Psychoanalysis in the university: A full‐time vision1

Psychoanalysis may be unique among scholarly disciplines and professions in having grown as an educational enterprise in a private part‐time setting, outside the university. Freud would have liked it to be otherwise, but in Central Europe, when it was created, university placement was not possible. In America, after World War II, the concept of the medical school department of psychiatry psychoanalytic institute was established in some psychoanalytic training centers but it could only partly overcome the educational and research inadequacies of traditional psychoanalytic training. The possibilities for a true university‐based full‐time training structure are explored.     

The optimal structure for psychoanalytic education today: a feasible proposal?

Our psychoanalytic training system, close to a century old, has been subjected to increasing criticism, starting shortly after its creation, for failing to properly fulfill its avowed purposes. The most intense critiques have centered around the authoritarian power lodged in a self-selected training analyst elite, the inadequate development of a psychoanalytic research tradition, and the isolation of our educational structure from cognate disciplines concerned with human mental life, owing to its private and part-time nature, apart from the university with its spectrum of biological and human sciences. Efforts to reform this system, including the establishment of psychoanalytic institutes within medical school departments of psychiatry, and the further call for their autonomous placement within the university at large, with full-time students and faculty, have been only partially successful and have not become widespread. The values of the newly emerging multifaceted psychoanalytic center as the best currently achievable fundamental reform are presented.     

Where Have All the Psychoanalytic Patients Gone? They're Still Here

Abstract

I develop my argument concerning the question of where have all the patients gone in a sequence of three parts. First, I indicate, very briefly, the nature of the issue and the array of confluent socioeconomic causes—as they are usually outlined—that are held responsible for it. Then I take up the remedy for this problem posed by Arnold Rothstein in his book (1998). which is the trigger to this series of invited commentaries, and I indicate how I both appreciate the merits of his proposal to recast the issue as much as possible within a psychological framework, amenable to psychoanalytic influence, and nonetheless feel his approach to be based on a one-sided, and to that extent, a limited and flawed assessment of the problem, and therefore an only partially useful remedial perspective. And lastly, 1 offer an alternative view of the internal historical developments in psychoanalysis that have played their complementary role in the evolution of this perceived “crisis” and the alteration of perspectives, based on my account of our contending current viewpoints on the nature of the relationship between psychoanalysis and its derivative psychoanalytic psychotherapies, that can perhaps promise a more effective counter to the crisis, despite the multiple external socioeconomic developments that are usually accorded causative primacy and that no doubt are indeed formidable.     

The future of psychoanalysis

We have tried, in a necessarily kaleidoscopic and highly condensed manner, to highlight our perspectives on the foreseeable future of psychoanalysis, along a number of interrelated but clearly distinct dimensions. Our discussion has dealt with the nature of our field as a science and also as a discipline, the nature of the training for it, the nature of its research, and the nature and scope of its professional practice. In all of these areas, matters seem both more complex and less clear-cut than they were in the immediate post-World War II period when we entered the field, which is now forty years ago in the approximately one-hundred-year-old history of psychoanalysis. We did not discuss in any detail the International Psychoanalytical Association or the American, its component through which we have our international membership. We have, however, via the IPA Newsletter, given voice to the organizational struggles of the International: the April 1989 issue of the Newsletter carries our account of the organizational changes within the IPA during the last four years and what we think they mean in relation to some of the issues discussed in this article. The fuller story of how our changing psychoanalytic life and identities are reflected in our institutional structures, as well as a more detailed specification of the future directions we have tried to chart in our inquiry, all deserve separate extended treatment and more complete justification.     

What kind of research in psychoanalytic science?1

The kind of science that psychoanalysis is (can be), and the kind of research appropriate to it, qualitative and/or quantitative, have been divisive issues from the very inception of the discipline. I explore in detail the complexity of these issues, definitional and semantic, as well as methodological and substantive. A plea is made for the application of qualitative (idiographic)and quantitative (nomothetic) research methods, each to the extent that is appropriate, separately or in conjunction, across the entire spectrum of research domains in psychoanalysis, empirical, clinical, conceptual, historical, and interdisciplinary.