A Freudian in Middle American Academia

I first encountered psychoanalytic thinking while I was serving as a disgruntled Mormon missionary in Paris in the early 1970s (yes, I can hardly believe it myself!). I ran across a book called something like Les Grandes Decouvertes de la Psychanalyse [The Major Discoveries of Psychoanalysis] and, being very impressed with this powerful new worldview of psychoanalysis, I decided that upon my return to college I would change my major from history to psychology. Soon after re-enrolling I was caught up in rather exciting encounters with all sorts of personality theories, from Freud and Jung to the existentialists and behaviorists.

The academic treatment of Freud and psychoanalysis at the undergraduate level did not lead me to believe that actually undergoing psychoanalysis was to be recommended, but I had the good fortune to be admitted for graduate studies in personality psychology at the University of Michigan. There it was understood by many professors and grad students that everyone had plenty of neurotic issues to work on and that if you did not enter psychoanalysis or at least some form of psychoanalytic therapy, you had not seen the light. You were even bordering on unethical behavior if you chose to do clinical work without

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having worked through a lot of your own issues. So, I entered a formal psychoanalysis a couple of years before I finished my PhD in 1982, and I feel that I learned as much about the psyche from that experience as from my book reading. In short, I suppose the thing I learned most was that people who consider themselves ordinary, as I did, do all those things that neurotics are defined as doing: projection, rationalization, reaction formation — and even experience those feelings that no one can see in themselves at first, like castration anxiety and violent unconscious impulses. What had been intellectual knowledge became understanding on the basis of experience.

I was hired as assistant professor at the University of Tulsa, a mid-sized private university in Oklahoma, as a token gesture by the psychology department toward a humanities-oriented dean. I was to teach courses on psychology and literature or psychology and social theory to keep the dean happy while the rest of the department cranked away on their empirical research programs. I suppose no one knew at the time I was hired that I had a strong interest in psychoanalysis. They probably saw me as an eclectic personality theorist with clinical training and a preference for qualitative methods. Eventually the mismatch between the department and me was expressed in a negative tenure vote, from which I was rescued by a second humanities-oriented dean whose college tenure committee overturned the department’s decision. So, here I remain, a lone Freudian in middle America. (There is a psychoanalytic study group in Oklahoma City, over an hour away, but I have not been able to attend their meetings.)

Over the past decade, I have continued to teach courses to clinical students on Freud and object relations theory, and to use psychoanalytic concepts in the interpretation of interview data, and, perhaps most importantly, in my overall view of how society and the self are constituted. I wrote about this recently in my book, Damaged Life: The Crisis of the Modern Psyche (1996), in which I develop a synthesis of Habermas and Marcuse to discuss the psychological impact of capitalist modernization. Like much of the Frankfurt School work, I arrive at a fairly pessimistic conclusion about the possibilities for reversing the colonization, by the market and the state, of the lifeworld, that sphere of human activities in which dialogue and debate lead to intersubjective understanding and the viability of culture and society.

Part of this pessimism is due to what I see as the failure of the majority of practicing and publishing psychoanalysts to look beyond the consulting room to address the macrosocial scene or participate in practical struggles for change. We academic psychologists tend to be guilty of the same thing, imagining that our research will be consumed in a manner that will have a significant impact on something beyond the ivory tower. So, my basic opinion on the question of relations between academia and psychoanalysis is that ties between the two must be developed in order to inform social practice. In the absence of a strong link between the two that is turned outward toward the project of social transformation, we will continue to get social programs designed by cognitive-behavioral social psychologists who do not have a clue as to what might really induce the sorts of self-reflection and intersubjective practices that a progressive psychoanalytically informed politics would suggest.

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