On Teaching Psychoanalysis in Antianalytic Times: A Polemic

The author argues that in the current attitudinal climate, characterized by significant denigration of psychoanalysis coming from biologically oriented psychiatrists, academic psychologists, pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, managed care organizations, anxious taxpayers, and revisionist critics of Freud, psychoanalysts need to adapt their training and supervisory practices to take into account the preconceptions of many of those seeking training as psychotherapists. Specifically, we need to appreciate the nature of the transferences toward analysts and analysis that exist in the wider mental health community and in the general public. These include assumptions that analysts are cold, arrogant, rigid, and worshipful toward Freud (who is himself seen as cold, arrogant, rigid, and narcissistic), and the prevalent misconception that psychoanalysis has been empirically discredited. Analysts need to find creative and honest ways, some of which are suggested by the author, to challenge the distortions in these stereotypes and to respond nondefensively and generatively to the grains of truth they contain. The essay concludes with some reminders of the legitimate strengths of the psychoanalytic tradition that suggest that its future is not as bleak as its disparagers have assumed.