Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present

This book charts the past and present vicissitudes of psychoanalysis’s relation to education and emphasizes on the necessity of its increased presence in university settings.

Why can fewer and fewer people afford either time-intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy or a three- to four-year college education? Why have psychoanalytic teaching and research become so marginalized? Where and how does psychoanalysis retain a foothold in academia? In an era when the futures of both psychoanalysis and higher education seem evermore uncertain, Psychoanalysis and the University argues for the need to overcome existing precarities and mutual resistances and suggests ways in which their prospects for survival could be reciprocally enhanced. Each chapter surveys and interprets present conditions, while arguing the necessity of supporting and expanding psychoanalytic teaching and research at both the undergraduate and graduate levels

Drawing on Cavitch’s deep understanding of both psychoanalysis and university settings, this is essential reading for psychoanalysts, university teachers and administrators, and all students interested in how augmented psychoanalytic education could enhance their understanding of the world.

Max Cavitch 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. His books include American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman and the forthcoming Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance.