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.
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