Psyche on Campus

Dear Psyche on Campus subscribers and other readers of the blog,

I’m very pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present, which will be officially released later this month by Routledge Press. I hope that readers of all kinds—including psychoanalytic clinicians and thinkers, university teachers and administrators, and undergraduates and graduate students—will be interested in what it has to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As readers of this blog know, psychoanalysis gives us our most complete and nuanced account of what it means to be human—including what it means to create and transmit knowledge from one person and one generation to the next. Psychoanalysis and the University charts the past and present vicissitudes of the relation between psychoanalysis and education, emphasizing the urgent contemporary need for colleges and universities to expand and enhance the place of psychoanalysis in both their curricula and their campus healthcare settings.

The relation between psychoanalysis and the university has always been characterized by various forms of resistance and renewal—perpetuating and, in recent decades especially, exacerbating the challenges faced by educators and clinicians who hope to expand the place of psychoanalysis in higher education. As I argue in the book’s Introduction, the precariousness of both psychoanalysis and the university makes this a particularly auspicious moment for overcoming mutual resistances, and one aim of Psychoanalysis and the University is to suggest ways in which their respective prospects for survival could be reciprocally enhanced. In my view, twenty-first-century universities need to do more to recognize their essential role in communicating the importance of psychoanalysis for understanding intrapsychic and psychosocial phenomena both within and beyond the classroom, just as the field of psychoanalysis needs to reassert its necessity, not only as a mode of treatment but also as the richest theoretical account of our subjectivation and intersubjectivity. My book’s most fundamental argument is that the perpetual marginalization of psychoanalysis in higher education is about much more than the suppression (by academic psychology, most notably) of a single field of knowledge—that it in fact amounts to a defensive refutation of the determinations of unconscious experience in all aspects of human affairs.

While Psychoanalysis and the University is addressed primarily to readers in the US, the UK, and other English-speaking countries, the systems of higher education in numerous non-anglophone countries, as well, share many of the same challenges and opportunities—thanks not least to the long, circumglobal history of the relation between psychoanalysis and education, as Chapter 1 demonstrates.

Following that broad historical overview, Chapter 2 (“Psychoanalysis and the Curriculum”) describes and evaluates psychoanalytic content in higher education over the past several decades. Where and how is psychoanalysis being taught in our colleges and universities? What sorts of departments and programs most often tend to include psychoanalytic content in their courses, and of what does that content consist? Who are the principal psychoanalytic thinkers students are asked to read? What would an expansion of psychoanalytic curricula look like from the perspective of different areas of study, and how might such enhancements be implemented and justified in light of the crises we now face?

Chapter 3 (“Psychoanalysis Among the Disciplines”) considers the ways in which universities “discipline” knowledge and whether psychoanalysis itself is—or should be—treated as a distinct discipline, with its own institutional infrastructure. Where do psychoanalytic studies already have such an infrastructure, and how are these programs faring, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels? Is psychoanalysis inherently interdisciplinary, and, if so, with how many different disciplines does it—or could it—interact? To what extent—and in what sense—is psychoanalytic research empirical? And how does it balance the empirical and the theoretical or speculative? What are the descriptive, heuristic, and epistemological roles played by psychoanalysis in different areas of research and teaching? And how might the enhancement of psychoanalytic education help mitigate or even reverse the effects of increasing standardization, accountability metrics, and other forms of naïve empiricism regarding the assessment of instructional quality and learning outcomes?

Scenes of instruction and learning are the particular focus of Chapter 4 (“Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy”), which describes and evaluates the activities of teaching and learning from a psychoanalytic perspective. How might the individual experiences of teachers and students, as well as the collective experience of the classroom group, be better understood in psychodynamic terms? How might such experiences be even better facilitated by actively incorporating certain psychoanalytic concepts and techniques into existing pedagogical practices? Of primary significance to such questions are the mutually informing phenomena of transference and countertransference—the often powerful emotional currents that flow, unconsciously, between teachers and students, as well as between students themselves, in classrooms, office-hours, labs, and other educational settings. What are the advantages as well as the dangers of the emotional attachments, erotic feelings and fantasies, and forms of mistrust, love, anger, emulation, and jealousy that tend to remain unavowed and therefore unaddressed in the pedagogical situation? The pursuit of knowledge itself has its own affective dimensions that tend not to be openly discussed as part of the learning process. But what if they were? How might psychoanalysis help teachers and students make better use of their “passion” (or “hatred” or “boredom,” etc.) for a particular object of study or entire field of inquiry?

The considerable cost—in time as well as money—of both psychoanalytic treatment and higher education prompts the very reasonable question: “Are they worth it?” Will either one make life better? Would an enhanced relation between the two yield further, unanticipated advantages? Chapter 5 (“Psychoanalysis, the University, and the Professions”) addresses these questions of value with respect to both psychological well-being and professional achievement, suggesting ways in which higher education could better prepare students for a variety of careers by augmenting the curricular and pedagogical roles of psychoanalysis on campus. It describes various post-graduate possibilities for students of psychoanalysis and explains how advantageous a psychoanalytically informed education can be in the pursuit and development of many different sorts of professions and careers. This chapter also addresses the often conflicting claims of metapsychological theory and caregiving practice in psychoanalytic training, while also considering how psychoanalysis could enhance the university’s own pastoral role—not only by improving the quality of campus-based mental healthcare, but also by developing the capacities of all students for compassionate self-understanding and ethical relations with others.

Finally, the book’s Appendix offers some further practical information for educators, including: a database of syllabi from various courses taught by academics and clinicians in a multitude of fields; information about professional psychoanalytic organizations with demonstrated interest in psychoanalytic education; and a supplemental list of sources not already cited in the Bibliography.

Psychoanalysis and the University is being published as part of the Routledge series, “Psychoanalysis in a New Key,” under the general editorship of Donnel Stern, and I’m deeply grateful to Don for giving my book such a wonderful home.

I’m also tremendously grateful to Jack Drescher, Sander Gilman, Lynne Layton, Emma Lieber, Andrew Solomon, and Eli Zaretsky, who were among the book’s first readers. Here is what each of them has to say about it:

“Can psychoanalysis ever be part of modern university curricula in ways other academic disciplines take for granted? According to Max Cavitch, psychoanalysis is inseparable from all university activities, even when not recognized as a distinct discipline. Neither activity, psychoanalysis nor higher education, is merely about transmitting facts; both rely upon the power of relationships to impart knowledge to students and teachers alike. So what, to paraphrase D. W. Winnicott, might a “pedagogical holding environment” look like? After presenting a detailed history of psychoanalytic pedagogy since Freud, Psychoanalysis and the University offers educators and psychoanalytically-oriented clinicians some thoughtful suggestions to answer that question.”
—Jack Drescher, M.D., training and supervising analyst, William Alanson White Institute

“Must we now have a psychoanalysis ‘in ruins’ for a university ‘in ruins’? Max Cavitch makes a compelling argument that now is the moment to rethink what has long been a conflict about where and who should be involved in the training of psychoanalysts and how such training can begin to reshape the very notion of an academic pedagogy within professional as well as liberal arts settings. The right book for the right moment.”
—Sander L. Gilman, distinguished professor emeritus of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of psychiatry emeritus, Emory University

“Max Cavitch is the champion psychoanalysis needs to break down barriers between psychoanalytic institutes and the university. Critiquing the utilitarian trend of knowledge acquisition in the contemporary neoliberal university, Cavitch argues that the university’s disavowal of the unconscious is one clear key to its impoverished state. His psychoanalytic sensibility widens our very understandings of what knowledge is and what it is for. Cavitch makes a compelling case for how, in his words, teaching with rather than about psychoanalysis can powerfully transform any classroom, no matter the discipline.”
—Lynne Layton, psychoanalyst; assistant clinical professor of psychology, Harvard Medical School; author of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes

“This book will be essential for anyone invested in the histories and futures of both education and psychoanalysis (which, to my mind, should be all of us). Fluidly weaving historical and contemporary sources on the complex, fraught, and fertile relationship between psychoanalysis and teaching, Cavitch’s account not only provides a lucid overview of the inter-implication of the two fields, but also offers an intervention on current thinking about the production and uses of knowledge. As the twenty-first century university finds itself in crisis; as new generations of students work to change our cultural relationship to questions of authority, identity, responsibility, and truth; and as psychoanalysis has reemerged on the contemporary scene in conversation with these shifts, this book should serve as an orienting point as we re-think what it means to learn how to live.”
—Emma Lieber, psychoanalyst; part-time assistant professor of literary studies, Eugene Lang College, The New School; author of The Writing Cure and editor of The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass

“In an era when psychoanalysis has been systematically devalued, Max Cavitch’s book comes as a revelation: that psychoanalysis is a tool not only for understanding the inner lives of individual subjects, but also for understanding our relationship to the outside world and its nuances. Within universities, psychoanalysis has been attacked as too obscure usefully to inform teaching, criticism, humanism. Yet this apparent uselessness is the very point: that insight has inherent value even when it does not have implications, and that in losing track of that notion, we lose track of education itself. Written from the standpoint of profound knowledge, deep experience, and meticulous research, this book stands as a persuasive defense of psychoanalysis in pedagogy, and establishes that the stripping away of psychoanalytic principles from university curricula has been a regressive step reflective of our yearning for simplicity in the face of an ever more complex reality. Cavitch ultimately proves that this represents not an escalation into clarity, but a descent into sophistry and chaos, a failure of education to understand or prepare students for the intricate convolutions of the world they constitute or the one they will inhabit.”
—Andrew Solomon, professor of clinical psychology, Columbia University Medical Center; lecturer in psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine; author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“In its early years, psychoanalysis benefited from being excluded from a restrictive and conservative university culture. Today, the university has become open to many forms of thought, but at the same time it is in a crisis of its own. Max Cavitch brings these two histories together, with unexpected and illuminating consequences.”
—Eli Zaretsky, professor of history, New School for Social Research, author of Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural history of Psychoanalysis

The book’s “ship date” is April 23, but orders for both print and electronic copies can already be placed at the Routledge Web site where, during the month of April, there is a 20% discount:

And from April 1 until September 30, use this discount code for the same discount:

 
Psychoanalysis and the University is also available at Amazon.
 

Max Cavitch, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Co-director of Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also edits the APsA award-winning blog, Psyche on Campus. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge, 2025), and Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance (forthcoming from Punctum Books). He is also the editor of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (Oxford University Press, 2023), co-editor (with Brian Connolly) of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke University Press, 2024), and co-translator (with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant) of Jean Louis Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema [L’Homme ordinaire du cinema] (MIT Press, 2016). Currently, he is the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum and the University of Vienna, where he is completing his next book, Fido and Psyche: Dogs In and Around Psychoanalysis, 1871 to the Present: An Illustrated History.

 

by Jyoti M. Rao

International experts have concluded that recent crackdowns on campus protests have created “a widespread hostile environment for the exercise of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association” and recommended that universities find ways to respect and support their students. Still, student activists and their allies have seen escalating disciplinary actions taken against them for speaking out against the horrific human rights violations in Gaza as a result of military bombardment substantially underwritten by the U.S. government. These actions against students have included extensive surveillance, involvement of armed law enforcement, suspensions, threats to employment, and declarations of tenured faculty as personae non gratae for participating in protests. In the early months of 2025, escalation of this hostility has included withdrawal of federal funding from universities at which protests took place and an executive order targeting students and casting their political activity in propagandistic terms.

While narratives about contemporary student protestors portray them as uniquely suspect and deserving of punishment, activists and reformers have been maligned throughout U.S. history:

“How far do we go in tolerating these people and this trash under the excuse of academic freedom and freedom of expression?” (President Ronald Reagan, referring to Free Speech Movement student protestors in California, 1967)

“If anyone came into my store and tried to stop business I’d throw him out. [He] should behave himself and show he’s a good citizen. Common sense and good will can solve this whole thing.” (President Harry Truman, referring to Southern lunch-counter desegregation activists, 1960)

“They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” (Governor James Rhodes of Ohio, referring to student antiwar protestors, 1970; Rhodes subsequently ordered the Ohio National Guard to suppress campus protests against the Vietnam War, resulting in the Kent State Massacre)

“It’s an excess of free speech to use—to resort to some of the tactics these people use.” (President George H. W. Bush, referring to ACT UP members seeking care for people with AIDS, 1991)

“They don’t know very much at all…about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.” (former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, referring to pro-Palestinian student protestors, 2024)

“You see these bums, you know, blowing up campuses.” (President Richard Nixon, referring to student antiwar protestors, 1970)

“[They] cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left [them] free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.” (Senator Jesse Helms, referring to southern civil rights activists, 1963)

“So ridiculous. [She] must work on her Anger Management (sic) problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend.” (President Donald Trump, referring to climate activist Greta Thunberg, after she was named Person of the Year by Time Magazine at the age of 16, 2019).

“[He] is the most notorious liar in the country.” (FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, referring to Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964)

This rhetoric is notably consistent in its condemnation of activists and activism across time, context, location, and issue. In these accounts, activists are repeatedly described as dishonest, contemptible, intrusive, ignorant, excessive, undesirable, dangerous, pathological, and punishable—the same devaluing terms in which student activists are described by many in power today. Yet almost all the quotes above refer to people and causes we now rightly credit for their efforts to win essential gains through their activism.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, negative portrayals of activists are rooted in a form of transference, a re-experiencing in the present of past affective and relational formations, broadly construed. Although clinical psychoanalysis has focused intensively on the dynamics of the transference between the patient and the clinician, Freud theorized transference as a ubiquitous feature of interpersonal life, an aspect of all relational interactions. This has led to a proliferation of conceptualizations, including what is known as institutional transference: patterns from the past that shape one’s perception of institutions and what transpires within them. Similarly, in psychoanalytic work in public health settings, some analysts have posited a bureaucratic transference: subjective perceptions in the present that have their origins “in prior experience with social agencies and social configurations.”

Building on this work, I have proposed a concept that may assist in understanding stubborn antagonism towards student activists—what I’ve referred to elsewhere as “social transference,” which is a particular form of transference emerging from the larger social context and directed at specific groups and at individuals understood to represent those groups. Social transferences may be positive and idealizing, as in white supremacy or adulation of the wealthy. Or they may be negative and devaluing, as in the case of attacks against people who are Palestinian, trans, poor, undocumented—or who are vocal in their defense, such as contemporary student activists. Ascribing qualities to others via projection in pre-scripted and repetitive ways is a hallmark of transferential process, as is the revivification in the present of relational patterns from the past. Sigmund Freud noted that we repeat in the transference what we refuse to remember; this may be especially salient in areas of longstanding trauma, such as social injustice.

Although all transferences begin as internal psychological processes, they may result in material actions taken against activists in the external world, including arrests and other disciplinary actions. Civil rights workers fighting for voting rights and desegregation faced physical violence, including lethal force, at the hands of both law enforcement and white supremacist gangs. Just days before the Ohio National Guard opened fire on Vietnam-era student antiwar protestors at Kent State University, killing four, student activists were maligned by President Nixon as “bums blowing up campuses” and squandering their opportunity to learn, and by Ohio’s governor as “the worst type of people”—accusations similar to those directed at present-day students protesting the dire conditions in Gaza. In the aftermath of the murders, a local resident was quoted as saying: “I don’t feel sorry for the kids, they asked for it.” In early March 2025, the federal government took the extraordinary step of initiating proceedings to deport former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent U.S. resident and green card holder, for his role in campus activism.

The open aggression and absence of empathy towards these student activists is, at least in part, the product of negative social transference, which leads to the vilification of activists as dangerous, lazy, overly entitled, irrational, undesirable, and disposable agitators. Abuses of power are facilitated by these transferences, in which negative attributes are assigned to activists and ostensibly reasonable action is taken against them as if these attributes were real.

Transferential dynamics may make our perceptions feel accurate despite their sometimes extreme distortions of reality. Thus it is crucial to view these negative portrayals critically—indeed, to consider them within a psychoanalytic “hermeneutics of suspicion.” While valid disagreement and critiques of contemporary student activism exist, it is essential to distinguish them from the powerful transferential elements that have been used to justify over 3600 arrests in largely non-violent protests, to obscure widespread support for student protestors among students themselves, and to justify federal transgressions against lawful citizens. Anti-activism tactics capitalize on negative social transferences to polarize the public and undermine the integrity of civil society.

Transferences may be perniciously paired with structural forces, such as Jim Crow in the post-Civil War South and the nationwide Lavender Scare of the 1940s and 1950s—phenomena that helped set the stage for unchecked negative social transferences to converge with the political exclusion of Black and LGBTQ+ citizens who might have acted as reality-checking deterrents to what so often followed: state violence used with impunity against those who resisted oppression with social justice activism.

Similarly, the banning of affirmative action and current purges of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have already led to steep declines in diversity on many college campuses, weakening the opportunities for learning and solidarity that such diversity provides. As the renowned scholar Robert Jay Lifton writes, scholarship and activism share important, mutually informing resonances. Weakening one results in the weakening of the other, a fact that is currently being used strategically to undermine both.

Social justice activism, including student activism, holds interpretive value that may contribute to a “working through” of the social transference. The transformation of negative social transferences is part of the potential for therapeutic action inherent in the interpretive action of social justice work. Other therapeutic actions offered by activists include the provision of direct emotional support and opportunities for introjection, catharsis, insight, and identification. In psychoanalytic terms, repression of student activism is a violent acting out of the negative social transference and a resistance against the interpretations being offered by activists to those who will listen.

In the case of students protesting Palestinian suffering, campus activists are drawing attention to the violent deaths of upwards of 46,000 people, at least half of them women and children. Over 60,000 children in Gaza will need treatment for acute malnutrition this year, a condition which carries the risk of lifelong illness. Nearly all children in the area face dire mental health consequences from the trauma they are enduring. Student activists on campuses today, with their understanding of the present and their vision of a different future, are being punished to quash the interpretive potential of their activism as they persist in drawing attention to the nation’s failure to safeguard basic human rights and to foster the capacity for love.

 

Suggestions for further reading:

Binder, Amy J., and Jeffrey L. Kidder. 2022. The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Catlin, Samuel P. 2024. “The Campus Does Not Exist: How Campus War is Made.” Parapraxis 4: 40–47, https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist.

Catsam, Derek Charles, editor. 2024. Struggle for a Free South Africa: Campus Anti-Apartheid Movements in Africa and the United States, 1960-1994. New York: Routledge.

Cohen, Robert. Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism. New York: New Press, 2016

Conner, Jerusha O. 2020. The New Student Activists: The Rise of Neoactivism on College Campuses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cunningham, Philip J. 2009. Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Freud, Sigmund. 1957. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death [1915]” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Tr. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 273-300.

Hall, Amanda Joyce. 2023. “Students are the Spark: Anti-apartheid in the Long 1980s.” The Journal of African American History 108.3: 369-297.

Makari, George J. 1994. “Toward an Intellectual History of Transference,1888-1900.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 17.3: 559-70.

Rhoads, Robert A. 2016. “Student Activism, Diversity, and the Struggle for a Just Society.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 9.3: 189-202.

Rosenfeld, Seth. 2012. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Schulman, Sarah. 2021. Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Stanley,  Jason. 2018. How Fascism Works. New York: Random House.

Thrift, Erin, and Jeff Sugarman. 2024. “Social Justice in Fractured Times.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 21.2: 1-16.

 

 

 

 

by Liesl Dentinger

In my third year of undergraduate nursing school, I was assigned to an inpatient women’s trauma unit in a freestanding psychiatric hospital for a clinical rotation. The goal of this clinical experience was to engage in therapeutic communication with patients, a skillset very different from the physical assessments and medication administrations I learned in other rotations. What prepared me best for these patient encounters was not my previous nursing classes or clinical experience but rather the ability to listen in ways I developed while studying psychoanalytic theory in some non-nursing courses.

During this rotation, twice each week for eight weeks, I would spend four hours sitting and talking with patients. In a simulation laboratory, I had already been taught how to direct conversations and to rephrase or summarize what patients said to me, and I had been assured by various instructors that I had the foundational skills to help me keep patients safe. However, I was skeptical that these techniques alone could promote sufficient trust and empathy in the therapeutic setting. In a way, they felt like a series of mechanical techniques for standardized behaviors that neglected the therapeutic value of conversation—of bringing thoughts and emotions into conscious awareness through talking—that I had come to understand through studying psychoanalysis.

I had taken “Introduction to Psychoanalysis” in my first semester at the University of Pennsylvania, and, as I was preparing to meet with patients, I often thought about the case studies we had read—in particular, Breuer and Freud’s early case studies of “Anna O.” and “Dora.” I was intrigued by how much could be learned when the patient’s words were credited with as much importance as other clinical markers, and just how much a patient might reveal to a certain kind of listener.

On my first day in the trauma unit, one woman excitedly approached the seat in the dayroom next to mine. She immediately began talking, and continued to talk for the better part of four hours. I tried to keep up with her, nodding and meeting her gaze. She talked about the previous nursing students who had rotated through—how they both remained at the nurses station behind a plexiglass barrier. One student merely sat there and did homework; the other was moved to a different unit after witnessing a patient engaged in self-harming. As she told me about these students, I couldn’t help but empathize with them and their desire to evade the sorts of awkward moments and puzzling conversations that accompany this sort of clinical rotation. But because I had read about the discomfort of not-knowing while sitting with a patient, I felt able to acknowledge my unease and, as Nina Coltart puts it in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, to “sit it out with a patient, often for long periods…through the obfuscating darkness of resistance, complex defences, and the sheer unconscious of the unconscious” (1992, 3).

I talked with this same patient for several hours during each of my visits to the unit. I spent most of that time feeling lost while trying to remain present and to manage my own feelings of uncertainty—experiences I wish I’d encountered in a simulation laboratory before entering the clinical space. I reminded myself frequently that my patient was a person, not merely a pathology, and that we were talking person-to-person. During our post-clinical conference—spent reflecting on the day with classmates who had been assigned to different units in the same hospital—I learned that sitting for this much time with the same patient was unusual. It was nerve-wracking to have someone talk so freely with me, and I feared I would miss something important. Though I was still uncertain about my role, I began to imagine what it would be like to have a positive influence on her treatment, and I hoped that by listening more “analytically” I’d enable her to speak more freely. I clung to this idea of analytic listening—listening both to what she was saying and how she was saying it, and to what she was saying at certain times rather than at others, and to moments of silence, and to my own subjective experience of what she was saying.

The waiting and not-knowing that accompany analytic listening is very different from standard nursing practice in settings where certainty is essential. Accurately memorizing medications and dosages, anatomical features, procedures, and protocols is vital to keeping patients safe. But this encounter helped me see that a tolerance for not-knowing allowed me to do even more, simply by remaining curious and open to learning whatever I could about my patient.

At the same tike, analytic listening may also have made me apprehensive that I might hear something that others responsible for her care wouldn’t have heard. The unit treated many patients, and most of them didn’t receive this kind of attention. But, as an unlicensed and inexperienced student who would be leaving in a few short weeks, I wasn’t sure how to evaluate the importance of all the things she was telling me or who to share these things with.

Often, patient safety depended not on analytic listening but on decisive and urgent action. One morning several weeks into the rotation, breakfast conversation was interrupted by jarring, banging noises. They were hollow-sounding but kept increasing in tempo and volume. I rushed to the hallway where the noise was even louder, looking for its source. What I found was a disturbing scene of a patient in crisis. She was arching her back and extending her neck, stretching her body in a way that was almost graceful…before repeatedly dashing her forehead against the cinderblock wall with all the force she could muster.

For the first time, I saw nurses and doctors rush onto the unit, colliding with each other in their hurried attempt to wrestle the patient to the ground and inject her with a cocktail of medications. I watched her flailing limbs grow weak. A therapeutic hold, I thought to myself, and considered how ill-suited the word “therapeutic” was for this exigent situation as the other patients lined the windows of the dayroom to watch.

When I returned to the dayroom, the woman I’d been talking with grudgingly returned to her seat next to me. Folding her arms, she said indignantly: “That’s all they do. They give us the needle.”

I was still mentally trying to return to the dayroom and to metabolize the scene of self-harm I’d just witnessed. I didn’t yet have the right words, so I used hers: “All they do?”

“Yeah, and now they’re going to take you away, too, just like the last one,” she said (referring to the nursing student before me, who had been reassigned to a different unit after witnessing a similar patient crisis). Here, then, was this woman’s lived experience of abandonment, of inconsistent care and inadequate attention. If she hadn’t said this, I might have failed to register my own implication in her story. For several weeks, she had talked and I had listened. But here was a reminder that I, too, would be placed elsewhere and that she would remain under the care of the nurses and doctors who entered the unit only during crises. Even if I wasn’t relocated to a different unit, I would be moving on to a different rotation soon. Who would be the next nursing student to take my place? Would they listen, too? While it is good and necessary that there are crisis responses in place, I wondered what it would be like if all nurses were as well-trained in analytic listening as in crisis-response.

Studying psychoanalysis in the undergraduate classroom has made me a more present and responsive student nurse. Yet, to my knowledge, I’m the only student in my large nursing class that has taken even one course on psychoanalysis. I hope that my nursing peers will give this field of study serious consideration, and that programs that offer courses in psychoanalysis do more to encourage the enrollment of nursing students. My experience has shown me that there is a demonstrably valuable opportunity to enhance the field of nursing through psychoanalytic education and collaboration.

 

Work cited:

Coltart, Nina. 1992. Slouching Towards Bethlehem… and Further Psychoanalytical Explorations. London: Free Associations Books.

by Marita Vyrgioti

Psychoanalysis has always had a closer relationship with the psychosocial than commonly acknowledged. Many of Freud’s own writings explicitly engage with issues such as religion, war, sexuality, and the pitfalls of sociality. And social themes abound in various iterations of post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought. By emphasizing the struggle between destructiveness and the propensity for love and reparation, Melanie Klein offered an account of human subjectivity that is both psychological and sociological. And D. W. Winnicott discussed democracy in relation to both the family and the larger society. Historians and psychosocial theorists have appraised Klein’s and Winnicott’s contributions to the formation of social democracy in Britain during the modern era. Indeed, from the beginning, psychoanalysis has been frequently engaged with the sociopolitical world.

Yet certain tensions between the intrapsychic and the psychosocial have also increased over time. Few psychoanalysts enter the public sphere directly to engage with social issues. For the most part, their interventions are applications of psychoanalytic models to social phenomena. Many analysts are still reluctant to consider closely the implications of war, neoliberalism, violence against women, colonialism, racism and racial oppression, climate destruction, and technological determinism in theorizing the psychoanalytic subject.

Continue reading “Reflections from the BA in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex”

The following press release comes to us from our friends at ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action and will be of special interest to readers of Psyche on Campus. This hour-long film–free to view at ROOM‘s Web site–captures an extraordinarily moving and exigent dialogue between two psychoanalysts: one Palestinian and one Israeli.

In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Dr. Karim Dajani and Dr. Eyal Rozmarin embarked on a series of epistolary exchanges and conversations about Israel-Palestine, about their personal histories, about the relation between unconscious processes and political realities, and ultimately about friendship. In the film, moderated by ROOM’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Hattie Myers, Dajani and Rozmarin offer us a glimpse into the challenges, misunderstandings, and rewards of their sometimes agonizing, often tender, and always compelling relationship.

Many of us will surely be sharing this film with our colleagues, friends, and students and discussing it in various settings throughout the coming year and beyond.

–Max Cavitch

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ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action releases the film Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine

Monday November 21, 2024. ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action has released a recording of a conversation between psychoanalysts Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian), moderated by ROOM’s Editor-in-Chief, Hattie Myers. With an urgent focus on Israel-Palestine, these two psychoanalysts engage in a powerful and tender conversation showing how unconscious process underlies political-cultural realities and individual misunderstandings.

This conversation was recorded at the “Psychology & the Other” conference hosted by Boston College and Northeastern University in London on July 14, 2024. It is available to view at analytic-room.com/speakingofhome.

Since 2017, ROOM has been publishing essays, poetry, art, letters, memoir, and creative nonfiction using psychoanalysis as a lens for social discourse. This year, ROOM has published an ongoing correspondence between Dajani and Rozmarin. Their final letters will be published in ROOM 2.25, set to be released in March 2025.

About the analysts:

Karim G. Dajani, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He specializes in working with issues related to cultural dislocation and displacement. He sits on the editorial board of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. His recent works include a special issue dedicated to the social unconscious and an upcoming chapter on race and ethnicity in contemporary psychoanalytic theories and praxis that will appear in the next edition of the Textbook on Psychoanalysis.

Eyal Rozmarin, PhD, is a psychoanalyst and writer who teaches at the William Alanson White Institute and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He writes at the intersection of the psychological and the sociopolitical, about subjects, collectives, and the forces that pull them together and drive them apart. He is co-editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis and sits on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. His forthcoming book is called Belonging and Its Discontents.

About ROOM:
ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action is an award-winning interdisciplinary magazine and an international forum for mental health professionals, poets, artists, and activists to engage in community building and transformation. ROOM sheds light on the effects our cultural and political realities have on our inner worlds and the impact our psychology has on society.

For more information, visit https://analytic-room.com.

 

 

 

 

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.

Continue reading “Does AI Squander the Magic of Making Comics in the Classroom? A Psychoanalytic Perspective”

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”