Psychoanalysis and the University

Reviews / Votes

'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, pychoanalyst; 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