Psychoanalysis and Academia in the United Kingdom

When I was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1950s, psychoanalysis had great prestige, but its presence in universities was largely confined to psychiatry departments. Nowadays you would be hard put to find many recent appointments of psychoanalytically oriented people in psychiatry departments. The more successful candidates train in psychopharmacology, behavioural work, or even research on genetics. Except for Lacanians in English literature, academic appointments for psychoanalytically trained or oriented people are still rare in any university department.

But, in spite of this and all the flak in the “Freud Wars,” the subject is far from moribund in certain quarters. In Britain there have grown up in the last decade about a dozen graduate programs in psychoanalytic studies. Most are master’s, but there are also a good number of places where doctoral dissertations are being supported. Among the universities with active programs are University College London, East London/Tavistock Clinic, Sheffield, Essex, Manchester Metropolitan, and West London; there are also programs in Eire [Ireland] and Northern Ireland. People come into psychoanalytic studies from all sorts of backgrounds and move on to various kinds of work. The curricula do not include any clinical work but concentrate on theory, history, and applications to other spheres, e.g., film, literature, parenting, groups, and institutions.

I think I am right in saying that I hold the only chair that has so far been established in psychoanalytic studies. I teach at the Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield, where we have master’s, doctoral research, and distance learning programs, as well as a very large and active web site, <http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/>, with extensive archives and guides to psychoanalytic resources on the Internet. We are also affiliated with numerous e-mail forums, for example, psychoanalytic studies; Psychoanalysis & the Public Sphere; and Human Nature, Authority & Justice. The forums attract several hundred subscribers a day. The Web site where my writings are archived gets up to three thousand visitors per day, and a new one covering a wider range of issues in the study of human nature, <http://human-nature.com>, gets nearly three thousand per week.

There is also a resurgence of publishing in this area. I edit a quarterly journal, Free Associations: Psychoanalysis, Groups, Politics, Culture. In February, a new academic journal, Psychoanalytic Studies, began publication, and another, PS, with a more Lacanian emphasis, has published one issue. Several publishers have brought out books in this area, e.g., Routledge, Karnac, Rebus, Polity, Free Association Books (which I founded) and Process Press (which I now run). There has even been a book devoted exclusively to the subject: Teaching Transference: On the Foundations of Psychoanalytic Studies (1996). It was edited by Martin Stanton and David Reason. Stanton started the first program in psychoanalytic studies, at the University of Kent in 1988, but I am sorry to say that it has been closed down. He was also active in founding the Universities Association for psychoanalytic studies (UAPS).

I suppose several hundred people have graduated from the existing programs, and others are coming on stream all the time. It is odd but impressive for applied psychoanalysis to be flourishing at a time when psychoanalytic practice

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is being subjected to so much criticism.

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