explain all human endeavor, we have little difficulty driving them into the most obscure regions of history. Unfortunately, they are nothing other than decorative tools if their only goal amounts to a designation or discreet obfuscation of what the historian does not understand (1988, 288-89).

Another advocate of a psychoanalytically inflected history was less circumspect. “My plea for history as an elegant, fairly rigorous aesthetic science,” Peter Gay wrote in Freud for Historians,

was powerfully assisted by my commitment to psychology, in particular to psychoanalysis. I saw it then, and see it even more now, as a rewarding auxiliary discipline that the historical profession has so far inadequately trusted, and certainly far from mastered. The much canvassed disasters of psychohistory, on which its detractors have fastened with a kind of unholy glee, are ground for caution rather than despair—or for disdain (1985, ix-x).

Taking these cautions seriously, we might still ask, what was/is psychohistory? What has the discipline of history lost by effectively disavowing it? And what might this mean today for the teaching of history in the United States (and elsewhere), as the university itself crumbles?

Continue reading “The Disavowal of Psychohistory and the Teaching of History”

by Harold Braswell

For most of my career, I kept my interest in psychoanalysis largely separate from my work as a professor of bioethics. I was nervous that colleagues and students would find psychoanalysis weird and retrograde, and I had other interests that were more readily accepted.

But in summer 2020 I earned tenure, which gave me a high enough degree of job security to allay my fears. Also, shortly after that, my father died. I had a lot of regrets about our relationship, and these regrets made me feel an urgent need to stop holding back in life and to live as I wanted. I entered personal analysis and decided to pursue clinical training, which meant first earning a degree in social work and then becoming a clinical candidate at my local psychoanalytic institute. These experiences dramatically enhanced my understanding of the transformative impact of psychoanalysis on my own life, and its potential to better the lives of others.

Then, in fall 2022, my university, Saint Louis University, launched a new undergraduate Core Curriculum, which required all incoming students to take one of its new “Ignite Seminars.” These seminars could be on any almost any topic, provided that the instructor was passionate about it—passion which, it was hoped, would “ignite” the minds of students just embarking on their education.

Continue reading “Teaching Psychoanalysis as a Manual for Living”

Psyche on Campus has been on hiatus for a few months while I’ve been finishing a new book, Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present, which will be published by Routledge in 2025. (More about that as the publication date approaches.) The blog is getting back up to speed with some terrific posts lined up for publication soon.

Meanwhile, here are four timely announcements sure to be of interest to many of you:

First up, on June 2 (that’s this coming Sunday!)

Consider tuning in to the free, online conference on “Psychodynamic Psychology in Academia: A Call to Action.” The panels and discussions will take place between 11:00am and 2:15pm (EST). To register (again, it’s free to all!), visit https://forms.gle/yXqoxFGAECcFh75MA.

Calling all undergraduate writers and their instructors!

Submissions are due by September 30, 2024, for the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual Undergraduate Essay Prize. This $500 prize will be awarded to an undergraduate essay which engages psychoanalytic ideas in relation to a focused question, in any academic discipline. Essays must be submitted by the instructor (just one submission per instructor, please). For complete details and submission instructions, visit https://apsa.org/fellowships-awards/undergraduate-essay-prize/.

Scholars and clinician writers take note!

The journal Re:visit~ Humanities & Medicine in Dialogue is now accepting article submissions of 6,000-8,000 words—in either English or German—for its next open section issue. The submission deadline is November 30, 2024. Re:visit publishes critical and (self-)reflexive writing about concepts and questions that place medicine (including mental health and mental healthcare policy) and the humanities in dialogue with one another. Theoretical, historical, and clinical/empirical approaches are all welcome. For complete details and submission instructions, (re)visit https://journal-revisit.org/jr/index.

Calling all readers!

If you’re a reader of Psyche on Campus then you almost certainly have something to say about psychoanalysis and undergraduate education, whether as a teacher, student, clinician, or administrator—maybe something you’d like to share? Psyche on Campus is especially eager to hear from those of you who are psychoanalytic training institute affiliates, candidates, faculty, and/or administrators, as well as from clinicians in private practice and those of you who are active in APsA, Division 39, IPA, etc. What are your views on the importance of teaching psychoanalysis at the undergraduate level? How important to you is it that new generations of college students have more and better opportunities to learn about psychoanalysis? What sorts of benefits might result from expanding the scope of undergraduate psychoanalytic education? What about the possibility of independent analytic institutes joining forces with universities? Any and all points of view are welcome. Send your short (800-1200 words) post or pitch your idea to me at cavitch@upenn.edu.

by Jeffrey Berman

In an unusually pessimistic essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” published in 1939 (the year of his death), Freud called psychoanalysis one of the three “impossible professions,” along with education and government. “One can be sure beforehand,” Freud ruefully confesses, “of achieving unsatisfying results” (1964, 248). My own experience with psychoanalytic education, however, has been far more satisfying. Indeed, for over 50 years at the University of Albany, I’ve made the writing of psychoanalytic diaries and personal essays a highly successful keystone in my undergraduate teaching.

In the mid-1970s, I created the first course on literature and psychoanalysis in our English department. Its central feature was the weekly psychoanalytic diary entries in which students wrote about their dreams—the “royal road to the unconscious,” as Freud puts it (1953, 5: 608)—fantasies, and psychological conflicts. Students could be as personal as they wished in their diaries; no subject was off limits. I didn’t grade the diaries, but they were a fundamental requirement. Before returning the diaries the following week, I would read a few entries out loud, always anonymously and with no discussion—always honoring requests from students who didn’t want their diary entries read aloud. At the beginning of the semester, I got many such requests. But by the end of the semester almost all of them gave permission.

Continue reading “Psychoanalytic and Therapeutic Writing in the Classroom”

by Greta Kaluževičiūtė-Moreton

In the autumn of 2021, after graduating with a Ph.D. in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex and completing my post–doc at the University of Cambridge, I made the decision to return to my native country, Lithuania. Since then, I’ve been working at the historic Vilnius University as an Associate Professor in the Institute of Psychology. This transition significantly influenced my academic perspective: unlike comparable programs in the U.K. and the U.S., the Institute of Psychology is quite sizeable, encompassing various branches of and perspectives on psychology and psychoanalysis. While there are significant traces of Jungian psychoanalysis in the work of Lithuanian scholars and psychology students, Freud is placed somewhat confusingly in the psychology curriculum. This means that Freudian psychoanalysis is perceived more as part of the historical background than as a set of ideas for use in understanding the contemporary psyche.

This is mostly a consequence of the split between research and practice: psychoanalytic clinicians tend not to remain in the academic sphere. Freud’s ambiguous status is also an historical consequence of the years of Soviet occupation, during which psychoanalytic education was suppressed for ideological reasons. Psychoanalysis—and, indeed, much of psychology—had to negotiate a regime directly opposed to the capacity for individual self-reflection (Rasickaite 2022).

Thus, many of the pivotal psychoanalytic thinkers in U.S. and U.K. programs—including Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, whose work I regularly taught at Essex—tended to be excluded from the undergraduate psychology curriculum. Even now, object relational, relational, and self-psychological theories tend to be relegated to postgraduate courses that focus on clinical training rather than scholarly research.

Continue reading “Smuggling Psychoanalysis into Psychology: Teaching Psychoanalytic Theory to Undergraduates in Lithuania”

     

Applications are now being accepted for student externships to the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 2024 Annual Meeting, at the Hilton Midtown in New York City, February 6-11, 2024.

 Eligibility: College Juniors and Seniors (not limited to any major or minor) and Graduate Students (in any field) with an interest in psychoanalysis.

 This externship provides a unique opportunity to discover the world of psychoanalysis in all its aspects: as a theory of mind, as a method of interpretation across the disciplines, and as a clinical practice. 8-10 students will be chosen to attend the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, February 6-11, 2024, at the Hilton Midtown in New York City. Registration fees and hotel rooms will be covered for all externship winners, who will also receive  stipends for transportation, food, and extern-mentor events.

Students will be able to attend all parts of the scientific program, such as plenary presentations, featured panels, and smaller discussion groups and workshops on an extraordinary array of topics including gender and sexuality, addictions, child and adolescent analysis, ethics, psychoanalysis in the social sciences and humanities, research and empirical studies, etc. Students will also be assigned mentors to assist in registration and to serve as guides during the meetings.

Application requirements:

1. 1. Current resume
   2. Unofficial Transcript
   3. One academic recommendation
   4. A 2-page essay responding to the question: “How do you imagine psychoanalysis might impact your field of study?” (maximum 750 words)

Application deadline: November 11, 2023. Include all four required elements in a single email to be sent to Dr. Susan Donner at sldonnermd@gmail.com.

 Questions? Ask Dr. Susan Donner at sldonnermd@gmail.com.

 For more on the externship experience, read program alumna Esha Bhandari’s blog post, “Child’s Play at APsaA: Discovering Psychoanalytic Play Therapy,” linked here: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/psycheoncampus/2022/02/18/childs-play-at-apsaa-discovering-psychoanalytic-play-therapy/

To be eligible, papers must have been written within the past year, either in an undergraduate course or independently under an instructor’s supervision, at a college or university within the United States.  Papers must be 12 to 20 pages long and must not have been published (or submitted for publication) elsewhere.

For more information: https://apsa.org/fellowships-awards/undergraduate-essay-prize/

And good luck to all the applicants! 

Remember, too (or, if you’re an instructor, please alert your students), that here at Psyche on Campus we’re always eager to hear from undergraduates studying psychoanalysis–anywhere where in the world!–who have a good pitch for a blog-post.  Simply email your pitch (or a completed post of approximately 800-1200 words) to cavitch@upenn.edu to be considered for possible publication!

by Spencer Biel and Katie Lewis

In December 2021, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared a youth mental health crisis associated with the coronavirus pandemic, pernicious effects of social media on self-esteem, and sluggish progress on issues like racial justice, climate change, and income inequality. More recently, he stated:

Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation has been an underappreciated public health crisis that has harmed individual and societal health. Our relationships are a source of healing and well-being hiding in plain sight—one that can help us live healthier, more fulfilled, and more productive lives. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2023)

These sobering advisories have special application to college students, whose developmental tasks include transitioning from being a child in a family to an adult in the world. This process involves forming meaningful relationships, trusting in social structures, and cultivating community belonging. However, many students feel isolated, overwhelmed, and unsure whether the adult world is even worth joining. In this post, we consider emerging-adult loneliness through the lens of attachment theory. For those with histories of early adversity, trauma, and disrupted attachment, we propose that a psychodynamic systems approach can be especially helpful to address underlying drivers of loneliness and isolation and enhance belonging.

Continue reading “Loneliness and Belonging in College Mental Health”

by Francois Rabie

My love affair with all things psychoanalytic began in my final undergraduate year at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. A module (roughly equivalent to a semester-long course) introducing us to clinical psychology and psychopathology drew strongly on psychoanalysis, and I was hooked. It made intuitive sense. Up until then much of my undergraduate psychology degree had consisted in learning how to design positivistic research methodologies and to deploy statistics in that endeavor. I’ve got nothing against structured observation and factor analysis. But something about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis struck me as intellectually and emotionally compelling—rich with possibilities in ways that psychology was not. In part, perhaps, because I was a humanities major, I was more strongly drawn to psychoanalysis as a way of studying human consciousness and subjectivity.

Twenty-five years later, I’m a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist—not just thinking about psychoanalytic concepts, but also fully experiencing their meaningfulness to the human condition in my intersubjective encounters with patients. Along the way, my own personal journey as an analysand helped me to apprehend the unconscious in rich, frightening, and liberating ways. Being a psychoanalytic clinician allows me to continue to explore and integrate the theory I’ve studied, the experience of my personal analysis, and, of course, daily encounters with my patients. Among the many satisfactions I derive from this way of life are a more profound personal experience of the oceanic unconscious and a deeply emotional sense of my own developmental journey. At the same time, I continue to refine my technique in the best analytic interests of my patients.

Continue reading “Teaching Psychoanalysis in an Era of Empiricist Psychology: Notes from Cape Town”