Psyche on Campus

by Alexander Stein

We drive into the future using only our rear-view mirror.
–Marshall McLuhan

There’s no universal formula for effective leadership. But there is an overlooked foundation: self-awareness. The best leaders aren’t just strategically smart, they’re psychologically minded.

In my work as an advisor to organizational leaders, and as a licensed psychoanalyst, I’ve found that leaders who are self-aware, emotionally regulated, and psychologically integrated—who are, in other words, introspective, attentive to their own blind spots and shortcomings, and able to effectively manage themselves both internally and socially without being hijacked by intense emotions—tend to helm companies that are more socially responsible and that succeed across a range of key performance metrics. In contrast, leaders beset by unresolved conflicts and whose emotional instabilities drive impulsive, erratic behavior and poor decision-making—no matter how talented, skilled, or innovative they may otherwise be—invariably generate or exacerbate problems for their organizations and then face greater difficulties in rebounding from them.

That this may be self-evident doesn’t make it any less significant. The observation by itself doesn’t solve the problem that many institutional leaders are skeptical, even dismissive, of the importance of self-understanding and reluctant to consider how personal history and unconscious forces influence decision-making in institutional operations.

What’s to be done about this? I think we can better prepare prospective leaders for their exceptional responsibilities by educating them to be psychodynamically minded—capable of introspection and self-reflection, attuned to unconscious as well as conscious feelings and motivations, and able to recognize empathy and care for others as strengths.

How? By creating psychodynamically-oriented courses that focus on human complexity in relation to organizational culture and leadership. Rather than offering such training only to early-career or established professionals, these courses should be made part of the required curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate students majoring in business, economics, political science, entrepreneurship, and technology. Such a curriculum would introduce these students to fundamental psychoanalytic concepts, including the dynamic unconscious, internal conflict, repression and other defense mechanisms, psychosocial theories of development and attachment, and the lasting influence of early childhood experience in later life. It would also help them appreciate how the practical application of psychoanalytic concepts can enhance one’s understanding of interpersonal behavior (Lunbeck 2024), thereby fostering psychological acuity in the pre-professional study of decision-making in institutional contexts.

One model already available is the program in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, established in 2015 and designed in partnership with the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. While not specifically focused on preparing business students or aspiring entrepreneurs, its curriculum is interdisciplinary and offers courses sponsored by different departments and programs. Many courses are team-taught by a member of the university’s standing faculty and a professional psychoanalyst.

Similarly, for the past two years, I’ve served as a volunteer mentor for the Purposeful Work Job Shadow Program at Bates College. Each semester, my Shadow Program has been robustly subscribed by a cohort of undergraduate students from majors including economics, neuroscience, technology and computer science, political science, psychology, sociology, and interdisciplinary studies. These students are all deeply interested in learning about psychoanalytic principles and eager to understand how psychological insights can be applied advantageously in organizational settings and other institutional contexts.

Of course, obstacles exist. Psychoanalysis has become largely eclipsed by psychopharmacology and other treatment modalities and is often mischaracterized in the public imagination as irrelevant and anachronistic. Moreover, there has been thus far only very limited implementation of psychodynamic pedagogy in leadership programs, thanks to the traditional canon of leadership and management theory and the leadership-development industrial complex. Instead, empirically oriented social sciences and cognitive-behavioral psychology continue to shape the study of human motivation and behavior, and while some of this research is incisive and useful, much of it is reductionistic, oversimplified, and psychologically naïve. Consider the how-to-be-a-great-leader genre—books, articles, and other media that promise to teach leadership skills through frameworks, principles, and success stories that privilege generic, prescriptive advice. Despite its popularity, this genre is not only inadequate, but it also actually encourages the avoidance of many challenging issues—for example, by perpetuating false illusions about leadership; by promoting formulaic modes of evaluation; and by failing to see leaders as complex individuals with strengths, weaknesses, and capacities related to developmental processes shaped by both intrapsychic and environmental forces (Stein 2021).

And this is just part of the broader marginalization of psychoanalysis in higher education. As Max Cavitch writes, such sidelining is about much more than “the suppression [by academic psychology, most notably] of a single field of knowledge but also, crucially, a defensive refutation of the determinations of unconscious experience throughout all aspects of human affairs” (Cavitch 2025, 9). Yet the argument for psychoanalytic education is a strong one. Psychoanalysis has always been a highly interdisciplinary field, meant to provide a comprehensive framework for a holistic understanding of individual and group behavior. It is concerned with understanding and addressing psychological development and functioning, conscious and unconscious processes and their relation to environmental factors, subjective and emotional experience, the problems and sequelae of trauma and early attachments, fantasies and anxieties, and unconscious conflict—all of which have consequences for decision-making and workplace behavior. Both practitioners and teachers of psychoanalysis engage patiently and thoughtfully with their patients and students, respectively, helping them to pay close attention to the potency of fantasy, desire, and aggression in their own and others’ experience and thereby enabling beneficial changes in thought, feeling, and behavior (Stein 2020). In addition to its clinical applications, psychoanalysis is an unparalleled educational resource for students and future leaders in every field (Stein 2024).

As leadership advisor Kerry Sulkowicz notes, “leaders are neither born nor made; real leaders are forged in the crucible of childhood and accumulated life experience, often with no small amount of trauma involved … some of the best leaders became that way as an adaptation to rather specific traumatic childhood events” (Sulkowicz 2021). Research shows that “family environments ripple through the decades to affect decisions” (Economist 2025), and there are demonstrated correlations between bosses who experienced a disaster in childhood and their appetite for risk in adulthood. Yet even reputable business publications recommend that “no one should be selecting [CEO] candidates on the basis of their formative years” (Economist 2025). Childhood experiences are generally overlooked when considering qualifications for leadership, except for cherry-picked synopses of early life struggles, such as escaping economic hardship or overcoming adversity, which can serve as compelling origin stories for assertive leaders. Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, observes that, if you ask parents what values they think are important for their kids, the overwhelming majority “want their kids to share … be generous … kind and empathetic, brave, courageous. Those values that we teach our kids, we then see somehow as weaknesses in leaders?” (Ardern 2025)

Minimizing or dismissing a prospective CEO’s formative experiences hobbles both the assessment of current and prospective leaders and later leadership issues. Considering the psychological “source-code” for ingrained ways of feeling, thinking, and responding; defense mechanisms; and predispositions to relating and communicating, among many other formative early life influences, is essential to the evaluation of individuals’ leadership capacities. The conventional approach to defining estimable leadership skills and traits, and the educational and experiential trajectory for aspiring leaders, radically minimizes nearly everything that happened before approximately late-adolescence.

Disproportionate emphasis is still typically placed on tangible strengths, measurable knowledge and skills, and operationally focused competencies. This, in turn, fuels the leadership development industry. Nearly every consulting firm has a dedicated executive coaching practice. Most universities and business schools offer curricula in leadership and entrepreneurship. Students can register for modules on such topics as “developing mindfulness and authenticity to build trust, create engagement, and promote productivity,” “learning different methods of effective decision-making and ways to avoid bad decisions,” and “establishing alignment between personal and organizational purpose.” There are leadership greenhouses, talent labs, and classes on ‘leadership in the age of AI” and on “becoming an empathetic leader.” Other course topics include: emotional intelligence, managing power and pressure, effective communication and executive presence, leveraging influence and motivation to boost productivity.

At an earlier time, such “soft” skills would have been denigrated as meritless. The fact that they’re offered now is a clear sign of a progressive attitude shift. But the content is inadequate. Half a century ago, the influential management guru Peter Drucker advised companies to hire executives “for their strengths, not their absence of weaknesses” (Drucker 1967, 72). That idea is still prevalent and both justifies and rationalizes a myopic and Machiavellian approach to achieving or assessing enterprise success, while also over-simplifying and over-valuing the contributions of a single individual—a hold-over of the specious “great man” theory of history.

Enterprise trajectories and outcomes are rarely entirely attributable to a single individual. They are the result of nesting decisions and processes involving many people. Deep analysis of any organization’s history and developmental journey inevitably reveals enormous complexity, and its current situation is nearly always the consequence of multiple, intertwining factors. In most organizational ecosystems, people adapt (or maladapt) to the explicit and implicit needs and expectations of its central figure. The measure of a leader is often determined, no matter what the official narrative is, by others’ willingness to accommodate, enable, comply, appease, or defer to that leader.

In addition, much of the preparatory guidance in university courses and the tools and solutions proffered by conventional consulting and executive coaching services fall short of achieving their stated aims. A 2014 McKinsey study asserted that “companies pay lip service to the importance of developing leadership skills but have no evidence to quantify the value of their investment” (Gurdjian et al. 2014). Another study found that while “global organizations spend more than $60 billion annually on leadership development programs, the returns these investments yield for leaders and their teams are not always clear” (Yemiscigil et al. 2023).

A different approach is needed. Leaders face tremendous challenges and are increasingly poised to support and influence their organizations in ways they may never have encountered before and for which technical know-how alone is inadequate. The pressures of rapid decision-making, profound human complexity, and intense disruption to working norms—geopolitical upheaval, post-pandemic transformations to business environments and global commerce, the meteoric ascent of AI and other emerging technologies—require leaders to have more psychological acuity than ever before. Today’s world requires a sophistication in thinking about leadership that only psychoanalysis can provide.

The success, failure, and struggles of people in leadership positions are directly related to their capacities and limitations in recognizing and effectively navigating their own psychological and emotional states. Leaders must thoughtfully leverage the multifaceted complexities of their whole selves. Fulfilling the demands and expectations of their role as ultimate institutional decision-makers is inseparable from the sort of self-understanding that psychoanalysis is uniquely qualified to enhance.

 

Works cited

Ardern, Jacinda. 2025. A Different Kind of Power. New York: Penguin.

Cavitch, Max. 2025. Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present. New York: Routledge.

Drucker, Peter. 1967. The Effective Executive. New York: Harper and Row.

Economist. 2025. “The Early Lives of Bosses: From Cot to Corner Office.” The Economist 455.9445 (26 April  2025): 64. https://www.economist.com/business/2025/04/24/the-early-lives-of-bosses.

Gurdjian, Pierre, Thomas Halbeisen, and Kevin Lane. 2014. “Why Leadership-Development Programs Fail.” McKinsey Quarterly 1st Quarter, vol. 1: 121-26. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/why-leadership-development-programs-fail#/.

Lunbeck, Elizabeth. 2024. “How Do You Teach Psychoanalysis to Gen Z?” Psychoanalysis and You. Podcast audio, October 3, 2024, https://apsa.org/psychoanalysis-and-you-episode-3/.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man: Signet Books.

Office of Purposeful Work Job Shadow Program, Bates College. https://www.bates.edu/purposeful-work/job-shadow/.

Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. https://web.sas.upenn.edu/psys/about/.

Stein, Alexander. 2020. “Psychoanalysis in the Public Sphere: A Call for Taking Analytic Thinking, Writing and Action into the Broader World.” Psychoanalytic Perspectives 17.2: 141-160. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fbc3428d0fb35038fbe4eb5/t/64ceb388b70e5d37fbf72762/1691267976505/Psychoanalysis+in+the+Public+Sphere_Dr+Alexander+Stein_Psychoanalytic+Perspectives+17-2+June+2020.pdf.

—. 2021. “How To Become a Malevolent Leader: A Field Guide for Aspiring Fraudsters and Tyrants.” Forbes, January 27, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexanderstein/2021/01/27/how-to-become-a-malevolent-leader-a-field-guide-for-aspiring-fraudsters-and-tyrants/?sh=43e7d9097149.

—. 2024. “Psychoanalysis as a Technology for Positive Change and Influence at Scale.” Technology and the Mind. Podcast audio, January 24, 2024, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dr-alexander-stein-on-psychoanalysis-as-a/id1638761843?i=1000642693582.

Sulkowicz, Kerry. 2021. “What Psychoanalysis Can Offer Leaders.” Unpublished lecture. Political Mind Seminar Series, Institute of Psychoanalysis (London), May 25, 2021.

Yemiscigil, Ayse, Dana Born, and Horace Ling. 2023. “What Makes Leadership Development Programs Succeed?” Harvard Business Review February 28, 2023, https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-makes-leadership-development-programs-succeed.

 

by Noëlle McAfee

Whereas authoritarians of old took power by seizing the levers of governance, today’s authoritarians manipulate their way into power through the ballot box. Ironically, it’s not just the beneficiaries who elect authoritarians; it’s also those who are bound to suffer—like the women who thought Trump would make in vitro fertilization free for all, only to find his administration doubling down on the regulation and punishment of women’s reproductive choices. But there’s more to it than promising one thing and delivering another. Authoritarians prey on people’s fears and promise them protection, luring them into voting for a paternalistic savior rather than someone who will promote democracy. They might even say, as one did, vote for me and you’ll never need to bother voting again (Astor 2024).

How do authoritarians convince people to freely choose their own domination? This is the question I’ll be exploring with my undergraduate students this fall in an advanced philosophy seminar at Emory University. I chose the course title, “Authoritarianism,” several months ago. Today, I’d be tempted to call it “Fascism.” I’ve taught versions of this course before, calling it “Populism” or “Politics and Psychoanalysis.” What they have in common is the use of psychoanalytic theory to help understand perplexing and, especially, anti-democratic political phenomena.

I tell my students that if we could easily find rational explanations for anti-democratic trends, then we wouldn’t need to bother with psychoanalysis. But the irrational, often self-destructive behavior that characterizes much contemporary politics is unintelligible without it. My students learn that, while the primary focus of psychoanalysis is on the individual, it’s also a powerful interpreter and even predictor of group behavior. Like individuals, societies have their own unconscious dynamics, their own “neuroses,” as well as shared paranoid delusions and psychoses. When otherwise reasonable people start believing in wild conspiracy theories or imagine that powerless, marginalized people are existential threats to a nation and its citizens, the explanations of pop psychology are useless. Psychoanalysis helps us understand that what seems like “merely” irrational thinking or behavior is motivated by complex unconscious as well as conscious intra- and interpersonal dynamics.

Psychoanalysis still offers the most sophisticated account of these dynamics and their origins, including the psychosocial effects of historical phenomena and the transgenerational transmission of traumas—all of which can be manipulated by savvy (and cynical) politicians. Psychoanalysis also helps explain large-group identity and ethnic conflict, as well as melancholic attachments to old grievances and why such processes and pathologies are so difficult to remedy.

Many political philosophers and political scientists try to explain the symptoms and effects of authoritarianism without exploring its causes. Sadly, the same thing can be said about many parts of the standard psychiatric reference work and diagnostic tool, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition (2022). Earlier editions—for all their many flaws—were more psychoanalytically informed; but modern American psychiatry is moving further and further away from its psychoanalytic roots. Similarly, empiricist social scientists who study authoritarianism can enumerate the elements of the authoritarian playbook but offer little explanation for why these elements routinely occur.

My course on authoritarianism will draw on what social scientists have learned. We’ll read phenomenological accounts such as Hannah Arendt’s classic book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973), Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (2017), and Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works (2020), which together lay out the steps in the fascist playbook: gin up fear, manufacture an alternative reality, blame “outsiders,” consolidate power, delegitimize adversaries, normalize state use of surveillance and violence, and seek solace in a mythic past. At the same time, we’ll study what motivates these phenomena through reading works by Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Melanie Klein, Frantz Fanon, Vamik Volkan, and Jacques Lacan. To make this manageable in a single semester, each student will use these works to analyze a particular “case study” of authoritarianism, from the past or the present.

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge is introducing students to key concepts in Freud’s metapsychology, such as the unconscious, mourning and melancholia, incorporation/introjection, and the mechanisms of defense. For works by Freud himself, I’ve found Peter Gay’s Freud Reader (1995) very helpful—especially in curbing my tendency to assign too much reading! Lacan and Fanon help explain what makes a phobic object simultaneously so alluring, what leads people to be hoodwinked by even the most outlandish propaganda, and the logic underlying the fantasy of “becoming great again.” And Klein’s (1986) theory of the paranoid-schizoid position makes it easier to see how ancient enmities and traumas can be so quickly reactivated—how common it is for people to regress to archaic defenses such as splitting, denial, and projection.

Psychoanalytic theory also helps explain how authoritarian leaders—who are seldom adept in such theory—manipulate these unconscious processes to take and maintain power. (Adorno’s 1951 essay, “Freudian Theory and the Power of Fascist Propaganda,” is especially useful in this regard.) When coupled with case studies of politically dysfunctional states, a carefully chosen range of psychoanalytic thinkers helps students see the logic of the unconscious at work, which, in turn, helps make sense of the authoritarian playbook.

The course requires an intensive introduction to key elements of psychoanalytic theory as well as various political theories of democracy and its weaknesses. For this to work, students need a variety of resources for understanding personal, interpersonal, and collective functioning on a wide spectrum from the “normal” to the psychotic. Most fundamental are those resources that give students a clear understanding of the individual and collective unconscious. Among other things, I introduce them to a modified version of Fredric Jameson’s concept of “the political unconscious” (2002). I emphasize that the political unconscious doesn’t entail an escape from the individual to some kind of social or political analog. Instead, each person can be seen as a microcosm of the sociohistorical, largely constituted (or “subjectivized”) by shared cultural and linguistic norms.

The (political) unconscious is a place of impulse and repression, resistance and regression, powerful desires and even more powerful—even tyrannical—imperatives. It expresses itself in symptoms. It has errands to run, wrongs to right, and scores to settle. Moreover, any one person’s unconscious is not exclusively one’s own. While some symptoms are representatives of our very personal and idiosyncratic conflicts, all psychic functioning is intersubjective; countless forms of psychic unease (or dis-ease) are communicated and transmitted between us, unconsciously for the most part. Making this abundance of internal conflict and unconscious communication a bit more accessible to consciousness can make the difference, as my students discover, between unthinking capitulation to an authoritarian regime and thoughtful resistance to political tyranny, in pursuit of democratic ideals.

 

Works cited

Adorno, Theodor. 1991. “Freudian Theory and the Power of Fascist Propaganda [1951]”. In The Culture Industry. Ed. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 132-157.

American Psychiatric Association. 2022. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. Text rev.  https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787.

Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Astor, Maggie. 2024. “Trump Declines to Back Away From ‘You Don’t Have to Vote Again’ Line.” New York Times, 30 July 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/us/politics/trump-christians-vote-ingraham.html.

Freud, Sigmund. 1995. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton.

Jameson, Fredric. 2002. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge.

Klein, Melanie. 1986. The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. New York: Free Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Tr. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.

Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Crown.

Stanley, Jason. 2020. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House.

Volkan, Vamik D. 1997. Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Boulder: Westview.

—. 2019. “Large-Group Identity, Who Are We Now? Leader-Follower Relationships and Societal-Political Divisions.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 79.2: 139–155.

 

Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine, 2024, documentary, 61 min, produced by ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action

reviewed by Naama Rotem

The film Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine was produced by the magazine ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action (and can be streamed, free-of-charge, at ROOM’s Web site: https://analytic-room.com/speakingofhome/). The name of the magazine “speaks” to the fundamental premise of both the magazine and the film: that psychoanalysis has social and political importance and holds the potential for action and change. This often controversial premise is expressed in the film’s unique encounter between two psychoanalysts—one Israeli and one Palestinian—on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Their 60-minute filmed dialogue makes clear that Palestinian analyst Karim Dajani and Israeli analyst Eyal Rozmarin both believe in the political potential of psychoanalytic dialogue. In their analytically-informed exchange, they seek both to understand and to undo various aspects of their respective experiences of political subjectivation. That is, their hope is mutually to reshape one another’s unconscious as well as conscious experiences and to inspire others to question the ethics of their own relation to collective national and ideological identities and to face more the intergenerational traumas that inform them.

Their belief in the ability of psychoanalysis to contribute to—and even take a lead in—social change is not universally shared. Many continue to insist that psychoanalysis should be concerned only, or chiefly, with intrapsychic and interpersonal experiences. Others who are more critical of psychoanalysis argue that it was and remains a coercive form of treatment, intended to make “maladaptive” patients adapt themselves to prevailing (essentially “bourgeois”) sociopolitical norms. According to the latter view, psychoanalysis is a conservative science that shapes the individual for the sake of society, not vice-versa. The opposing view, expressed in the film, regards psychoanalysis as a discipline that can indirectly affect social change—not least, by exploring the unconscious processes that promote conformity, aggressivity, and various defensive mechanisms including repression, splitting, projective identification, and identification with the aggressor.

 
As part of Dajani and Rozmarin’s public correspondence, Dajani writes, in a letter dated June 2024:

I am convinced that psychoanalysis has great potential to heal individuals and to address trenchant social problems. Ideally, the two go together. (“Learning” 2024, 33)

Rozmarin points out that Freud himself shared a version of this view. He cites several of Freud’s post-World War I essays, in which he addresses problems of society and civilization. In his letter dated January 2024, Rozmarin refers to the power of psychoanalysis to understand not only the individual but also human society:

As the psychoanalysts we are, I believe it is our task to revive our original ambition, to strive, from our angle, to understand the human condition, which also means human society. (“Crossing” 2024, 17)

Their epistolary exchange, like their filmed dialogue, makes clear that psychoanalysis is capable not only of understanding or treating individuals, but also of affecting real-world conditions and of motivating and facilitating sociopolitical change.

As such, I think this film has the potential to be very useful for undergraduate students of psychoanalysis. It clearly demonstrates the potential inherent in this discipline for understanding the relationship between the individual and the society in which they live. Even more importantly, it demonstrates the freedom that is important to have regarding the application of this understanding and the theoretical discourse to everyday life and to contemporary political and social affairs.

Dajani describes this dialogue between two psychoanalysts as a “process of mutual analysis” (26:05), and it proceeds with a kind of radical honesty and genuine concern for the other as they seek to overcome, to whatever extent they can, the unconscious as well as conscious obstacles that continue to make it difficult and often painful for them to regard one another as partners in a shared endeavor.

From my own perspective, the film is not without its flaws: although both Dajani and Rozmarin fully acknowledge the atrocities committed by Israel and the absolute power it has over the Palestinian people, they nevertheless sometimes speak as if they were comparable forces in conflict. Both—perhaps inevitably—seem to have some blind spots. For example, their implied comparison of the Nakba and the Holocaust sometimes seems to forget the disparities between them, as well as the fact that one of these events was inflicted by one side of the conflict upon the other.

I was also given pause by some of Rozmarin’s remarks about the exploitation of both Israelis and Palestinians by the rest of the world. At one point, for instance, he says:

We are alone, we are either exploited or used for the geopolitics of it… Israel is just exploited with arms and money and the Palestinians in different ways. (48:15)

Here, Rozmarin wants to see Israel and Palestine as though they were partners—members of a kind of collective, who must work through their problems together. It’s as if he forgets, temporarily, that Israel has the support of much of the rest of the world in its oppression of the Palestinian people. But the political “exploitation” of Israel is nothing like the death and destruction visited upon Palestine and Palestinians by an Israeli army that is supplied by the rest of the world with vast amounts of money and arms. While I understand Rozmarin implication that the Israel-Palestine conflict is cynically manipulated by more powerful geopolitical actors, he seems to exaggerate Israel’s victimization and to downplay its oppressive power.

Nevertheless, the film succeeds in making me want to look beyond these possible blind-spots and points of contention in order to consider both speakers’ broader intentions. The very act of dialogue—the sincere attempt to understand the other’s thoughts and feelings—is, of course, courageous. However, in a political situation that is not a war between two equal sides but a military occupation of one by the other, it is worth asking what the premises and goals of such a dialogue are, and to question whether this dialogue unwittingly creates a false sense of balance between the sides.

Given the atrocities Israel continues to perpetrate, it’s difficult to think about the merits of “dialogue,” or about the trauma of the oppressor, or about the nuances of the Israeli psyche. But Dajani and Rozmarin do not pretend to speak as representatives of their respective nationalities. They speak as individuals, who also happen to belong to opposing sides of an appalling conflict. They are modeling an interpersonal—not international—dialogue, and they are asking their audience to listen carefully and with compassion to both an Israeli voice and a Palestinian voice. Doing so doesn’t mean justifying either side’s actions or abnegating their responsibilities. Indeed, they pursue dialogue as one such responsibility—as a humane and even radical choice.

 
Their dialogue also poses a challenge to the rigidity of strident identity politics, whether identity is thought of in national, ethnic, gendered, sexual, or religious terms. The film challenges identity politics by seeking similarities as well as differences. While belonging to different identity groups and acknowledging the personal importance to each of them of this form of belonging, Dajani and Rozmarin attend closely to the complex psychic structures of identity and (dis)identification.

Also crucially, Dajani and Rozmarin explore ways in which their political interests might be aligned and new identities configured, based on their shared desire for peace and for the well-being of both peoples. As Rozmarin puts it: “We are the collective….We do not belong in different groups—this is the group” (32:20).

The very willingness of Dajani and Rozmarin to speak together so openly and publicly is a challenge to identity-politics-as-usual. Moreover, their psychoanalytic perspective sheds much-needed light on the ways in which social forces shape our unconscious as well as conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It illuminates a way beyond the unthought and the unthinking. Toward the end of the film Dajani points out that “what I am doing here is engaging in an act of freedom” (47:12). And indeed, Dajani and Rozmarin demonstrate that psychoanalytic discourse is a discourse of liberation—one that helps people to free themselves from both the seen and unseen forces acting on them and to reformulate their sense of being and belonging.

Although initially, in approaching this film, I was inclined toward suspicion and skepticism, I ultimately found the decision of an Israeli and a Palestinian to engage openly in a psychoanalytic dialogue to be radical and courageous—as well as hopeful. Yet it would be an exaggeration to say that the hope it inspires is entirely durable and lasting. As I write this, almost a year after Dajani and Rozmarin’s filmed conversation, the atrocities committed in Gaza by the state of Israel have only intensified. While watching the film, I was immersed in the idea of possibility. Briefly, I felt as if a humane future was being forecast simply by two individuals speaking to each other out of a sincere and mutual desire for the good of the other. However, as soon as the film ended and I looked at my phone, the ongoing reality hit me, and the horrors being perpetrated, as it were, in my name reminded me of the almost infinite way we still have to go on our way to this future. I tried to hold on to the hope this film proffers, but could also feel it slipping away like desert sand through my fingers.

 

Works cited

Dajani, Karim, and Eyal Rozmarin. 2024. “Crossing Divides.” Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action 2.24: 10-17.

Dajani, Karim, and Eyal Rozmarin. 2024. “Learning From All Things.” Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action 6.24: 34-39.

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.

Continue reading “Attacks on Student Activism: A Psychoanalytic Perspective”

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.

Continue reading “Psychoanalytic Listening as an Undergraduate Student Nurse”

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.

Continue reading “Special announcement of a film-release: “Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine””

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”